Rose-Colored Glasses and Other Cliche Objects Through Which to View the Year

As I sit here in a fancy downtown coffee shop, drinking my pretty espresso drink (shout-out to my girl/fave barista Allison for free coffee--how else can I afford this costly musing?), it's easy to think back on the semester, and even on the year, with only tenderness for the sweet kids in the classes I've taught.  While this might be somewhat true (I could think of a couple of students that I would describe as "sweet"), that's really not what my experience has been.  And you know what?  I'm not looking for that.  If I was, I should probably teach rich four-year-olds in a Montessori school, and that's totally antithetical to my entire existence.

For example, my students have done/said the following:
-made a lot of fart noises when they realize that I'm taping them
-said, "Miss, I found a book about your anus" while holding a library book about Uranus
-said lots of other gross things when they thought I couldn't hear them/didn't think I would understand
-braided lots of hair instead of working on assignments
-not had anything to write with 60% of the time

While they can be endearing and frustrating at the same time, I've come to realize that my students from this semester are actually people who think deeply and have entire worlds inside of themselves.  I think that the danger of reading so many articles about education and being in classes about pedagogy rather than actually teaching can cause us to think of students as objects to be manipulated rather than real human beings who act of their own accord. This semester was definitely helpful for redressing those tendencies.  My last classes of teaching were centered on a poetry reading/celebration time, and I had some doubts about whether some students would actually turn in meaningful poems to share.  While there were a few who didn't turn in anything at all, I was pleasantly surprised by a few students--they created poems full of struggle, epiphany, and exploration.

Perhaps even more revealing of their peoplehood was when they read their poems out loud to the class.  I shared a poem that I had written in college to get them going, in case they felt embarrassed (I've realized that opening myself up to them is probably the best way to motivate them to do real work).  And they blew me away with what they were willing to share with the class, and how they were willing to support each other by listening.  My CT made copies of all of their original poems, printed them on cardstock, and gave each student a stack of their own poems to give out that day (Poem in Your Pocket day).  I returned home with two back pockets full of poems they wanted me to have, and I kept them in there the whole day.  (I'm pretty sure some fell out at Target later that afternoon--spreading the gift of poetry!)  I left that day with a bit of sadness but with a renewed sense of understanding and purpose in teaching.  This is what it's all for--giving people of all ages an opportunity to use their voices to come together to create meaning.  Oh, and to create fart noises.

Musings on middle school

Now that I've finished my third teaching video this semester, I actually think that I cringe a little less while looking at myself teaching.  It's not that I've fixed all of my weird tics and hand motions.  No, a lot of that seems almost out of my control.  I think I've just become more comfortable with who I am (on a computer level, anyway).  Unless I do heavy duty editing work, I'm going to say "cool" and "sooo" a lot.  I'm also going to have a double chin from certain angles.  No fixing that one.  But the part that I've actually enjoyed watching is my interactions with students, especially on a one-on-one basis.  It's hard to know whether or not you actually had a connection with a student when it's just one-sided.  But when you view those interactions and get to observe the student's body language as well, it affirms your sense of, "well, that didn't go so badly!"  And for me, that's a positive thing.

I'm teaching a few more times in the upcoming week, and then I'll be done for the semester.  I've really enjoyed getting to know the eighth graders because I really feel like they let me in on their lives a little more than my students last semester.  Also, they're at an interesting point in their lives: still in middle school, so they let their guards down every once in a while, but they're mature enough to understand important topics and the implications of some big ideas.  They will all gather around their teacher when she starts reading a picture book out loud in the library, and they'll write poems about struggling with sexuality.  It's been a really positive experience, and I hope that they don't lose their sense of wonder and community that they've built in middle school.  It'll be interesting how they'll react to more freedom.

I've also started my year-long plan this week, which was more complicated than I thought it'd be.  I mean, there's so many things that I want to accomplish in a year's time, but there's just so many interruptions and shorter weeks and grading periods that also have to be woven into your plans.  I could see myself taking several weeks to go ahead and plan a lot of this stuff before the year starts because there's so much to take care of, especially at the beginning of the year.  I was also thinking about all of the additional responsibilities that teachers naturally take on.  My CT is the head of her department, and she pretty much is in a meeting or has to lead a meeting every single morning.  Then, obviously, she has to follow up on those meetings and take care of whatever business is necessary.  With that duty on top of teaching, when do you ever have time??  She's played hooky a couple of times this semester, and I actually think that's refreshing--sometimes, you just have to take a day to yourself to unwind and take a few steps back.  I'm looking forward to that time...we do have a couple of weeks in May, right?  :)

