Keep an Open Mind

Today was the last day in my To Kill a Mockingbird unit.  My students have been working on their essays for TKAM over the past month, and they turned in their final essays today, which are worth a pretty significant chunk of points.  As they turned in their essays, it was almost as if you could feel the entire room relax.  After I had collected all the papers, I took a few minutes to congratulate my students on finishing their essays.  I told them that they had worked really hard for a long time, and that now, hopefully, they had turned in something that they could really be proud of.  A few of my students responded to this by saying things like "I actually kind of liked writing that essay." or "I'm so excited for you to read my essay." It was so nice to reflect with them after they finished the process of writing their papers.  It was also nice to see that some of the students who were initially apathetic or nervous about the essay were able to see that they had improved, and that maybe writing an essay can be a worthwhile and even fun activity.  After all, I keep telling my students that writing an argumentative essay is just like arguing with someone, except that no one can argue back!

Toward the end of class, I reminded my students that we're going to be reading Romeo & Juliet next.  At first, my announcement was met with a lot of ugly sounds - groans, moans, and a few "Do we have tos?"  Now, I would say that my students have made this sound pretty much every time I've introduced a new project/story.  Many of the kids who had just told me that they enjoyed writing their TKAM essay or enjoyed reading TKAM made those same ugly noises when I told them three months ago that we were going to read TKAM.  It's almost like they have that first bad reaction because they think they're supposed to immediately dislike anything related to school.  I pointed out to my students that they made the same sounds when I introduced TKAM and that most of them ended up enjoying the book and getting a lot out of it.  I asked them to keep an open mind about R&J, and told them that they will likely be pleasantly surprised at the end of the R&J unit like they were with the TKAM unit.

I feel like I spend a lot of time in my classroom communicating the value of what I'm teaching to my students.  And I also know that a lot of my students listen to me and eventually try to be more open-minded.  My goal, however, is that one day, my students will be open-minded right from the start.  There shouldn't be an attitude that everything to do with school is boring or pointless.  I'm not sure where it comes from, but a lot of my students come into my classroom already possessing that attitude.  I'm going to spend the rest of the year trying to rid my current students of that attitude as much as possible.

A Typical Teacher Day

I've been catching up on some edublogs, and I came across a post on sweattoinspire.com in which Todd Bloch, a #miched educator, shared what a typical day is like for him as a teacher.  At the end of the post, he challenges other teachers to share what their typical days are like, so here's a typical day for me:

5:00am
Wake up and start getting ready for the day.  Make sure I pack a lunch because there is no time during my lunch period to leave the building on a normal school day.  Also pack a snack because lunch is so early and short, my stomach is grumbling by the end of the school day.

6:00am
Leave for school.  I carpool almost every day with another teacher who lives close to me.  Carpooling is great for a few reasons.  1) It cuts down on gas costs, which leaves more money from my starting-teacher's salary to pay for things like student loans.  2) Carpooling helps me stay awake when it's my turn to drive because it makes the drive more interesting because 3) our carpooling discussions are like therapy, planning, and brainstorming all rolled into one.  Some of my best ideas for lesson have come from carpool conversations.

6:38am
This is what time we get to school.  Every day.  Pretty much no matter when we leave.  It's like we've discovered a wormhole or something.  We aren't really required to be at school until first hour starts at 7:11, but we have to get there at least a half hour early to get ready because once that first bell rings, THERE IS NO TIME.

6:38-7:11
About a half hour to get everything ready for the day - make any copies, sort materials, excavate my desk from the layer of miscellaneous papers from the day before, check in with any colleagues about plans for the day if necessary, answer questions for NHS kids who stop by to sign up for activities (I am the NHS sponsor at our school), chat with the group of students that like to hang out in my classroom before school every day, write the new objectives for the day on the board, and, oh yeah, run to the bathroom really fast before I'm not able to go once class starts.

