Better use of time....

I've been really busy lately, I'll find a moment to blog something sinister over the "holiday" break...

Unit 2 Test: The Soundtrack

I've taken shamefully long to finally grade my Unit 2 test.  Almost 3 weeks!  Every time I even thought about the test I felt nauseous.  Sadly, I'm sure my students did as well.  This was a sloppy, unfocused unit that has given me several valuable insights into how important it is to have a clearer understanding of where I want to go with a unit before I start teaching it.  

So I'm wrapping up the grading on a Saturday afternoon when I'd so much rather be with my family.  I'm appalled at the results; the essay answers defy any previously held notions of laziness/inaccuracy.  The average essay answer is about a 14 out of 20.  Its just horrible.  I'm tempted to wipe this test from the record.  It will definitely be mercifully devalued because I did not hold up my part of the bargain.  

Anyways, while grading this test this song popped up that so beautifully encapsulates the spirit of this test - complete with an almost hindu-chant like beginning as a nod to our coverage of major world religions. 

Observed....

Last week I had my official first observation.  I would say it went way better than I had hoped or expected, even if afterwards I feel slightly embarrassingly hypocritical with how well planned and staged my observation lesson was in relationship to my ordinary, clumsy lessons.  Prior to my observation, we had watched about 40 minutes of the PBS Islam: Empire of Faith documentary to learn about the contrast between the West (Europe after the fall of Rome) and the East (Islam and the rise of Islamic culture and civilization).  Following this viewing, I distributed to students 7 different brief articles on the various contributions of Islamic society made during this time like in education, medicine, paper & publishing, architecture, chemistry & astronomy, art, and mathematics.  The day of the event, students quickly summarized the key points of their article in groups onto a large poster sheet of paper.  Then we posted each sheet throughout the room.  The students moved from station to station in groups quickly taking notes on each category in a graphic organizer.  For homework, students were to rank each category of contribution to determine which they considered to be the most important in today's world, and write an essay on why they considered that the most important. 

In my opinion, the lesson went off with only a few glitches.  The students were eerily silent while moving from station to station.  I think they were reacting to the fact that my Assistant Principal was there.  Perhaps they were actually engaged in the activity.  I know most students took good notes b/c I checked their organizers.  The essays were lackluster.  My students consistently disappoint me when it comes to writing substantiative essays.  Their short paragraphs are typically robotic, forced, and oozing with grammatical and phrasing errors. Still, I have them write something almost every day.  

The result: I probably won't be fired in this my first year of teaching.  Also, I probably won't be put on a PIP (personal improvement plan), though I wonder how many first year teachers can even be put on one.  I'm trying to make each day as thought out and well-executed as that one, but that is definitely an ongoing struggle.

the election summed up

Watch more The Daily Show videos on AOL Video

Confession: Bailout

One of my biggest weaknesses this first quarter has been creating a logical, organized system of assignments and grades.  Its understandable considering that I've never done it before, but my whole system has just sucked ... seriously.

In the beginning, I just collected everything.  Everything was treated as if it was life or death.  This stemmed from my own sense of inadequacy in both asking students to do anything and in my lack of confidence of why we were doing it.  As a result, I've got piles of papers, much of which has been thrown away, some of which gets filtered through to help boost student scores by giving them more chances to score on stuff.

It gets worse.  I've been horrible at keeping track exactly what was to be handed in when.  Some classes handed in assignments that I simply forgot to ask other classes to hand in.  Sometimes I would forget until the bell pretty much to remind about handing stuff in.  I almost feel bad for my students, it must be confusing and frustrating to keep track of everything.  Not entirely, there are at least 15 students that keep good track of everything to be handed in and do so beautifully.  However, knowing myself, I would have really struggled in my class so far.

As a result, I've decided to implement a "mercy-based" grading policy this first quarter by extending deadlines on almost all assignments for all students.  This week I've had students flocking around my desk at the whiff of possible make-up work.  I've had students that were failing hand in 6-8 assignments and suddenly shoot up to a C-.  I've also had students that have a 16% do nothing and not show up for anything.  She makes me really mad.

