Posts Tagged ‘Education and Teaching’

I think I’ve done everything I can to get ready — lesson plans are in the bag, and the prep work is done. I’ve created an activity for social studies where the kids make, in four separate quarters, our Texas map, then we tape it all together for display. I’m kind of excited about this but also worried it won’t work.  Another thing — Southwestern Texas doesn’t have as many map details as the rest of the quarters. But perhaps we will include a few details from Mexico in that portion.

Dean told me I should not be so worried about my first day, because the real “first” time you teach is the first time you stood in front of a class. It’s true, I was a substitute teacher.

But tonight, I feel as if I’m in the calm before the storm. I’m not cooking dinner, someone else was recruited for that, so I’m just blogging and listening to the kids play video games. I’ve got my roll sheet and my policies and procedures, and if my classroom looks rather bare compared to the rooms of the teachers who’ve been there a while, nevertheless, it does look ready, with stacks of books on the desks, an icebreaker activity waiting for the kids, and the seats and lockers assigned in four table groups — the reds, greens, blues and yellows. Tomorrow, they will make up their own names for their tables and chose a leader for each workgroup. But tonight, I will not think about these things. I will enjoy myself, watching another Bollywood movie from Netflix with Dean, and just assume everything will be okay. Because whether it is or it isn’t, there’s not much I can do about the outcome for the next 12 hours, except wait and see what it is.

August 17th was our first day of “real” work at my school. We opened up with a meeting of all the teachers and then it was off to the classrooms to work on getting set up.

My situation, as a brand new teacher, was somewhat unique. Everyone else was trying to get all their teaching tools put away, while I was trying to figure out how to set up my room, make a few posters, cover the bulletin boards, and get my class list. My class was empty. I had no last year’s teaching tools to put away.

I felt helpless. Fortunately for me one of the other teachers came to my room, knowing I was new, and announced that she had a huge box of borders which had been left with her by a retiring teaching last spring. I looked through them. I found some borders decorated with globes, some with rainbow pencils, and some with apples and “welcome” spelled out. I could put colored butcher paper over the bulletin boards (a technique I learned from observing the classroom next door) then staple the borders around for an attractive display. I would have two subject-specific word walls and one large bulletin board for student work.

The colored butcher paper comes on huge rolls, like the rolls you see upholstery fabric on, and although there is a mechanism for tearing the paper off, it doesn’t work properly. So, as for the first time ever I tried to tear the roll away, it ripped. It was uneven. I felt foolish.  But I got a large piece of paper and carried it down the hallway.

“That paper looks pretty raggedy,” another teacher teased  me.

“This is just my practice run,” I told him. And in fact, it was. Hanging the paper, I had to learn to use the straight edge along the top, staple it in place, then let the paper hang down the bulletin board, staple that down the sides, work down to the bottom, staple it all, then go around the bulletin board with open scissors like an exacto knife and take off the excess.  When I was done, it was too messy, the paper hadn’t been big enough, I had to do it again.

If I can’t even put up a bulletin board, how am I ever going to teach my class, I wondered as I walked down to get more butcher paper. And will anyone notice that I wasted a whole bunch of paper?

No one noticed. The second time I brought three sheets of paper for the three boards and this time it went much better. I learned you can patch a corner that’s too short by slipping another same-colored piece under it and stapling — you can’t really see the rip. Then once the paper is up, you staple the borders around the edges. I broke a lot of staples doing that because the wood was pretty hard. I got it done. My bulletin boards looked great.

This was only one small battle, of course. I hadn’t yet made the posters, I hadn’t brought the plants I bought in yet, or the notebooks, and it still looked pretty bare. But they told me  my computer would be coming in today. And the posters are almost ready. And I keep telling myself over and over, with all the teachers in this world, all of them who had a first year and a first day in front of their own first class, and who made it, why should I be any different?

