On My Leave of Absence from Blogging

I've been quite absent from the blogging world these past 5 months. Not only have I neglected writing in my own blog, but I have also dispensed with reading others' blogs. My new job and my new life consume a great deal of time, including requiring daily reflection in the form of an online Zoomerang survey. I let myself forget how much I enjoyed reading other people's writing about their experiences, and I allowed myself to grow lazy about my own writing. I think a great deal but never write anything down anymore, other than my "to do" lists and quick notes about my job. All this frustrates me and yet I do not know if I have the discipline or force of habit to rectify the situation in 2008. I wish I could say with certainty that my intentions would be enough, but I am not so sure. I am going to try however. Maybe the outlet will be good for me.

How did it get to be Christmas Eve?

It's been four months now since I've been living in a new city, working a new job and living with new people. None of it's new anymore really. My life has changed in more ways than I thought possible in such a short time in brilliant ways. Now I'm home for Christmas and nothing is the way it should be, and I feel cheated almost. Coming here, seeing my family, was supposed to help recharge my batteries, physically and emotionally, but it's doing quite the opposite. The meager holiday spirits I had managed to hold on to have dried out in light of everything that is unexpectedly unwell here and we're all on edge. I don't know what to make of any of it.

Bittersweet ends & exciting beginnings

Tomorrow morning, I'm moving to Boston. My summer work is almost done, although I'll be winding it down and putting the finishing touches on it via email with my co-teachers, my students and my supervisor. It's been a wonderful 5 weeks - I've had a lot of fun and I think we've all learned a lot. The reality of leaving this place, of at long last being so far away from even my surrogate family, is really starting to sink in. Physically, I may be all packed up and ready to hit the road, but emotionally, the cool facade feels flimsy. I'm looking forward to all that this year will bring, but I'm going to miss this place and my people. That's all for now, folks.

The Life of a Start-Up Teacher: Summer Edition

I have high hopes and every good intention of keeping this blog more up-to-date over this summer. Regular school is out. My kids and I all survived the staggering, stagnant heat AND the pressure of 4th quarter grades and final exams. They may not believe it, but I'm going to miss them....even most of the ones who were great pains in my neck all semester long. With only an tiny handful of exceptions, they were good kids, great even, but just not good (or even satisfactory) students.

Over the summer, I've got summer reading for next year's gig, a ton of stuff I want to do selfishly just for me, and a six+ week teaching gig with the summer classes of a college prep program run by a former professor/supervisor/mentor. I'm super-excited. Because these classes are supplements to their high school course of study, the curriculum is much more flexible, much more contemporary and experimental. I'm working with two great, much more experienced English teachers - one in the literature courses and one in the "rising sophomores" writing course - which will be an amazing resource, but I'm also going to get to know a whole different kind of student, more motivated, more committed, while still caught in the ambiguous, murky territory of being a high school kid.

So hopefully, I'll be chronicling and reflecting on all of that here. Bear with me. We're on a whole new ride.

Why Can't I Get This Whole Blogging Thing Right?

I am a disciplined, organized person. I love writing. I love talking about my students and my classroom even when they are driving me crazy. Why then, am I not posting here with regularity? I feel like I am failing miserably as a blogger, and I am certainly failing my commitment to reflective practice. This makes me unhappy. It makes me question what all I am doing right now that I should be inspired and energized to write about in this blog. And still the answers elude me. Something's just not right.

That is all for now, folks.

One Foot on Each Side of the Line

Which line? I'm talking about that line dividing kids and teenagers from grown-up, students from those of us who work full-time (and then some) for a living. It's murky territory for me - technically, I belong to the latter group, but it's not for nothing that I teach high school. Sometimes, like today, I wish I were still a part of the former group. Of course, then I remember how much high school can suck, and how other than my family, most of the people I care about and hang out with are friends I met during college, and I reconsider. Besides only with the wisdom of my years did I come to embrace my literary dorkiness for how wonderful it is.

But if I were still a teenager, still in high school, I wouldn't have to go to a Teen Book Bash, complete with awesome author readings and bad high school a cappella, undercover. (By the way, I LOVE a cappella...which is why I know bad a cappella when I hear it.) It was an awesome Saturday afternoon. It was gorgeously sunny out, so the event was pretty well attended. I got to hear about 2 dozen popular YA fiction writers read from their own work. Some of these authors were people whose work I've followed for years (including one amazing lady whose historical fiction I first picked up in middle school and who is probably my grandmother's age and I didn't even think was still writing), others were people I've heard students talk about or whose books I've seen in the library and bookstores and wanted to read, and some were a completely new experience. I wished I were not as broke as I currently am, so that I could support their work and our local public library's work by buying the books they had for sale. I eventually caved and bought a couple paperbacks - money well-spent - but man, I could have gone for several times as many!