Planning and Not Planning for a Year

When I taught freshman comp, there was not a whole lot to think about when it came to overarching planning.  I had to do units on specific material at a specific time in a specific order.  There was no deviating from the plans of the powers that be.  And really, that was okay with me.  It seemed difficult enough at times to make sure that I was filling all of the class time (and to be honest, I usually didn't--my students loved me).  But I think that I wasn't actually considering any larger goals for my classes.  My planning strategies made sure that students were following all the linear writing step processes (which I now know is not necessarily helpful) and got all the required papers done.  I'm not sure that I was actually encouraging higher level thinking beyond how to analyze an essay...I mean, WHY bother analyzing an essay in the first place?  They all had to complete a final exam, but it was kind of a blow-off assignment, and I'm pretty sure I communicated just that to my students.  Sigh.  Oh, misguided youth.

So, I really like a few of Smagorinsky's strategies for ending a year, especially the writing portfolio to reflect on growth in writing and the multimedia project to reflect on personal growth (and not the extended definition papers--geeze, he's really into those).  I think the choice of one over the other (portfolio versus project) would kind of depend on the your group of students for the year, and even the age group--I would probably assign the project for 9th and 10th graders, whereas I'd want older students to be more reflective about their writing pieces throughout the year.  We've had to utilize a process log when turning in texts for our Teaching Composition class, and I think it's been really helpful for me to look through my attempts, especially failures, to notice techniques and other strategies I used to help me through.  Mostly, I think it's necessary to do these end-of-year reflective pieces and projects.  If not, what has the whole year been for?  Just constantly producing without thought of the greater whole?

I also like Smagorinsky's suggestions for teachers to complete an end-of-year portfolio as well.  It makes sense for professional reasons, but it also seems helpful for planning out the next year, with what worked, what didn't, or patterns of problems or successes that you notice.  Perhaps even better is the fact that you're keeping all of your writing in a notebook and reflecting on that writing, so that you can model this behavior to your students.  Look!  This is a necessary thing in the real world!  My CT keeps all of her notebooks from various years, and she's really open with her students looking through them.  This past week, she showed them a notebook from a few years ago when she first visited Austin, a poem she found, and a poem she wrote modeled on that found piece.  She shared aspects of her life with them, what was important then, and compared it with her notebook from this year, which she said needed some more love.  The students all loved looking through her work (it's almost like getting to read through an adult's diary), and it inspired them to get re-engaged with their own notebooks.  And they made some really cool work that day, with found poetry and other creative work!

I guess I'm just learning more and more how important transparency is for students.  I'm not sure that I'd keep a notebook that's too personal, but I want to make sure that students see me writing for authentic  purposes and reflecting on what they're learning and how I'm teaching--I think this builds trust between us.  I also want them to know that they're coming to school and working to be involved in a reading and writing community not just to finish certain tasks or papers everyday.  They're building their knowledge constantly to reach a higher plane--knowledgeable, involved citizens in a democracy where they can make change.  And I want them to know that I care enough about them to think long and hard about the things I want them to do in class.

The Circle of ELA Life

Shapes and teaching: I've learned that the circle is tops in the field of education.  Seriously, there are so many circles involved in good pedagogy.  Lit circles, now culture circles; they're what makes the culturally relevant, student-centered world go 'round.  I think that Souto-Manning's explanation of culture circles seem to work perfectly with a workshop based classroom situation, and they are the best way of setting up a critical inquiry unit.  While all the steps sound fairly basic and approachable (generating themes, problem posing, dialogue, problem solving, and action), the one issue that struck me is how difficult this culture circle set-up would be in practice.  The student generates all of the discussion and content, but the teacher has to be constantly listening to pick up on themes of social issues that the students bring up naturally through conversation in order to guide her unit.  After that, she'd have to be the ULTIMATE discussion facilitator to ensure that discussions are productive and safe.  Even before she could become a facilitator to guide instead of direct conversation, she would have to teach students what good dialogue is and how to have those kinds of conversation (there's a great article by Robert Probst about teaching talking in the classroom that addresses this issue).  And while we would like to think that all of the students would want to take action on their own and figure out their own way of action, I think you'd have to provide some scaffolding there.  On top of all of this, the author mentions that the teacher would have to be constantly reflective and questioning of her own practices the whole time.  We definitely need to practice reflection throughout any kind of unit, but man, Souto-Manning kind of makes the concept seem completely exhausting.

Also, the example that Souto-Manning gives of her first graders utilizing culture circles is crazy.  I'm sure that some classrooms work like that, but I honestly think it would be hard to get the entire classroom involved in the same kinds of conversation, especially in high school.  That's probably the reason why Valerie Kinloch only focused on two students in her Harlem book instead of 20!

