It's been two years since my last post and a lot of things have happened.  I'm at another private school out in sunny Southern California cruising along with classes full of gravy kids.  It's all a bit like Pleasantville or the Truman Show before the shocking disillusionment.  But the disillusionment is there, believe you me, it's there.

It's been a while since i've had a comment and I'm wondering if this blog has reached the end of it's life since I'm no long posting stress-induced ironic comedies about behavior problems.  It is nice to go back and read some of the old posts, however.  Every year is so full of things happening that reading something from just four years ago feels like an era ago.

I have contemplated writing about the very different anxieties of teaching in the private school world, but there is the very real possibility of getting fired.   Perhaps when I figure out how to further change my name to something that is even more distancing from my actual self...TT the Matholotho teacher?  Wow that is bad.

Bitter Apple

A former colleague of mine posted the following article on her facebook page:
"Teaching Ate Me Alive"
http://www.salon.com/2012/09/15/teaching_ate_me_alive/

They are the bitter musings of a disillusioned LAUSD middle school math teacher who recently left the profession.

There were several parts that reminded me strongly of my brief and overwhelming time teaching at an urban school.  I can relate to this guy in the intensity you feel while you are there.  Enough happens in one day to fill 6-7 blog entries...if you have the strength to type at the end of the day.  I found one archived entry from that year that contained three words:  Worst Day Ever.  That's all I had the strength to type that day.

In an urban school, you are bombarded by angry people all of the time.   Kids are screaming and cursing at you because you try to get them to work, parents screaming at you because you failed to get their kids to work or because you tried to get their kids to do work, administrators having "meetings" with you because you can't get kids to work or send the kids to the office too often for screaming, "fuck no" for the 20th time you ask them to open their book.

Actually, by the end of the school year, I was seeking therapy to deal with the stress of the whole situation.  My coworkers were sympathetic and very supportive, but it seemed that they had a particular knack with the kids that I had yet to gain.  Looking back, I think it was simply that the kids didn't trust me.  They knew that I would probably quit after a year like so many other teachers.  And despite my situation, the other new teachers were struggling in far worse ways than me.  Control in my classroom was often lost due to 1-2 people erupting every other day.  It was almost always regained by the end and I took GREAT pains to stop it from happening again (literally 2-4 hours on the phone with parents after school, meetings with administrators, logging issues, grading EVERYTHING).  For the others, it was chaos classroom from day 1 to day 108.  But in the end, I lost the battle.  Because I ended up leaving that job after one year and they stayed.

A part of me regrets leaving that school.  I know that I would be a much better teacher today had I stuck it out another 2-3 years.  Trial by fire churned out teachers that shined like sword-of-knowledge-wielding archangels.

On the advice of my entire family, therapist, and feeble sanity, I decided to leave.

Everyone warned me about LAUSD when I moved to LA, so I went the private school route.  It turned out to be the best decision for me.  I don't think I could've handled going back to urban teaching just yet.  Who knows, I may find my way back.  Or I may never look back.

So in a way, my brief and troubled life as an urban teacher was that chunk of apple that lodged in my throat and put me to sleep.  Maybe someday I will find the courage to break out of the glass casket and return again.

A Crisis of Faith

Growing up in the church, I learned about a moment that occurs often in the life of young Christians.  It's a type of rite of passage for those who practice their faith based on blind acceptance of Sunday School lessons.  This is called a "Crisis of Faith".  When they occur, the young Christian begins to doubt their beliefs and even the genuineness of their own devotion.

In Ed. school, I learned that teachers also go through a crisis of faith.  Usually around the fifth year, there is a spike in teacher turnover.  Usually at this time, teachers are facing burn out or a fizzling of their passion to teach.

My fifth year teaching was the hardest of my career.  I was teaching for the first time at an urban school and facing large class sizes, universal student apathy, and fiercely defensive parents.  I can't tell if the pain I felt then was any sort of crisis of faith.  I think I was more concerned with surviving the year than reflecting deeply on my role and passion for my profession.

In my time teaching, I have gotten numerous positive reviews.  Administrators, colleagues, and students have all affirmed my methods for pedagogy and valued my opinion.  But now, for the first time, I am struggling with an administrator that doubts most of my methods and decisions in the classroom.  It is disconcerting to say the least.  His doubt feeds my own doubt and I sometimes feel tortured about my own insecurities.  It hurts too.  Hurts deeply to know that I may have failed at the profession I have invested so much time and love into.

