Never a Dull Moment

Well this was my Friday. Except that, really, it wasn't. We didn't find out about this until sixth period, though it does explain some of the more bizarre things I noticed during my day, such as all the gates being locked what seemed randomly in the middle of second period and a higher than normal percentage of district office people roaming about. I just figured it was so that they could see for themselves that our kiddos are packed into their classrooms like little sardines. But they were there I guess essentially as security. Hopefully they did a little noticing of the situation, though ...

It is a little troubling to consider that despite being more than adequately practiced at dealing with tragedy on our campus, to the point where we seem to be getting pretty good at it (and what an awful thing to be good at), I'm not entirely convinced we are practiced enough at a disaster -- of any kind. I think about the hurricane happening on the East Coast and the earthquake that just happened in Virginia and about a myriad of other weird and disastrous and dangerous things that have and could happen on a school campus and really have to wonder whether our students -- and our staff, too, I guess -- really know what to do in a true disaster situation. Sure we do drills and practice walking out to the football field, but that's a drill. Nerves aren't rattled, death isn't imminent. I mean, I guess maybe you can never be actually prepared for an earthquake or any otherwise unsafe situation, but I just can't shake the feeling like we just really wouldn't know what to do.

But to change the subject, because dwelling on what may or may not happen is depressing ... I got up early this morning and got cracking at my summer assignment grading. I should probably be doing that instead of blogging, but I'm going to try to make a concerted effort to blog much more frequently, especially this year. But I worked from 8:00 until about 9:45 (I had to be somewhere at 10) and graded about 25. In the old days, this would have meant I would be almost done - I mean, if I'd had 32 kids, I would have only had 7 left. As it stands now, that left me with 17 more, which is going to be about an hour more work. I did grade a handful a few hours ago, while watching Lifetime's Dance Moms marathon (more about that later, perhaps) but now I really should probably get back to them. I want them done for Monday and I still haven't done anything for lesson planning or grading for my sophomores yet. A lot of the problem with grading, I think, is psychological. Granted, I do have almost 40 more students total through my day that I did when I first started, so that is more than a sixth class worth of work to grade, but in the grand scheme of things, it's not *that* many more ... okay, maybe that's me being in denial. But anyway, it's just ... psychologically demoralizing to look at a pile that seems to never get any smaller. When I had classes of 36, you could do half -- 18 -- and feel good and take a break and come back later and do the other 18. Now half is nearly 25 and it's insanity. And I don't really want to even talk about the 120 Writing Diagnostics I have from my sophomores.... but at least those I don't really need to write feedback on.

So anyway. I should probably get about the business of grading. I'll digress into my analysis of Dance Moms later, but for as snarky as I've been in my head lately about this show's existence, I accidentally ended up watching it and minus a few of her quirks, the dance teacher/studio owner lady may be my new hero. A post for another day...

Onward. And tomorrow, I shall discuss gamification. And my attempt to gamify English. ... Heh.

A preview: the inspiration for my project.

Notes on the First Day of School

Wow am I tired. And wow do my feet hurt. And so does my throat. I always forget how much you're on your feet when you teach and how much talking you do the first day. But I lived. And it actually went really pretty quickly. But holy moly am I tired.

First period was just about as bad as I was picturing it being: I ran out of space for students to sit and my poor but good spirited TA ended up sitting on the picnic blanket on the floor (I told you I wasn't kidding). But I even had one student at my teacher desk and five students on chairs. They were pretty good-natured about it but it was overwhelming.

Then my third period sophomore class is at 44, and I attempted to have them get up and move around in a Four Corner Debate, which worked *mostly* but oh my god, it's like when you're trying to pack a suitcase: when you first pack it before you leave, you can get everything to fit with room to spare when you pack it neatly, with everything folded and rolled, but when you've used and worn things and decide to just throw everything back in the suitcase willy-nilly, NOTHING fits. It's like that with students in a classroom, too: sitting in their desks, 44 fit fine, but trying to stand in groups in the four corners of my classroom was like being in the mosh pit at a concert. I had to climb onto the top of a desk to get above the fray because otherwise I end up having a giant panic attack.

The rest of the day was pretty uneventful as things go: the kids are unsure about me, and I'm crazy, so they spend a lot of the period looking at me like I'm from outerspace, come to steal their binder paper, but I think I have a good group. Lots of girls in APEL and lots of boys in sophomore English. It's weird.