7:11-9:00am
Teach my first two hours of the day.  Most classes at our school have around 30 students - I am lucky that a couple of mine are smaller, but four of my six classes are completely full with 30 kids and sometimes an extra directed study student.  In my classroom, we always get started right away, and once we start, we don't stop until the bell rings.  My friends who are not teachers tell me about how they sometimes have to prepare a presentation for work.  I'm sure that those presentations are very important and that they're different from what I do in my classroom, but teaching is kind of like preparing two or three presentations every day (or more, depending on how many preps you have) and then presenting it six times.

9:00-9:57am
Prep Time! Plan for the rest of the day or the next day...or maybe even the day after that if I'm really on top of everything and have been working a lot at home.  Prep Time can also turn into Meeting With the Principal Time or Return Parent Phone Calls/Emails Time or Sub for Another Teacher Time or several other things, sometimes with little or no notice.

10:00-10:32am
Teach half of fourth hour, which is split by lunch.  Kids get pretty excited and hungry around this time of the day.

10:32-11:02am
Half hour scheduled for lunch.  Lunch actually starts whenever all of the students are gone from my classroom - after I answer any questions or sort out any issues from the first half of class.

11:02-11:29am
Teach the other half of fourth hour.  Kids are either pretty excited or sleepy around this time of day...something to do with just having scarfed down weird combinations of foods in record time.

11:34am-2:20pm
Teach three more classes.  This year, I alternate subjects each hour, so I teach German, then English, then German, then English again, and so on. It's a great brain exercise switching languages every hour every day.  Also, sometimes "teaching" involves a lot more than what I expected it to before I actually started teaching.  Like telling a student that the middle of the classroom is not the best place to reapply deodorant.  Or having to help a student get his glasses untangled from his hair (I have no idea how this happened).

2:21pm
Breathe.  And go to the bathroom.

2:22-3:00pm or 3:30pm or 4:00pm or 4:30pm (depending on the day)
Grade and/or get ready for the next day.  Depending on the day of the week, there could also be staff meetings or professional development or Tea Club or NHS meetings/activities or tutoring or giving a student a make-up test or meeting with colleagues to talk about planning.  Right now, I'm lucky that I can usually stay as late as I need to.  A lot of teachers have to leave by a certain time each day (to pick up children and things like that), but that means that a lot of them are doing more work at home.  This year, I leave school around 4:00 most days.

On the way home
Think and talk about the day with my carpool buddy.

At home
Do any prep or grading that I didn't finish at school.  I've learned that I'm never really done with everything for this job.  Even if I had every day of the year planned at the beginning of September, there would always be work to do - rethinking plans, making things better, integrating new tools/ideas/requirements and of course, grading.  This year, I average about 1.5 hours of work at home per night.  This varies widely though, depending on the time of year, the units I'm teaching, and the amount of Netflix I watch while entering grades.

10:00pm
Go to bed and get ready to do it all over again in the morning.


I don't mean for this post to sound negative.  I really do feel it is an accurate description of what I do most days, and I know that some people are not aware of what it can be like to be a teacher.  I really do love my job.  I don't mind being busy, and I absolutely love the time when I'm actually teaching.  I feel like being around the kids gives me energy to get through these crazy days, even if I am sometimes exhausted when I get home.  And I look forward to seeing the kids again every day when I'm walking into school at 6:38am.

Sharing is Caring

Today, I had the opportunity to present about technology tools to my colleagues at a professional development session.  It was awesome.  One of my colleagues (@ElaineMantinan) and I were able to discuss and show how to use some really great educational technology tools - Google Drive, Kahoot, Padlet, Quizlet, and Twitter.

I was particularly excited about this opportunity because I feel that these tools have changed the way I teach for the better, and today was my chance to share that with a bigger group of people.  I firmly believe that if you find something that works well and helps your students, you should share it.  Professional development should involve an open exchange of ideas and should be about everyone working together to make everyone better.  Today I was glad to have a chance to be a part of that.

Thoughts from #Miched Chat 9/24/14

If you're reading this blog post, you probably saw it on Twitter and are likely someone who participates in chats like #miched, #edchat, or any one of the various education-themed chats that happen regularly on Twitter.  If you don't know what those are yet, I very strongly encourage you to check it out.  I've only recently started participating in the #miched chats from 8-9pm on Wednesday nights, but it's already radically changing the way I go about learning and improving as an educator.

