Category Archives: education

the discipline

Onions Have Layers

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I spent the weekend having an identity crisis. Each day, I engaged in activities that nurtured different pieces of me. I came home on Friday to indulge in books and silly television, and spent Saturday at an education conference. I read fitness and body image blogs on the way home, where I dove into some writing. Sunday was a day of comfortable domesticity, cleaning a bit and running errands with Boyfriend. NYC public schools had Monday off, so I headed uptown to talk shop and plan with some of my teacher family, before returning home for an evening of cooking. It was a well-rounded, full weekend, and looking back over it as I waited for the last dish to be done in the oven, I expected to feel both nourished and ready for bed.

Instead, I was a live wire of anxiety. I tossed and turned through the night; I dreamed of paralysis, collapsed buildings, pits of snakes, the flu, etc. Early in the morning, I whispered to Boyfriend, “I don’t want to go.”

It wasn’t until I was sitting at the train station, packed and prepped and totally ready but completely not ready, that I could attempt to articulate the crushing guilt I was carrying. That’s what it was: guilt. I want to want to be excited about a new school year, new students, new colleagues, new opportunities. I mean, I love this stuff, don’t I?

… don’t I?

Every time I ask myself that question, or wish for more unstructured, self-directed time to write, read, and move, the weight of my guilt grows. Every time I let myself think about goals I have outside of my teaching practice, I feel the pit in my stomach threaten to swallow me whole. You’re not a writer, you’re a teacher, I scold myself, trying to drum up some enthusiasm. As if I didn’t just write this whole thing about multi-facetedness.

As we begin our units on identity, my students are thinking about onions today. Onions, I told them, have layers. All of the layers together make an onion. What are your layers? They draw, and label, and crinkle their noises, and talk, and write.

Thankfully, Boyfriend is really smart, and he had an insightful response to my early morning confessions of guilt. “These aren’t two identities,” he reminded me. “You’ve always been a writer. Up until recently, it just wasn’t a part of you that you considered real. It’s good that you feel it now.”

“You’ve always been a writer,” I remind myself. “You are a dedicated, hard-working, experienced teacher. These aren’t two identities.” I am layered, like an onion, I tell myself, ready to draw, and label, and talk, and write.

 

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Don’t Break the Bank on Books, part one

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I moved about 30 boxes of books into my new classroom this summer. When I told boyfriend, he said, “and they’re just gonna keep on coming.” He’s right; I have since ordered books for my classroom at least 5 times.

I’m not about to apologize for this, or rationalize it. The steady influx of books is a fact of my classroom life. But as you can imagine (and as many a teacher well knows) books can be an expensive habit. Here are some ways I keep the costs down.

Memberships and discounts: My Amazon Prime membership and my Barnes & Noble educator discount are put to good use. The yearly fee for Prime is made worth it very quickly with the shipping costs saved & Amazon pricing. B&N’s educator discount is free & gets me a 20% savings on titles for my classroom – 25% during the twice a year educator appreciation weeks.

Outlet shopping: While Amazon & BN are close to unbeatable in terms of selection, there are insane deals available on YA and Middle Grade titles elsewhere on the Internet. If you are working in a Title I eligible school, meaning ____, you qualify for a membership to FirstBook.org. The organization serves teachers & students in two ways: a deeply discounted marketplace for books, and opportunities to receive loads of free books several times throughout the year.

Another great discount retailer is BookOutlet.com. As with FirstBook, you probably won’t find newer titles on BO, but there are some notable titles, many that fall into the Popular For Years category, and quite a few readalike titles for students who have devoured the “cool” books & need new material. I bought 31 books for around $150 this August (& I only stopped at 31 because I needed to leave to catch a flight!). Even with $20 shipping in the US, that’s a steal at a $5/book average. I like that BO carries what they call “Scratch and Dent” copies, used books that they warn will show signs of having been read. I love a broken in book to begin with, and if it saves me money, so much the better.

