Joiedevivre Reader, Writer, Baker, Cleaner, Student…

I’m taking a break from teaching for a while, perhaps.  I’m more than likely going to transition out of teaching and become an instructional coordinator.  In the meantime, I might sub or do some other part-time teaching work.   There is so much more to education than teaching in a classroom.

Instead, I am rediscovering myself: reading, writing, cooking, baking, cleaning.  I am also going to become a grad student in January.  I think I will keep the blog going as a record of my thoughts on what I read for school and how that relates to education, unless I decide to go into a completely different direction.

I don’t know what the future holds, but I know what the past does.  The present is my mirror, my reflection, and it fades as quickly as it has come.

Individual vs. Classroom Community Building.

It has been two weeks.  I am the only person who is going to have all the freshmen all year long in the entire building.  There is a lot of training that is going to have to happen, and I know it is on my shoulders. I have now realized, with some help, that one of my weaknesses is relationship building with a class.  I am really good at individual relationship building, as that needs to happen. So, I am turning back to Jim Burke again.  My paragraph this week is to build our community classroom.

On Monday they will work on Life Graphs.  I have 90 minutes with them, so we will start the class with that.  It will give them an opportunity to cut, glue, draw, work with their hands.  That’ll be their homework.  Hopefully I will get some willies out, because we will take some notes on verbs.    I know that I need to talk about how this will work, what it looks like and what it does not look like.

Then they will share these on Tuesday. Again, we will talk about what that looks like and what it does not look like. We will tackle the first reading strategy after some sharing time.  If I need to split up some sharing time, I will.

Wednesday I will give them some more sharing time if we need it.  Otherwise, we will delve into the Weekly Poem. I think they will like that, because they do like poetry.  This is a chance to be more culturally relevant, by finding poetry that they might be familiar with, or themes that they can connect with.

Thursday I am going to have them work with a personal roundtable, where they identify those people how had the most influence on them. Again, this will give us an opportunity for all of us to get to know each other more. Then we will work on another nonfiction reading strategy.  The class is called Reading Strategies, after all.

Fridays, I think I need to turn into a word game day.  Might as well have a little fun at some point during the week.  A little competition won’t hurt anyone.  I think it also needs to be personal reading/ reading conference day.   That way, they can have time to read.

So my problem is classroom community.  I guess I was too business oriented without the points of fun that I should have had more toward the beginning of class.  I went through procedures, seating charts, two initial assessments, setting up an interactive student notebook, practice for the weekly paper, and what is grammar and what are nouns notes, plus the nouns worksheet. I am a bit frustrated by my pacing, as it is taking me way too long to do attendance.  I should know who the kids are, and I do, I just can’t figure out who is missing by looking at the room yet. Annoying.

Things that are going well?  I am became the Poetry Club mentor, which a FRESHWOMAN is starting at the school.  How awesome is that?!  Our first meeting is Tuesday after school.  I have been making parent phone calls about discipline, and I need to make more.  I have also been handing out detentions, but I don’t want it to be a classroom of fear.  Still, they need to be quiet as they will completely fail at life if they don’t pay attention.  I have also been working through discipline, talking to individual students about their behavior.  I just wish those talks would work better, but I am trying to put a lot on my end first before I start kicking them out of class.

I have been using PowerPoint to essentially detail all my lesson plans.  It keeps me on top of things, and I have started putting in a slide for compliments.  It’s a great reminder to do these things, and it keeps me my absent-minded butt consistent.  I also have been using a clicker, which I now declare to be the most amazing thing in the world!

To recap: this week’s goal is to learn more about them as they learn more about me and each other. We should wrap us the procedural items for the class as we get more into reading strategies. I am also going to increase my pace.  I realize I also need to not repeat things, and tell them that I am not going to.  It is on the board, and I am saying it.  It will also be online.  It’s their fault if they didn’t hear because they weren’t paying attention.  I also need to make positive and negative parent phone calls.  I am going to try and call every home this weekend.  We’ll see how that goes.

I am going to learn how to build classroom community, and I am going to get better at it.

Classroom Management:EEK!