I hope someday, sooner rather than later, I will be able to use my newfound expertise of CURRENT young adult fiction to change at least one student's attitude towards reading. And if it takes longer, so be it. At least now I've witnessed that there is hope for us all: there are still adolescents of all stripes who read for the pleasure getting lost in someone else's world and enthusiastic adults of all stripes working hard to keep them, our target demographic, engrossed in a good story. Since Hiro hasn't shared his ability to fold space and time with me, I'll take the side of the line I'm stuck on. But I'll gleefully toe the boundaries and indulge my inner adolescent by taking those books I picked up for a test run.

Until next time :)

Something wicked this way comes:

the end of the marking period. (Cue the ominous music!)

Predictably all of a sudden students who haven't cared a whit about their work, their grade, our class or more generally, school, are now in a panic as they realize time is up and that ugly, ugly F that my co-teacher and I kept warning them about is about to become part of their permanent record and make its way into their parents' hands. Forget all the extra running around and grading their frenzy is generating, and all the unnecessary negotiations and arguments about late work policies and unauthorized absences that have ensued. I just wish I had some way of making them understand that if they put just a shred of the energy of these last minute efforts into their work when it was first assigned (after all, they have to come to school and sit in our class anyways), they wouldn't be in this situation in the first place.

Luckily, something sweet this way comes too: Spring Break! I'm willing to give them a clean slate when we get back - have they learned enough to appreciate it?

Book Meme - Another Take on the Books the UK "Cannot Live Without"

I pulled this book mem off of Mister Teacher . It's an adaptation of another blogger's take on the "Top 100 Books the UK Can't Live Without." The comments on some books were made by me, and I did add a book or two at the end - I don't know how many of these were on the original list.... Feel free to use it yourself...

*Look at the list of books below.
*Bold the ones you've read.
*Color the ones you want to read.
*Leave blank the ones that you aren't interested in.
*If you are reading this, tag you're it.

1. The Da Vinci Code (Dan Brown)

2. Pride and Prejudice (Jane Austen)

3. To Kill A Mockingbird (Harper Lee)
4. Gone With The Wind (Margaret Mitchell)
5. The Lord of the Rings: Return of the King (Tolkien)
6. The Lord of the Rings: Fellowship of the Ring (Tolkien)
7. The Lord of the Rings: Two Towers (Tolkien)
8. Anne of Green Gables (L.M. Montgomery)
9. Outlander (Diana Gabaldon)
10. A Fine Balance (Rohinton Mistry)
11. Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire (Rowling)
12. Angels and Demons (Dan Brown)
13. Harry Potter and the Order of the Phoenix (Rowling)
14. A Prayer for Owen Meany (John Irving)

15. Memoirs of a Geisha (Arthur Golden)
16. Harry Potter and the Philosopher's Stone (Rowling)
17. Fall on Your Knees(Ann-Marie MacDonald)
18. The Stand (Stephen King)
19. Harry Potter and the Prisoner of Azkaban(Rowling)
20. Jane Eyre (Charlotte Bronte)
21. The Hobbit (Tolkien)
22. The Catcher in the Rye (J.D. Salinger)
23. Little Women (Louisa May Alcott)
24. The Lovely Bones (Alice Sebold)
25. Life of Pi (Yann Martel)
26. The Hitchhiker's Guide to the Galaxy (Douglas Adams)

27. Wuthering Heights (Emily Bronte)

28. The Lion, The Witch and the Wardrobe (C. S. Lewis)
29. East of Eden (John Steinbeck)
30. Tuesdays with Morrie(Mitch Albom)
31. Dune (Frank Herbert)
32. The Notebook (Nicholas Sparks)
33. Atlas Shrugged (Ayn Rand)
34. 1984 (Orwell)
35. The Mists of Avalon (Marion Zimmer Bradley)
36. The Pillars of the Earth (Ken Follett)
37. The Power of One (Bryce Courtenay)
38. I Know This Much is True (Wally Lamb)
39. The Red Tent (Anita Diamant)
40. The Alchemist (Paulo Coelho)
41. The Clan of the Cave Bear (Jean M. Auel)
42. The Kite Runner (Khaled Hosseini)
43. Confessions of a Shopaholic (Sophie Kinsella)
44. The Five People You Meet In Heaven (Mitch Albom)
45. Bible - Sort of
46. Anna Karenina (Tolstoy)
47. The Count of Monte Cristo (Alexandre Dumas)
48. Angela's Ashes (Frank McCourt)
49. The Grapes of Wrath (John Steinbeck)
50. She's Come Undone (Wally Lamb)
51. The Poisonwood Bible (Barbara Kingsolver)
52. A Tale of Two Cities (Dickens)

