Montana, we have a reputation

An actual conversation I had at the beginning of class today with a very short 13 year old boy.  He called me over to his desk as the class was getting daily writing journals out for our daily 5 minutes of writing:

A: Mrs S, you're from Montana!  You'll like this.  Guess what I did this weekend.

Me: Um, you went to a movie.

A: No, I killed three turkeys with one shot!

Me: Really.  How'd you manage that?

A: Well, there was this big group of turkeys all mixed up, and I shot, and the bullet went through the neck of one turkey (insert hand gestures to clarify how a bullet might go through a turkey neck) and then went through the head of the turkey behind it, and then the bullet went into the upper chest body area of the turkey behind that.  [At this point A. is gasping and grinning from not having breathed in over a minute, having madly gesticulated all the while.]

Me: Huh.  [Blink].  Maybe you should write about that in your journal today.

A: Already on it, Miss!

I had to fight hard to not first laugh out loud, then ask him where one might find turkeys all the way down here in New Zealand outside of a poultry farm.  In the end I just had to smile.  Not only was he finally quiet and writing, which isn't an easy feat for this kid, but his eyes were shining the same way my nephews' eyes shine when they share an adventure with me.  

Good stuff.  Not a bad way to start the week, even if it did mean the deaths of three turkeys.

The Wall Cometh

My last post outlined the things that bothered me last year but seem to be of little consequence to me this year.  One month on, are those opinions still solid or have they changed?

For the most part they're still holding true.  I'm not getting as frustrated with kids when they don't seem to absorb things as well as I think they should.  My school is fairly disciplined and it used to bother me when some kids weren't as self controlled as others; this year I'm rolling with things more easily and deal with the independent young people differently.  This is largely in part to the demographic I'm teaching this year.  A lot of my classes are made up of well meaning and very nice, yet loud and disorganised, youth.  Even though they want to do well, they don't always show it, and so gently reminding them to 'get back on the thought train' gets a laugh and about 8 more minutes of concentration before the next derailment.  

As one of my favourite authors so eloquently put it, so it goes.

And that wall of homework that I predicted would show up around week 5 or 6 is here, and indeed it came in structural-mass form.  One large pile from one class, another large pile from another, and Friday bore a pile of common tests from two of my senior classes.

I work in a shared office and sit in one corner of the long desk that wraps around the room:  my 'to mark' pile sits on the border between my work space and the next persons and currently looks an awful lot like a wall.  

But I've placed my pile there for a reason.  The co-worker who sits next to me is eerily fast about grading student work and getting it back to the kids.  I'm talking Jedi fast.  She claims that she can do this because she is a neat freak: she can't stand having clutter on her desk.  I think she's just good at what she does and have told her as much.  So I place my not-yet-but-almost-towering pile near her tidy, clean desk as a way to shame myself into getting things done more quickly.

Just another trick I've learned to help me get around the feast or famine grading cycle that seems to plague our department.  Is my trick working?  Somewhat.  I've adjusted my grading process to tackle small chunks of the pile every day.  I stay at work until I've done as much as my brain can handle, typically until around 5:30, and then I say enough is enough and bike home.  My desk isn't as clean as my co-workers when applying this method, but it's an improvement over last year.  I'm not taking papers home to grade (or have them stare at me from my bag when I'm not grading them), and I'm not worrying about paperwork when I'm at home.  After all, I'm working on other equally important things there as well.

I'm allowing one exception per week to account for busy days and personal appointments that need to happen between 3:30 and 5.  Today, for example, I needed to leave a bit early to swing by the bike shop and get my bike tuned up.  This was supposed to shave an hour out of my afternoon, so I brought home an hour's worth of papers to grade.  Easy stuff, fill in the blank sort of work.

We teachers need to be flexible with our time, routines and habits; it's the nature of what we do.  But seeing as time is finite, at least as we deal with it on our human scale, if we take time to do one thing, that time has to come from somewhere.  Gauging how to balance the needs of work and personal space isn't always easy, though.  I guess that's the educator's white whale: balance. 

Week 1, Year 3

We just had the first full week of school for the 2009 school year, and I'm beginning my third year of teaching here.  I'm trying to look forward as much as I look back these days, breaking the habit I was taught in college.  In my first year I was always reflecting back on the efficacy of individual lessons or units or conversations, making mental notes for how to change those individual situations in the future.  In my second year, I was looking back to my first year for lessons on how to make the current year more effective.  That period of time when "it gets easier" remained nebulous and, to be honest, I didn't have much time to think about what it would look like when it came around.

Well, it's here.  These first days were busy, productive, enjoyable, exhausting, and noticeably less nerve wracking.  The night before I met my classes I slept the sleep of the dead, and woke up to a cup of coffee and the paper the next morning.  No thoughts about potential problem students, no fears about making the same mistakes as last year, no butterflies in the stomach, and certainly no rush to get to school for that extra 20 minutes of prep time in the morning.  I simply enjoyed a cuppa joe, looked at the clock, got dressed, and hopped on the bus.

That being said, I know that the easy-breezy feel of today will turn into a tropical storm tomorrow.  But I can actually say that now because I know where the busy times of the year happen around here.  I predict that I will hit the first wall of homework grading in about 4 school days, which will be followed in about three weeks by the first round of essays from my older students.  

For all of the little snaggles that happen in the teaching profession, at least I can say that I'm keeping my eye open for when they happen instead of looking back to how to avoid them completely.  There are thing I can't control, such as the sinking feeling you get when you have that first pile of grading after summer break.  It's the same for everyone who has ever had to go back to work after vacation.  One thing I've learned is that the snaggles for educators come in waves, and they boil down to one problem that is out of my control for the most part here: time.  