Still, knowing about culture circles, that there's a name and steps involved in this "literacy for social action" practice, is definitely helpful for thinking about framing a critical inquiry unit, even if I can't utilize all of the steps that Souto-Manning espouses in her version of culture circles.  Freire even says that we shouldn't just "import" pedagogical practices without re-writing and re-creating them for ourselves.  In other words, even when your teaching methods are grounded in best practices and culturally relevant material, you're still doing your students a disservice when you mindlessly copy someone else's methods.  I have to keep this in mind for myself sometimes.  When I observe a great teacher, I want to immediately copy everything I see her doing.  When I inevitably find that I can't do that (because I am a different person with different sensibilities), I consider my own efforts to be less successful.

I have to keep Freire's admonition in mind this upcoming month, when I'm on the docket to teach a lot more!  The test-prep unit is done, they're STAAR testing next week, and then it's on to the bigger and better world of real reading and writing.  AND April is National Poetry Month!  So we'll see what I can do with poetry and almost-done-with-middle-school eighth graders.  What a scary thought.

East Austin on My Mind

Man, oh man, I had lots of mulling to do after finishing Harlem on Our Minds.  I've actually been thinking about the issue of gentrification for a while now, especially since I've lived for the past two years in East Austin, a part of town that is becoming/is already a "hip" place to live in town.  It wasn't until maybe five years ago that this area began to really feel an influx of "white-ification," and my husband lived here before then.  He explains that it was an issue of cheaper rent for more space.  It's also a function of location in Austin--the east side is closer to downtown, without having to slog through all of the traffic on Mopac and I-35.  However, the demographics of the area are definitely changing these days.  Instead of being feared by White people (though some still ask me how scary my neighborhood is--the only terrifying thing is how early the roosters begin crowing), E. 6th is a mecca for all bars hipster.  Even farther east, where I live, there are more boutiques and trendy pubs opening every week.  Although they're all local businesses, instead of the chains mentioned in the book, they're definitely the kinds of shops that the lower middle class cannot afford.  I can't afford most of these places.  However, I would feel welcome in them, which is a function of race.

Kinloch is quick to provide evidence that White people feel that gentrification is more of an issue of class than of race.  While I feel more comfortable saying that it's only based on class, I'm sure that it is an issue of both class and race.  On my block, we are the only white people.  The rest of the houses contain Latino families, some of whom have been there for decades.  Although we rent, we are discussing buying a house in the near future, and we would like to be on the east side.  It's an area we know well, and there are many local artists and gallery spaces in this area of town that are important to us.  However, I am concerned about my role in white-ifying the community.  I think that, as Kinloch points out, involvement in the community is important so that I am preserving the neighborhoods rather than stripping them of their history and culture.  In addition, I do think that Austin tries to alleviate some gentrification issues.  For example, many neighborhoods on the east side have very strict zoning laws to prevent the construction of condos and corporate businesses.  In addition, there is a housing program available through the town for residents of Austin who have low incomes to be able to purchase a house.  In this way, the town is allowing people the opportunity to own rather than to have to deal with the financial strain of constant rent increases.  I mean, we've even had to deal with the rent increases; interestingly, we rent from a Latina woman who owns many properties throughout the east side.

I don't think there are simple solutions.  While I cannot change the white privilege that I enjoy, I can use my space constructively.  As a member of the community, I plan on being involved more in activities and the neighborhood planning boards (we're a part of the Govalle community).  As a teacher, I can utilize projects such as the activities that Kinloch discusses so that my students understand the history and the current state of the spaces they inhabit.  And when I do buy a house, I will make my decision responsibly and acknowledge the role that both race and class play within my community and the way that it functions within the larger scope of the city.

Even with all that said, I'm still mulling.  Kinloch's put East Austin on my mind.

A Measure of Success and Possible Failure

Although it was probably a crazy time for me to think that I should teach 8th graders, I created and taught a lesson the Thursday before Spring Break.  And surprisingly enough, it went well!  I'm sure it was partly because they got to leave the room and go to the library for part of the day, but I like to think I included a little pizzazz in there on my own.  I got to interrupt the "Test Prep" unit with a lesson about how real readers choose books--I decided to talk about getting recommendations, mostly from friends, but from teachers as well.  I think that it's important to emphasize that they're honing their reading and choosing skills not just for the classroom, but for all their years beyond school.  Real readers depend on their friends and colleagues, and even websites, to give them recommendations about what they should read.  I taught two classes, and I realized from the first class that it would be better to model the recommendation with a real person.  This seems like a "duh" thing, but sometimes I forget to use the resources that I have in the room.  If I'm asking them to do partner work, it makes much more sense for me to not play both partners.  It's even confusing to read that sentence.