It's weird seeing so much of campus empty, though. There are empty classrooms gathering dust. One of the science teachers today, after school, was saying that there is an entire ROW of science classrooms empty, with equipment just moldering in it. And though our school population is smaller, it's not THAT much smaller. Classes are bigger and thus you need fewer teachers. Ideally, there would be teachers in those classrooms with classes of 28-30. And the staff is dinky now, too -- there used to be over 100 teachers, possibly closer to 120, and I think now we're down in the 70s or 80s (I could be COMPLETELY wrong about this, but for perspective: when I first started to work at my school, there were nearly 30 English teachers. We filled up the department chair's classroom. Now there are 12 of us. That's it. 12. With not really THAT many fewer students spread out between us.

So at this point, I should probably plow into the summer assignments I collected today. I guess the silver lining is that even though my classes are PACKED to the gills, I still actually have fewer APEL students total than I did last year, so that's nice. I think I've got 90? Last year I had 115 or so. Yay. I think?

The other silver lining: some of our buildings were without air conditioning today (and our classrooms are essentially designed for AC ... there are no functioning/opening windows in any classroom that I can think of) but mine was not one of them. So there was that...

And tomorrow, it all starts again.

It's 9:20 pm the night before the first day of the new school year and I am freaking out.

Seriously.

Normally, I'm pretty good at hiding my anxiety because it's silly but also fairly normal -- I mean, teachers get anxious just like the kids do before the first day of school. But this year ... oh boy, is this year going to be different. And it's got me terrified.

See, there's this little budget problem. Don't know if you, dear reader out there roaming about the Interwebs, are familiar with California's bit of a money problem, but this wee little problem (... if you haven't caught the sarcasm yet, shall I hit you with a stick?) has translated into a huge problem and that is class size.

Now, for some reason, people seem to not really be taking this problem seriously. After all, our test scores have stayed pretty consistently high. Our ELA test scores were mostly the same as the year before, with smaller classes and slightly more resources. Obviously we didn't need those resources in the first place! We can do WAY MORE with WAY LESS!

Except, that at some point, we're not going to be able to. And I have a feeling that "some point" is going to arrive tomorrow. Or at least, the dawn of the "some point" day will break tomorrow.

I have 46 junior APEL students slated to arrive in my first period classroom tomorrow morning -- my classroom that currently holds (barely) 40 desks and 4 chairs. I might teach English, but I can also do math, and that says there's room for 44 students. Those other two? ... I'm contemplating a picnic blanket on the floor. And I wish I were kidding. My room just isn't built for this size of a class, and I'm SURE this has GOT to be a fire hazard somehow. My room is teeny tiny, and I love it, and I don't want to move, but holy crap, the thought of having 46 bodies, plus me, plus 46 backpacks in my classroom is enough to send my already-jittery nerves into a full-tilt panic attack. ::breathes:: You CANNOT effectively teach 46 high schoolers at a time.

YOU CANNOT.

I am good. I don't toot my own horn much, really, because I know how much there is still left for me to learn about teaching and organization and planning, and I always see the flaws in what I do, but I'm good. Really good. And though I know I can ATTEMPT to teach 46 with the best of them, and I will do a hell of a job trying to engage all of them and rally all of them and wrangle all of them, but honestly, the quality of their education -- the quality of our classroom relationship, the quality of my feedback to them, the quality of the depth and breadth of the work they'll do for me -- is going to suffer perilously. I cannot physically assign the same amount of things as I used to. I cannot physically counsel, guide, and support them each individually any more. Thankfully, I've embraced things like Facebook and Google Voice and this blog to at least help me get to know my students better, but it's hard. I feel like I learned less about last year's students than any group I've yet had, and that makes me sad. And it helps me recognize that we're doing a huge disservice to these kids by cramming them like sardines into classrooms meant for 30 students. There's no room for anything else. I've already jettisoned furniture. It's just sad and disheartening. It makes me want to scream and cry and teach my ass off.

I guess the only redeeming thing, if you could call it that, is that it seems like everyone is feeling the same way. Teachers are wandering around campus looking completely panic-stricken (... or, perhaps, I'm just projecting my own neurotic fears onto their faces, who knows). But I had at least four conversations today with four different teachers and all of them said echoes of the same thing: "We're so freaked out about how many kids we have on our caseload that we're shutting down and becoming incapable of doing anything productive today." Granted, we all eventually made copies of our syllabi and our first day of school activities, like the good little diligent planners that we are, but what about days 2-175? I can't even fathom. I've got my sophomore curriculum KIND of planned out, but I'm also about to embark on this grand gamification experiment and I really didn't do as much work as I should have this summer to get that up and running, but it's really going to be a lot of trial and error, and I'm going to be really honest with my students about it. After all, it's all about them and their success anyway.