Last night's #miched chat (9/23/14) was about personalized learning, and it really got me thinking about a few of the questions and responses.  One of the questions asked during the chat was "share a time when YOU benefited from having your learning personalized."  Many of the participants responded that the #miched chats and their Twitter PLNs were helping them to become better teachers.  It was great to see how many educators feel that they've benefited so much from just communicating with each other.  Every person in the #miched chat was there because they wanted to be - because they care about their students and they care about becoming better educators.

However, this got me thinking about how many teachers there are who are not yet participating in #miched or any other online sharing between teachers.  They are either unaware of or choosing not to participate in such a great opportunity for learning and professional development.  For some teachers, it seems that they equate professional development with boring lectures about things that don't have a direct connection to the classroom.  It's like professional development is just something to suffer through to check a requirement off a list.  There is a gap between what some schools are using for professional development and what teachers need and could really use to become better.

I find it kind of sad that this gap and attitude toward professional development exists at all, and it makes me want to go out and change people's minds.  I know of some people who don't think that teachers should have to do any professional development - that teachers have too much going on as it is already.  To me, that sounds like there are teachers who don't want to learn.

However, if we expect our students to always strive to become better and to become lifelong learners, shouldn't we teachers have the same expectation for ourselves?  How can we prepare our students for the world when we're not keeping up with how the world is changing?

I've learned a lot regarding this issue from #miched and other Twitter chats.  It is now easier than ever to do your own, personalized professional development, thanks to the Twitterverse full of teachers who are willing to answer questions and share ideas.  Also, by sharing my own ideas on Twitter and from the responses I've gotten, I feel very empowered and like I have something of value to share with my fellow educators, even if I'm only in my 3rd year of teaching.

Professional development isn't just lectures provided a few times a year by our school districts.  Professional development as I think of it (as teachers learning to be better teachers) is so much more than that.  It's a Twitter chat between educators on a Wednesday evening.  It's a discussion with a coworker in the hall about a new tool you're trying out in class.  Maybe it's even a reflective blog post that you're not sure anyone will ever see.

My point is that we need to get the word out about how valuable some "non-traditional" forms of professional development can be, and we need to be willing to try new things and to share our own experiences and ideas.  If we get more educators sharing and learning, we can all get better together.



If you would like to check out all of the tweets from #miched chat on personalized learning from 9/24/14, click here.  Thanks @ToddBloch for tweeting out the Storify story of the chat!

School is Fun!

I love those days when, at the end of the school day,  I think to myself: Today was so fun!  I actually get paid to teach and have fun with kids all day!  Awesome!  Granted, not every day is like that, but I've been having a lot of those fun days recently. I love it when my students are having fun and learning at the same time.  I think it's so important to provide students with experiences where they can see that learning can be fun.  If students have fun learning, hopefully they'll come love learning and become lifelong learners.

I have heard comments from others about how learning can't always and shouldn't always be fun.  One of the reasons I've heard for this is that "Most jobs aren't all about fun and games."  I get that, but I have a super fun job, and I know a lot of people who have fun at their jobs too.  I also don't think that just because some people's jobs are boring doesn't mean that we teachers shouldn't have fun with our students wherever we can.  Maybe if we have more fun in school, we'll create people who will have more fun in their jobs and lives in the future.

This post is pretty much an example of stream of conciousness, but I guess, as I'm thinking about this issue of fun in school, my thoughts are mostly summed up by: Why wouldn't you want to have fun in school whenever you can?

SCHOOL IS FUN!

Teach Like a Pirate: First Reflections

One of my wonderful colleagues, Jim Ekdahl (@EkdahlJames), recommended and let me borrow the book Teach Like a Pirate by Dave Burgess.  Admittedly, it's been taking me a while to actually start reading it - things have been so crazy with the first couple weeks of school.  I have, however, been able to read the first few sections - one on passion and one on immersion - and I'm really enjoying the book.  Here are my thoughts so far:

Passion:

Basically, Mr. Burgess says that teachers tend to have two kinds of passion that get them excited about their jobs: content passion and professional passion.  I am very passionate about the subjects I teach.  I find the German language and culture fascinating, and I have always loved all aspects of English.  While I do get excited about the content that I teach, I think I get even more excited about what Burgess calls professional passion.  

