Be Hopeful!

Today's post is a little different than most of my blogs, because while I'm engaging in reflective practice, it's about the work I do with Girls on the Run.

A couple of years ago I became a Solemate for GOTR and the WHS student council always has one of the spirit stations at the 5K race.  I wanted to bring GOTR to the West Side, as I knew there was a need for it. After a lot of planning and hard work by Lety Verduzco, we were able to secure a GOTR site through the Boys and Girls Club and a generous grant.  Lety, me, an ND grad student named Claire, and one of the founders of the Michiana chapter of GOTR Kris, are the coaches at Harrison and they are awesome women to work with.

We spend an hour and a half on Mondays and Wednesdays working with 15 girls on a myriad of issues: body image, health, exercise, decision making, cooperation, displaying gratitude, and empowering young girls.  These girls are some of the most amazing 3rd and 4th graders I have ever met.  They are intelligent, insightful, hopeful, fun, energetic, and loving.  I wish I could capture their passion for school and life for everyone in the community to see.  I also want to give a shout out to Harrison Primary, which has impressed me with their commitment to their students.  There is no doubt in my mind that quality teaching and learning is taking place in that building, and the evidence of parent outreach is tremendous.

It's refreshing to see education at the primary level, because it's so different than high school.  It also makes me kind of sad to know how much pressure these kids feel to pass ISTEP. My girls mention it every time I'm there.  But mostly, it's a reason to be hopeful of the future.  Good things are happening, but the community needs to know about them.  If not, we are left thinking that things are as bad as the media would like us to believe.

So I invite you to support public education, to support your local schools, to support the kids in your community, to volunteer, and to help shape the future. You won't be disappointed.

 

Working the Process

It's been a crazy few weeks, but it's been a good few weeks! I haven't had much time to blog since I've been working on getting my research project approved, and there's so much I want to say.  Alas, today will be devoted to the power of the process.

Too often, educators get in their own way. We think of great ideas and instantly try to implement them in the classroom without accounting for how we will need to scaffold what we're trying to teach.  I promise that scaffolding is one of those words that educators throw out all the time, but aren't really sure what it means or how to do it. The past two weeks have been victorious. I have owned scaffolding and the research process, two things which are not easy.  I spent a lot of time front loading how to annotate articles, find MIPS (most important points), formulate a thesis, and why it's important to determine the credibility of a source.  It has paid off this week as my students have begun their own research projects.

I introduced Scrible to my students as a way to organize their resources and to annotate the different sources they were using.  Shout out to Kelli Stair for introducing me to Scrible this past summer! I love it and highly recommend it for any teacher who is trying to prepare students to conduct research. Another great website is a.nnotate.com if you want students to code PDF files or Power points.

It has been neat to watch my students struggle with the research process and formulate their own ideas and thoughts about what's going on in the world.  Their projects are due next week, and I'm excited to see what they come up with :)

The Struggle

Anyone who knows me can testify that my faith is extremely important to me.  I would not be who I am and could not do what I do without God.  On Sunday, the homily was about the need to forgive and love those who are the HARDEST to love. I was convicted and still am convicted because I am struggling with this issue right now.

I've had a student who has been mad at the world since August.  This student hates me, hates most adults, is defiant, is rude, and gets under my skin like no student I've ever had. Ever. In ten years.  I've had a lot of difficult students in my ten years of teaching, but I've never met one who I couldn't connect with.  Until now.  I feel like I'm running into a brick wall.  Nothing I say or do is right.  I'm pretty sure I've been shot with daggers, and it's taking everything I have right now to be the professional adult in this situation. It's testing me as a Christian, and I'm failing miserably.  Deep down I know there's a hurt child inside all that anger, insolence, and hatred.  I'm just having a hard time seeing it. 

Living your life according to God's law is a challenge sometimes, and I'm losing epically.  I know I can't change this student, but I can change my attitude.  So I'm going to pray about this and would appreciate prayers from my fellow brothers and sisters.  I don't expect it to happen over night, but I know it will happen with God's help.

A Note on Creativity

Last week one of my students said something pretty profound, and I haven't been able to stop thinking about it.  Anyone who knows me well knows I'm creative.  I love painting, drawing, exploring different music, decorating, writing, taking pictures, and playing with fashion.  My classroom has so much color and there are tons of quotes, pictures, shelves of books, posters, and student work.  I hate anything dull. With a passion. 