Anyway, there was exciting chatter in the classroom about the books that they've already read and why they think their group members should check out a certain book.  I forget that whenever you decide that you like something, you feel like everyone else should like it too, so there's a built-in desire to tell people about what you like.  They brought post-it notes with three suggestions to the library, and they spent their time actually hunting down books to read.  I loved that even in the library, students were recommending certain titles with me (I had shared my recommendation of Matched, which is a book that they're familiar with).  And, as always, the library and the librarian are amazing, so it was a really fun class period.

Those are the lessons that seem full of life and fairly easy to plan.  It seems like that's in stark contrast to my whole class text unit plan, which was a little painful and really hard to work out.  I'm sure it's because I end up working on assignments where I feel like I'm inventing the wheel, but I ended up choosing a text that isn't commonly taught at this point.  Also, in working out my plan, I was not only creating assignments from scratch, I was attempting to find all these other examples of texts to include in the unit.  I'm a little worried that I tried to do too much in the unit, but I tried to keep in mind that I specifically planned it out for 11th graders, so I think they should be able to handle it.  (And that's another problem--I was making up an audience rather than thinking of one I'd been working with.  I just decided that I couldn't envision the current classroom I'm in doing a whole class text.)  In addition, I tried to work in a lot of group work so that they wouldn't feel overburdened individually, but we'll see.  I'm sure it's one of those things that I'd have to be in the thick of to decide what to weed out and what to keep.  Once again, I have discovered that lesson planning is really, very, extremely tough.

Real Writers

One major issue that I've run into this semester (and maybe this is an inevitable Spring semester issue) is TESTING.  All day, everyday.  During the course of my middle school observations, I haven't been able to observe on several occasions because the whole school is on lockdown for testing.  Now, I understand that we want our students to have all the tools necessary to be able to do well on these tests, since that's the way that their success is currently measured in our school system.  But it seems like we're mock testing and testing stuff that we don't even have time to teach!  And here's the latest, craziest "mock" test situation: the 8th graders were being tested this past week, taking up the three English class periods that weren't already taken by a different standardized test, on something that they aren't actually testing on this year.  Yes, that's right, they were practicing for a non-existant test (it was on writing a short story within that lovely 26-line block).  And to what end?  They had already completed a short story unit earlier in the year, and they needed to work on their non-fiction unit.  My CT also explained that she had built in a few weeks for test prep, but she probably wasn't even going to be able to have time for that.  Instead, pointless (to me) diagnostic testing takes precedence.  Sigh.

So, to transition to Christenbury, in a perfect world, we would all be reading lots of literature (read like "litrature") and chatting about Shakespeare all the time without having our weeks and units halted and interrupted by the call of the standardized test.  While she had some helpful suggestions about how to cover certain texts that may be tough to understand, I did have a problem with her overview of YA books as well as her assertion that you shouldn't teach a whole unit on poetry.  First of all, her characteristics of YA books seem a little reductive, especially "a stripped-down plot."  Also, the section about concern for the classics also seems too stuck in the canonical trap.  Who's to say that these "classics" are necessary?  And I do think that the poetry as a unit works as long as there's creative writing involved; I could see that lots of poetry gets overwhelming, but there seems to be a lot of components that you can talk about, even getting into issues brought up in hip-hop songs.  Christenbury's chapters on writing and revising are right on, though, especially with her emphasis on the recursive nature of writing (since that's what we've been focusing on in Teaching Composition).

I think that the main concept that stood out to me when reading Smagorinsky was that of choice--no matter what writing assignment you're giving to students, there is room for individual creativity, which is of utmost importance.  I've noticed my CT giving students a reflection at the end of the class, but she'll let them decide among three different types of reflection.  So, while there's still structure involved, it lets them think about what they want to pursue and even what their individual strengths are.  I also prefer genre-driven units when it comes to writing activities, because while it's important for the teacher to model certain lessons, it's also important that the students can immerse themselves in other examples of the genre.  The portfolio that's produced by the end of the year is a really great idea, though I think it'd be difficult to accomplish with younger students unless you were super organized (and caused the students to be super organized as well).

Both Christenbury and Smagorinsky emphasize the importance of having time for real writing--not just writing that can be accomplished according to a certain set of rules during a class period.  This real writing is tough--we're doing some of that right now in our Teaching Composition class, and it always surprises me by how much harder it is than I have anticipated.  We have a few weeks built in to do revisions, and while that isn't really feasible in a high school classroom, I'm understanding the importance of time with real writing.  Not that I have enough of it, but Spring Break is coming!