I’ve also recently come across ThriftBooks.com, which is similar to BO but with free shipping for orders over $20. TB also carries more new-ish titles, still at impressive discounts. I only grabbed 6 books on my first order, which cost me $26. TB also carries many used books, and the product descriptions will indicate if the copy you’re adding to your cart is excellent, very good, good, or acceptable. The shopping cart lets you know if a “greener” option is available for one of your choices, offering you a slightly lower price for taking a used copy instead of a new copy. I love the ease & convenience of used book shopping this way – I don’t have to scour shelves & lug my purchases home (as much as I love an afternoon of browsing used books, the tediousness of shopping for my classroom this way takes most of the enjoyment out), & I don’t have to spend hours hunched at my computer reading through product descriptions to determine which copy of a book I should purchase.  TB also offers a rewards program for registered members; points for every $50 spent. Most of the books I received from TB were formerly in libraries, so they were sturdy hardcovers with protective plastic casing – great durability for teenage readers.

This is only Part One of money-saving strategies for book shopping! What do you do to cut back on costs in your classroom? Share in the comments and help me build up Part Two! 

(Another) One of These Years

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Last year, a friend alerted me to the existence of Penny Kittle’s podcast, Stories From the Teaching Life, & I immediately grabbed my phone to download every available episode. Yes, please, I thought. This is exactly what I need. 

I listened to four episodes before I had to stop.

The podcast is the most beautiful & heart-rending experience. Kittle has always won me over with her honesty & authenticity – when she shares these amazing moments from her classrooms, she never lets me think that they are more than moments, that she is some super-teacher who never deals with the students or the days that the rest of us have to slog through. I’ve never found myself rolling my eyes at an idyllic & preachy tale of how she has “saved the children.” Kittle has a knack for sharing a monumental moment without promising or even alluding to a happily ever after. It is nourishing to take in, a reminder of why I love this job & how easily I let these moments slip by without stopping to savor them.

But it was painful, too. I could ignore the gap – one that seemed to widen by the day – between myself & my “paperback mentors,” even between myself & my teaching family. I would listen to & read about them transforming their classrooms & schools, tackling teaching tensions with colleagues, taking risks to bring students what they need, & I wanted to feel inspired & invigorated.  & I do. I couldn’t ignore the longing for administrators who trusted me enough to teach, who valued the work I was doing & the growth we were all making.

I’m having one of these years, I told myself, but I realized then that I’ve been having one of “those years” for the past six or seven.

I’ve come a long, long way in how this environment affects me. I don’t lose (as much) sleep, I don’t skip (as many) meals or replace them with junk food (as often). I don’t convince myself that I really am a terrible teacher who has been greatly harming children for the past 10 years. But it hurts, a lot, for what feels like always.

In 10 years of teaching, I think I had 2 years of working with administrators who had confidence in me & who respected my commitment to professional growth as what it was – a desire to improve & learn, not a defiance of the methods prescribed or enforced by the bureaucracy of our education system.Looking back, I think I can remember what it was like to have post-observation conferences that were collaborations rather than punishments, to be allowed to assess my students’ progress in meaningful ways & interact with them as if we were all humans & learners together. Vaguely, I recall it.

Since those first few years of working in one of the last remaining “big” high schools in the Bronx, with a department of veteran English teachers who met weekly to discuss pedagogy & best practices, I haven’t worked in a school that has trusted me to know how to teach my students, or to invest myself in figuring out how.

This, despite the conferences I attended on my own time & dime, despite the thousands of pages of professional reading, despite my memberships & contributions to professional organizations, despite the hours spent at school before & after hours, despite the fact that my teacher family & I volunteered 40+ hours of our time, including our Saturday mornings, to facilitate a teacher book club on revisiting the teaching of reading. Everything I did was suspect, & in this I represented the vast majority of public school teachers in the Bronx. I know this because I know so many of them, and I have spent these past 10 years immersed in networks with other teachers so that instead of running across disgruntled educators at mandated PDs, I connect with teachers like me. There are many, & we are tired, & even knowing that the others are out there, we feel lonely.

There are days when I can savor the moments with my students. & I’m lucky, because there are great moments nearly every day. But there were also so many days when my colleagues & I would shuffle the halls & shelter in our classrooms, too diminished by criticism & doubt to rally together.

