Uncle

Early on in this teaching adventure I called son1 to extoll the many virtues of the format of the results from a standardized test that the children took before I started.  So informative!  Such a useful metric!

Now, not so very far into the future, I see why they are so unpopular in the press and amongst teachers. In the short time since my start date, we’ve spent four school days  testing, and I’ve spent a couple of hours after school at faculty meetings getting trained so that I can administer those tests.  Tomorrow is another test, and in a few weeks will be the Big One (two days).

At this point, I’m not learning much new information from the results because I spend enough time with the students to see what their needs are.  I’d rather just spend that time….teaching.

optimism

I think I’m starting to hit my stride as a teacher, or at least I don’t feel so seat-of-my pants each day. From the time I was hired until Spring Break, I made a (mostly) systematic improvement in each subject starting with English, then Social Studies, Math then Science. Each day we also did some intensive work on comportment.

tragic

Halfway through the school day the vice-principal came to tell us that one of my student’s brothers was shot and killed this past weekend. He was 17.

It was the first time it occurred to me that not every one of my kids is going to be ok.

Pilgrimsomething

 I can’t tell you a thing about The Mayflowerexcept that it’s written by Nathaniel Philbrick (who wrote Sea of Glory, which was very good).  I meant to bring it with me on my trip to Denton as fun reading, but I forgot it.  Now I probably won’t get to it again until summer break.Oh, well.I’m pretty sure I know how it ends.

Know-it-All

I may be jinxing myself by posting here before I’ve actually finished this one, but it’s hilarious and A.J. Jacobs is a tiny god.   Go read it, so we can talk about it.  Can’t wait to finish it, can’t wait to read Year of Living Biblically.

Not teaching

Oof! There are some school related blog posts that have been brewing in my head for so long that they’re growing positively stale. No matter! I’m not writing them now, because I’m on blissful Spring Break! I’m not even going to write about immigration, which is the other topic On My Mind recently.  Nope, instead I’m going to write about some books, since I went on a book buying spree followed by a book reading orgy. For the last two days I’ve been reading like a…person who reads alot. And hasn’t been able to read much lately. etc.  A trip to my local B&N, which I still patronize even after one of the booksellers called me pretentious. (I was being pretentious, but I’m Working on It), yielded the following:1. The Time Traveler’s Wife2. Know-it-All3. The MayflowerLet’s start with The Time Traveler’s Wife. Before I say anything about it, I have to confess the following sins that I committed against it:1. I started it after spending several hours on a different book, and then I finished it the same day. Reading fatigue gave it a slightly tiresome patina towards the end.2. I looked up the ending of the book on Wikipedia months ago, before I even considered buying it. I’m sure that at the exact moment I did so, son1 felt a disturbance in the Force and cried without knowing why. More likely, he was shaken out of a programming-reverie and felt compelled to shake his fist at the general direction of Texas. Point being, I cheated, and it lessened my enjoyment of the book somewhat. I’m ashamed! ashamed!These circumstances aside, it’s a nice read.Regular readers here might have noticed by now that I often judge books by the following (unfair, shallow, inconsistent) criteria:1. The cover2. The title3. adventure4. scandal5. Actual literary merit.I will use that rubric here: The cover: meh. The juxtaposition (an awful word) of small maryjane shoes next to men’s dress shoes looks a bit pervy, but the book itself is not pervy. 2. The title is serviceable and descriptive, though it would be more accurate if it was called The Time Traveller and His Wife. It doesn’t live up to my favorite title of the past year (Brutal Journey). (sidenote: the author has a goofy sounding name, and that makes me feel more warmly towards the book).3/4. No real scandal, middling adventure. That is to say: engaging, but not seat of your pants. I must reiterate here that this is an entirely personal and very flawed metric. It was this precisely this kind of terrible judgement that caused me to undervalue David McCullough’s John Adams because I happened to be reading a dual biography of Mary Queen of Scots and Elizabeth I at around the same time. Adams, you’ll recall, was faithful to his wife, nice to his children and a loyal patriot. This bored me to tears in comparison to MQof Scots and E1 who plotted endlessly and, in the case of of Mary, was accused of bombing her husband. And YET, even I have to admit that only crap movies are made about the Tudors while HBO is airing a real corker about John Adams. I digress. Also, I think I may have made no other point other than establishing that judging the literary merit of a biography based on the entertainment value of the film adaptation is probably worse than judging the literary merit of any book based on how much scandal it contains.You probably shouldn’t pay attention to anything I say about books, but if you have a spare afternoon, I recommend The Time Traveler’s Wife.