So there you have it. My lunch is packed, clothes laid out, and my copies are sitting in a neat little stack in my classroom. But I'm so terrified beyond the capacity for rational thought about getting back in the saddle tomorrow and having to take the same ride as last year, with less support, less money, less time, and less physical space. I guess it will take some adjusting, but if I run screaming for the hills, mail me care packages, okay?

Pesky Essays, FINALLY done!

See that stack? That's ONE ASSIGNMENT. 110 essays, averaging between 7 and 12 pages, with a few outliers. Basically that's nearly 1,000 pages worth of writing. But not just any writing. Student writing. And not just any student writing. Student writing about non-fiction, which is inevitably shaky at best. But tonight I FINALLY finished the. I've only had them since February 11th, but no never mind that. I had to make their AP-based in-class essays a priority because of the AP test looming -- and I graded THREE of those. 330 handwritten essays. But since those have been done, I've been ignoring EVERYTHING else in order to finish these blasted things in time for their 12 week grades.

In honor of my finishing these essays, here is what I've learned from my AP juniors:

1. Correctly formatting a Works Cited page according to the Modern Language Association's (or MLA's) specifications is apparently impossibly hard. I mean, forget that it's a formula, and it is the ONE time in English class where there is a COMPLETELY right answer and many COMPLETELY wrong answers. As my friend Allison said on my Facebook, you'd think THIS is what they would excel at. But no. Evidently, having resources on the Internet like EasyBib and NoodleTools has made this process MORE challenging, not LESS, even though when I was in high school, we had to either check out (or just give in and buy) the MLA handbook to make sure our citations were correct, lest we lose our precious PUSD Writing With Style manual they used to hand out in hard copy to us at some point in our schooling (perhaps 9th grade?). I mean, seriously. I had blue hyperlinks, centered entries that made the Works Cited page look like poetry (fail), incorrect indents, incorrect entries, non-Times New Roman, too much space between entries, too little space between entries, and even students that forgot to cite their actual primary source (their non-fiction book). Sheesh.

2. Students are not above bribery. I found a dollar bill taped to an essay this year. But as Bonnie pointed out, one dollar isn't even enough to buy a delicious Starbucks drink. So that's sorta fail bribery. Exhibit A:

3. Someone out there -- and it is NOT me -- is teaching students to center justify their papers. I don't mean center -- they know (well, MOST of them know) that their essay paragraphs shouldn't have the look of a poem on the page. However, more and more in the last two years, I am having students submit essays with both the left and right margins flush, rather than just the left. (If you have no idea what I'm talking about, you're probably lucky.) The problem with this is that, despite looking deceptively more "professional," it throws off the internal line spacing and gives me a headache. It just looks weird and unnatural on an essay. But SOMEONE must be teaching this. What else explains this epidemic, especially given that generally when you actually ASK students to do something that requires finding an obscure setting, option, or button in Microsoft Word, it takes a PowerPoint, several walkthroughs, an YouTube Video, trial and error, and snarky Facebook posts to teach it to them effectively.

4. Apparently magazine and newspaper titles require no formatting. Except, actually, they do, and so I have expended more than a little red ink circling all of the times students mentioned The New York Times or Newsweek without italicizing them. And in an essay where these are two VERY popular resources to mention, this is a very nearly criminal offense.

5. Students get really cranky about books they don't understand that they don't realize they don't understand. It's fun.

6. Students *think* that I won't notice that some quotes are randomly in different fonts, or that their whole essay is in a Times New Roman-like font, but is not, in fact, Times New Roman. I have an eagle eye for these things; they cannot fool me. But inevitably, they try. Or, weirdly, this year, I've had whole essays in Times New Roman except for, say, the Works Cited page title, which is in Courier or Arial, or an occasional citation word in another font. It's inconsistent and bizarre.