Minor panic attack today as I realized I really need to start planning those first few days and weeks of school.  Last year, I went through procedures, but I think I was wordy, and I wasn’t as consistent as I should have been. Of course, it was difficult when I had to go from one room to the other, pretty much every class period.

I have a few posters I am going to make to keep as reminders in the room about bathroom, pencils, raising hands.  Still, I am going to make sure I have a very specific, written out script and plan for every day.  I have to. I am just one of those people where I need that rigidity.  Only when I have a specific game plan will I be able to be flexible.  I’ll do it, I know I will.  For now, I have a whole list of things I know I need to do:

1. Make a strict template of the daily schedule.  I am combining what I have learned from The English Teacher’s Companion, Reading, Writing, and Rising Up,  The First Days of School, and Teach Like a Champion in order to develop this schedule.
2. I have to write out a plan for the curriculum, which I am still researching.  I am a big picture person, and I still don’t know how I am going to navigate this voyage until I look at all the currents and how they flow.
3. Unit plan.  I really want to finish rereading Understanding By Design.  In college, we did a Jigsaw of the book.  Again, being a big picture person, I really didn’t understand it well, and I think part of it was using this strategy as it was not very helpful to me.
4. Dip into Teaching for Joy and Justice. I want my curriculum to address social justice issues, and I think Linda Christensen is a genius for just that.  I would like to design my units heavily on her ideas.
5. Develop standards into daily objectives that are measurable, and figure out what I am teaching each week, what my “paragraphs” are going to be as I tell this story of Freshmen English.
6. Develop this objectives into rubrics. (yes, I know, I will kill myself if I try to do this all by myself.  Thank goodness for the Internet!)
7. Write up my units in the templates I have for work.
8. Figure out what will be going with me to school and what won’t.  I have to move everything out at the end of the year.  I live in an apartment with a large storage space, which is where all my teacher stuff is now.  I am going to have to buy some shelving for that space so I can have a mini-office back there.
9. Enjoy my last bits of summer!  I have truly taken time for myself, and am so grateful for the opportunity to rejuvenate.
10. I think, once I get my plans laid out, I am going to post them here.  Some stuff I may keep up my sleeve, as I know the kiddos will be reading the blog!
11. Differentiation plan.  I attended a webinar by Robyn Jackson, and her suggestions for differentation are so simple, but I need to integrate that into my planning.
12. Self-assessment tests.  I have one that I am supposed to give at the beginning of each “semester” (really quarter) but it doesn’t tell me enough.  I am going to have to create some based on where their skills are at and the standards I am looking at. Heh.

Planning, Planning, Planning!

So I have been hired as a Grade 9 teacher here in Milwaukee!  I am really excited for this school, and the school culture.

I have been working steadily for weeks now, planning my curriculum.  I picked up my sturdy copy of The English Teacher’s Companion by Jim Burke, and lament that I did not read this thing cover to cover sooner. I have enough ideas to fill my classroom with lots of different ELA activities every day, all of them intertwined with each other.   I am glad that I have been taking the time to really plan out my curriculum last year.  I didn’t quite get the chance to, and that was regrettable; this has to happen before the school year starts or I might already be floundering.  Now, I have a good sense of where I am going to navigate our ship.

So what is our safe harbor?  Keeping Linda Christensen in mind, my units will thematically revolve around Social Justice and Culturally Relevant pedagogy. It has to. I have always wanted my students to be critical thinkers, and did some research.  What I found makes the most sense, and it will be the most difficult to pursue.

Essentially, according to the articles at Adolescent Literacy, adlit.org (a great website!) critical thinking cannot really be taught.  In order to think critically, one must have background knowledge and practice thinking.  My kiddos will be given lots of texts to read and analyze. One of the things I am going to implement is Burke’s Weekly Paper concept, otherwise known as Kelly Gallagher’s Article of the Week.  I am also going to do the Weekly Poem as well.  They need the work and the practice.

I used to hate research, but now I am really enjoying it!  The kicker is that I am researching topics that really interest me. Teaching–it’s an addiction of the worst kind.