I’m writing this in mostly past tense because my most recent school change will take me out of a toxic work environment, but it will also take me out of the Bronx. I am optimistic about my new place of work, for many reasons. I wonder what it will be like to be valued again. A handful of planning conversations with my new colleagues already indicates that my voice is appreciated and desired. I am taken aback by how foreign and delightful this feels.

Over the past 10 years, I have known so many teachers who have become apathetic after so many years of being treated like the problem. We come to believe that this is just what the job is, who administrators are, and how schools work. It is easy for things to become hopeless. And that things might not be this way everywhere is a tough sell. But I’d always rather take a chance on hope. Besides, I really want to be able to listen to that podcast again.

Starting Over, Again

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Coming out of silence is almost as hard as living in it. In an oppressive environment, I survive by turning inward. It’s a strategy that has served me well and protected me through many challenging situations, but the longer I stay in the safety of isolation, the more difficult words become.

It is uniquely brutal, breaking silence. The stakes and the size of what Needs To Be Said have been growing furiously in the corners of my mind, and it all looms over me now, whispering that I had better get this right.

The only way I’m going to get it right is if I get it done. All I can do, is do.

When I think, and talk, and read, and write, about living a writing life alongside my students, this is the part I leave out. Most people do, I find. Even when honestly exploring the challenges of helping students build independent writing lives, I rarely read about teachers struggling through lapses in their own writing practice. “A line every day, even if it’s terrible,” I’ll hear. And I admire it. But what about when you miss a day, and one day becomes one week, and one week becomes months and your writer’s notebook is a brick of guilt you lug around every day? What about how even when you manage to pry open the cover and confront the discouraging blankness of so many pages, you sit with the pen hovering over the paper and let the white noise roar in the space between your ears, and you write nothing?

This is hard to admit, to talk about, to write about. It is hard to come back to this place. I’m ashamed at how long I’ve left it. I’m afraid I’ll abandon it again. But I think there is value in pushing my way through fear and shame, instead of trying to leave it behind me. And I want to have something to say, some experience to draw on, when I sit with my students before overwhelmingly blank pages and pick up a pen. I want them to know that we can always begin again.

What Doesn’t Kill You

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The Monday after the mass murder at Pulse in Orlando, FL was also the last day of classes before end-of-year testing began. Attendance was low & classes were loosely structured – test prep, last minute grade savers, can I please just read my book? I had thought about the shooting all weekend, but I had no words yet. 
I teach students who are newcomers to the US, who have immigrated from countries in Africa, Asia, Latin America. Many of my students practice Islam. Many look like the Latinx clubgoers who were attacked at Pulse. Many come from places where governments are corrupt, violence is public & frequent, where homosexuality is considered a capital offense, where gay people are proclaimed subhuman. 

I only spoke to one of my students about the shooting. L brought it up to me, asking if I’d heard about it. I braced myself for a conversation about homophobia & respect; L is the kind of student whose anger & desire for attention manifest in making deliberately hateful comments for their shock value. I was raw & stinging underneath my skin, angry beyond coherent words, & I wasn’t sure I could be calm enough to handle what he might throw at me. 

I told him: Yes. I heard about it. It made me so angry, & scared. 

L was quiet for a moment, looking at me thoughtfully. Then he said, This stuff isn’t supposed to happen here. 
A friend of mine, another high school English teacher, confers with her students after their daily freewrites by asking them what they have written about & jotting quick notes in her log. On Monday, one of her 9th graders told her, I wrote a list of reasons why people who don’t know me might try to kill me. 

How am I supposed to write that down for my conference notes? she asked me. How do I even begin to say something that matters to that student? 

& she told me, she shared that story with a few friends, some teachers & some not. One of the fellow teachers said, Oh, 9th graders are so dramatic. 

I have made the same list. More than once. 
Who I teach & what I teach, & who I am, brings me often to the intersection of politics of language, identity, religion, culture, feminism, & more. I’ve heard a lot of frustrations that adults feel about “politically correct” thinking & language – that words will not change feelings & ideas, that these are band aids on broken bones, that oversensitivity is going to raise our children to be weak & useless. I have heard teachers use justify their refusal to bring issues of race, gender, & sexuality into their classrooms. To them, I say that I don’t think it’s about us, necessarily; it’s about the younger generation we have a hand in raising. Maybe the words I use & those I choose not to use will do nothing about my own cynicism, my apathy, my held biases. But 10 years of teaching has shown me the power of words & how they influence mindset, openness, & thought. When I ask myself what I want my students to learn & take away from my classroom, it is never my lack of faith in humanity. If we want them to do & think & live better, then we have to teach them how. 