53. Ender's Game (Orson Scott Card)
54. Great Expectations (Dickens)
55. The Great Gatsby (Fitzgerald)
56. The Stone Angel (Margaret Laurence)
57. Harry Potter and the Chamber of Secrets (Rowling)
58. The Thorn Birds (Colleen McCullough)
59. The Handmaid's Tale (Margaret Atwood)
60. The Time Traveller's Wife (Audrey Niffenegger)
61. Crime and Punishment (Fyodor Dostoyevsky)
62. The Fountainhead (Ayn Rand)
63. War and Peace (Tolstoy)
64. Interview With The Vampire (Anne Rice)

65. Fifth Business (Robertson Davis)
66. One Hundred Years Of Solitude (Gabriel Garcia Marquez)
67. The Sisterhood of the Travelling Pants (Ann Brashares) - and all 3 sequels, of course
68. Catch-22 (Joseph Heller)
69. Les Miserables (Hugo)

70. The Little Prince (Antoine de Saint-Exupery)
71. Bridget Jones' Diary (Fielding)
72. Love in the Time of Cholera (Marquez)
73. Shogun (James Clavell)
74. The English Patient (Michael Ondaatje)
75. The Secret Garden (Frances Hodgson Burnett)
76. The Summer Tree (Guy Gavriel Kay)
77. A Tree Grows in Brooklyn (Betty Smith)
78. The World According To Garp (John Irving)
79. The Diviners (Margaret Laurence)
80. Charlotte's Web (E.B. White)
81. Not Wanted On The Voyage (Timothy Findley)
82. Of Mice And Men (Steinbeck) - teaching it as I write...
83. Rebecca (Daphne DuMaurier)
84. Wizard's First Rule (Terry Goodkind)
85. Emma (Jane Austen)
86. Watership Down(Richard Adams)
87. Brave New World (Aldous Huxley)

88. The Stone Diaries (Carol Shields)
89. Blindness (Jose Saramago)
90. Kane and Abel (Jeffrey Archer)
91. In The Skin Of A Lion (Ondaatje)
92. Lord of the Flies (Golding)
93. The Good Earth(Pearl S. Buck)
94. The Secret Life of Bees (Sue Monk Kidd)
95. The Bourne Identity (Robert Ludlum)
96. The Outsiders (S.E. Hinton)
97. White Oleander (Janet Fitch)
98. A Woman of Substance (Barbara Taylor Bradford)
99. The Celestine Prophecy (James Redfield)
100. Ulysses (James Joyce) - one of the most painful experiences ever
101. Jurassic Park
102. Learn Me Good

-------

103. Diary of a Young Girl (Anne Frank)

104. On the Road (Jack Kerouac)

105. Travels with Charley (John Steinbeck)

106. Lucky (Alice Sebold)

35 (+ the 4 I added) read (several - like all the Harry Potter ones - multiple times), 22 on my ever-expading list of books I want to read (including about 10 that I've seen the film versions of)

Expect another book meme, started over at Huff English for teacher books soon.

Immortalized as the Wicked Witch of the West

My students crack me up. Seriously. Sure, they also exasperate and annoy and frighten me with their ludicrous behavior and even more ridiculous excuses for their behavior, but some days, they just crack me up. It's part of what keeps me coming back for more (abuse).
A couple of weeks ago, I assigned a creative writing assignment in my mid-level class as the culmination to our first unit - short stories and the elements of fiction. There were few parameters because the objective was for them to demonstrate that they knew what technical (structural?) components made a story a story. I gave them a pretty straightforward, but detailed rubric, gave them time to pre-write and draft in class, and then sent them on their merry ways for the long weekend. Once I'd collected them, I didn't get to reading and grading them for almost a week, and I was in for quite a surprise when I did. One of my students took my advice to "just take an ordinary incident you experienced and stretch the truth of it" quite literally and wrote a story about being assigned an open-ended writing assignment such as this one by a very intimidating teacher. I meant to copy the story, so I could post it along with this, anonymously of course, but our department's copier was on the fritz the day I was going to return the stories to my kids, and I just forgot to hold on to his story. Hopefully, he didn't toss it and I can get it from him to copy next week.

Vocabulary Wisdom

Another post about the new job is in the works, but I couldn't pass up posting some English teacher wisdom, in the fine words of my favorite "philosophers:"


Thanks goes to the reflective teacher for leading me to this awesome searchable database of Calvin & Hobbes comic strips.