Ref: “Skills and Other Dilemmas of a Progressive Black Educator”

Skills and process.  ” ‘…linguistic minorities starts with accepting their culture and language and helping them to build on it’ ” (Delpit 9).

“… [When she was in graduate school, she learned that] people acquire a new dialect most effectively through interaction with speakers of that dialect…when I was growing up…corrected every other word I uttered in their effort to coerce my Black English into sometimes hypercorrect Standard English forms acceptable to black nuns in Catholic schools” (11-12). 

“Yes, if minority people are to effect the change which will allow them to truly progress we must insist on ‘skills‘ within the context of critical and creative thinking” (19). 

“…time to reassess what we are doing in public schools and universities to include other voices, other experiences; time to seek the diversity in our educational movements that we talk about seeking in our classrooms” (20).

I am relearning about culturally relevant pedagogy in preparation for the school year.  When I was in college, we were brought up in educational theory to recognize that we were going to be warriors for the achievement gap.  We had Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom by Lisa Delpit as one of our required texts. I honestly didn’t connect her words until I actively started working in urban education here in Milwaukee.

I think that might have been one of the gaps in my own teacher education.  In Madison, there is poverty, and students of color, but since it is its own little island, in my opinion, it doesn’t see the severe poverty and its vast consequences as Milwaukee does.  I think our own education program emphasized process over skills (at least not our Methods prof; In the Middle all the way!).

So, I have a decision to make as a teacher.  What do I do that is best for the students?  Do I correct their oral language?  Maybe I need to find the right time.  Not while reading, as I know that is a death knell.  Maybe not during discussion when they are speaking to each other.  I don’t think that is a good idea either.

It’s funny.  I am a NWP Teacher Consultant through the UWMP, and I loved the experience.  In a way, I focused on skills, as in, teaching students how to self-revise.  No, it wasn’t grammar or usage, but it was about concretely writing and revising.

Still, I know that I need to combine both.  I am excited that I will have the opportunity to do so, and am glad that I have the time to reflect on my practices!  At the least, this is why I am so excited to build my PLN online.  We need to have multicultural voices in the landscape as well; otherwise, where will our students be if they are not represented. I also worry that not as many urban teachers engage in this dialogue, as we are the ones who need to be speaking out the most!

The Constant

If you are a fellow Lost fan, you might get the reference.  Otherwise, for those who aren’t, in my last post, I discussed the feeling of being neither here nor there, and explained that I had a constant, a point in my life that navigated me through these treacherous waters.

For me, that constancy was Catholicism.  When I was a child, I attended public schools K-8.  I had some friends, and it was a community school, but I always felt like an outsider, as if I didn’t 100% belong. It would be emphasized in small comments in regards to my appearance, because I didn’t look like everyone else.  Or people would comment that they couldn’t understand my mother because of her accent. 

I was then sent to a Catholic high school across town. I was super-mad at my dad, because I did not like change, and I didn’t want to have to make new friends once I got to school there.  Don’t get me wrong; there are still some effects of this decision.  For instance, there are only two people from high school that I have been in constant contact with, and one of them passed away last year unexpectedly.  I have one friend from elementary school who I have reconnected with, and that’s been great!  Still, my social circle around here is small, and I am using the skills that I developed in high school and college to make friends.  It is a lengthy process.

Even though I fought my parents for almost two years (8th and 9th grade) it really was one of the best decisions they could have made for me.  I was not challenged well in my public schools, and I think it was because they did not think I was capable.  I know I would not have been able to attend UW-Madison if I had not been challenged at the Catholic school.  I also know that being accepted for who I am was central to the school’s mission, and that helped me greatly.  My baby brother just graduated from the same school, and I spent some time talking to teachers who were there 11 years ago and still are today. I had found a community, and that meant so much to me, and it still does.  No matter where I go, I can find that community, and know that I have a place, a home.  

It was also this community that gave me my first taste of my vocation.  I never would have thought of being an educator if I had not attended this school.  I became enamored of the idea of peace and social justice, and made it my mission to help bring social justice in this world.  I truly believe that it is through education that we can most equitably bring social justice. 