Students and colleagues still affirm that my classroom is relevant, meaningful, engaging, and useful, but conversation after conversation with this administrator somehow manages to destroy all that in my mind.  It makes me wonder if I made the right choice after all.  If after all of this time doing this, I had somehow become a bad teacher without knowing it.

There was one colleague I knew once who read all the literature, did countless hours of research and conferences, employed a variety of engaging and effective teaching strategies, and was hated by her students.    On paper, everything pointed to her being a great teacher.  IN her own mind, she was a great teacher.  She worked tirelessly, like at a hamster wheel, to do what a good teacher does.  But in the end, it all meant nothing because her students didn't buy it.  There was something soulless about the way she employed those techniques that gave the content an unnatural pallor that was a turn off to students.  I fear that my teaching might someday become that.  A soulless bag of tricks.  OR has it become that and I didn't even realize it.  Like that colleague.

I have met teachers with 20+ years of experience who are my idols.  The craft they employ into this profession is so perfect, so relevant, so elegant, that I wonder if I could ever aspire to be that good.  Is there a way to overcome this crises and move on to a stronger, better classroom?

Rockstarrism

Wandering aimlessly up and down the aisles of a Barnes and Nobles bookstore, I came upon a title in the education section that caught my eye:

Deborah Kenny was a young mother of three small children seeking to make sense of her life amid the despair of her husband's untimely death when she decided to devote herself to radically reinventing public education. Born to Rise recounts a journey that led Kenny to risk her life savings to open schools in Harlem while proving that all children, regardless of socioeconomic circumstances, can learn at high levels. Students enter Harlem Village Academies several years behind grade level, but in just a few years they are transformed, ranking among the highest in the nation—with 99 percent of eighth graders meeting proficiency standards in math, science, and social studies.


-Amazon

Curious to know Deborah's secret for success, I sat down at a nearby bench and read a few random chunks.  According to my 20 minute skim, she credits her success to a carefully selected team of all-star teachers.  I was particularly interested in her descriptions of the various teachers she encountered on her quest for "rockstar" teachers.  A number of candidates had great resumes and interviewed well, but when she went to their classrooms, in nearly every case, the lack of behavior management skills and student engagement ruined it for her.  "mostly" controlled was not enough for her.  She was looking for pied piper level engagement in the roughest schools.


This was a source of chagrin for me in that some of the disruptive behaviors she witnessed were definitely elements of my classroom back in my urban teaching days.  Granted, I had much more classroom control than other first year teachers there, but I admit it was usually around only 88% of the time.  

So then I took to reflecting on my own abilities as a teacher.  Am I a "rockstar" teacher?  Would this lady hire me if I were applying to her school?  Highly unlikely for both counts.


This is something I have been thinking about a lot recently as I finished up my 7th year teaching.  I know I'm a good teacher, but I also know I'm not a rockstar teacher.  My goal from day 1 was to be a rockstar, I always figured I would be a rockstar, and yet, 7 years later, feels more like I'm an airport lounge singer.  Okay, maybe not that bad, but still...not a rockstar.


I feel I do have the potential still to be great, but it just doesn't quite feel there yet.  My students are engaged and tell me they were challenged in my class, fun happens (could happen a little more), and there are results, but not everyday is a homerun.  I always feel that there could be so much more...SO much more.  


What, then, could push me into that privileged realm rockstarrism?  More time?  greater effort?  paradigm shift?  I'll keep working on it.

On teaching grammar

Let me just preface this post with a disclaimer that the following thought processes are not polished pieces and thus by no means a sample of my ability to construct grammatically impeccable prose.  Let me further add that I wrote the following after an insomnia-stricken night of reading Tina Fey's Bosseypants and anxiety-driven nightmares about next year's curriculum.

So once again I am faced with the struggle of putting together a meaningful and effective way of teaching grammar in the English classroom, and it continues to be one of the most difficult tasks I have faced in my career.

Examples of DOLS

Here is a breakdown of my pedagogical history with grammar:

In graduate school, I learned that 10-20 minute mini-lessons in grammar are probably best.  You know, the good ol' D.O.L.s where you throw up a sentence with a comma splice as a warm up and have the kids correct.  Then go over with the class.  The best part about all this is that my professor ended the whole discussion on grammar with a wonderful little anecdote about some huge study that was performed where three groups of kids were administered a grammar test as freshmen then taught grammar differently:

• Group A were taught traditional grammar (parts of speech, parts of sentence, strunk n white, etc.)
• Group B were taught grammar mini lessons and modern grammar (like sentence diagramming trees, etc.)
• Group C were taught no grammar at all

 At the end of four years all three groups were tested again.  The result?  No difference.  None.  And with that encouraging note, our lesson on teaching grammar was dubiously concluded.