Some people like that. Many do not. But it’s not about us. 
Right now, teachers are being discouraged from talking about the massacres & murders of their students’ time. Sometimes, it is test pressure. Often, it’s that teachers aren’t trained or prepared to have these conversations. Sometimes, there are direct orders from administrators, or protests from parents who do not want teachers pushing political agendas on their children. 

Passing a test cannot be more important than becoming the kind of adult who has agency & knows how to maintain it, who both wants & can plan how to improve their world. 

We need to accept that educators need to be trained – really taught & practiced at – teaching through trauma, even more than they need a scripted & leveled curriculum. 

& maybe part of our problem is that people consider teaching students that everyone is human, everyone deserves recognition of their humanity, is a political agenda. 

I don’t have any answers, any profundities to share about the victims of this massacre, or of any other. I am not adept at teaching this way or bringing the real world into student discussions, with getting over or going through my own fear. I have only the dread I carry deep in my belly, dread that my students navigate a world that sees them as less & less than what they are, that reduces them to slivers of their identities & judges them. That dread, that fear that I will walk into my classroom to find another of my students has been murdered or attacked because of their ethnicity, their clothes, their sexuality, their neighborhood. That, the certainty that we can & must do better, & an aching raw wound for a heart. It still works, though. 
A prospective teacher in my friend’s graduate class once confessed to me that she was just not comfortable putting any LGBT-themed books in her future classroom library. “I’ll just set some aside for a student who is dealing with…that issue,” she said, flustered. 

“What if you don’t know?” I asked. 

She looked confused, like maybe I was not as smart as she had thought, like, how would she not be able to know? 

“I mean, what if you have students who are hiding themselves & too scared or feeling too alienated to express themselves, or students who are even in denial themselves? How can you know what they need if they’re hiding it from you & everyone?”

She shook her head. “Um…”

“& what about your other students?”

“What do you mean?”

“Shouldn’t they learn that gay people are normal, that they’re teenagers who do all sorts of teenager-y things, like have favorite music & fights with siblings & best friends & crushes & everything?” Shouldnt they all learn that being a different kind of person doesn’t make anyone less of a person?
It’s not about us. It’s about our students, their futures, & doing right by them. If it’s about anything else, then isn’t it part of the problem? 

4 Ways to Manage Student Choice in Argument

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I can’t believe that my last post here was within this school year! As you can imagine, given the months of absence, it has been an eventful year. I’ve found myself talking about argument units a lot lately, sharing the triumphs & the pitfalls of new approaches to teaching structured debate. From state standards to mandated assessments to curricular demands, argument units are becoming larger pieces of elementary through secondary classrooms.

Most teachers I know are always thinking about how to engage their students in any writing or thinking they bring to the classroom, & argument offers a unique challenge: teachers want students to have choice, but structure often gets in the way. In talking to many educators of different grade levels, here are 4 suggestions for keeping student choice alive & well in your argument units.

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Happy

Posted in education, ELLs, nyc schools, public school, teaching by

Two Writing Teachers: Tuesday Slice of Life

In 10 years of teaching, not one high school student has ever told me he or she wanted to teach English.

Some students have mentioned that they would like to be teachers. “But not English,” they’ve always been quick to add. Serious eyes, emphatic headshake. Not English, the horror.

I’ve seen lots of emphatic headshaking in the past 10 years. Most of my students can’t seem to understand why anyone would be a teacher. “I don’t have the patience,” they’ve told me, usually following with the certainty that they would end up smacking somebody. I just smile, because they think that’s where I spend all my patience. They don’t know what I really need all this zen for.