I don't plan on doing this next semester.  I'm actually really glad for a new grading period.  Its kind of like a fresh start.  I'll be doing things differently this time - clearly documenting all assignments due online and when - so students have to go find out for themselves.  Also, I need to do better at getting students feedback several times a week.  But to do that requires time to grade, and thus far most of my time goes to planning.  Hopefully I can do better this next quarter.  In the meantime, I'll just give my students a big nasty bailout so that I don't have to defend my horrific grading malfeasance.  

For the first time, I feel like I'm teaching ...

Since my Unit 2 test last Wednesday, I've embarked on a new project in chronological world history teaching that I think is working out better than I had anticipated.  

My Unit 2 was awkward.  It was an ill-fated attempt to use the textbook, as I decided to teach the Prologue to the book - looking back now it is a bizarro tribute to democracy and judeo-christian tradition as the foundations for the modern world as we know it.  Even if such is the case, the treatment in this section is really biased at best and at worst utterly confusing to teach as some sort of "prologue" to modern world history.  

My teaching of this section reflected this.  I was jumbled, unclear about what exactly the point of learning this was.  If I were to ask myself why we were really learning this it was, well ... its the first part of the textbook.  The worst part was that I could barely explain why we were learning it.  I didn't even get to the point where we put the different pieces together until the study review.  I caught myself explaining everything the day before the test and I thought to myself I should be doing this every day.  

Of course I know better than to just teach from the textbook, but to be honest, I'm completely burnt out on lesson planning, or planning in general.  I have quickly become the result of the idea of a 1st year teacher being entirely left to plan a year of World History given only an 11 year old textbook without any guiding curriculum, assistance, or other resources to create quality lessons.  I am pretty much out of tricks.

This doesn't mean I'm not still trying.  It just means that I've, perhaps positively, accepted the reality that this is going to be an uphill struggle, and that I can't expect myself to pull off a teaching masterpiece every day.  I've tried, and I can't.  

I have learned, however, that the textbook is not the answer.  Textbooks suck.  They suck the life right out of history.  They are like the enemy, and anything the enemy says is acidic bile to be violently spewed from one's brain in the minutes after your test.  I know this, I've been a student.  

So I've decided to take a new direction, to do my best to walk the middle ground: somewhere between the soul-less drudgery of the textbook lessons, with all of the question and answer worksheets, graphic organizers, and searching out a verbatim answer that students rarely understand - and the exciting, activity-based realm of history as a life-experience, learning to view the world, and the past through the eyes, or even better, perspectives of others.  This is where students learn to think outside of themselves and mature as they slowly open their minds to the remote possibility that others might have had it worse off than them.  

I feel like I've gotten a glimpse of the prior, and it is brutal.  It is the history I hate (to teach).  It is when things don't quite make sense because the textbook becomes the authority not the student.  

I feel like I'm slowly getting a glimpse of the latter.  I've been using a History Channel video called the "Dark Ages" to introduce my students to the Middle Ages.  Its been good to help students come to know multiple players, places, and events because it provides them with tons of visuals and context references for them to sequence and process material.  It isn't perfect, but with frequent stops and multiple reviews, I feel like the big picture of why we are learning this is slowly unfolding while we are learning, as opposed to the study review.  

I feel like I'm trying to put it all together for my students every day.  I think they understand and appreciate my transparency, they are definitely more receptive to the content than they've been, and I can tell by the increased participation in key students that the ideas are getting through better.  

Of course, I'm giving an open note quiz tomorrow so we'll see how it goes.  I'll post an update in a week or so.

My Brightest Diamond: "Golden Star"

Stumbled on this while wasting time before grading tests on a Saturday afternoon.  I first heard of My Brightest Diamond a few years ago, but her songs are continually haunting and impressive.

