One of the things that makes first-year teaching so difficult is the constant time stress one faces. Not only are you trying to create engaging lessons (which as I mentioned in a previous post, are critical to your success in managing behavior) on a daily basis, you are bombarded by your own education and training. In my case, I have graduate school classes, mandatory Teach For America events, and tons of district professional development. This week, I have Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday nights blocked out for these commitments, which amounts to back-to-back-to-back 13+ hour work days, not including the hours I spend at home planning my lessons. Needless to say, there is absolutely no shot that I will get more than six hours of sleep this week. This has become the regular for me. I bust my ass throughout the week with the intention of using the weekend to get a head start on the next week. But by the time the weekend comes, I'm so wiped out that I need the time off to recuperate. On the bright side, fall break is only a few weeks away, and I'm excited to take some real time off and travel back home for the first time in almost a year.
However, what I really want to talk about is the content of much of my "teacher training". By now I have sat through hundreds of hours of professional development, ranging across topics from science-specific to teaching literacy to classroom management. There is no shortage of advice or information for new teachers. Everyone has opinion, and everyone wants to share their wisdom. While I understand that this is done with the best of intentions, I think that much like our students, who try their best to master the "inch-deep, mile-wide" curriculum, new teachers feel overwhelmed by the sheer amount of information they receive. Even more confusing is that much of the advice a new teacher receives is contradictory. Countless times I have received advice from a colleague only to have that advice refuted by someone else. The most striking example of this was during my new teacher induction right before the start of school. On a particular day, we had an "expert" talk to us about how behavior narration (a technique where you literally narrate when students are behaving correctly) was completely useless. The very next day, we had another "expert" swear by this same technique. As I've encountered this phenomenon more and more, I've realized that successful teachers treat advice (and professional development) like items in a thrift shop. Most of the stuff you hear is junk-- not in the sense that it is worthless to everyone, but that there are only a few things that you can realistically use in your own classroom. It takes some digging to find, but there are gems out there for everyone. What I may find to be completely useless someone else will find to be their diamond in the rough. The challenge of the new teacher is that while you are often digging, you aren't very adept at finding those rare gems. Regardless, I'll be getting a lot of advice this week, whether I want it or not.
Monday, September 16, 2013
Saturday, September 7, 2013
A "Bad" Day -- Continued
As I walk through the gates of my school, the sun shines against the weathered concrete walls. A sign reads "Welcome to Cougar Nation"--the slogan of the current administration, which inherited a school three years which had been one of the worst in the district, if not all of Phoenix. Today, we are a "C" school according to the Arizona Department of Education, whose ranking is based on a combination of overall student achievement (based on standardized testing scores) as well as year-to-year student growth. This ranking system, while obviously not perfect, provides a good snapshot of school quality. I have no illusions that I work at a great school, in terms of the quality of education received by students. About three-quarters of our students met the (low) state standard in reading, with only one in two reaching the standard in math. In my content area specifically, only about 40 percent of 8th graders passed the state standardized test in science last year. Increasing school achievement is not a simple problem; there are many factors which cause inner-city schools to struggle. Identifying these factors is a major part of my work. While on a daily level I am in the classroom trying to provide my students with the excellent educational opportunities to which they are entitled, I also recognize that I work in a broken system. Even for brand-new teachers, it does not take long to realize that the laws and structure that direct public education, especially in high-poverty areas, are fundamentally flawed. For me, the specifics of these flaws are still somewhat hazy. I do not claim to have the answers to fix the system. To many people, this type of statement seems very cynical. Simply pointing out a problem without providing detailed analysis or a suggestion of potential solutions is often very frustrating. However, in public education there are so many viewpoints, ranging from politicians to academics to teachers, that the issue becomes too complicated. There are simply too many actors trying to affect too many variables at one time. At the same time, policy is almost always a top-down process--instituted sweepingly at the national or state level. These broad policies simply cannot effectively incorporate the needs of a heterogeneous population of schools. Even within my own district I have experienced the frustration of an over-arching policy undermining effectiveness at the level of the individual school. For example, my school district recently extended its internet firewall to block YouTube. Ostensibly, this ban is to prevent misuse by students (or maybe teachers?), despite the fact that many have smart phones with unrestricted internet access. In reality, this severely hinders my ability to use Khan Academy in my classroom, which is a major focus of my school's instructional focus. Khan Academy is an online learning platform which has videos and practice problems specifically designed for student use. Unfortunately, many of their videos that cover relatively basic content (the stuff that middle school students need!) are imbedded YouTube videos, meaning that the district firewall blocks them even when accessed through the Khan Academy website. Sure, I can download individual videos at home to show in class, but the whole purpose of a platform like Khan Academy is that it is guided by student-specific needs, such that each student needs access to different videos. Under the current district policy, this is effectively impossible to carry out.