So the other day, when W asked me if he could talk to me after class for a few minutes, I wasn’t expecting we would be discussing career aspirations. I suppressed a flicker of annoyance, mostly because I knew it was anxiety-driven – the period following W’s class is our professional period and our conduct during that time has been under scrutiny lately. But I like talking with W, who presents as generally too cool, strolling on the edge of wayward, but is clever and funny and kind of a sweet dork. So I smiled and said, “Of course,” desperately hoping he wouldn’t ask about his grade. My stack of waiting-to-be-marked assignments, growing by the day, sighed wearily from my desk.

Instead, W told me that he’s thinking of becoming an English teacher. I couldn’t measure my smile, but it was wide enough to have W bowing his head in embarrassment, giving us both a moment to get our cool back. He actually managed to do so; I was just giddy.

He told me that he had been thinking about his future lately, but also his past. He came to the US a few years ago, knowing no English, but he worked hard to learn. His accent is enough Bronx that I had assumed, when I first met him, that he had lived in New York since his childhood. English isn’t easy, he told me. Now, he likes helping people learn, but he especially likes helping them with English. When he thinks about his future, he told me, he feels like helping other people in a similar situation to his would be a good thing to do with his life.

“I think I’d be happy,” he said.

I told you, kind of a sweet dork, right?

My face was still cracked open, so my initial reaction to all this was a firm YAY!!! But I gave myself a pause. Because this was not just a notice. W wanted advice. He wanted to know, apart from the “economic issues,” as he put it, if teaching is a good job. He wanted to know if it makes me happy. And I wanted to be honest.

I told him that teaching engages my whole brain, my heart and my breath, everything. I told him that I see the world as a teacher, that every article or vine or movie or meme I come across makes me think, if only for a second, about how I could bring this to my students. I told him that this job does not stay where you leave it, that even with the boundaries I have set around how late I will stay after school and what physically comes home with me, I can never just clock out or shut down. There is no off switch for the teaching part of my brain, I said, because it’s pretty much all of my brain. Every year, I told him, I meet these fascinating people, and I get to know them, I share with them, and we become something of a family.

All of that, I assured him, is as demanding as it is rewarding. Sometimes – some months – some years – the giving outweighs the getting. This job makes me happy, I said, because learning is amazing. It is amazing to learn and it is amazing to witness the learning of others, and as a teacher I get both. I don’t know how many other jobs can give you that, because when I found this one, I knew that I was home. So, yes, this job makes me happy. But it also makes me angry, and sad, and tired. I told him that this job is hard; that even though – depending on the state he lives in and the lifestyle he wants – he can do ok, he can live, those well-deserved holiday breaks and that hard-earned summer vacation will not lessen the demands this job will make. “That’s just life, though, isn’t it?” I asked him. “Nothing is just one way all the time.”

When W told me he wanted to be an English teacher, Nancie Atwell’s warning to prospective teachers flashed in my mind. I don’t want to leave anyone with the impression that teaching grants you this pure, noble career, that the rewards of student achievement can counterbalance, let alone compensate for, the demands, demoralization, and abuse of education reform. It is easy to miss out on the joy of teaching in this current climate; it is hard to grow. For a moment, I imagine my life as a New York City dog-walker and I consider telling W, “Run.” Or at least advising him to do something in finance.

But I wanted to be honest. And honestly, even with the anxiety, the daily madness of working with 100 teenagers (and their 1,000 hormones each, and their completely normal adolescent ridiculousness multiplied by the trauma and anger and abandonment issues that frequent this population), the insult of being told by official after official, none of whom know anything about teaching this subject or this population, that I cannot be trusted with my own professional growth, even with the knowledge that I could be a very happy dog-walker, this job makes me happy. That might not be enough, I know, but it’s what I’ve got for now.

W thanked me for staying to talk to him. I smiled again, and told him, “Anytime.” The stack of unmarked marking cleared its throat, but I ignored it (I’m really good at that). As he left, I asked him how long he had been thinking about this, being an English teacher. He paused at the door, considering his answer over the muffled shrieks of exuberant 9th graders. “Since this year, I guess,” he said. “You’re a good teacher, Miss.” He left and I laid my head down on the desk, pillowed on my arm, thinking that in this job, when it rains, it absolutely pours.