I feel like I’m at the edge of a tremendous sea, in a tiny boat, getting ready to embark. That’s an uneasy feeling, but it’s not necessarily a bad one. A lot could happen, and surely will.

The other night at teacher training, our professor showed us a video of an anaconda eating a capybara and wanted us to learn how to give kids a chance to make non-traditional presentations using one of the “other” seven of the “eight ways of knowing.” The eight ways of knowing are:

Verbal/linguistic (the traditional one);
Logical/Mathematical;
Visual/Spatial;
Body/Kinesthetic;
Musical/Rhythmic;
Naturalistic;
Intrapersonal and
Interpersonal.

Toward this end, the instructor asked us to sign up  to interpret the Anaconda material in various ways. We could create a fairly tale, do a cartoon or illustration, act the story out, create a dance based on the story, and a couple of other things. I chose, probably because of my experience teaching music, to write a song. Two classmates also joined me in doing the song approach. I had figured I could go home and get my guitar. But it turned out we were only going to use a few percussion instruments in a plastic box.

It quickly became clear that with only about 20 minutes to prepare the lesson we had to write fast. We wrote the song lyrics and chose the instruments. We polished the lyrics. Then, when there was only about 60 seconds to go, we realized our song had no melody.

“That’s okay, we’ll do it as a rap,” I said.  Here, then, is the Anaconda Rap Song:

A capybara family was playing on the ground
An enemy was coming, it was big and it was round.

As they were sitting eating, just having family fun
Not one of them knew that the snake was gonna come.

Thirteen feet long and a good foot wide,
It swam underwater so they could not hide.

(now we used the “swizzling” instruments to create extra suspense)

The capybara tried to fight
But pretty soon, with one last bite
The capybara wasn’t breatin’
This was what the snake was needin’

The snake’s jaw came unwird
Afterward she was fat and tired

It was a very successful lesson, I have to say, after all. “I guess we really are elementary teachers at heart,” I thought to myself. “Only elementary teacher types could really ‘get into’ this exercise.”

There’s a little bit of kid in all adults, I suppose, and more in some of us. This morning I’m going back to class. We’re going to do a skit with stuffed animals. Yes, this is fun.

So, after a week full of paperwork and two night classes of summer teacher training, this is the first full day of summer school, and I don’t want to go. I’m not up for it. I’m exhausted from the last week of teaching elementary school, the grading, the graduation concert, learning the grading software, and then taking responsibility for my own kids 24/7 and now I have to go to class from 9 to 4 this afternoon and it doesn’t seem bearable. Plus I forgot to order the text books, so I only have one of them, and not the “important” one, which is humiliating.

There’s nothing wrong with the classes, mind you. Actually they’re quite interesting and I probably need to learn these things, about classroom management and making lesson plans, to use on interviews soon. But my level of exhaustion is very great.

I barely succeeded in dragging myslf to the class on Thursday night and then they said today’s class was not a half day but all day and I almost fell over in despair. The next day I went and told my mother:

“I feel like I can’t do it.”

She gave me that old teacher look, that she probably used on kids of her own classrooms before she retired. “Think of the positive results of going.”  She’s talking about having a real job and all the comforts of employment, things like being able to pay your bills and not worrying about if someone has to take a trip to the emergency room.

Okay, I can do something for 12 hours that would appall me if I had to keep it up for a lifetime.  Just because I’m exhausted doesn’t mean I can’t “wing it” one more time.  And again, and again. We all have our problems, don’t we? And it seems to me these days, that we wish they were dramatic, like the ones in movies, so we could get some interest and sympathy. Then they’d be like those of Indiana Jones: a giant ball of cement is rolling down to crush you. But actually, the real problems of life are much more pedestrian.

Not that I don’t feel like a giant ball of cement is rolling down a ramp toward me. I do. But I also know that my chances of getting past this crisis are almost as good as Indy’s chance of getting out of that tomb. And that gives me the strength to continue.  As Woody Allen said, 95% of life is just showing up.