7. Even AP-level juniors are not comfortable enough with their writing to take risks and stitch all of the requisite elements of their essays together with engaging transitions. The transitions were probably the weakest element of every single paper in that stack because students seem to see this particular assignment as six or seven disparate parts that they can write in a vacuum, away from each other, and then just copy and paste them together and make it work. But in many ways, it doesn't. Sure, their ideas are good, and technically all of the required components are there, but there's no talking of paragraphs between each other, and no ... finessing ... of ideas from one paragraph to another. I suppose this comes with maturity. I guess.

8. Even when students can actually PICK the book they want to read, they still don't read it. This was so apparent to me that I actually am annoyed. I don't really get annoyed when it's obvious they haven't read a core lit novel; it hurts their grade, sure, but ::shrug:: it's life. But when you've been able to PICK your book from a rather lengthy list of non-fiction books, and really, as long as it meets certain criteria, you can even pick books that don't appear on the list, and then you STILL don't read it? This is just stupid to me.

I think that's all I can think of that I learned from them as I was doing this, other than the same standard things that were reaffirmed: students aren't very good at editing and proofreading, they still don't quite understand the idea of full circle arguments, and they don't understand the difference between a semi-colon and a colon. But that's par for the course.

But I'm done. And I feel like a HUGE weight has been lifted momentarily off of my shoulders. That weight returns tomorrow when I arrive at school to the two buckets OVERFLOWING with the work I either have been completely ignoring or just collected TODAY. :-/ I have a long weekend of grading ahead of me to get ready for 12 week grades. Not to mention that I have to prepare my All Quiet on the Western Front unit to roll out.

... sigh. My work never ends. But for now, bedtime. I deserve it. I've graded 16 essays since I got home at 4:00.

Today Reminded Me Of Why I Do This

You can't ever really predict how well a lesson will go. You can pretend: you can rehearse in your room, plan to use a timer, plan all your questions and objectives, print your handouts on colored paper, and go over and over your plan in your head thirteen times. But the plain fact of the matter is that sometimes it works and sometimes it just doesn't.

But today? Today, it worked. And really, I'm not even that sure what I did. But it did, because today was awesome. It was a bright spot in an otherwise fairly hellacious week for me (in my personal life, at least) and I really needed it to remind me why I freaking love what I do.

It all started with an article.

See, I was scoping out the New York Times opinion section for some persuasive articles to use for an APEL activity on Tuesday (that also went well, actually) and came across this article. I almost used it for that activity, but ended up using it in Speech and Debate instead. But then I decided to use it for APEL today as a warm up. To be honest, I wasn't really sure how well this article would be received. It's mostly logos-based with some ethos thrown in, which I knew my students would understand and appreciate, but even I was unprepared for the sheer number of nuances ready to be discussed by a room full of inquisitive and opinionated juniors.

We're working on rhetoric and argumentation, so I won't go into everything they had to do with it before we discussed it (hooray for the Toulmin model), but today was without a doubt the best discussion my APEL classes have ever had. Kids that almost never participate were practically falling out of their desks trying to have their voices heard, and though some of what they said was just completely weird (such as suggesting an organ harvesting machine that would allow the inmate to remain alive whilst the organs were extracted ... ick), it was just the best thing ever. I'm sure that for most of the discussion, I just had this huge beaming smile on my face (well, when I wasn't hiding behind my cardigan at some disgusting suggestion) because I love it when they're smart. Well, they're always smart. I love it when they embrace it and let their guard down and really dig deeply into what it means to be human and live in this world with other people. I would have let them keep talking the whole period -- and they would have been able to keep it going -- if I had had the time to spare. They kept coming up with new facets to the conversation -- and I was even able to work in a connection to Antigone. (This blew their minds. At which point, as we moved to the next mind-blowing activity, I told them to cram their minds back into their heads so they could be re-blown.)

But today's discussion -- and the following activity -- reminded me of why I love being a teacher. I love seeing them vulnerable. I love ripping into a moral dilemma through some kind of text and pushing kids to see both sides and hold them up next to each other and see that the answers aren't as clear as we'd like them to be. I love listening to kids think on their feet. I love watching kids' arms wilt as they wait desperately to share a thought that has occurred to them. I love poking their small experiences with the sticks of my not-much-bigger experiences and forcing them out of their comfort zones. I love that I get to teach English, this beastly monster of a subject that also allows me a wide latitude to throw an article in their face, under the guise of looking at how the article is built and what makes it effective (which we also discussed) when ultimately my true purpose is to spark critical thinking. Hold it up. Look at it. Tell me what it is. Tell me what it isn't. Tell me something else. But what about this? Or this?