Rewriting History, Repeating the Future

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“College Board Caves To Conservative Pressure, Changes AP U.S. History Curriculum”

I woke up to this headline on a friend’s Facebook and shared the story right away. I knew my friends who are teachers and readers would want to see it, too. Another friend of mine commented with disbelief. “Is this satire?” she wrote, followed by a few WTFs. That’s a reasonable reaction to the discovery that the RNC and other influential conservative politicians have effectively replaced AP US History with the teaching of the theory of American exceptionalism. That statement may seem dramatic, but I don’t think it so when the same ideologies have led to this: “Texas also recently changed its state academic guidelines, which means its new textbooks won’t mention the Ku Klux Klan or Jim Crow laws.” When I first heard about that decision in Texas, I expressed my alarm, and many of my fellow New Yorkers just shook their heads in that “what are ya gonna do?” way. One quipped, “Well, I hear you don’t mess with Texas.” The general attitude was that this was crazy, but it was an isolated, small crazy. However, as ThinkProgress points out in this article, “Texas is a very influential textbook market, and publishers tend to look to Texas when deciding content for the textbooks they publish.” The impact of these decisions has a far wider reach than we like to acknowledge. These aren’t bizarre revisions to our nation’s past that affect remote communities. High schools across the country offer AP courses, and the presence of these classes is often seen as a marker for a school’s prestige and quality. In other words:

…stunting students with warped, sugar-coated notions of social and political history will only foster more divisiveness. Affluent, whiter schools tend to have a wider array of AP coursework than others. Indoctrinating these students with inaccurate portrayals of a historiographically flawless United States will cement an already extant unwillingness to understand or identify with groups that are still dealing with the reverberations of systemic disenfranchisement today. (Flanigan, “All the Ways the New AP US History Standards Gloss Over the Country’s Racist Past”)

When I wrote this post about my experiences with Facing History following the death of Michael Brown, I gave voice to a long-standing, ever-present tension within me about my responsibility and role as a teacher. Teaching history is not merely a job; it’s a responsibility. Even when that history is hard to look at, or unflattering, or painful, we are responsible for teaching it honestly to those who did not live it. We can’t be afraid to do that. Unfortunately, that seems to be exactly where these policies come from: fear.

I was talking to a friend recently about how differently the US teaches its history from Germany. Germany has some dark history, but everything I’ve read about it shows a consistent effort to confront that past with students so that things change. It’s looking fear in the face, turning on the lights and revealing the monster instead of running from it and letting it grow huge. Back in 1995, Alan Cowell, for the New York Times, wrote about a history class in Germany. Cowell observes: “They are taught that the Nazis came to power on the wings of economic collapse and humiliation at Germany’s defeat in the First World War. They are taught about Hitler’s race laws. They are taught that their forebears killed six million Jews. But they also learn that this was history, with a European and a German context, not personal guilt.” This approach to teaching history does not shame or harm students, but instead puts them in positions of power; in this setting, students can see that their choices matter, and that their perspective gives them an advantage over their forebears. History through this lens is authentic and vital, the key to changing the world and making a difference.

Critics of the changes to the AP US History curriculum guidelines do not seem to hold these values: empowering students, improving American society, truth. ThinkProgress reports: “Some of the main criticisms of the guidelines, conservatives voiced, were less emphasis on the founding fathers and more emphasis on slavery. The guidelines also included earlier American history that included violence against Native Americans and mentioned the growing influence of social conservatives.“ To protest the inclusion of these realities indicates a clear political agenda, and in disguising it as patriotism they pervert patriotism; they send the message that we can only be proud of our nation by hiding its true past and lying to our children.

This insistence on fragility and the demands that history be blurred and revised to protect the feelings of students is both misguided and deeply harmful. It’s pervasive, though, and effective, because it feeds directly into the culture of fear. “In September of last year, Ben Carson, a pediatric neurosurgeon who is now running for president, said ‘most people’ who take the course would be ‘ready to sign up for ISIS.’” Confronting our past and giving voice to those whose stories have historically been silenced is not about finger-wagging, shaming, or demanding apology. It’s about examining how and why genocide, slavery, and institutionalized racism happened in our country, because only doing this will empower young people to make choices that break the persistent patterns surrounding them. It’s about making sure we understand that what we have to be ashamed of is that 40,000 people think that their discomfort gives them the right to erase history, rather than a reason to write a better future.