Last weekend I met a man here in town who told me a sad story from over 20 years before — how he’d graduated from college, he thought strongly, gone into graduate school with a merit based scholarship and then, before the year was gone, flunked out.  He said he’d loved the subject matter — history and philosophy — but just hadn’t been able to keep up with the speed of instruction once he left the small college near his home where he’d done his bachelor’s.

“I think the real problem,” he finally said, “was that I couldn’t really read. I mean, I could read a paragraph or two, but not for very long, and not very well. I later found out I had dyslexia. After I married, my wife helped me work on it and now I can finally read decently.”

My initial question, how did you become a scholarship holder in a graduate program if you couldn’t read, was not broached. But I was confident I knew the answer. The colleges in question were small, special interest and in this case religiously affiliated institutions. Clearly, his bachelor’s institution had not required the Scholastic Aptitude Test (SAT) and then passed him along through his degree program for attending class, while the graduate institution didn’t know his true abilities before he came because they didn’t require the Graduate Record Exam (GRE). Ultimately, due to the institutions not requiring entrance tests, this man was blissfully unaware that his level of reading was not up to par.

It is very common for such smaller, special interest colleges, which have a hard time competitng with larger public institutions such as TCU or UTA head-to-head, to carve out niches for themselves, such as concentrating on kids of a certain relgious philosophy or taking students with spotty academic records whom larger schools won’t admit.  Some schools, which need to bolster enrollments, do not require admissions testing or any meaningful evaluation of incoming students in an effort to get every possible warm body into their institutions. If you have the money, they have the desk.

Having admitted students who aren’t generally considered college-eligible, these institutions continue to promote students who can’t really handle the coursework to keep keep their tuition flowing in, which in some cases comes from the federal government in the form of loans and grants.

Sometimes, I suppose, graduating from such a  ”degree farm” might be okay, for example if your family owns a business you’re planning to go into and you already know how to do the work involved, or if you’re going into a field or work, and there are some, where college degrees are expected but the work you actually do is not  academic in nature.

If, on the other hand, you plan to do real academic or teaching work, or go to a graduate school, the results of attending a program like the one my friend went to could be heartbreaking.  One benefit of going to an established, reasonably-sized institution (say, over 500 students and over 25 years old) is that you generally know what you’re getting.

My friend who flunked out of grad school now works in the party rental industry. He has a family, loves studying philosphy and history in his spare time,  and one might say he has found his niche.  However, when he talks about his grad school experience, you can still it bothers him. “I really would have liked to be a professor, and I still would,” he says. “I had no idea at the time what was going wrong.”

And at the time, the schools he was dealing with had no intention of explaining to him, because doing so would have cut off potential students’ tuition money.

We had career day at our elementary school today.  Although I’m the music teacher, I did have to take a class to see one presentation, by the Southwest Dairy Farmers, which consisted of one representative dairy farmer, and one representative cow, a Jersey named Maggie.

“That’s my mother’s name,” one of the kids I was in charge of told me as Maggie was introduced.

The man who ran the show, Farmer Dave, wore a huge straw cowboy hat, sunglasses (he took them off for a second so, he said, we could “check out his eyeballs”) and a long, long handlebar moustache. He looked like a cross between a biker dude and a country western dancer. 

Maggie stood in the trailer, which opened so you could see her whole body, with only two metal bars holding her inside. She was pulling down hay from a net hanging in front of her, and looked as us out of the corner of her eye with an expression less friendly than that of Daisy the milkbottle cow, but of course not malevolent. She was, after all, a cow.

Dave told us a little bit about the importance of drinking milk — three glasses a day — and then demonstrated the milking process using a milking machine, all installed neatly in the trailer, with a door opened so you could see the fresh white milk splash into the collection bottle. It was really quite impressive. 

Before he started this job,  he said, he used to milk 600 cattle three times a day — they give more milk that way than if you milk them twice — and even with the machine that got a bit fatiquing. So travelling for the Dairy Farmers with Maggie was actually less work. He nows farms, we might say, public relations opportunities.