Teenagers are smarter than we give them credit for in this overly-tested educational life of theirs, and somehow, this article, weird as it is, struck a chord with them and they just absolutely burst into a kind of nuanced thoughtfulness that you can't predict. You can't model. You can't capture. It just happens. And I just feel so blessed and lucky that this was my day today.

Today was magic. Pure, unpredictable, productive magic. And I hope they felt it, too.

And, amazingly enough, my sophomores just added to the magic by embracing the vocabulary story competition activity that worked so well two years ago, but fell completely flat on its face last year (... last year's sophomores ... ::shakes fist:: ). They were so focused (you know an activity is going well when your timer goes off and EVERYONE begs for more time).

Essentially what I did was have them, in groups, write a vocabulary story using as many vocabulary words as they could from their 90 from the semester. They needed to use at least 10, but every extra word added is extra credit. And, to make it more interesting, I told them that I would have someone in my life -- mom, brother, boyfriend (and boyfriend becomes a very distracting word to use in a sophomore classroom. ::facepalm::) -- to read them. This year's kids did what my students two years ago did: they asked GREAT questions about their audience. What does your mom like? Where did your mom go to college? What about your boyfriend? Do they like pirates? Ninjas? Star Wars? It was completely and totally hilarious and awesome. And the stories are priceless. There was even a Charlie Sheen story. Winning!

And then they didn't completely fall apart when we got to Antigone. They're getting it, it seems. They discussed when I asked them to discuss, they answered questions. Overall, really, it was just a really rather awesome day.

And now, it's 8:15 pm and I am completely and totally exhausted but I am just still feeling so completely and totally happy that today was such a career-affirming day.

I really needed it.

March Madness. And Not The Basketball Kind.

So, for those of you not exactly in the "know," March is pretty much the worst month of teaching. We were discussing this notion at lunch today: how every. single. year. we all forget that March is just a giant epic suckfest of awfulness because the kids are restless, we are restless, the yearly state tests loom, Spring Break seems so awfully far away, and there are no holidays, assemblies, or any other breaks in our routines. So, yeech. Which also means that I have the life sucked out of me every day just trying to wrangle all of my students and not actually kick them. Or yell at them. Because that's just too exhausting.

There have been many posts I've been meaning to write. One about Chelsea. That will happen when I'm in a better, less negative headspace. I want that one to be more positive. One about standardized testing. But I'm way, WAY too hopped up on standardized test-driven ire to make that one come out in an articulate, meaningful, and objective way. So I think the direction in which I will head relates to last Monday's Daily Show where Jon Stewart added his voice to the now-politically-correct, new American past time of teacher bashing.

It was pure poetry.

As was this part. (These were just two clips split up, but are part of the longer intro segment.)

But many of the clips of "legitimate" news stations shown were not so much poetry -- well, okay, perhaps poetry, but the kind of lame, sad, acrostic poetry a second grader might make for their dad on Father's Day. THAT kind of poetry.

But there was one moment of that particular clip show that has stuck in our heads and made us angry. That's right. Angry. And that is the notion that teaching is nothing but "a part time job."

::pause for effect::

Um. Really? Part time? ... Really?

Later in this post, I'll do a little math to demonstrate that this is horribly, terribly, awfully, ridiculously, pathetically untrue that is, but first, here's why fighting these kinds of misconceptions can be frustrating and troubling: it can often be really, REALLY hard to combat them when you do actually have to concede to the following two facts:

1. Teachers get summers off.

Well, okay, first of all, that depends a lot on your district, or even your school within your district. We have six high schools in our district and one of them is actually on a modified year-round schedule. Several of my friends are on year-round or modified year-round calendars and do not, in fact, get months and months and months of the summer off. And to add insult to that misconception, many of the teachers that I know that do teach through the summer do so without air conditioning in their classrooms, a luxury that I'm sure is afforded to this so-called political pundits sitting in newsrooms.

However, sure, I must concede to the fact that I have the summer off.

But does anyone ever ask me whether I prefer it that way?

Because honestly, I don't.

Actually, I'd much prefer to be on a year-round calendar, and most teachers I know who are not currently on that system would love desperately to be on a year-round system. Our traditional school calendar, where we start in August/September and end in May/June is just as antiquated, irrelevant, and outdated as a lot of what we still do in education, and I will be the first one to say sure, hey, take away my eight, nine, ten weeks of summer if it means that I might not only be able to have more frequent, regular vacations like the rest of the working world, but also, I might be able to do some awesome teaching that would actually stick because it wouldn't go falling out of students' brains while they sit at home and play Modern Warfare for hours at a time while their parents are working.