Confession: I have no idea what I'm doing

So I just today had a brief meeting with one of my students, who just so happened to have missed probably 50% of class out of the last 2-3 weeks.  She hasn't handed in a single assignment, and has no idea what is going on in my class.  Meanwhile, I've just stood by as she occasionally comes and goes, quietly expresses that she has no idea, and I give her some smaller assignment to work on because in the thick of class it is really hard to focus on things like that adequately.  

Finally I got to sit down with her today and realized that she has no idea what is going on - and then some.  Even trying to explain about the beginnings of democracy, I quickly came to realize that she didn't know what government was, a citizen was - she couldn't even tell me anything about what democracy is.  She said she'd never heard of it before.  So I explained about each of them.  Then I went to explain how Greece is significant because democracy developed there, and I realized she had no idea about what Greece was or when 600 BC was.  So I explained about the timeline from BC to AD and how it works like a mathematical graph, with little success.  When it seemed like she understood the way BC and AD worked, I started explaining the developments of Solon - the first leader of Greece in 600 BC.  But I realized that she had no idea what social classes were, or what hereditary meant, or even what a council was.  So I told her to read the first 4 pages (something she should have done 2 weeks ago) and take notes and write down any questions she has so that we can discuss them.

I think this is one of the more profound learning experiences I've had in teaching thus far, as I've seen on a more personal, one on one basis what it means to not expect background knowledge, and how to acquaint myself with the often nuanced hurdles that students will face as they are forced into entire portions of text that lay out historical developments.  Do they understand when and where this is happening?  Do they understand why they are reading it?  Do they understand what they are supposed to be learning, or remember from the text?  I think from now on, when I approach new material, I'm going to do it as if I were speaking directly to this student, and adjust my work to be certain that students understand the basics before I proceed to have them understand the deeper concepts.  

One immediate thought I have is that I've been perpetually vexed with the need to distinguish my honors class from my regular class.  The sheer weight and demand for thought and planning to prepare for one class has been up until this point almost unbearable that I've just been unable to prepare for both classes.  Furthermore, I haven't had a clue as to how I would make the two courses different - I didn't know how each class was different, or what they could handle.  But I think now I'm starting to get it.  I think I need to direct my regular class to smaller steps towards this one student's level to make sure that all the students understand the basic, general concepts.  I also think that in a way, I've already been running my class on the whole like an honors class.  I think that out of fear of not testing my students hard enough I've really cranked up the questions, pace, and depth of my expectations, and I can see that it has been just too much for my regular class.  I can see now the need to carefully examine every paragraph for every concept that might need to be introduced and make sure that students in my regular classes receive more scaffolding than I've been providing up until this point.  

Overall, I will probably refer to this day mentally for a long time in my lesson planning, as I try to reduce everything to its simplest parts before I really try to build up to and explain, let alone expect the students to understand let alone "synthesize" to speak in Bloom-ological terms.  I would rather my students really understand a few simple important concepts, than marginally and confusedly attempt to put out some sort of higher level analysis on abstract concepts they don't, nor will they ever probably understand.

Late night saturday confession ....

So I've been grading quizzes that I "administered" on Wed. and I think that I'm realizing that I didn't teach very well what was on the quiz. Since my Unit 1 test, I've moved into the prologue of our Modern World History textbook, which deals, either somewhat arbitrarily or as a distinct gesture towards western-centric historiography, with the "rise of democratic ideals." 

The text is clumsy, and can hardly be taught in concept without sounding like some puppet for the textbook writers, who obviously wanted to frame everything that happened since 1300 until now within some sort of democracy-uber-alles context. And while I can understand the importance of democracy in shaping the modern world, I haven't bought into to why the book presents it the way it does, and I think my teaching has reflected that.

So I've basically been giving my students a painful assortment of worksheets and questions to get them exposed to the material. Also, for 2-3 days I had my students create some befuddled skits on the Magna Carta, which not only took longer to complete than justifiable, but I'm not sure left my students with the lasting, multi-perspective understanding of the Magna Carta that the activity intended. Not to mention, the Magna Carta is hardly even a paragraph in the book, but we seem to have obsessed over it. 