So this is me, and I try to use these experiences to hold up the mirror to my students, and understand where they are coming from.  In doing that, I hope to help them change their world. 

Mixed/Mezcla

I am going to blog about some of my reflections of texts that I am reading, starting with Other People’s Children: Cultural Conflict in the Classroom by Lisa Delpit, but I want to ponder about my literacies, discourses, and cultures first.

I currently live in Milwaukee.  I came here because I was offered a job at an alternative school for students who are at-risk of not graduating from high school.  Sadly, it closed last year.

I grew up in a small town an hour and a half north of here.  My dad is an Irish/Slovakian white man, but he looks and acts more like a full-blooded Irishman.  He married my mom and brought her back to Wisco.  Because of his job placement, we ended up in this small town, but I know he would have not wanted to live in a city if his life depended on it.  In fact, he’s not too keen on me living here now.

Now retired, my dad worked as a prison guard for the state.  He came across this employment after being in the Peace Corps for four years; he had graduated from UW-Madison with a degree in Business Management. However, the recession in the 80′s forced him to find a job wherever he could, and he thought the Dept of Corrections would be a quick climb up to management.  Not quite, as we found out.

As mentioned previously, dad is a UW grad like me, but he is an incredibly smart man.  He, and many of his siblings, are likely MENSA candidates.  Though my brothers and I grew up working-class, it was fostered in an environment with parents who loved to read, and our dad pushed us on our schooling every day.

My mom has quite a different background.  She is from the Dominican Republic (where my dad was in the Peace Corps; oh yes, he met her there!) and struggled to finish high school.  Not because of her intelligence, but schools kept closing, and she had to hitch-hike every day just to get to one.  She has some post-secondary education, a secretary’s school of some sort, I think, and did some work at a tech school before they screwed her transcripts up. She, and my dad, are both fluent, in English and Spanish, written and spoken. In fact, mom and I were learning English at the same time! Sadly, I am not bilingual.

Why all this background? In this small town, I grew up in a very white area.  My mom and I, I like to joke, were the darkest people living there for a long time, as my brothers are on the lighter side of the skin spectrum.  Even though I am mixed, I think I grew up thinking that I was a darker white kid with a different family, some who lived in another country and I got to visit them there!  In fact, I was hurt and confused when some kids called me a n*****.  This was one of the first bubbles of consciousness that I didn’t quite “fit” fully in this world. Even my paternal family wasn’t like that, as many of my cousins are also mixed as well.

I understand the literacies and discourses of formal English, and the hegemony of the majority culture.  I can navigate pretty well, but, sometimes, not well enough.  There is a missing piece that I struggle with.

“One foot on sea/the other on shore…”

In college, I was lucky enough to earn a scholarship based on merit.  It is also part of the university’s recognition that admission and retention of students of color is low. It was there that I became more aware of myself as a woman of color, and that I embraced the fact that I am black, and the descendant of slaves.  I also welcomed the culture and history that came with it–music, laughter, stories, and language.  I am Latina, or, more to the point, BLatina.

So, when I came to Milwaukee, I thought, “This was my in!” Here are students who are in poverty ( I grew up pretty poor myself.) and who struggle with racism on a daily basis.  And with quite a few of the students, I did connect with them on this basis.    For some, I didn’t connect based on that. It seems like they think I am just a poseur who doesn’t know what it’s like to be “Black in America.” Do I?  Yes, and no.  There is a lot I do understand, and a lot that I do not. But my naivete has struggled to see what I see now.

There have been many cases where I have encountered personal racism.  I have also butted heads quite a few times with  institutional racism.  I have managed, in some ways to work around the latter, but not very successfully.  My students encounter it every day.  Worse, I need to examine my teaching and see how I have not given the students tools to understand and work around the institutional racism.

So here I stand, one foot in sea and the other on shore.  Because of the changing tides, I might have both in one, or both in the other, but that time is fleeting. I did, however, find a cultural tie to bring me to a place of constancy, which will be the subject of my next post.

A ship, if you will, to take me out to sea, and to bring me back to shore.