Plus, as an additional but no less important last thought, I worked my ass off this summer and didn't get paid for it. I rearranged and reorganized my classroom for two weeks before school started in panicked fear about the forty-plus class sizes I was looking at. And I'm really, REALLY glad I spent that unpaid time in my not-yet-air-conditioned-because-it-was-still-summer classroom because otherwise, I have no idea how I would have survived even the first two weeks of school. I also modified a ton of curriculum, heaved boxes and boxes of books home and revamped quite a bit of stuff to accommodate for increased numbers of kids and the sheer anxiety of having to grade that much. Oh, and there was the 8 hour day Andrea and I spent at my house planning out our APEL year. And we didn't get paid for that, either. Billable hours, what?

2. The school day ends at 2:30.

So, this is what is technically true for me, though I know other schools in our district end at 3:05, 3:35, etc. It just depends on the buses. (Really. The buses dictate everything related to time in the district.)

But yes. The students leave at 2:30.

Except they don't leave.

Ever.

Today I had a line of at least seven students and it took me until almost 3:15 to get through all of them. While neglecting my after-school Speech and Debate class, which I teach Tuesdays and Wednesdays from 2:30 to 3:30. Then sometimes, even they don't leave. They want to stay and chat. Discuss their homework. Their lives. Ask me, the English teacher, for help with physics. (It's true. And I can actually help them. But that's sorta kinda besides the point, except, really, in the grand scheme of things, it's not besides the point, because I'm freaking amazingly well-educated and can ACTUALLY teach things I'm not NCLB certified to teach. Weird, huh? Anyway, I digress...) But they're a chatty, needy, hilarious, annoying, weird, quirkly, lurking bunch. And so though it seems like those claiming I work a part time job assume that all of our students Apparate home at 2:30, it's really not the case. At all.

We also all have email these days, so technically, my work day never ends. I mean, I guess I could be one of those teachers who only checks my school email while physically at school, but that's just not my reality. I'm available to my students via email, Facebook, and, this year, through Google Voice, which allows them to text me with short, simple questions if they're struggling. So, actually, I'm never really off-duty unless I make the mental choice to be. Or unless I leave my cell phone out of audible range.

And then there's the grading. Oooooh the grading. And the lesson planning. And the balancing of a life on top of that. And the grading.

These days, my lesson planning generally amounts to a few scribbled post-its and scrounging around on my various computers for the handouts I know I have so that I can look at them, modify if necessary, and make copies.

But sometimes, I get into a fit of "THIS DIDN'T WORK LAST YEAR I NEED SOMETHING NEW!" and will spend four, five, six hours at a time trying to devise a new lesson, and building a lesson from scratch ain't easy, folks. It requires figuring out objectives. Materials. Rehearsing so that you can figure out timing. Talking to yourself. Deciding how best to deliver the content. Making a Power Point or chart or overhead if necessary.

And heaven forbid you decide you want them in groups and THEN decide you want to pick the groups for them, because then you have to decide whether you want them in heterogenous groups, which usually means the poor, hardworking, good kids are going to have to limp the struggling kids along, even though you'd like to hope against all hope that a heterogeneous group will be what helps the struggling kids become unstruggling kids by listening to and emulating their peers, but let's be honest: this is high school we're talking about here, or in homogeneous groups, which usually means you get to spend a period ignoring the top 75% of your class and hovering over the two or three groups of kids all now piled together looking completely lost and befuddled and trying to explain to them, in small chunks, what you expect of them.

AND THEN, when you make that decision, you've now resigned yourself to at LEAST a half an hour (but usually more) of going through your class lists and trying to arrange the groups to your liking, but really, you're never going to do it right because someone always hates someone else, and someone can't work with someone else because they've gotten in trouble with them, or so and so just broke up with so and so, so they can't be in the same group, and after an hour, you really just want to throw the materials in the middle of the room and let them go at the assignment Lord of the Flies style to see which of the strong will survive.

And then there's the grading. Oh the humanity. I think if you ask a lot of teachers, especially English teachers, you'll find that many of them had some kind of TA experience as a young kid where they feasted on the power trip that was grading other students' work. We lurved it. It's powerful, dangerous, intoxicating to edit an essay with a red pen or grade a multiple choice test and hack away at the wrong answers like they've personally offended you by getting it wrong.