The hour and a half before my students arrive is always my most productive work time. If I don't finish preparing during this time, then it will lead to a rough day of teaching, so my productivity is fueled by a simple need to survive. I have not yet been able to apply that sense of urgency to my work time after school or at home, but once I master that skill I am sure that lesson planning will become a much easier task. Most days, I have to make copies of notes, worksheets, or activities that students will complete during class. For most professions (I would even extend this to say most teachers), making copies is a straightforward and simple proposition. Unfortunately, at a school trying to pinch pennies from every area imaginable, printing and copying often becomes quite a difficult proposition. The school policy is that each teacher must provide their own copy paper; we are not given any sheets. It's ridiculous to think that teachers don't need to make copies, especially in a school where students do not have 1:1 access to computers. The monetary aspect, however, is actually more of a minor gripe (I have already spent several hundreds of dollars in my own classroom). What's more annoying is that because there is no shared paper, the printer/copier has no paper in it. Thus, in order to print something out, I first have to walk from my room to the copier and put my paper in the machine, making sure that nobody else is printing or copying at the same time. Then, I have to walk back and print the document. If everything goes as planned, I will have my papers printed out when I go back to the copier. Often, however, I will find that the copier has messed something up, or another person has cancelled my job by copying something else. While it may seem inconsequential, those few extra minutes of stress and walking around pile up over the week. This is just part of a larger trend of teaching in under-financed districts--for the teacher, whose role is the most important in the education system, life is made the most difficult. It seems like common sense to me that we, as a society, should do everything in our power to make the "non-teaching" aspects of a teacher's profession as easy as possible, because the responsibility of being a role-model, mentor, and educator for students is already difficult enough.
August 27th started out like any other day. My homeroom students came in at 7:45 and ate breakfast, which is provided to them for free. That day was mini packets of fruity pebbles, so most students ate. Apple-splices-in-a-bag day is less popular. Homeroom is always an interesting 15 minutes, because I really just have to make sure the students don't kill each other. During this time I get to know my kids, slowly building the relationships that are critical to being a successful teacher. While I want all of my students to succeed, I feel a special attachment to homeroom kids. At 8 am I let them out for first period, and they hurry off to different classrooms. For some reason, there is no official passing period at my school, so usually students are ready to go right as I open my door. I wish there was a least a few minutes between periods so that I could quickly catch my breath, but instead I teach three periods back to back to back for a total of 225 minutes non-stop before lunch. That day I was teaching a lesson about identifying graphs, which is one of the standards that students will be tested on at the end of the year. Needless to say, graphing is a relatively dry topic. I shared with my students that I used to loathe graphing assignments when I was in school, but I tried to emphasize the importance of being able to accurately interpret graphs. Answering the "why on earth do I need to know this?" question is one of the most challenging parts of teaching. Sometimes, I can't even convince myself that certain content is important, but it is still my job to teach it. In this case, I believed that the lesson was important, but the lesson itself wasn't very engaging. If you ask a teacher, they will tell you that the most difficult job of a new teacher is managing student behavior. My Teach For America training, district professional development, and graduate school content has all been primarily focused on classroom management, and even with this amount of training I am still not close to mastering this skill. Nevertheless, one of the first things you figure out is that engaging content solves most management problems. If students are busy working on things that they find interesting, they have no reason to behave inappropriately. The number one reason a student misbehaves is because he or she is bored. That particular day, I did a terrible job of making my lesson interesting, which led to me effectively losing control of my classroom in one of my periods.
