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.