Not good, but not terrible

First of all, allow me to say (with great relief) that today was not the disaster that I thought it would be.  Also, thank the SBJ for Blockbuster.  They were not what you might call “attentive” or “well behaved”, but considering that we didn’t have PE, Fine Arts, recess, or lunch in the cafeteria, I think we did pretty well.  I rented Night at the Museum and was able to successfully parlay that into a lesson.

Ooof

Today was not so much a good day, and for the first time since I started teaching (a scant month ago), I am not so much looking forward to tomorrow.  This morning we started out the day with a lecture about grades, turning in work, and behaviour, given by me.  I was pretty cranky for reasons that don’t bear getting into (hunting down recalcitrant students to force them to do their missing work, and the bathroom break.  Don’t even get me started on the bathroom break!).     After that, they were steadily terrible all day, even in my smaller class, which is usually much quieter and more diligent.  Did I set them on a path to resentful misbehavior by starting out the day negatively?

Worse than the bad behaviour was the feeling that we didn’t learn anything all day.  Science was especially excruciating.  I taught the lesson the way I usually do: having them read from the text book and explaining each new concept as it comes up.  Today I felt more certain than ever that I was mostly talking to myself, and not a single person grasped the concept.  It’s a terrible feeling.  Better science lessons will mean much more planning than I’ve been able to devote and some real soul searching about how to teach these topics.  Science and Social Studies are the two subjects that I most keenly feel the limitations of a bilingual classroom – concepts which fairly complex to understand in your native language become a minefield of opaque vocabulary in a new language.   Some of my kids speak almost no English at all, and I have not been successful so far at arriving at a good balance between slipping into too much Spanish (to make sure everyone understands) and neglecting Spanish altogether (and thus losing a portion of my audience).

I’ve more or less given up on teaching Math in English, but since I have never taken any Math in Spanish myself, I have to stop and look in the kids’ textbooks all the time because I don’t recognize the vocabulary they use.  (Yesterday I was stumped by a word that turned out to be “integer”).   Still, at least in Math we are learning.   (A longer Math post is forthcoming)

All of this is a buildup to what my post is really about, which is Sheer Dread for tomorrow.   The sixth grade is the only grade level that lives entirely out in temporaries.   We traipse in and out of the building several times a day for lunch, Fine Arts, and bathroom breaks.  Other grade levels (in the school building proper) are taking standardized test benchmarks  tomorrow, and in the interest of maintaining a sacrosanct silence, 6th grade is not going in the building tomorrow.  No P.E. (which means no planning period for me), no recess, and lunch will be eaten in our room.  The whole day, we’ll be in the same room.

ooof.

Postcards

In a fit of reckless ambition a few weeks ago, I sent an email to friends far and wide to send my class an email with a fact about the city, state, or country where they live.   I sent the email out after realizing that my kids can only name three states out of fifty US States (they can name almost all the northern Mexican states), and they have almost no concept of any other continent.  We’ve only gotten a handful of cards so far, but it’s been a huge, huge hit in class.  It’s the first thing I’ve done that they’ve shown real interest in.  They ask every day if we’ve got a new one, and they pass them around and pore over them like talmudic texts.   Their Social Studies text book is as boring as dirt, even to me.

All that to say: if you haven’t sent one so far, please do!  I guarantee that they don’t know anything about the place where you live, and they will find any detail exotic and exciting.

The Cunning Man

 I took a train trip down to Austin last weekend, and it afforded me time not only to grade papers but also to finish a Robertson Davies book.If you’ve never read anything of his, skip The Cunning Man and read the Fifth Business, which is the first book of the excellent Deptford Trilogy.  I can’t recommend him highly enough as an author; his prose is meaty and satisfying, and I find myself constantly nodding my head at his insights.With that said, I can’t recommend The Cunning Man very highly if you’re not already a Davies afficionado.  It’s all writing and no book.Will expand more on this soon….