My roommate and I have dubbed this as "getting steamrolled". When you get steamrolled, it means that the students are misbehaving to a level that you cannot control, such that the class becomes a collective steamroller and runs the teacher right over. Every teacher, even veterans, get steamrolled sometimes--it comes with the territory. This wasn't the first day I had gotten steamrolled, but it happened to be the worst steamrolling I've had in my short career. What made it worse was that my graduate school clinical instructor was making his first observation in my classroom, specifically paying attention to my classroom culture. In short, he expected to see me running my classroom, and instead saw my kids running my classroom while I tried to explain the fundamental difference between a bar graph and a line graph. The highlights of this class period included: a student picking up his desk and moving it halfway across the room to a new location (without permission) during the middle of the lesson, and another playing with a dry-erase marker that eventually flew out of his hands and right over the head of my clinical instructor in the back of the room. When you look back on it, you can't help but laugh, but in the moment getting steamrolled is one of the most helpless feelings you can have.
At the end of school that day I felt completely defeated. I was tired, distressed, and regretful. "Why am I here? Why am I doing this work? Why do I work so hard for students who don't even want to learn?"--these were the thoughts running through my head. I wanted to quit. I wanted to go home and sleep. I wanted to go back to the life of comfort and privilege that I had enjoyed for 22 years prior. I wanted to do anything but teach. To make things worse, I still had five hours of graduate classes that evening, and I didn't have a lesson planned for the next day. I begrudgingly made the drive from my school to the downtown ASU campus for my 4:30 class, thinking that my terrible day was just going to get worse.
My professor walked into the classroom, introduced himself, and then told us, "I hope the next two years of your life are as brutal as possible. I hope they are challenging, tiring, and frustrating, because I want you to remember them for the rest of your life. Most of you will not stay in the classroom, but you will remember being a teacher no matter what you end up doing. I want you to understand how tough of a profession this is, because those who haven't done it simply don't understand." These words were exactly what I needed to hear. I needed someone to understand what I was going through. I needed someone to tell me that this journey was worthwhile. I needed to be surrounded by classmates who were on the same journey. Despite being completely exhausted when I came, I left that night feeling rejuvenated. I am not sure how I would have bounced back without that. One of the toughest things about teaching is that it really is a marathon; regardless of how you feel or what happened the day before, the next day your students will be back at your door. They expect you to be there, they expect to learn. They are counting on you to help them, and they often don't have anyone else who can. One of the aspects of privilege is having the option to walk away, to avoid challenges and adversity. I am privileged because I could walk away. I could leave my job and do something else. I would not have to worry about meeting my basic needs. For most of my students, there is no option to walk away. They face adversity every single day of their lives. Their only escape is school, it is their only chance to make things better. If they don't succeed, they will endure a life filled with hardships. For some of them, no matter how hard they try they won't escape. It's not fair. The system is broken. It is because of this I cannot quit. I must endure. Even after the worst days, I must come back the next day with the same level of commitment to my kids. Not because I have no choice, but because so many of my students have no choice.
The hour and a half before my students arrive is always my most productive work time. If I don't finish preparing during this time, then it will lead to a rough day of teaching, so my productivity is fueled by a simple need to survive. I have not yet been able to apply that sense of urgency to my work time after school or at home, but once I master that skill I am sure that lesson planning will become a much easier task. Most days, I have to make copies of notes, worksheets, or activities that students will complete during class. For most professions (I would even extend this to say most teachers), making copies is a straightforward and simple proposition. Unfortunately, at a school trying to pinch pennies from every area imaginable, printing and copying often becomes quite a difficult proposition. The school policy is that each teacher must provide their own copy paper; we are not given any sheets. It's ridiculous to think that teachers don't need to make copies, especially in a school where students do not have 1:1 access to computers. The monetary aspect, however, is actually more of a minor gripe (I have already spent several hundreds of dollars in my own classroom). What's more annoying is that because there is no shared paper, the printer/copier has no paper in it. Thus, in order to print something out, I first have to walk from my room to the copier and put my paper in the machine, making sure that nobody else is printing or copying at the same time. Then, I have to walk back and print the document. If everything goes as planned, I will have my papers printed out when I go back to the copier. Often, however, I will find that the copier has messed something up, or another person has cancelled my job by copying something else. While it may seem inconsequential, those few extra minutes of stress and walking around pile up over the week. This is just part of a larger trend of teaching in under-financed districts--for the teacher, whose role is the most important in the education system, life is made the most difficult. It seems like common sense to me that we, as a society, should do everything in our power to make the "non-teaching" aspects of a teacher's profession as easy as possible, because the responsibility of being a role-model, mentor, and educator for students is already difficult enough.