My first teaching job at a local public high school, I stuck pretty hard to the advice given in grad school.  I used the old school overhead projector and a bunch of rainbow colored fat sharpies.  On one film of transparency, I made up three sentences with an issue I found either in the grammar text book or their writing.  When the kids walked in they would take out paper, copy the thing, and correct on their own.  Then I would correct together with the class using a thinner, water washable marker.  Spray, wash, repeat for the next block.  

The advantage to this (in addition to the fact that a darkened classroom calmed the kids down after a rowdy lunch) was that it was quick, easy, and mostly painless for both me and the kids.  

The disadvantage was that for most of the kids, it amounted to little more than busy work.  The less ambitious would just copy the sentence and wait for us to correct as a class.  I saw little change in their writing and they had difficulty applying the concepts to situations outside of the example I gave them.

Sorry grammar,
I'd rather teach alliteration

The next job I had, I landed a department head position at a start-up foreign boarding school.  I was basically given carte blanche on curriculum, so I did what a lot of English teachers would love to do:  I gave up teaching it altogether.  

Well, not completely.  Mainly I would simply list out a bunch of "no no"s like "don't start a sentence with 'but'" and take off big points when the rules were broken.  True to my professor's anecdote, I saw about as much improvement in their writing as my first job with the DOLs.

Filled with all sorts of antiquey goodness

Skipping ahead to my first U.S. private school job, I was tasked with teaching a very hard line traditional style of grammar.  

The kids were in hell  It was worksheet Hades with a cherry on top.  It was like teaching math problems that had answers you couldn't understand for 20 minutes every day.  

The benefits?  There were actually a small population of kids that "got it".  They were usually the ones that had rocked it in middle school and were merely validating the chops they earned back then.  There was a larger group of kids that "sorta" got it, and a group of kids at the bottom that wished the room were suddenly attacked by rabid polar bears.

The worst part about it though was that it killed any sense of creativity, imagination, or personal voice in their writing.  The kids who were good at the grammar started having panic attacks because they couldn't figure out how to put together their own style of sentence.  Kinda like when I was a kid, I played Moonlight Sonata until my family wanted to burn the piano.  I was sooo good at it, but then ask me to figure out how to play my own version of "happy birthday" and I'd only be able to do so with one finger...and it would definitely suck.  And the kids at the bottom were stuck there.  No amount of tutoring and coaxing seemed to help.  

The next year, I decided to go with the style of teaching that really helped me as a student back when I was taking linguistics classes as an undergrad: Sentence diagramming

I found a fantastic textbook gathering dust in a back closet in the basement of the school and build a years worth of lessons off of it.  I felt confident that I had finally found the solution.  Diagramming made so much more sense than labeling and correcting from worksheet hell.  I was wrong.

Pin the label on the sentence part, kids!

It turns out that diagramming REALLY works for some kids...a lot of kids...but for the kids at the bottom, it was even worse than the traditional instruction style.  It was certified torture particularly for students who were dyslexic.  Which makes sense, since diagramming asks you to visualize the relationship between sentence parts in an organized manner.  If word order is constantly dancing around in front of your eyes, you would go nuts trying to pin stuff down in nice little trees.

I also learned that diagramming has become the pet pedagogy of many English middle school teachers, and that a number of the students I had struggling with it in 10th grade had fruitlessly labored through it in middle school.    

It wasn't as soul-sucking as the traditional grammar in terms of voice and creativity in writing.  But it still did sap the energy out of their writing and there still were around 30% of the kids just not getting it.  Over all, not worth it.

Finally, I've come to Private School #2 whose current English curriculum is headed in a direction 180 degrees in opposition to Private School #1.  In this school, voice is king.  Creativity fostered, nurtured, treasured.  Strunk and White are dirty words.  

Thus I started the year reveling in reading and writing mostly creatively.  But I noticed issues in the writiing that were screaming out to be addressed.  Paragraphs plagued with run-ons, pronouns with missing antecedents, and sentences missing subjects or verbs entirely.  So that winter, I put on my thinking cap and came up with the following:

Five grammar units based exclusively on the five grammatical issues that most affected clarity in student writing that year.