Except, it's only fun when it's not your grading. Grading your own stuff sucks, because you have to learn from the grading. Grading is not a passive thing. Grading, especially of an essay or dialectical journal or really any student writing, is an active, incredibly cognitively challenging adventure in...

* mind-reading: ("did the kid really mean that? Oh, wait, no, I see where they were going with that, but how did they get there? oh, they were looking at that quote... they must not have seen the rest of it. But ...oh, okay, this paragraph is about that! Oh! ... hmmm. That wasn't a very good topic sentence. Oh, but here's their evidence. Hmmm, I think they're trying to say this, but I think ... oh, okay, I see what they did there..."),

* handwriting deciphering (is that a k or a t? ... What the heck does that say?! Oh... it just says "flock" ... hmmm.),

* and lesson planning ("OMG, NONE of these kids got that answer right! What did I not teach this year? How come no one has discussed that quote we talked about in class? Oh, wow, these kids really don't know how to select effective evidence. I need a new lesson. Wow, and this batch of essays really missed the whole idea of weaving... I need a new way to explain that").

Not to mention that it's disheartening to look at a ginormous stack of essays on the edge of a table and realize that in an hour, you've graded three of them.

Keep in mind, too, that this grading doesn't happen during the school day. Oh no. Sometimes my friend Summer and I like to joke that our work gets in the way of our work -- that being an English teacher wouldn't be so bad if it weren't for the pesky teaching part. Then we could spend our days at work at our teacher desks, basking in the glory of the grading. But we can't. We have to teach. Teach our asses off. For a new breed of kid called "technology native." So the grading has to wait.

Seriously, if I only graded during the "free" time I had at school, none of my students would get anything back EVER. First of all, there are too many distractions. Second of all, it doesn't give me the focus I need. And third of all, there's just too much of it to try and eke all of it out in the piddly 57 minutes I have of a prep three days a week. ... and if I graded, when would I photocopy? Do paper work? Meet with administrators? Meet with other teachers? Clean up once in awhile? It is absolutely, unequivocally, completely impossible to get everything I need to get done achieved during my 7:30-2:30 work day. It's as simple as that.

So yes. The bell rings at 2:30. But then my real job begins. And it isn't pretty.

Part time job? In case the grading aspect hasn't convinced you that I don't, in fact, work a part time job, here's a break down of my week last week, in terms of hours:

Monday: Arrived at school at 6:30. (And work begins immediately.) Left school at 3:30. [9 hours]

Tuesday: Arrived at school at 6:30. Left school at 3:45. [9 hours, 15 minutes]

Wednesday: Arrived at school at 6:30. Left school at 6:30. (Yes. That's not a typo. 12 hours. It included regular teaching, Speech and Debate, a fairly-epic department chairs meeting, and then room arranging/cleaning/planning/prepping) [12 hours]

Thursday: Arrived at school at 6:30. Left school at 3:45. [9 hours, 15 minutes]

Friday: Arrive at school at 6:30. At 2:30, dashed to my car to beat the parents out of the parking lot and headed to Carlsbad High School for the Speech and Debate State Qualifying tournament. I was there from about 3:30 until 11:00, actively engaged in helping to run the tournament. I got home around 11:30. By my reckoning, that was a 17 hour day. [17 hours]

Let's see. I might be an English teacher, but my ability to do math tells me that all total, my work week last week was 56 hours and 30 minutes. Oh, and that was just the time I spent "on duty."

You know, at school.

Around people.

Or actively preparing my classroom or self to teach.

And, pretty much every single one of those days, I went home and also did something work-related, whether it was:

* grading 90+ Gatsby quizzes, 80+ Julius Caesar Final Essays, and 90+ Gatsby Dialectical journals,

* planning my Promising Practices presentation for March 19th (my name's not there yet as a presenter, but I am indeed doing my first official county-wide teacher presentation),

* worrying about my Speech and Debaters performing in Poway's Got Talent on Friday night (while I was at Carlsbad with my other Speech and Debater),

* emailing kids and/or parents and/or other teachers when I didn't immediately respond during the day

* editing handouts and revising lessons for upcoming class sessions.

Part time job? ... I might get paid like it's a part time job, but it's not. It is an all-consuming, sometimes soul-sucking, often awesomely-rewarding, passion-driven, exhausting, frustrating, never-ending calling.