About a year ago, a Reddit user asked German-educated members of the online community to share what it was like to learn about World War Two in their country. The anecdotes shared are interesting and inspiring, but I was particularly struck by one user’s takeaway.

It’s not the past that should define us, but how we deal with it. Most countries brush their past aside. Deny their mistakes. Their crimes. They ignore it. Place blame on the others. Refuse to learn from it. Germans don’t do that. And that should make us proud. Patriotism should always have its limits. You can be a patriot without denying your [country’s] past and its crimes.

I can’t say it better than that.

Free-falling/Free-writing

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Free-writing with students terrifies me. 

 Every time! I always think at some point the fear of the first free-write will subside, and instead of inwardly panicking while my students gape at me in horror – You’re asking us to write? By ourselves? Are you crazy? – I’ll remember that I’ve done this before and no one died. But no, I can’t convince myself of that on Day One; even as I reassure my students that they can do this, my inner freakout perfectly mirrors their outer. What am I going to write about?! they cry, and I smile serenely while a voice in my head shrieks WHAT ARE THEY GOING TO WRITE ABOUT?! 

 There’s a lot to be said for faith. Often, I forge ahead with what I know will benefit my students even when the risk of failure threatens, and I’m only able to do so because I’ve done it before. It’s a small comfort, but it’s real and when I clutch it in my nervous hand, I find I have enough in me to keep smiling, encouraging, nudging. 

 “Miss, I don’t know where to start,” G. said on Day One. The class around us was completely ignoring the independent volume I’d requested (aka shhhh) as they traded topics across tables. 

 “Me either. Actually, that’s how I started,” I replied, tapping my pen against my mostly blank page. 

 G. narrowed his eyes a little, which is sort of his pre-smile, and jutted his chin at my notebook. “You’re writing, too?” Suspicious, slightly smirking. 

 I nodded and glanced down as I read him my first line, “‘I don’t know where to start.’ Yep.” 

 “Let me see.” G. wasn’t even trying to hide his doubt this time.

I could’t help smiling as I folded the notebook over and flipped it around, pointing at the scant 3 lines of writing. 

“I’m a little stuck, but I got some words on the page.” 

 G. raised his eyebrows and nodded, stoic teenage boy for, “Ok, cool.” His pen touched down and I let out a breath I didn’t know I was holding. Words on the page.

That’s what I’d told them: Just get some words on the page. You can do it.

Most of them didn’t believe me. I could tell by looking. 

And by them telling me, “I don’t believe you.” 

 Some didn’t get a word on the page. “It happens,” I told them. “Sometimes, the words aren’t ready to come out of our brains yet. It’s ok.” And then I repeated that to myself all day.  It’s ok, it’s ok. Reminding myself that this practice is important, vital, in developing writing voice, that this is how we become independent and thoughtful writers – we write.

This constant justification is a big part of my teaching life now. Where I used to feel confident in my choices because I had seen their effects, I feel uncertain even in the most tried and true routines, under the ever-more looming shadow of evaluation. Frankly, I feel like a marked woman; my days in this job feel numbered as I approach the inevitable Ineffective. But even though I’ve made up my mind to teach the best I can for as long as I can, I’m not immune to a freak out here and there.

But one of the greatest things about this job is that, while I’m often playing the long game and not seeing the results of some moves for years to come, there’s some amount of instant gratification. It comes in the form of students who press their notebooks into my hands at the end of class and say, “Please read.” And students who say across the table to the classmate with the blank page before them, “I’m writing about this, you should try it. Don’t worry. You can do it.” And looking around the classroom to see almost every pen moving, and students thanking me for giving them this space and time, and just one of my most troubled and disruptive students telling me that writing really helps, and he feels ready now. And when I ask, ready for what, he tells me, ready to learn. And when I say, I think you’re learning right now, he laughs and says I’m right.

One of my colleagues, before he retired after 35 years in NYC public schools, once told me that teaching was never easy, but recognizing good teaching was very easy.  He said good teachers figure out what their students need, and they figure out how to help them get it. And that’s the best answer to the why, to the what if, to the should we. They need this, and my job is to help them get it. 