August 27th started out like any other day. My homeroom students came in at 7:45 and ate breakfast, which is provided to them for free. That day was mini packets of fruity pebbles, so most students ate. Apple-splices-in-a-bag day is less popular. Homeroom is always an interesting 15 minutes, because I really just have to make sure the students don't kill each other. During this time I get to know my kids, slowly building the relationships that are critical to being a successful teacher. While I want all of my students to succeed, I feel a special attachment to homeroom kids. At 8 am I let them out for first period, and they hurry off to different classrooms. For some reason, there is no official passing period at my school, so usually students are ready to go right as I open my door. I wish there was a least a few minutes between periods so that I could quickly catch my breath, but instead I teach three periods back to back to back for a total of 225 minutes non-stop before lunch. That day I was teaching a lesson about identifying graphs, which is one of the standards that students will be tested on at the end of the year. Needless to say, graphing is a relatively dry topic. I shared with my students that I used to loathe graphing assignments when I was in school, but I tried to emphasize the importance of being able to accurately interpret graphs. Answering the "why on earth do I need to know this?" question is one of the most challenging parts of teaching. Sometimes, I can't even convince myself that certain content is important, but it is still my job to teach it. In this case, I believed that the lesson was important, but the lesson itself wasn't very engaging. If you ask a teacher, they will tell you that the most difficult job of a new teacher is managing student behavior. My Teach For America training, district professional development, and graduate school content has all been primarily focused on classroom management, and even with this amount of training I am still not close to mastering this skill. Nevertheless, one of the first things you figure out is that engaging content solves most management problems. If students are busy working on things that they find interesting, they have no reason to behave inappropriately. The number one reason a student misbehaves is because he or she is bored. That particular day, I did a terrible job of making my lesson interesting, which led to me effectively losing control of my classroom in one of my periods.
My roommate and I have dubbed this as "getting steamrolled". When you get steamrolled, it means that the students are misbehaving to a level that you cannot control, such that the class becomes a collective steamroller and runs the teacher right over. Every teacher, even veterans, get steamrolled sometimes--it comes with the territory. This wasn't the first day I had gotten steamrolled, but it happened to be the worst steamrolling I've had in my short career. What made it worse was that my graduate school clinical instructor was making his first observation in my classroom, specifically paying attention to my classroom culture. In short, he expected to see me running my classroom, and instead saw my kids running my classroom while I tried to explain the fundamental difference between a bar graph and a line graph. The highlights of this class period included: a student picking up his desk and moving it halfway across the room to a new location (without permission) during the middle of the lesson, and another playing with a dry-erase marker that eventually flew out of his hands and right over the head of my clinical instructor in the back of the room. When you look back on it, you can't help but laugh, but in the moment getting steamrolled is one of the most helpless feelings you can have.
At the end of school that day I felt completely defeated. I was tired, distressed, and regretful. "Why am I here? Why am I doing this work? Why do I work so hard for students who don't even want to learn?"--these were the thoughts running through my head. I wanted to quit. I wanted to go home and sleep. I wanted to go back to the life of comfort and privilege that I had enjoyed for 22 years prior. I wanted to do anything but teach. To make things worse, I still had five hours of graduate classes that evening, and I didn't have a lesson planned for the next day. I begrudgingly made the drive from my school to the downtown ASU campus for my 4:30 class, thinking that my terrible day was just going to get worse.