All in all, I'm realizing the role that I must take in presenting the material in clear, coherent ways, which I haven't done, and I can tell because my students are not able to put the big picture together, as evidenced by their almost 80% failing of the quiz. Its ok, it will be a learning moment for them, as I'm going to have them create a study guide out of the quiz using the answers to extract valuable information, and for me, I'm going to take a different approach to presenting and testing a chunk of information in the future.

Update: btw, I've been working on backwards design with my department chair, and it is really helping me to have a clearer idea of where I want my students to go with the material and how to get them there. I'll be posting more on my unit in the coming week.

Rainy Friday afternoon grading ...

While feverishly grading my Unit 1 test essays, trying to get them finished by next week sometime, I was stopped in my tracks by this amazing Sigur Ros song that popped up on shuffle. Here it is in video form, quite possibly one of the most beautiful audio and video recorded.

Detention update...

Happily, all of my students showed up for detention. At detention, I took one of my biggest trouble students aside and told her she could be getting straight a's, that there is no excuse for her to misbehave, and that I need her help to keep control of the class so we can learn. Today, she screamed at my class to quiet down when I was trying to get their attention after working in groups. It was hilarious. I don't know if that was a response to what I said but I'll take the help any day.

The Constable grows a pair...

... gave out 10 detentions today. Two came after school today.  When If the rest don't show tomorrow then calls home to each of them.

Up to my neck in grading....

I vaguely remember several warnings on how much stuff I collected to be graded, but I didn't really realize what they were talking about until now.  Since the beginning of the year, I've probably collected about 20 different writings/homework from my classes.  That is almost 3200 things that I have to "grade", which has now become a swamp of papers that I don't have the time to get to.  

My solution is to employ a simple grading system for drill type BCR's where I just give a quick check, check plus, or check minus - which get a score of 2-5 points.  That is helping me move through papers and get some grades down so that I can have something to show my students.  

I've already started grading the tests too, my wife has helped with the multiple choice - I made a master grader by punching out holes so she just lays the sheet down and marks the wrong answers and adds them up.  So far the results are all over the board, which shows to me that the test wasn't too easy, and I'm pretty certain it wasn't too hard.  I've yet to get into the essays to know whether the students could explain domestication, the differences between hunter-gatherers and early farmers, and why civilization developed in the Fertile Crescent rather than in Papua New Guinea.

The nice thing about mindless grading of drills and various essays - I can listen to Michael Medved.

Giving my first test....

So today was my first test.  It went well on the delivery side of it.  We'll see how it goes when I get the scores tallied up.  From what I saw, the smart kids were done in about half the time of what was recommended to me that I allot for them to take the test.  I have a feeling like some kids are going to just get a straight up 100%, but that is just my guess.  

I ended up making 3 different versions, which I copied simultaneously so they were already premixed ready for me to distribute to students.  I also created three variants on the essays, just to avoid some later period students getting off easy because their friends told them all the essay topics.  

The best part by far was the peace and quiet that dominated today.  My students were well-behaved and every class period was so quiet.  When students were done, I told them they could just rest their heads - and they did.  I had to wake them up to collect their tests.  It was like nap-time in preschool.

I have so much stuff to grade right now I don't know how I'm going to get it all done within the week.  I've meant to grade during my planning period, but sometimes I just tend to fall into some sort of mindless state as my brian processes the millions of data inputs that fly at me every second in my classroom.  I think that as I build more stamina in teaching, I'll be able to just file away the day and get to work on what has to get done.  That is one of the only ways to be able to leave work at a decent time and have a life outside of the classroom.

Writing my first test...

Tonight I finished up my 1st test. It is a slightly strange unit - but aren't all units titled Introductions to History. That is pretty much a license to teach whatever you want, and I taught stuff I wanted to and didn't want to. But I have to say, at least I have taught some stuff. My students will hopefully understand the fundamental role in farming in providing a surplus of food that enabled people to focus on other tasks, like learning how to shave their bodies. Here is the study guide:

Study Guide Unit 1

Vocabulary: 

fact 

opinion 

artifact 

evidence 

famine 

epidemic

bias 

generalization 

primary source 

secondary source 

social class 

domestication

chronology 

primate 

hominid 

nomads

surplus 

job specialization

raw materials

“cargo” 

theory 

natural resources 

geographic luck 

east-west axis

civilization 

institution

scribes

Bronze Age

ziggurat

cuneiform

Geography: Be able to find these places on a map.