Clearly, my creativity trickles into my teaching. I try to think of really different performance tasks because I want my students to think outside the box.  However, I never really considered how someone who thinks s/he lacks creativity might feel like one of these assignment is impossible to accomplish.  The student I was writing about earlier told me that "your brain is all rainbows and color and pictures and stuff. And mine, mine is grey. I don't think like you." I literally stopped in my tracks and saw two things: how right he was and how sad it was that he thought he lacked creativity.  Or that he associated creativity with color, rainbows, and things that glitter.

Creativity is everywhere. It's in our instagram photos, the selfies people take (this is a talent, I swear!), people's clever and witty tweets, their writing, their thoughts, the clothes they wear, their cover photo on FB, their cooking and drinking. It's endless.  The thing is, so many people think they're dull and boring and have nothing to bring to the table of creativity.  It's just not true.  Our creativity might not look the same, but it doesn't mean we don't have any. Are some blessed with more than others? Yes.  But we do a disservice when place ourselves in a grey little box, only find validation on a scantron sheet or standardized test, or a myriad of other "safe" places to express our knowledge. 

I also have to recognize that I need to provide different options for my students that they feel comfortable with and gradually provide those students with opportunities to practice being creative.  I need them to feel safe before they put it all on the line on a large assignment. 

On that note, I'm going to return to thinking about rainbows and pictures, and apparently lots of color :)

A Lesson Learned

I was fully prepared to go to school tomorrow. In fact, I even did my hair so I wouldn't have to do it in the morning (saves so much time!). So when I saw that we were closed tomorrow, I was shocked. Maybe I still am. I must admit that the extra day is coming in handy with this illness I've been battling, the snow, the frigid temps, and my COMP that is due in two weeks. I am taking advantage of these days, and I'm also thinking back to the last time I was in this place.

I was so ready to get back to school after our extended winter break, that I "wanted it too much" (credit BPG for the phrase). I know you're probably thinking how can it be wrong to want it too much. I asked myself this question the night of our first day back at school, which went down as an epic disaster. Yet, after a series of reflective questioning, I realized he was right. I wanted the first day back to be so spectacular that I forgot that the best made plans don't often go as we expect them to.  Just because I had an amazing lesson plan (in my eyes), just because I was ready to be back in the groove, just because I had to cram a 4 week unit into 2, just because I...well you get the picture.  Everything was related to what I wanted, what I expected, what I dreamed, what I envisioned. None of it was based on what I knew deep down about kids: they're kids.

Kids are fickle, they're social, they're anti-social, they're moody, they're hormonal, they're apathetic, they're excited, they're lazy, they're active, they're a bunch of oxymora! I don't know how my kids will be when they come to me on Thursday. But I do know how I'll be, which is chill. I'm going to be cool, calm, collected, I'm going to go with the flow. We'll make the most of what we have on Thursday and Friday and then we'll start fresh Monday.

You see, I want it, but I don't want it too much :)

Sea of...

It's day four of being sick in Northern Indiana, and let's just say it's been a struggle. I can think of a million things I would actually enjoy doing right now: tubing, sledding, ice skating, building a snowman, but alas, I am too sick to do anything fun.  Yesterday, I was practically too sick to do anything that involved thinking. I didn't even go to church today, which if you know me, rarely happens. My ass is always in the pew on Sundays! However, for everyone's best interests, I decided that it would be best if I stayed at home.

So for the past few hours I've been working on my COMP, planning out centers for my classroom, reading articles, and contemplating life as a teacher.  I read an interesting article today on FB about how to make sure your best people leave (http://www.ragan.com/Main/Articles/Top_10_ways_to_ensure_your_best_people_will_quit_47779.aspx). Yes, you read that correctly. It was a great article, and it discussed the kind of climate that makes good employees frustrated.  While it wasn't geared towards educators (because, I mean, who really thinks of us as professionals-note my sarcasm), it hit the nail on the head. I've been in a funk for the past month or so.  School spirit and school morale is pretty dismal right now (insert a lack of fun), I'm feeling a little used and abused (insert unappreciated, #7), and I'm feeling completely constricted by what I can and cannot do by my technology limitations (can I please get my router back? #8).  In short, I'm fed up and frustrated.  I want to move forward, but I feel stuck, and I feel like my kids are stuck because I'm stuck.  Not a good combination.