The presentation, for first grade and kintergarden, was short and sweet, emphasizing that milk comes from cows and it is good for you. “Take care of your body,” Farmer Dave said at the end. “Your body is going to be the most valuable thing you have until you have your own children.”

That was a fine way to end a fine presentation, and I gave Farmer Dave and the Southwest Dairy Farmers an A.

I have been working as a long-term substitute music teacher, and that means I’ve been working full time. Though I can’t really feel it’s full time when I get out at 3 and can pick up my own kids from school. There is something so precious about the last two hours of the work day — you can rest, drink a cup of coffee, pick people up, talk, cook dinner, and help with homework.

School teaching is work, of course, and when you’re on duty, you’re on duty. As the music teacher, I have five classes from 8:15 to 12:05, and there are NO BREAKS in the morning. Then there’s two more classes in the afternoon. I do get an hour of planning every day, but I have to use it for lesson creation, since I have to come up with something for the kids to do. 

The lessons come out of a group of music books made by Silver Burdett, which combine student texts, large flip books, transparencies, support music, and sets of CD’s. These CD’s in themselves are remarkable. Each grade year consists of 15 or 16 CD’s of music from all over the world and American history, and one CD devoted entirely to Texas music. There are about ten times as many lessons as are needed to complete a school year, and I’m only covering six weeks, but still, in order to teach them you have to prep by learning:

1.  the songs

2.  the history of the songs

3.   the rhythms if the kids are going to play maracas or jinglebells or drums or triangles, and

4.  any dances or hand gestures.

I originally thought this would be a good job for me because it fit my schedule and location needs, and because I was asked — getting a long term job as a sub is at the school’s discretion, of course, and since you get paid more these jobs are somewhat sought after. But I am beginning to like it more or more, even to the level of considering teaching music over the long term. As I walk around the house in the afternoon singing to myself “I got shoes” or “Caballito Blanco,” some of the songs I”ve learned from the music books, and my own children tell me it’s just a little uncool, I say, “Don’t take my music away! This is my job, after all!”

And when the kids at school have a good time dancing the Vibora or the Rock and Roll Hokey Pokey, lessons I found, rehearsed and then taught, I admit, I feel very satisfied. So, for now, I am pleased with music teaching. I’m also pleased with the approach of summer and of payday.

My husband is a college instructor. “I was talking to one of the other professors,” he told me the other day, “and she said in 15 years, the students just keep getting more and more selfish and more and more discourteous. You go to observe a lecture, and they’re texting under their desks. They talk to eachother while the professor is speaking. It’s like teaching Jr. High.” Although he hasn’t been teaching 15 years, he says he has observed some of the same things.

Most recently, at the end of a test, while some students were still working, a couple of other students were talking before leaving, and when one of the still-working students asked them to be quiet, one girl said “Sure, B—-” and left the room. 

I was outraged at hearing this. I said, “I haven’t heard that kind of language yet in our elementary school classrooms, I’m sure they say it to each other but they wouldn’t dare say it in front of the teacher.” I imagined myself a college instructor. I imaged taking the bad-mouthed girl outside the class next time she showed up, and telling her, “You may not have thought of this before, but this is a four year institution of higher learning and when you leave here you will have a bachelor’s degree, which actually does mean something — part of what it means is that you have some basic professional courtesy and ability to speak politely in front of a group. People who can’t be civil in a group belong on the assembly line, where they don’t care if you want to shoot your mouth. If you want to be a professional, on the other hand, and work in an office, you have to learn to speak with grace and courtesy. Especially if you want to pass this class.”

I told this to my husband and he listened with interest. “After all,” I concluded,  ”these kids are basically suffering from, among other thing, the fact that few have ever told them off or expected much of them. I think that’s too bad, but as teachers it’s part of our job to get after the hindermost.  Just because someone else, apparently didn’t go after this girl when they should have, or she would have known how to act, doesn’t mean you should continue making that mistake.”