Snow Days, Long Weekends and maybe finally getting caught up

I've had another week of adventures and realizations. The learning curve on this job is long (arguably, never-ending), and I've got miles and miles left to go. Here are a few of the lessons I learned this week:

1. Snow days are a gift from some higher power. It's awesome to suddenly find that I have an unexpected solid day to do work sans interruptions, distractions and commute time.
2. Still on the subject of getting a break mid-week: My friends at Eagle Rock are definitely on to something with their Wednesday schedule of school activities but not actual classes. Coming from a college environment where students have few, if any, classes on Fridays, and having been part of the alternative Wednesdays at ERS, and experiencing now, first hand as a teacher, how much more manageable 4 days in the classroom are, I would definitely argue for some kind of new schedule, especially when it is planned (as opposed to losing a day of instructional time you were counting on).. Five days in a row spent in the classroom, week after week, do not work well for students OR teachers.
   

One Week Down....

Well, I know I disappeared for a bit, but there was nothing to write about until I actually started the new gig on Februray 1st, and then of course getting settled in and caught up took over my life. After a full week of classes, things seem to be going smoothly, and I am thoroughly exhausted again. So far having my own classes has not felt that much different from student-teaching, especially since I have a co-teacher in the two core (or basic skills) sections. It is an interesting change to have legitimacy as a staff member; there are so many minute administrative details I have to worry about now, but there are perks too - access to computers and student information, the ability to get my hands on supplies and materials, and hopefully as of tomorrow, my own keys to the classrooms where I teach. Part of me is really peeved that my supervisor didn't have the foresight to put in a request for keys when I first accepted the job, rather than waiting until I was actually in the building, but he's been so apologetic about it and helpful about other things that I cannot stay mad. Besides, even the promise of keys is a big step up from having to wait for permission to go to the restroom because the classroom could not be left unattended and unlocked.
This school is very different from what I had become accustomed to - it is bigger than TCHS and the main building is at least as old, but everything is infinitely more well-kept. The culture feels vastly different too; there is positive energy from students and staff, and even the apathy feels good-natured. My students are a very mixed bag, but I do not forsee any trouble to the scale I had with second block during student teaching, even from the biggest wise guys. With less than a handful of exceptions, they are doing their work without putting up much of a fight, and many of the weak students strike me as hardworkers despite their limitations. I am undergoing baptism by fire when it comes to working with "classified" students and their accomodations, but it has not gotten too bad yet.
Right now I am teaching a unit on short stories that I wish I had had more time to put together (I could have found much better readings to use!), the highlight of which has been watching my students "map" children's books like Where the Wild Things Are, The Giving Tree and To Think that I Saw It on Mulberry Street. I am looking forward to planning for Romeo and Juliet, Steinbeck's Of Mice and Men, and Cisneros's House on Mango Street soon.
I need to rest up for the week ahead - more classroom adventures to come soon.

Changes are brewing...

Yesterday afternoon, around 3:15pm, I accepted a job offer - as of February 1st I will be teaching 3 blocks of Freshman English at a mid-size suburban high school (and spending substantial amounts of time in my car). I have a real teaching job.... and I was still being considered for another. Safe to say, it was a very surreal day for me. I am exhilarated and terrified, simultaneously, and cannot stop wondering, "Who the heck decided I was qualified to lead an actual grown-up life?" I need to write emails to various family members, former employers/supervisors and academic advisors to let them know, but I hardly know where to begin - I always find it ironic that I am an English major and a writer, yet words elude me quite often. Now there is paperwork to take care of, planning to think about, and I have to start thinking about where I will live (or who I will live with) after February. Just for this weekend though I wish I could simply relish knowing I have some stability for the next five and a half months and enjoy being temporarily free of any substantial workload.

Enjoy your weekends. Over and out.

P.S. I also saw Freedom Writers last night. I fully intend to post about it later this weekend, this just isn't the moment for it.

It's a daunting world

The holidays went by too quickly, if you ask me, and now I've been thrust right back into the fray. Already I miss the crazy cousin camraderie, too much "primetime in the daytime on TNT" with my mom and my sister, and my aging "satos" trying to share my easy chair and my snacks.
Now I'm on the job hunt while still finishing up the final requirements for my certification. Interviews are less intimidating than I expected, and so far things are boding well. The thought of actually getting offered and doing any of these jobs, that part is definitely still very intimidating. My professional portfolio and defense are scoring quite high on the intimidation scale too - I'm down to the wire on this one. The online software my teacher preparation program uses to handle all our portfolios is almost as unwieldy as the enormous binders of photocopied "artifacts" it is replacing. It has so many little quirks and glitches that I feel like assembling my portfolio is taking up a much time as it took to create many of these projects! But everything is in motion so that I'll be done with all of it soon: my meeting with my advisor went well, I know exactly what I still need to take care of and my defense has a date and time. Wonderful! Now I can proceed to be terrified because I finally have to enter the mysterious world of grown-ups with real jobs, health insurance and full-price movie tickets (yikes!). I don't feel like a grown-up - I feel like an impostor who has simply been very successful in infiltrating their ranks.
Well, it's time to continue working on my professional portfolio - more reflection about "Standards" and such - so I'm over and out.