My current department assigns each course to one or two teachers, who plan out the major units and objectives for the course and then pass that schedule on to the classroom teachers.  I have been told that the first two weeks of classes should encompass getting-to-know-you style activities that also introduce reading comprehension skills and introduce basic language study and analysis vocabulary.  Then I have to start either a short text unit unit or an extended text unit, depending on the course.  I've been given freedom to choose my texts and method for teaching them, but I still have to limit myself at this point to poetry, short stories, and novels.  No film, media, creative writing or anything else.  Reading comprehension should be woven in because there will be a common test for all classes in week 6.

Here lies the snaggle.  Looking at all 5 of my classes, this first unit will end for all of my classes within a few weeks of one another.  Ending a unit means summative assessment to see what the kids have learned.  Since our department's focus is essay skills (the core of the standardized testing in New Zealand), that means 150 essays to grade within a few weeks time.  That's a big time sink, and since I don't get to design my own courses I can't stagger that work load.  Time, in this case, is not on my side.

My one bit of reflection that I'm allowing myself at this point is to notice large trends: what can I control and shape, and what can I not control.  I can control how I make the writing process easier and more skills-based for my students, teaching baby steps up to the complex writing they'll have to produce at end of year.  I can't control how many final drafts of essays pass across my desk at the end of these units.  I've decided this year to optimise my grading for first drafts of essays, grading only a few paragraphs and then passing them on to the students to finish grading.  This actually worked last year.  It saved me time, halved my grading load, actually, but it also modelled self-assessment skills for the kids.  They can see that I commented on their topic sentences in the first two paragraphs, so they can check their topic sentences for the rest of the essay.

Alas, I still have to use essays as my main form of summative assessment.  Since I can't control this, I'm not going to worry about it.  I'll try to write a little less on student work by making up a shorthand glossary for the kids to have in their notebooks, and using symbols instead of words to mark up their writing.  But I'm not going to loose sleep over taking that extra day to get work back to them.  There's only so many hours in the day, after all, and that's another thing I can't control.

Maybe the "it gets easier" lesson really boils down to self-determination.  Once you stay in a profession long enough you better get at understanding what your job actually entails.  In education, this doesn't always jive with the ideals built up in teacher training programs.  Last year this dissonance caused some headaches for me.  This year, I've had to compare the two (job requirements vs social expectation) and determine what goals I can practically achieve. 

A bike ride in Auckland...

Is like an intense game of frogger: it's ultimately fun but you really have to look out for cars.  This week alone (two days into it) I've had two close calls.  That being said last week was uneventful.  I think this means my riding has been raised to a new level, to continue with the video game analogy, but I could be wrong.  There just be more congestion due to all of those drivers back into the swing of things after the holiday break.  Who knows.  The only thing I do know is that it feels good to be able to stop at a red light right next to a car that passed me about a kilometre back, and to think that I didn't have to burn any gas while the other guy did.

We're experiencing a resurgence in bike ridership in our home lately.  With the longer hours of daylight and drier weather Peter's been biking in to work nearly daily and I've recently bought a bike to toodle around the neighbourhood on.  I have to say that it feels darn good to be back on the bike, now that the obligatory and awkward "getting to know you" phase is over.  Two years of relatively low physical activity and a shiny new case of asthma have left me a bit out of shape, you could say.  The rolling hills of Auckland didn't make the process easy but after a few weeks of short near-daily rides I'm doing better.  I can now make it 14 kms without stopping (I actually feel pretty good afterward) and I only need the inhaler sometimes after I ride now.  All in all Peter and I are feeling healthier these days thanks to this long-forgotten mode of transportation.

Our readers may recall previous posts in which Peter explained the perils of cycling in Auckland.  The roads are narrow; shoulders and bike lanes (where they exist) tend to be filled with gravel, broken bottles and the odd dead hedgehog; storm drains are not always designed well and grates can sometimes run parallel to the curb.  And always the aggressive traffic.  None of these things make cycling as a commuter mode of transportation an easy choice, and those around here who choose to take the plunge trend toward the hardcore.*  I'm trying my best to fit into this category, as I'm lucky enough to live along a commuter corridor that has bike paths for most of its length.  My employer also has showers and lockers in the women's bathroom, which means that I can have a quick rinse once I get to work.  Not everyone has access to this sort of thing here, so I should probably take advantage of it.

At its heart, this change is simply the latest step in our efforts to become a bit more earth friendly.  We never drove the car all that much to begin with, but I'd say that 95% of its use was for my daily commute.  At first I didn't feel bad because I could justify it: my weekly petrol bill was half the cost of bus fare for the equivalent distance, and driving cut my commute time in half.  What's not to love?  We'll, I hate sitting in traffic at the end of the day, getting wheezy 10 minutes into a friendly ultimate frisbee game at work, that extra roll on my stomach that now pops out when I sit down, and generally being a part of the twice-daily single occupant vehicle exodus.

So we're trimming back.  My goal is to be able to bike to work come the end of the month without being too red faced and sweaty.  Peter's biking to work daily, and we're cutting back on our meat consumption.  It's all a part of our attempt to keep healthy and cut down on our carbon footprint.

I'll be taking the camera along some of my rides later this week so you can see what we're up to in our daily routine.

*A special note for Moms Jan and Char: don't worry.  We wear helmets, ride only when it's safe and get off the bike or ride on the foot path when it's not.  You've taught us well.