Skipping to Day 30: New Beginnings

So... 19/30 isn't awful... (it's more than I blogged in the past five years, so growth? Yay!?)

This past week has been full of the wonderful and awful surprises that come with working in education, so my ability to be truly reflective was overtaken by the desire to keep my head above water. I keep going back to the thing I wrote in one of my first entries, that true growth happens in difficulty. So I'm really growing right now.

This last question asks us to reveal what we might do if we weren't afraid. I'm generally not afraid of too much - maybe I'm most afraid of getting off schedule with school stuff. I don't like to be behind on grading (which I am right now), I don't like to not have a plan for where we are going, I don't like feeling like I'm very behind. So if I weren't afraid of that... I might go off script for a bit. My students had a Socratic Seminar a couple weeks ago - around 80 minutes of just my students talking (self-moderated) about the reading and the ideas that stemmed from it. If I weren't afraid of being behind on all of the things my students need to know, I would have more entirely-student led classes. We would discuss what they wanted to, and I wouldn't have to worry about AP or ACT scores, and we would just refine our thoughts and argumentation skills.

What would Socrates say about all of our testing? What would he have done if he hadn't been afraid? (Assuming he was ever afraid of anything... or would admit to it.)

Day Eighteen: Stand-up Comedy

Being a teacher is like being a stand-up comedian for an audience that almost never gets your jokes.

Day Seventeen: We've always done it this way...

It's easy to say that money is the biggest issue facing education, but I think it's more than that. It's resources, it's time, it's maintaining the will to keep going in a system that is rigidly stuck in a world of its own. I know I've already talked about this a bit, but I think our system's inability to change (and part of that is money) is the biggest issue. "We've always done it this way" is killing us.

Day Sixteen: Super Speedy Scoring

If I had a superpower, it would be the ability to grade or score work with rapid-fire speed. This sounds like a stupid power (maybe my super power is to slow down time or to speed up my reading and writing, like to super-human speeds), but I've been thinking about ways to get effective feedback to my kids as quickly as possible, and this sounds like a good option.

This comes from this post that I read recently on Edutopia on providing quality feedback, as well as the question we asked "what is meaningful feedback and are you good at giving that feedback to your students?" I have always seen this as one of my weaknesses as a teacher, and I think it's because of my perfectionist nature (see my last post). I want to give the BEST feedback possible, and as personalized as possible, and as understandable as possible. Which is just not possible 100% of the time.

So if I could be a super-speedy scorer, part of my issues would be solved. I could score quickly and then spend more time letting kids know what those scores mean for their future work and growth. This will someday be solved by the App I will create for my classes, so then my answer to this question will change: probably to something like "the ability to fly" or "the ability to know when they are messaging friends with their iPads instead of looking up information for class."

Day Fifteen: Compassion/The Struggle is Real

So I have this one student who refuses to turn in work. He is in my AP Lang class, and he has expressed this anxiety of submitting anything in to me because "it's not perfect yet." And I tell him, it doesn't need to be, I just need to see that he's on the right track.

I've had this blog post partially composed for five days now, and I didn't want to click publish because I didn't have the time to make it perfect yet... Which brings me to my biggest strength as an educator:  compassion. I don't mean that I feel bad about the amount of work assigned and I just let them slide by; it means that I totally get the struggle. This is difficult. I first thought about this idea of compassion when I was reading The Elements of Teaching by Banner and Cannon, and the chapter "Compassion" was mine to use to lead a class discussion. While the entire book covers other elements of teaching that are important (the other two elements that I think are my strengths are "Learning" and "Imagination") this chapter came with one very specific warning:

"Anyone contemplating teaching as a profession should consider compassion as a measure of suitability. The physical and emotional toll exacted by teaching will be too much for those lacking it... Those who experience difficulty in accepting the place of compassion in the classroom, who resist the idea of sympathetic emotions, or who prefer their working lives to be exclusively intellectual should avoid teaching altogether and probably consider devoting themselves to less demanding occupations, such as politics or crime" (89).

It is the only time in that book where they discuss any one element as vital - all of the others had ways to work on each element, but the element "compassion" was listed as a necessity already established in our personalities. This doesn't mean we dumb down anything out of pity; we don't change anything our students need, but we meet them where they are. We can acknowledge that the struggle is real, and help our students move from the struggle to work on that skill. The inability to do this (or the inability to see the value in compassion) is detrimental to our effectiveness as teachers.


And this blog post is far from perfect, or what I really wanted to say, but I'm going to click publish because I need to model this struggle for that one student.

Day Fourteen: Feedback

Feedback for learning is anytime I can help a student see where they are in relation to where they need to be, and how to help them get to there.

I am good at this sometimes. The problem with giving effective feedback is that it takes a ton of time (and I only teach 3 classes - I can't imagine what the load of work looks like for my colleagues with 6). Rubrics are effective, but especially when it comes to elements of writing styles and crafting a voice - this takes time and care to develop. And this is where I spend most of my time when commenting on student work.

Sometimes this is reduced to one last thought at the end of their writing - one or two things I notice that could be improved. I know that is better than nothing, but I like to look at their writing as a dialogue that I need to participate in.

Day Thirteen: Wordles

I use a lot of technology in my classroom, and I could always use more... but to answer this question I'm going to talk about how I use Wordle in my classes. Wordle is a word cloud generator that will take any text you put in (including the URL to a blog) and spit out a word cloud of the most commonly-used words.

I use this as a pre-reading activity. The larger a word is, the more used it is in the book or article or chapter. Based on the words on this Wordle, what can be guess about what we are about to read? What might the main themes be?

I also use it as a way to gauge students' thinking about a subject prior to and after a unit. Have each student write 100 words (or 200) answering the essential question for the unit: my current unit's question is "To what extent does school achieve the goals for a true education?" Comparing the answers before and after usually reveal new ideas and texts that were not in the first Wordle. It's a cool thing to show the class, so that they can see the shift in their own thinking.


You're welcome! (And thank you, Blogosphere, for all of your suggestions!)