Africa, Papua New Guinea, Europe, Middle East, Asia, “Eurasia”

Key Concepts:

Understand the few key ways in which Australopithecines were different from chimpanzees. What was the most significant way in which Australopithecines & Homo habilis began to more resemble modern humans? 

Homo erectus - they migrated down to Southern Africa and out of Africa throughout Asia all the way to China and Indonesia. Understand how Homo erectus began to more resemble modern humans in regards to diet, the use of tools and the craftsmanship to make them, and the relationship between these advancements and their larger brain size. 

Neanderthals - Know the approximate time frame that Neanderthals lived, that they lived at the same time as modern homo sapiens, but are not our direct descendants. Understand how Neanderthals were similar yet different from modern humans physically. Also, you should know the significance of their burial rituals and customs.

Homo sapiens sapiens - these are modern humans. Cro-magnons were one group that lived around Europe. They were the ones with the cave art. Know about this art - what it depicted, and what it might have meant. Most important - technologically, what skills enabled Homo sapiens to migrate throughout the world and populate every continent? 

Know about the hunter-gatherer (nomadic) lifestyle - how they found food, why they had to migrate, why they had small families, what factors prompted hunter-gatherers to first experiment with agriculture. (Mini ice age made it more difficult to find food.)

Know what domestication means. How did domestication change the nature of plants and animals? How did early farming villages and communities develop? How did people have the ability to work on things other than finding food?

The first farming communities all developed around the approximate time in history and around large rivers - why? How did farming create new needs for technology? What were some of the first technological advances? (tools to help farm, writing to record agriculture patterns etc.) 

What were the effects of the Agricultural (Neolithic) Revolution? Why would it be considered a “revolution”?

Guns Germs & Steel - know who Dr. Jared Diamond was, what Yali’s question was, and what Dr. Diamond did to answer Yali’s question (a.k.a. to discover the “roots of inequality”?) What did Yali mean by the term “cargo”?

Understand the concept of “geographical luck”. The geographical factors are the raw materials (crops and animals) that nature provides a certain location. Dr. Diamond contends the Fertile Crescent is extremely “lucky” - why? Papua New Guinea was not geographically lucky - why? (They had difficult crops that provided little nutrition, no animals to work the land so they had to do all the work themselves.)

Dr. Diamond argues that the crops, animals, technology, and overall advantage spread from the Fertile Crescent on an “east-west axis” along the latitudinal lines. Why was it harder for these advantages to spread on a north-south axis? 

The concept of food surplus is of central importance to this entire unit of study. How did farmers get a food surplus, and what did it enable them to do? How did food surplus lead to the development of tools? How did the development of tools lead to cities?

What are the components to a civilization? (advanced cities, specialized workers, complex institutions, record keeping, advanced technology)

Why were governments necessary? How did trade develop? What are the agricultural roots of civilization?

Liars: Sailing to Byzantium

I've always had a mild historic romantic notion for the Byzantine empire because of the time I spent in Eastern Europe in the land of aggressively nationalistic Orthodox chauvinists. Lately, I've been coming back to this track over and over.

Weekly highlights

All week I've been really struggling to get my students to get on task at the beginning of class.  I have a drill on the overhead every day for them to get to work on when class starts, but this week they have taken upwards of 2-5 minutes just to settle down and get on task.  So I busted out a marker and started putting checks on pages of students that were on task during the first minute, and it worked well.  I didn't even have to tell them what the check meant, I think students are conditioned to just want something on their page.  In the future I'm going to get some sort of stamp to use - or maybe incorporate marking students off as I take attendance.

Two girls in my 2nd period honors class told me I reminded them from Kip from Napoleon Dynamite.  I did a quick impression of Kip where he says don't be jealous cause I've been chatting online with hot babes all day, and they erupted in laughter.