Beyond the T-Chart

Posted in books, education, ELLs, language, reading, teaching, writing by

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“I’m going to give you a little dude,” I announced, holding up a handful of paper rectangles. On each is the empty outline of a cartoonish body.

“Now, be kind to this little dude. Don’t draw on his face, or crumple him up, or poke him with your pencil.” In every class, this gets a chuckle.

“This little dude is Junior. He’s going to live in your notebook.”

Handing out everyone’s little dudes there were a few jokes – fake rips, little dude fights between tablemates – but all of my students were taking care of their outlines. They placed them in the center of their notebook pages, quickly taking the two pieces of tape I tore off before moving on to the next student. Some students adjusted the orientation a few times, looking for the best spot before committing to the tape.

“Does everyone’s Junior have a home?” I asked. Most of each class chorused, “Yes,” with some notebooks flipped to show me their secured little dudes. Some students were still labeling him; “Junior,” they wrote, then waited, not drawing on his face.

“What are we focusing on today? Remind me?”

“Internalexternalconflict!” someone called out, every class.

Junior’s internal conflicts – his personal struggles, the problems he carries around inside him throughout this novel – we wrote inside of the outline. External conflicts we arranged around him, drawing arrows that press into him from all sides. Students offered conflicts and suggested where they belong, then defended their positions. There were great (multi-lingual) arguments happening, more like negotiations:

“Poverty is internal because it makes him feel so bad about himself.”

“But I think it’s external, because he was born into this poor family and this culture, so it comes from outside of him.”

“Yeah, so his low self-esteem is internal, but poverty is external.”

“Can we put them next to each other?”

In most classes, I did little more than write. I placed my “marker” on the SmartBoard and said, “Ok, here? What am I writing here? Do we all agree? Where else could it go?” My most energetic class had me dragging chunks of text around the figure on the board, pulling out his insides and swapping them around until we created a Junior they could recognize.

I had them 2nd period, usually their most zombie-like time slot, and their raised hands punched the air with enthusiasm that made me nervous for possible concussions.

My coworker’s son is in 3rd grade. He just made a mobile for his book report. My coworker smiled when he recounted his son’s excitement over making the mobile. Just a coat-hanger, some paper, some string and tape, he told me. So much better than a book report.

What we really had to do on Little Dude Day was review. For a lot of reasons, we didn’t end where I had hoped we would before the winter break, and we were coming back in the beginning of the middle of The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-Time Indian. Before we jumped back in, we needed to recap. I’ve been trying to decompartmentalize literary elements with my students, who come to me with the idea that plot goes here and characterization here and never the twain shall meet. I want to help them see the connectedness of all those pieces, the overlap and interdependence.

They showed me some beginning understanding of that as we wrote in and around our Juniors – “This conflict is why he is like the way he is,” one student said, after the poverty and low self-esteem connection was established.

“Tell me more about that,” I responded, because it is my mission to make everyone roll his or her eyes at me.

Eye-roll, sigh. “He draws the cartoons and says really crazy stuff because he’s not really happy, right?” I will spare you my torturous replies, though this student was not so lucky.

My number one advice for teaching high school English has become, “Be corny.” Sometimes, I say I don’t know what it is about corny, but I do know; corny is fun. So much of high school is not fun, increasingly so these days. I have seen many teachers do a similar lesson on internal and external conflict, using a T-chart. T-charts are the wrong kind of corny. It should go without saying that fun is effective, even in small doses. It is more memorable, more meaningful. And it is easy. It added about 6 minutes to my prep to print out enough little dudes for my four classes. (I had a student cut the pages in half. In my more efficient classes, they managed the tape without me.) The room was alive, as tired as we all felt coming off a week-plus vacation. Their noise was productive and sparkling, their silences thoughtful.

In one class, a student said the bullying Junior faces (external, they decided) makes him feel very lonely.
“Is lonely a conflict for him? Where should it go?”

They paused, some waiting, some thinking. One of my students was looking down at her little Junior, frowning. She mouthed, “Lonely,” and put her hand over her chest before looking up to tell me, “Internal. Inside.”

“Yeah, inside,” said the student next to her, touching her own sternum. “Right there.”