My professor walked into the classroom, introduced himself, and then told us, "I hope the next two years of your life are as brutal as possible. I hope they are challenging, tiring, and frustrating, because I want you to remember them for the rest of your life. Most of you will not stay in the classroom, but you will remember being a teacher no matter what you end up doing. I want you to understand how tough of a profession this is, because those who haven't done it simply don't understand." These words were exactly what I needed to hear. I needed someone to understand what I was going through. I needed someone to tell me that this journey was worthwhile. I needed to be surrounded by classmates who were on the same journey. Despite being completely exhausted when I came, I left that night feeling rejuvenated. I am not sure how I would have bounced back without that. One of the toughest things about teaching is that it really is a marathon; regardless of how you feel or what happened the day before, the next day your students will be back at your door. They expect you to be there, they expect to learn. They are counting on you to help them, and they often don't have anyone else who can. One of the aspects of privilege is having the option to walk away, to avoid challenges and adversity. I am privileged because I could walk away. I could leave my job and do something else. I would not have to worry about meeting my basic needs. For most of my students, there is no option to walk away. They face adversity every single day of their lives. Their only escape is school, it is their only chance to make things better. If they don't succeed, they will endure a life filled with hardships. For some of them, no matter how hard they try they won't escape. It's not fair. The system is broken. It is because of this I cannot quit. I must endure. Even after the worst days, I must come back the next day with the same level of commitment to my kids. Not because I have no choice, but because so many of my students have no choice.
Monday, September 2, 2013
A "Bad" Day
August 27, 2013 is a day I will never forget. That was last Tuesday, more than three weeks into the year at my placement school in the heart of South Phoenix. But this is where my story begins. Our memories often lie along a spectrum, and we tend to classify them in our minds as "good" and "bad" or somewhere in the middle. However, for my most vivid memories, their place in the spectrum is unfixed. I think, perhaps, they defy classification because they transcend the arbitrary labels of "good" or "bad". On a basic level, August 27th was a "bad" day. I know this because if offered the chance to relive it, I would certainly decline. Nevertheless, I also believe that this day is one of the most important in my life. It also happens to be the reason I decided to start writing this journal.
That day began like most days for a first-year teacher: blanketed in fatigue. I've never liked waking up early. In college some of my worst days began with an early morning workout for baseball. My senior year, I strategically planned my schedule as to never wake up before mid-day (never mind you that most of the time I'd get woken up by someone mowing a lawn, edging the sidewalk, blowing leaves, etc.). Most weekdays I wake up at 5 A.M.; sometimes I treat myself and wait until there's the tiniest bit of light outside, which only adds up to 15 or 20 more minutes. On average, I'd say I usually sleep 6 or 7 hours on weeknights. This particular day, however, it was far less. I'm usually out the door 45 minutes after I wake up, and depending on whether I choose to feed my coffee addiction, I normally arrive at school between 6 and 6:15. I am either the third or fourth car in the parking lot, arriving slightly later than the janitor, the principal, and sometimes one of my TFA counterparts. One of the interesting things about Phoenix is that there are about five different ways to get any place you want to go in a reasonable amount of time. From my Tempe apartment to my South Phoenix school, I have four different routes I take. The fastest route is to take the freeway down to the southern edge of Tempe, then drive west along the southernmost major road on the Phoenix-proper grid. This takes you past some of the "landmarks" one might associate with the area--the most striking of which is a giant resort where my school district, despite severe budget cuts to other areas, hosted two days of professional development complete with three course meals and a free Starbucks coffee bar to get you through that afternoon slump. This route is the quickest, but it bores you to death. You drive so fast that the already dull view of apartment complexes and strip malls blends together into one dreary scenery, the only demarcation being the intersections that count--48th St., 40th St., 32nd St.,--moving closer to the geographic center of the city.