On the 11th, one student suggested that we have a moment of silence in honor of Sept. 11th.  It was really powerful for me, to be standing there for a minute in complete silence - not only because of the emotions I feel about Sept. 11th, but just to be there teaching - responsible for so many students understanding of the world and how it works.  I couldn't help but slightly tear up and one student noticed and it was a good humanizing moment for that class to see how that day and moment of silence would impact me.  

I assigned them a project over the weekend to make a Guns Germs and Steel children's book.  They did not like the idea and I could have cared less.  I have a feeling like some books might suck.

On Friday afternoon, we had a BCTR final meeting.  It was great to see everyone, even though I was completely drained mentally and emotionally.  Best of all was my conversation with Jon Michael.  As we were talking I realized how terribly alone I've felt these last 3 weeks, and it was so nice to just talk to someone who knew what I was going through.  Not to mention he might be able to get me a full year of world history lesson plans, which would probably have the most dramatically positive impact on my life for the next 10 months.

First Confession ...

For months I have been looking for a place for me to record my thoughts. The tumultuous haze that my life has become has almost left me breathless at every moment, yet as I let it all pass by unrecorded I feel like I am doing myself such a disservice, if not only to record my failings in my first year as a World History teacher in Baltimore City. The only thing more painful than the daily gauntlet of mistakes and pulsating reality of my inadequacy as a teacher is the fact that I would submit myself to repeat the same painful lessons by not documenting this experience in some way shape or form. 

So this will hopefully become a place where I can rest my troubles on a proverbial raft and float them out to sea, only to be picked up by some Russian cod fisherman and ravaged according to their filthy fancies. 

My confession up to this point is that I have initiated a sadistic and bizarre experiment in self-sabotage during my first few weeks as a teacher.  Rather than simply distribute the textbooks the first day, and begin a typical high school world history course like any other teacher, let alone a new teacher, I somehow became asphyxiated with the notion of independently choreographing some sort of "bridge unit" - to chaperone my students on an enlightening sojourn from the dirty crevices of prehistory until the time when my modern world history textbook begins, so as to honor the necessity of historical continuity for these 9th graders that will most likely purge 99% of any knowledge of material we cover as fast as it takes to inhale a deep breath of nitrous oxide out of a lonely whip-it purchase.  

And that decision has made my first month teaching an absolute hell.

Not to mention, it has stolen most all of my time, as I frantically throw together fragments of disparate lessons to have some sort of history-oriented material to throw at my students.  As a result, I've all but entirely ignored my grade book, which at 3 weeks in, has yet to even be properly set up.  That is a task for this weekend, along with creating a test to give to my students to assess their knowledge of my bastard-child, severely mentally challenged of a frankenstienien first world history unit that I have posthumously named "Introductions to History".  Perhaps I should have named it "The Shape of Introductions of History to Come" because of its revolutionary disjointed, abstractly holistic core, which all but taunts my students with a tortuously elusive relevance.

Well that is enough for tonight.  I have to sit down and decide how the hell I am going to score these piles of assignments I have collected from my students.  It reminds me of doing taxes.  I think this is the time where I start to make serious adjustments to how many assignments I'm going to collect, grade, and give back.

First Post (semi confession)

So when I started this whole new teaching career thing, I had a few different ideas in mind as to how I was going to document my experience. First, I thought I'd write a book. Then, I thought I would keep a blog so that I could refer to it when I wrote the book. Now, I want to keep a blog as a place to vent about how ridiculously overwhelming being a new teacher is, and as a way for me to not only remember how hard it was (and sure is of course), but for me as a way to mentally work through my issues so that I can become a better teacher and person.

Speaking of issues, I'm on the verge of my 1st Back to School Night, and I'm wasting time making a new blog. I have some sort of dysfunctional glitch that makes me crave pointless busy work when I have stressful deadlines before me.

I'm probably start posting more soon. If you're reading this you probably know who I am, but if you don't, then I hope you never find out.