Letter to Myself

Dear Scott,

Here is the deal, you are about to learn a lot over the next few months. The first thing you should know is that you are not nearly as prepared for all of this as you might think that you are. I strongly suggest that you take a good amount of time to really sit down with the books that you will be teaching and delve into them thoroughly. This isn’t to say that I didn’t read them or anything, but genuinely look at the stories and really develop where you want you units to go as you read.

Next, develop your lesson calendar as completely as possible as early as possible. I did so for our freshman and it made the semester go by much more smoothly, even though some things changed as the semester went forward (know that this is going to happen frequently and that it is ok when it does). For the seniors, however, I kind of developed the lesson a bit more on the fly. While this has worked out just fine, it has resulted in some very stressful evenings.

Another warning that I have for you is that your students are not going to ask you what homework they are missing or what their grades are until you near the end of the semester. This is crunch time for them and they’re ready to see what all they need to do to pass your class. Don’t wait for them to begin asking. Stay on top of your grading as best as possible and hand out progress reports whenever you get the chance to do so. I have been doing this more and more lately and it seems like most of my students are starting to be more cognizant of where they stand and are starting to buckle down and get a lot accomplished. While this is great, just make sure to do it all semester, as opposed to the last half of the semester. With that, make sure that when you do hand out progress reports, you are ready for the onslaught of students coming at you for make up assignments. Have handouts printed out and ready to go on these days (this has been my biggest problem all semester, don’t let it be yours).

Lastly, and related back to some of the first advice that I gave to you in this letter. Make sure that you have a point for each of the lessons that you teach. Allow your lessons to come together in a culminating activity, project, essay, test, whatever you decide for it to be, that genuinely makes sense when related back to the topics that you have discussed. These discussions that you do with your students are going to go great, but allow them to mean something for them. Allow those great discussions to be more than filler. There is a lot of great stuff there, I’m fairly pleased with where it is ending up right now, but let it happen for you.

Scott, just make sure that you enjoy yourself and are relaxed as possible out there. You are going to get along just fine with most of your students and, if you treat them with the respect that they deserve, they are going to love you. Don’t let that opportunity pass you by, as the more they like you, the harder they are going to work for you. Let it happen.

Sincerely,

Scott

A Classroom to Myself

Over the course of this semester, one of the things that I have found most interesting is how much the dynamics of the classroom change whenever my CT leaves the room. Now, I want to preface where I am going with this by saying that I respect my CT very much and I am incredibly grateful for everything that she has done for me over the course of this semester. That being said, I absolutely love the days that she has to be away or step out of the room for one thing or another. It is amazing the amount more relaxed I become when I have the classroom all to myself. I feel like I become less self-conscious of what I am doing, and become more conscious of what the class is doing. This week was one of those weeks.

Due to her involvement in AVID, my CT frequently has to take a day or two every now and again to travel for meetings around the country. This past week she was away for two days: Wednesday and Thursday. The first day I spent with my seniors and the second was spent with the freshman. With my seniors, we are reading One Flew Over the Cuckoo’s Nest.  The instruction format that I have taken on for most of my lessons with this book has been very much like that of a college classroom: a bit of reading, a bit of writing and a lot of discussing. This day was largely discussion based. With my CT out of the room, I felt as though this discussion came along incredibly naturally. I wasn’t focusing so hard on what types of questions I needed to ask, I simply asked questions and really spent the hour talking to my students about the book. It was great! They were incredibly responsive, had done their reading and we were able to have a genuine, relaxed discussion about the book.

The next day was spent with the freshman that I have been working with. Now, this is the class that I have been with since pre-student teaching, so we are already fairly comfortable around each other whether my CT is in the room or not, but this day was especially relaxed. The students have started working on their last project for the book that we are reading, so most of the class was spent answering questions about what was expected of them. They are going to be making a soundtrack for the book (I will post the outline and project on the wiki later this week so you all can see more clearly what we are doing), and one of the students had a question regarding an extra credit portion I put on there for creativity. Somehow we got on the topic of something Taylor Swift does in her album and I jokingly professed my love for her body of work. All of the students thought I was dead serious and when I broke it to them that I was not, one of the students lost it so much that she was crying. Possibly my biggest accomplishment of the semester.

Again, this is not a knock on my CT. Being able to receive her feedback on my lessons is incredibly beneficial. Sometimes, though, it’s nice just to have the classroom to myself.

Nearing the End

I'm going to do my best to balance my level of gratitude and frustration in this post. As we begin to approach the end of the year, there has been a shift in the classroom that, for some reason, I had not done a great job of anticipating. The light switch seemed to go off in a sense. We are all getting tired and can all see summer just around the corner. Driving home instruction, especially for seniors who are ready to move forward with the rest of their lives, can be like pulling teeth on some days. I don’t know why I didn’t anticipate it because I have certainly been in the same position almost every year for the last seventeen years of my life.