See, I love teaching. Ask any of my former students, they'll tell you how much I love teaching.  I also happen to be pretty good at it. Except right now, I kind of feel like I'm not doing as good of a job as I could be. Actually, I know I'm not. I want to open up the world to my students, let them spread their wings, find value in what they're learning, but lately it feels like I've lost my way.  I've had glimmers of it in the poetry slam, the connections my students made with R & J and their idiotic impulsive decisions.  Glimpses, however, are not enough. I want a full-fledged movement like I had the first year I did a service learning unit on the Rwandan Genocide and my students created a dynamic black and white magazine about what they learned. Talk about authentic learning. I miss having time for students to create poems about the masks they wear and being able to make actual masks! It was quite a sight to see all those symbolic pieces hanging from the ceiling. Yes it was messy, but it was worth it.

I hate that for whatever reason, education has seemed to have forgotten that students are people. Yes, they are children, but they are people. Last week one of my students stood up and said "dang, who decided that we needed to sit all day at school?". What a great questions! Lord knows, I'm the one who takes walk breaks at all day in-services because I feel like I'm going to die if I sit in that chair any longer. But it's "sit in your seat", "be quiet", "stop moving", "put that food away", "give me your electronic device" all day long for most of these kids and we wonder why they hate school. And we want them to perform on a standardized test? Sorry people, but this is a different generation, and at a certain point, we have to realize that or we're going to keep running into a brick wall.  We need to start caring about the right things, instead of things we think we have the right to control.  Kids are kids and they're going to test the limits. Sometimes, they're going to make horrific choices that we don't understand, but it's our job to help them do better. It's our role as educators today. Like it or not. And many of us can't keep doing it alone.

We need to start having real conversations about mutual respect, authentic assessment, authentic experiences in the classroom, student accountability (firmly believe in this) struggles that come with implementing theory into practice, reaching today's students, figuring out which disciplinary issues matter, and which ones honestly only matter to us. It's time for reflective practice. I'm in it for the long haul, and I plan on teaching other 18-20 year-olds to commit their lives to this amazing profession (even with all this b.s. legislation).

I'm starting with myself, and I'm starting by getting rid of the negative energy around me. It's bringing me down, and I can't let it do that. I just gotta do me, and if that means surrounding myself with only a core group of people again, so be it.

On a different note, here's a great poem from the poetry slam we had in January. Sorry about the rocky video job, but we don't have a class for that...

Star Crossed Love and Crisis Intervention

It's officially the second day in 2014, and I'm four days away from beginning the second half of the school year.  I was hoping that at this point in break I would be brimming with new ideas about how to teach "Romeo and Juliet", writing, success time, and how to best manage the instructional calendar. Sadly, I'm anything but enthused.  Inside, I feel empty.  Creativity?  Pretty much nonexistent.  Positivity? More like frustration.  I've spent the past few years aligning the 9th grade curriculum and instructional calendar to the Common Core and the Indiana Standards, only to read in the paper that our glorious legislators are ready to tank both and start fresh.

I've read the concerns about the Common Core, and I like to think I'm well-versed in all things curriculum and instruction oriented, and honestly, I support the Common Core. I don't support state legislation about education that is created on the ideals of people who have never taught a day in their life.  People are afraid of what they don't know, what they think will happen based on a variety of fallacies floating around the internet, and their own opinions about how they want their child to be educated (which you are entitled to as a parent).

I appreciate that concern, I value those opinions, but at the end of the day, I want answers based on evidence, rather than emotions.  I want the students I teach to leave high school reading at an appropriate grade level.  I want them to be able to speak and listen in an educated away.  I want them to treat their fellow brothers and sisters with dignity and respect.  I want them to be free of racist stereotypes that will do far more damage than a standard that expects them to evaluate the reason behind a valid argument.  I want them to be free from teachers who simply don't want to be in the classroom anymore.  Some who have already written them off as menaces to society.  I want them to question, to explore, and think a little.  Not be told what to think.

I'm tired of teaching "Romeo and Juliet" for the 20th time.  I have great essential questions, a killer statement of enduring understanding, and my favorite "Verona Twilight", but aside from that, I don't want anything to do with teaching something that is so damn sad and idiotic.  Can you tell I'm just not feeling this?  Yet, I'm full of guilt.  Because I should care. Or should I? How can I get my students excited to delve into something that I want nothing to do with? It's cold and snow is everywhere, can't we teach something other than a tragedy based on the impulsive idiotic decisions of two ridiculous teenagers?

Sometimes I wish that people would just get out of my way. Including the asinine legislators at every level.  Let me do my job.  Let me figure out how to create some passion in the classroom instead of selling my soul to standardized tests.  I want my teaching to mean something, and right now, I'm not sure it does.