What do you think? Should she be chewed out? Should her participation grade be lowered for inappropriate language?

Thinking to broaden my teaching experiences, I decided yesterday to try substitute teaching music — after all, I reasoned, it would be fun, I like music, I am regarded a decent singer and it looked like there was a comprehensive lesson plan with the assignment

Little did I know that, my vision of myself as Maria in The Sound of Music notwithstanding, music teaching is not for the faint at heart or the amateur.

First, I discovered that the lesson plans were actually not as simple as they looked. The kids arrived for the first class, which was supposed to be on playing recorders, with no instruments. “Where are your recorders?” I asked.

“We never play recorders. Are we going to watch a movie?” I assumed they were trying to “put me on” as an ignorant substitute teacher. I couldn’t allow this to happen, so I whipped out my guitar and began to play for them. This worked well, up to a point, but then there was the number of hours of music instruction I had signed up for, about six in all, rotating through a number of different classes. By the time the day was done, my fingers on my left hand hurt from the guitar strings, my voice was starting to break, and I had learned the following:

1) In kindergarden, kids like to sing “Old McDonald,” but by fourth grade, they listen to rap, hip-hop and Hannah Montana.

2) Though you can get someone’s attention by saying you’re going to play an instrument in person, live, once you are “on stage” you’ve got to keep performing or lose control of the “crowd.”

3) The “real” music curriculum does not just involve singing and playing maracas, they’re actually supposed to learn to i.d. the instruments in the orchestra and how to read music, among other things.

4) Do not let a group of thirty kindergarteners play percussion instruments simultaneously.

I began, at some point, to feel like Jack Black in School of Rock, in the depth of a desperate improvisation, only with less equipment and musical ability then he had at his disposal. Meanwhile, the kids told me I should write my own songs. I promised I would do so before coming back. Now what should my song be about? I don’t know, because I haven’t written a song in about 25 years. Well, they do say that kids keep you young.

I’ve been fairly anti-school lunch for a while, ever since the year when I finally let my son eat them through the fall and winter and in April he came down with Type I diabetes. I was suspicious of them before, of course, because I had eaten them once or twice as a kid, they tasted horrible then, and I couldn’t imagine they had gotten better since. What concerned me when my kids went to public school was that they seemed to think the cafeteria lunch was something you might want.

My feeling of malaise culminated as I was substitute teaching last Friday, when an entire class of 5^th graders elected to take the hot lunch and one of them said “Yeah! Free hamburgers!”

They are not “free,” kids, they are supposedly provided to the needy. School lunch comes out of the Great Depression’s milk programs, when children who were underweight were allowed to have a free milk at lunch during the school year because they were in danger of malnutrition. Parents who were struggling to feed their families welcomed this help with gratitude  because they really needed it.

The program expanded to include full lunches and then moved on to include breakfast. At some point, the nutritional quality of the lunches may have fallen, or the quality of the ingredients dropped. The scandal during the Reagan years regarding ketchup being counted as a vegetable was memorable, but unfortunately, I can’t see any signs, from the school lunches I’ve observed or the one I ate last month, that the overall quality has dramatically changed since I was a kid.

Effort after effort to wake up country to the need to provide better food in our schools have not yet been successful. And perhaps that’s because ultimately this is the parents’ responsibility. I want to enter a call to parents everywhere: if you can, try to make your kid a sack lunch. If you do:

1. You, not the school, will get his or her gratitude and loyalty, because you, and not the school, will be feeding him.

2. Your child will have better health if you simply refrain from packing food laden with trans fats and high-fructose corn syrup.

3, Your child will feel a sense of independence and the pride of not needing the school’s help.

How do I know this last? I guess I believe it because I always felt that way when I was in school. I was  safer, somehow, because my parents sent me a lunch to take to school, a kind of benediction on my school day.