Each unit involved: 

• An assigned paragraph-long writing assignment due in electronic form
• two or three in-class 20 minute lessons on the issue involving class practice
• A thick homework packet of practice worksheets exclusively on that issue
• A print out of a word document containing every student's initial paragraph which we go over and correct on the smartboard. (missing names of course)
• One or two paragraph-long writing assignments by which that ONE issue only is graded.
• Another printout of a student writing for them to correct on their own.
• A quiz on that concept consisting of a paragraph that I composed which mimicked manner in which the problem occurred in student writing.

A final test of all five concepts in the form of a paragraph that I composed which mimicked their own writing.

The result?  The best improvement and retention I had ever seen.  Even struggling students showed gains in ability.  

In this weird metaphor, the godzilla is my unit and the train my precious  instructional time

The problem?  It took a huge amount of time to implement.  HUGE.  The monster units ate a giant chunk of instruction time, reading, time, and grades.  Also, I ended up having to explain to people who see grammar instruction as a voice-killer why I decided to prioritize this instruction over more creativity nurturing endeavors.  

It was really hard.  Tears were shed.  I regret the tears but not the time or the units.  It was the first time I actually felt GOOD about teaching grammar, and I didn't want to let go of it just yet.  

I ended up limping through the remainder of the year and shelfing the last two units I had planned.  So now it's summer and I'm back working on this problem.  7 years in the works and still working.  Ideas?  Suggestions? 

Teacher villains

It's summer break and I've been watching marathon runs of the hit TV series Breaking Bad.  The show has brilliant plot twists, dark savage irony, and deliciously flawed complex characters.  I'm fascinated by the show's main premise of a high school teacher's twisted decent into becoming a villain. Not that I am in the least tempted to become a meth cook or drug dealer of any sort (or am at all capable in the least of doing so), but it brought up questions in my mind about my profession and how it is viewed by society.

It's funny how when you think about teacher villains in the past, you usually imagine the witchy teacher from A Christmas Story (You'll shoot your eye out) or some washed up lame-o who has 0 passion (Bueller...Bueller...)

I wondered why (until Breaking Bad) you don't really see teachers being clandestine criminal masterminds, thieves, serial killers, or drug dealers.  I guess because the thought of it is really scary.  God forbid a person you trust your children with for a good portion of the year would be moral monster at home.   Perhaps it's like finding out that breakfast cereal has been the one and only cause of cancer all this time.  Then what?  It would cause a panic.  You'd be up all night counting the bowls you ate while watching Saturday morning cartoons.  Lying there, calculating the darkness you innocently consumed, and then freaking out about it.

I remember once seeing on the front page of the local newspaper an article about a high school teacher who was arrested for DUI over the weekend.  Out of all the DUI cases the police caught that weekend, it was the teacher who made the front page.  In fact, there weren't any other cases in the paper at all.  Why was this guy's arrest so special?  Because he was a teacher.  The standards we live by in our culture are so high.  It's so important to the community to publicly "out" teachers who have violated the law.  

Not that teachers resent it.  In fact, I would say that most teachers are the strongest believers in very public and strict levels of accountability.  We set very high bars for ourselves.  We are aware that "The Children are Watching" (an assigned reading I had one year from administration).

2 years, 2 schools, and a world of difference later...

I received an email from an Angela asking me to post again on this blog. Thanks for reading and prompting me to post again.

To be honest, I had completely forgotten about it. I was in a rough place when I created it (and I think I am still a little scarred) in a lot of ways. But after therapy, a move to sunny CA, and a shift to teaching private school, my life has taken a turn for the better. I look back at the previous posts and can't believe how rough it was for me back then. I also realize why so many of my colleagues were on anti-anxiety medication or anti-depressants. Fortunately, the changes I made in my life made it possible for me to move forward without the aid of medication.

So now, in an ironic twist of fate, I am teaching at an elite prep school on the west coast. A friend of mine who teaches high school Spanish referred me to a recruiting agency out here that found me a position right away at an affluent private school outside of LA. From there, I moved up to an even more exclusive school farther outside of LA. And here I am. In the last place I would ever imagine myself to be 2 years ago.

And although this school's tuition is about as high as your can expect, life here for both staff and students is RADICALLY different from the stereotypes you see in movies like School Ties or The Dead Poet's Society.

I feel really fortunate to have this job, yet I don't feel like I've won the teacher lottery or anything. It comes with its own set of unique challenges.

But the bottom line is: it is a far better place that I'm in now, than I was before.