In the weeks leading up to the start of the school year, I took this route every day. There was no thought of anything different. Isn't fastest always best? What I hadn't realized yet was that this road was also very unreliable. Most days went without issue, but occasionally there was an accident or some other incident that caused huge backups. What makes things worse is that once you've committed yourself to this route, it's very difficult to recalculate and go a different way. My worst experience was a day when there happened to be a road-rage shooting an hour or two before I left my apartment. I hadn't thought to check traffic reports, so I was met by a wall of traffic and road blocks, turning my 20 minute commute into an hour and a half. Perhaps in protest of this great injustice, rather than real necessity, I started to take a new route to work. Instead of going straight south down the freeway and then west all the way over, I hopped on a different freeway that dipped under the city center heading west. From there I exit and drive over the Salt River into South Phoenix. Although it costs a few extra minutes each day, I actually prefer this commute, which may come as a surprise to those who know me as a very rational-thinking, pragmatic individual. Have no fear; most days I still take the quickest route, but there is a certain aura to driving past Rio Salado Park and seeing the skyscrapers of downtown right before crossing into an area of Phoenix filled with so much history and culture. The juxtaposition of the developed downtown area against South Phoenix is not unlike that of most major cities in the United States. But it is striking, and after a few months here I still have yet to be desensitized to the emotions it brings me. Driving through the backstreets that surround my school, I am reminded of why I am here.
To be continued...
That day began like most days for a first-year teacher: blanketed in fatigue. I've never liked waking up early. In college some of my worst days began with an early morning workout for baseball. My senior year, I strategically planned my schedule as to never wake up before mid-day (never mind you that most of the time I'd get woken up by someone mowing a lawn, edging the sidewalk, blowing leaves, etc.). Most weekdays I wake up at 5 A.M.; sometimes I treat myself and wait until there's the tiniest bit of light outside, which only adds up to 15 or 20 more minutes. On average, I'd say I usually sleep 6 or 7 hours on weeknights. This particular day, however, it was far less. I'm usually out the door 45 minutes after I wake up, and depending on whether I choose to feed my coffee addiction, I normally arrive at school between 6 and 6:15. I am either the third or fourth car in the parking lot, arriving slightly later than the janitor, the principal, and sometimes one of my TFA counterparts. One of the interesting things about Phoenix is that there are about five different ways to get any place you want to go in a reasonable amount of time. From my Tempe apartment to my South Phoenix school, I have four different routes I take. The fastest route is to take the freeway down to the southern edge of Tempe, then drive west along the southernmost major road on the Phoenix-proper grid. This takes you past some of the "landmarks" one might associate with the area--the most striking of which is a giant resort where my school district, despite severe budget cuts to other areas, hosted two days of professional development complete with three course meals and a free Starbucks coffee bar to get you through that afternoon slump. This route is the quickest, but it bores you to death. You drive so fast that the already dull view of apartment complexes and strip malls blends together into one dreary scenery, the only demarcation being the intersections that count--48th St., 40th St., 32nd St.,--moving closer to the geographic center of the city.
In the weeks leading up to the start of the school year, I took this route every day. There was no thought of anything different. Isn't fastest always best? What I hadn't realized yet was that this road was also very unreliable. Most days went without issue, but occasionally there was an accident or some other incident that caused huge backups. What makes things worse is that once you've committed yourself to this route, it's very difficult to recalculate and go a different way. My worst experience was a day when there happened to be a road-rage shooting an hour or two before I left my apartment. I hadn't thought to check traffic reports, so I was met by a wall of traffic and road blocks, turning my 20 minute commute into an hour and a half. Perhaps in protest of this great injustice, rather than real necessity, I started to take a new route to work. Instead of going straight south down the freeway and then west all the way over, I hopped on a different freeway that dipped under the city center heading west. From there I exit and drive over the Salt River into South Phoenix. Although it costs a few extra minutes each day, I actually prefer this commute, which may come as a surprise to those who know me as a very rational-thinking, pragmatic individual. Have no fear; most days I still take the quickest route, but there is a certain aura to driving past Rio Salado Park and seeing the skyscrapers of downtown right before crossing into an area of Phoenix filled with so much history and culture. The juxtaposition of the developed downtown area against South Phoenix is not unlike that of most major cities in the United States. But it is striking, and after a few months here I still have yet to be desensitized to the emotions it brings me. Driving through the backstreets that surround my school, I am reminded of why I am here.
To be continued...
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