We all feel this way at one point or another, no matter how much we may have enjoyed the school year as a whole. What is more, is that we are also, technically speaking, seniors ourselves. We want to get through this semester so that we can start with the next chapter of our lives just as much as these students do. Plans are beginning to fall into place for man and we are starting to have some sort of idea of what we will be doing just a few short months from now. It is exciting, but it is also difficult not to let it distract us from where we are right now.

All of this being said, I am incredibly appreciative of those students who do continue to show up to class and who do continue to put in a ton of hard work. They are the ones who continue keeping me in check and realize that I still have a lot to work for this year. It’s not over yet. We may be a month out, but they understand that we still have a lot of work to put in. It is exciting to see those students who have struggled throughout most of the year find a sense of urgency to get caught up with their work and stay focused in class.

On a somewhat related note, I had the honor of writing my first letter of recommendation for one of my students this past week. She needed somebody who was not technically one of her teachers and could function as a reference from an outside community member. And she chose me to write it for her. Now it would have been nice if I had more than two days notice, but I’m not going to complain too much about that. It was a real honor to be able to recommend a student for a scholarship, especially one who is as deserving as she is.

I suppose the point of this blog post is to just let you all know that if you’re feeling the end of the year weighing upon you, you aren’t alone. But we need to get through it on a strong note. The stronger we are getting through the year, the stronger our students are going to be as well. 

Conferences

This past week I had the opportunity to sit in on parent teacher conferences for a night. My CT and I discussed everything beforehand and determined that while she would handle everything with the parents of our seniors, she would get the ball rolling and then have me talk to the parents of our freshman. Everything was going pretty smoothly throughout the majority of the evening. Most of the parents were understanding and were willing to help if there was a certain area that their child was struggling, and the others were just happy to hear that their children were doing well in our class.

At around 6:50, the staff made an announcement that conferences would be ending and that all of the parents who had not yet visited with the teachers were more than welcome to come back the next day. I began packing up and preparing to head home, as a few students with their parents came in to chat with my CT (informally, not as a conference). As I finished loading up my laptop and other items that I had been working on, one of my students and her mother came in. “No big deal,” I thought to myself, “I’m really not in any rush this evening.”

I introduced myself to my students mother and the first thing she asked was, “What is the point of this book my child is reading?” Well there was something I was not expecting to end the evening with. Our students are reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, a book that, while culturally enlightening in a lot of ways, does have a lot of 15 year old male vulgarity within. I began explaining to my student’s mother just that-focusing more on the cultural enlightenment, not on the vulgarity of course. Fortunately for me, my CT and I had sent a permission slip home along with the book prior to our students’ beginning it, so we were able to use that as reinforcement. My CT came over after about a minute or two of my explaining and helped back up everything that I had said up to that point. We offered an alternative book choice in case it was a big enough issue for her daughter to continue reading the book. By this point the mother conceded and sighed that, “Well, at this point I suppose the damage has been done. Since she is so far in, I’ll let her go ahead and finish the book.”

The point that really stuck with me during all of this was something that my CT said. While the book is a little bit rough around the edges, and a lot of people might take offence to some of the content, it is important not to only challenge the students, but to challenge the teachers as well. If the teachers are not able to defend the content that they are teaching, then there is really no point in them teaching it in the first place. To this, I was happy to hear my student’s mother say, “That’s fair, and he was able to defend it well.” 

Conferences

This past week I had the opportunity to sit in on parent teacher conferences for a night. My CT and I discussed everything beforehand and determined that while she would handle everything with the parents of our seniors, she would get the ball rolling and then have me talk to the parents of our freshman. Everything was going pretty smoothly throughout the majority of the evening. Most of the parents were understanding and were willing to help if there was a certain area that their child was struggling, and the others were just happy to hear that their children were doing well in our class.

At around 6:50, the staff made an announcement that conferences would be ending and that all of the parents who had not yet visited with the teachers were more than welcome to come back the next day. I began packing up and preparing to head home, as a few students with their parents came in to chat with my CT (informally, not as a conference). As I finished loading up my laptop and other items that I had been working on, one of my students and her mother came in. “No big deal,” I thought to myself, “I’m really not in any rush this evening.”

I introduced myself to my students mother and the first thing she asked was, “What is the point of this book my child is reading?” Well there was something I was not expecting to end the evening with. Our students are reading The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, a book that, while culturally enlightening in a lot of ways, does have a lot of 15 year old male vulgarity within. I began explaining to my student’s mother just that-focusing more on the cultural enlightenment, not on the vulgarity of course. Fortunately for me, my CT and I had sent a permission slip home along with the book prior to our students’ beginning it, so we were able to use that as reinforcement. My CT came over after about a minute or two of my explaining and helped back up everything that I had said up to that point. We offered an alternative book choice in case it was a big enough issue for her daughter to continue reading the book. By this point the mother conceded and sighed that, “Well, at this point I suppose the damage has been done. Since she is so far in, I’ll let her go ahead and finish the book.”