I feel very strongly that I am called to be a teacher.  I remember when I was in first grade, we had to come to school one day dressed up as what we wanted to be when we grew up.  I wore a skirt and a pink cardigan, and when my teacher asked me what I was, I told her I was a teacher (how did the cardigan not give that away immediately?).  That is my first memory of thinking about what I wanted to be when I grew up.  Then, late in high school, I decided to study engineering because there was a part of me that thought, for some reason, I couldn't be just a teacher.  I had to do something more, something better, something important.  After some stressful, not-so-happy semesters, I eventually switched my major in college from engineering to about five other things before finally realizing and accepting that nothing made me as happy as when I was working with kids.  Once I finally got to be in the classroom more while student teaching during my masters program, I knew that I had made the right decision.  Now, I wish I could go back and tell my high school self that teaching, for me, is the best and most important job.

I love being around my students.  I love teaching them about things I think are awesome.  I love learning from them - learning about other people, learning about how to be a better teacher, learning about myself.  I love those moments that Burgess calls "LCLs" or life-changing lessons.  While I love teaching German and English, what I am more passionate about is teaching kids.

Immersion:

The second section of TLAP that I've read so far is about immersion - jumping into the lesson with the kids and participating in it with them.  I think that I do this a lot already in my teaching.  I like to join in on the vocabulary games that we play in class.  While teaching, I prefer to sit in a student desk or walk around the room instead of sit at my own desk.  Sometimes, when I assign a project for my students, I make my own along with them.  I find myself doing more standing, walking around, and kneeling next to student desks rather than sitting while they are working on something in class.  Not only does that make teaching more interesting and fun for me, I think it does for the kids too.  

I know I still need to work on being really immersed in the lesson with my students ALL the time instead of just some of the time, but while I was reading this section of TLAP, I found myself realizing that I'm already more of a "pirate" than I had previously thought.

Stay tuned for more reflections on Teach Like a Pirate!

Experimenting with Student Freedom

I had a mini epiphany over the summer while I was brainstorming for some fun projects to do in my German 3 class this year.  While I was wondering to myself if a certain project would be better done as a video or a live presentation, I thought to myself: Why not both?  Or why not something else entirely?  What if there's a better way to do it that I haven't even thought of yet?

I really started thinking about what knowledge I wanted my students to have at the end of a unit and how I wanted them to demonstrate that knowledge.  That's backward planning - which seems like such an easy concept, but I still find myself struggling to remember to use it, as well as pleasantly surprise at how smoothly everything goes when I do use it.  Anyway, it got me thinking.  If every student is unique in their strengths and the way they learn, why don't I allow my assessments to be as unique as my students?  Why ask every student to make a video when some of them would prefer to do a live presentation?  Or make an infographic?  Or create a website?  Or do something that I haven't thought of yet?

I know it's not realistic for me right now to abandon every single assessment I have and allow the students to choose their own thing for every assessment, and I do think there is merit to having each student use a variety of methods to show their learning.  However, sometimes - a lot of the time, I think I should be allowing my students to have more of a say in how they show me what they've learned.  Our students can be so creative when they're motivated and excited by what they're doing in school.  Why not let them use their strengths and be creative in the ways they are assessed?

So, I'm officially experimenting on my German 3 class this week.  I've assigned them a project on the states of Germany, and I told them that they can present the information in any way they choose to do so (as long as they run it by me first).  Some students are making posters on Glogster, some are making websites with Weebly, some are making videos with WeVideo, some are making a Powerpoint presentation, and one was even thinking about incorporating interpretive dance (that last one may have been jokingly suggested, but still - you never know what they'll come up with!).  Their projects are due next week - we'll see how it goes!