2nd year update: No time to play

So I'm well into my 2nd year of teaching and have actually been ignoring this blog and focusing my efforts on building my class websites. I created two wordpress blogs for my World History and AP Human Geography classes. They have been time consuming to say the least, yet really fun to create and tweek. My favorite part is that students have their own accounts and can actually contribute posts to the class blog, which, in all honesty, I'm still trying to figure out how to best utilize. The best part is when we go to the computer lab to do research, I can have the instructions, links, and resources available there for students so they just get right to work, and I have to walk around and make sure they are looking at the right sites.

This year has been very different, yet equally challenging as my first year. On one side, teaching World History for the second time has been a lot of fun as I have a much clearer sense of what I'm doing, talking about, and where we are going as a class. It also helps that we have great freshman this year. They just seem so much calmer than last year, though I think my improved classroom management might also have something to do with it. I took 2 days at the beginning of the year to review all of the policies and procedures, and it really paid off in holding students responsible. Still, I've noticed that in the last month they are starting to test the policies and I've had to make phone calls and dish out detentions, which I do using a staples receipt book so I get a hard copy of their detention notice. When they come I mark it off. If they don't come by the date I set it is a phone call home.

AP HUG has been awesome and impossible. If I could choose any class to teach it would be that. But there is just so much content to learn and then try to teach I've really been struggling to create a coherent curriculum, especially in lieu of the fact that there kind of isn't one. There are the AP HUG points that students are tested on, but no so much any advice as to how to teach them. We did get nice new Rubenstein textbooks that are mostly effective at delivering content. I really look forward to learning as much this year so that I can put it towards next year.

Other than that I am pretty much neck deep in the daily grind of planning, grading, revising, venting, copying, explaining, and then some relaxing and sleeping.

First year summary/Summer of bureaucracy

I find it interesting that at the end of last year, my first year of teaching, I felt some sort of pressure to eloquently summarize the lessons learned from my first year of teaching, but I don't think I'm going to do it. Instead I will spend my precious summer time rewatching the entire wire series with my wife (1st time for her... welcome to balmore), finding a good used car for my family, and listlessly working at North Ave at the headquarters of Baltimore City Public Schools. If anything, the latter has likely numbed my senses for whatever expectation I had for a summer full of achievement and thoughtful reflection in preparation for my second year of teaching.

I have casually accumulated a simple list of thoughts that summarize my first year:

• I learned that I love teaching and know that eventually I will become the kind of teacher that I would like to be.
• I am thoroughly sobered and humbled by what it takes to be a good teacher, and the efforts of the amazing teachers that I have the privilege to work with.
• Next year is going to be much more fun - and much harder in many ways.
  

On a more puzzling note, I have had the opportunity to work this summer at City Schools HQ, a monolith of bureaucratic insanity and statistical worship. I've even had the chance to meet some of the top dogs, who, in all honesty, are less dissapointing than most I've met there. The building has a sort of invisible ectoplasmic aura surrounding it, almost like in Ghostbusters 2. All those who enter into its inner chambers will experience of the sadness, political manuevering, raw gossip, and desparate insecurity that give the monolith's invisible forcefield such a healthy, thick, shiny, pulsating quality.

The end of my 1st year teaching.....

In the next week I'll be posting an exhaustive reflection on the end of my first year of teaching .... when I get a moment. Today is Friday and I must celebrate the last day of my first year - by going to Super Walmart and buying groceries with my family.

Spring Fever ...

Spring has come and has me feeling strangely nostalgic. As I walk into my classroom on these humid spring mornings, I have flashbacks to the beginning of the year, when I had no idea what I was doing.

Now, I still have pretty much no idea what I am doing, but I am slowly getting my footing. Even this entry is an attempt to delay my finishing a brief mini-lecture that I'll be giving tomorrow before a quiz (that I spent 3 hours today creating).

By this point in the year, I am done with my BCTR content seminars - bi-weekly meetings designed to teach new teachers how to plan their units backwards, which they might actually be able to do in 2-3 years. I'm done with all of my formal observations - satisfactory. I'm almost done with my last literacy in the content area at Hopkins.

In fact, with HSA's at the end of May, that means there are about 3 weeks left to teach. That is frustrating because I'm not as far in world history as I would like. Next year will go much differently.

I've found that as the year goes on, I have less and less to say about anything. I'm always neck deep in work.

Good songs to grade to...

As I am entering into a week completely absorbed in grading, here are a few samples of music that I like to grade to.  Mostly electronic or ambient, no lyrics, not too loud or rockish.

Heavy Water / Id Rather Be Sleeping - Grouper

Night Is Blurred - Signer

Archangel - Burial

Good Things End - The Field

& Down - Boys Noize

Midnight Black Earth - Bohren & Der Club Of Gore

Tidal - Auburn Lull

Dont Save Us From The Flames (Superpitcher Remix) - M83

Confession: negligent grading

One lesson that has been reverberating throughout my 4.5 months of teaching is how important it is to get stuff graded quickly and get it back to students.  

First, students appreciate rapid feedback.  It lets them know how they're doing, and they become incentivized to do better as they get a snapshot of their performance in class.  Sure, a lot of students just take the work and throw it away, but it is important that they have it to be a part of their materials that they can use to study and prepare for quizzes and tests.  As we go into mid-term week, I realize I haven't nearly come close to where I'd like to be in grading and getting materials back.  The reason for this has to do with my inability to make time or preparations to grade and hand stuff back.  Grading takes so much time.  Even a simple homework assignment will take me 45 minutes to grade for my 165 students, and that is not even really reading over it.  So I tend to give assignments, and collect them, and then just file them away with all of the other stuff that I have to get to.  Worst of all, I take too long to get tests back.  The reason for this is the essays are really time consuming to read and grade.  

What I tend to do is get so consumed in planning for the future and what we're going to do next in class that I rationalize not grading stuff fast enough and getting it back to the students.  I've been thinking that getting material back to students is actually more important than just plowing through new material; I'll probably start making plans to have some down time each week (like by giving some reading and answers) so that I have time to hand stuff back.  That would give me more time during the week to get stuff graded and get it back.  Ultimately, it is really about setting priorities and implementing them into the course.  I feel like I've seen all I need to see to put grading and getting stuff back as one of my top priorities.  

Lastly, and probably more personally, I've learned that when I take too long to grade things my overall confidence as a teacher goes down.  Just for me, to know that I'm not fulfilling my side of the bargain to let them know how they're doing I tend to feel guilty, of course, but moreover I tend to compensate for that guilt by lowering my expectations and requirements of my students.  I'll start to excuse poor behavior, or make exceptions when students don't fulfill their requirements because after all, neither am I really.  Most of all, I lose sight of where my students are at as far as understanding the material, and can't adapt my plans to reinforce areas that I need to.  I'm still learning what that really means and how to do that, but I certainly can't even begin to do that if I never look at what I'm getting back.  Probably sometimes I don't even want to see what I'm getting back - especially when it is a topic long past - for fear of how little has been taken in and understood.  

These are just some of the hundreds of factors that I have to look forward to in the years to come as I learn just what the crap I am doing......