The point that really stuck with me during all of this was something that my CT said. While the book is a little bit rough around the edges, and a lot of people might take offence to some of the content, it is important not to only challenge the students, but to challenge the teachers as well. If the teachers are not able to defend the content that they are teaching, then there is really no point in them teaching it in the first place. To this, I was happy to hear my student’s mother say, “That’s fair, and he was able to defend it well.” 

The Grind and Other Bad Metaphors

It appears we have reached the point of the semester where everything seems to be coming at you at 100mph, yet the weeks go by just slow enough to give you pause and see the work piling up before you. I knew going into this semester that it was going to a little change of pace from what I was used to during the school year. Obviously this is in large part because I am now on the other side of the podium. As students, we became used to having seemingly every test from every class converge upon us at once, whilst two or three papers were sprinkled on top. This often made for at least seven big, grade deciding, projects to deal with over the course of the week. As teachers, we are now reaching the point of the year where we begin to experience the other side of the coin. While we may have only one subject with two or three grade levels a piece, each of those classes are sending numerous assignments, large or small, our way to be graded. We are at the point where lesson plans need to be adjusted in order to accommodate unexpected changes in our schedule. With each of those schedule changes, we may have to rush to create new lesson templates for our students to use the next day. In short, we are reaching the time period right before spring break.

The semester is reaching the mid-point, the peak before the downhill slide into summer. We are at the point where we can all but see over the peak of the mountain and look onto the valley below. We are at the point where repetitive sentences and cheesy metaphors make a blog post feel way more emphatic than it should. But as those papers pile before us, as those last minute rushes to change a our schedules occur, there is still the understanding that in two weeks we can take a breather. With a little bit of work, not only can we all at least come close to getting caught up in the classroom, but we can get caught up with our own personal studies as well.

See that’s the trick for us right now. Teachers and students, they are two sides of the same coin—and as student teachers our coins are two faced. We inhabit both sides and are currently fighting through the semester as both students and as teachers. And wouldn’t you know it, both our student obligations and our teaching obligations are coming to a head at the same exact time. Funny how that works. The hope, however, is still there. If nothing else, we can champion the fact that we have to work twice as hard, and then with a little luck, breathe twice as easily once spring break rolls around. I know that these next two weeks have the potential to be hell, getting myself caught up on grading and lesson planning. But this isn’t anything new. You and I will get through it like we have every March, with the knowledge and reassurance that after Spring Break, we’re practically there. 

Preliminary Spring Break

Nothing like having a little spring break before spring break rolls around, isn't there? Really though, it was interesting to observe some of the reactions by both the teachers and the students last Wednesday as the snow was coming down. Obviously the students were excited, as the snow was accumulating quite rapidly. What was really amusing was how antsy all of the teachers appeared to be. At one point during an advocacy period, some of the students poked their heads outside to catch a glimpse of the snow as it fell. While my CT commented, “You act like you all haven’t seen snow before,” you could tell that there was some level of anticipation in her tone as well. I don’t know how many phone calls she received, or how many other teachers came by to see what her thoughts were on whether we would be getting the next day off. It was like they were all a bunch of high school students waiting for a snow day or something (though I can’t say inside I felt any differently). As we all know, the final product was one of the biggest snow storms that we have seen in years, with yet another one on the way. No big complaints on my end, however, there are some complications that come with it.

The trick now is what this will do to the lesson plans. Due to homecoming and parent teacher conferences, my lesson plans already had to be adjusted somewhat. With the KPTP deadline, I think many of us feel at least something of a crunch in getting all of our main lessons and evaluations in accordingly so that we can either be good to go before spring break, or complete the last minute details over the course of the break. However, with this preliminary spring break it only seems to add to the crunch. I know that I will now have to swap, tweak and perhaps even remove some of the lessons that I had planned in order to not only keep my KPTP schedule on line, but to not get too far off for my CT’s final unit beginning a little ways through April.  On the bright side, looking at some of these lessons, I have found that many of them will work just fine being condensed into one another. The book that my freshmen are reading, The Absolutely True Diary of a Part Time Indian, has been well accepted by my students thus far. This should make assigning some outside reading a little easier than it would be for, say Romeo and Juliet. I wasn’t slated to start my senior’s unit until this Tuesday, so that should, fortunately, not have to be adjusted by more than a day depending on what this next storm brings.

But back to the main point: It really is quite humorous to see just how little things change from high school to the professional level. The amount of rejoicing by not only teachers, but other professionals that I have seen on Facebook and the like has been nothing short of amusing. Not that there is anything wrong with that, I can’t say I was complaining too much. Stay safe in Round 2 everybody!