At the end of the day, it's not really a job at all.

It's a lifestyle.

And there's no such thing as a part-time lifestyle. It's all or nothing.

No More Pink!

On March 15, 2008, I received my first pink slip.

My principal, list of teachers in hand, crept sheepishly into my classroom, his tired and frustrated face still wearing the stress of the teachers he had already talked to before coming to my classroom. He sat down slightly awkwardly into a student desk and halted over his words, telling me that because I had only been in the district two years, I was being notified that I would possibly not have a teaching position to come back to in the fall. I knew it was coming; I had done the math in my head and figured it would be inescapable. But hearing it, with such official finality from my principal, the principal who had hired me after months of calling me every Monday evening on my way home from UCSD graduate courses to assure me they were waiting for a spot to offer me, the principal who had been my own high school principal for three years, the principal who supported me in my first two years of teaching and who respected me the way that my first principal had not, was awful. I was able to mostly hold back my tears until he was gone, choking on the last few words I said to him as I put on a brave face and shrugged that it was inevitable.

But as soon as my classroom door clicked closed behind him as he went off to talk to the next teacher on his list, I dissolved into a puddle of teachers, clutching my face at my desk -- the desk I might have to clean out at the end of the year, and, sitting there through the tears, surveying the corners of my classroom, thinking in a flash of all of my classroom teaching possessions boxed up and taken home to rot in my garage. The weight was too much.

Oh, and did I mention that March 15th, 2008 was my 26th birthday? Because it was.

And that was only the first pink slip I would experience in my short career. I was pink slipped on March 15th, 2009 and again on March 15th, 2010.

In 2008, the first one, it actually didn't officially stick. I mean, it wasn't immediately revoked within a few days; I think it took a little less than two months before most of us were notified that though they'd had to notify us for the March 15th deadline (which is one of those weirdly arbitrary California Ed Code dates), things had improved and we would not be issued the next even scarier notice. We even got a lovely little form letter from the district to say that they were happy to inform us we would, in fact, have a position the following year in the district and apologized for the stress. This was nice.

The next year was not so nice. Unlike the year before, where my principal visited each teacher individually, 2009 was the year of the Epic Pink Slipping. I think there were at least thirty teachers in the room, which our principal and district human resources people assembled in a room to bring the axe down once, as gently as they could. It was awful. Lots of English teachers -- almost half of our department. Many math teachers. Lots of elective teachers and a handful of Social Science Teachers. Thirty teachers at that time was almost a third of the staff. It was gut wrenching and awful, and though high school teachers tend towards biting sarcasm and humor to deal with pain and anger, the fear was pretty poorly masked. Some managed to ask some practical questions, mumbling things about unemployment and COBRA and being able to be on a sub list in the district. Things that make me shut down and pretend like I'm in a coffee shop in Paris and NOT being told, for the second year in a row, that because of something completely and totally out of my control -- out of anyone in that room's control -- I may not have a job the following year. And this time around, things were worse. There were meetings -- hundreds of teachers piled into multipurpose rooms being told to search for other jobs and gather letters of recommendation, being reassured that recently laid-off teachers would not only be hired back in the order of seniority, but would be at the top of the substituting food chain. We were issued packets that explained things like unemployment and COBRA and the rehiring procedures. On the May date -- the "For Reals" deadline in the world of layoffs and pink slips -- we received an even fatter packet than we received on March 15 with an even scarier Reduction In Force letter that heralds, in seemingly cold finality, the official loss of your position in the district. The March 15th letter becomes nothing but a friendly preview for the mayhem to come.

It was terrifying.

For days, weeks, months, I had a stomach ache. I carry all of my stress in my stomach anyway, but I ended up being so bad off that I nearly had a nervous breakdown on my mom's couch with a college friend in town, crying so hard I could barely breathe. I was tired of feeling like crap, tired of not sleeping, tired of being stressed out and freaked out all the time, to the point where it was affecting my health, my relationships with family, friends, and my still-fairly-new-at-the-time boyfriend. I suffered through bouts of vertigo. GERD, which presented itself similarly to morning sickness: I woke up every single morning for weeks feeling scared and shaky and nauseous. I ended up at the doctor's several times in a matter of months; more visits than probably the five years prior combined. I started gaining back a lot of the 90 pounds I'd lost in the two years before, despite all of my efforts to stave it off. The stress of the uncertain future acted like a magnet, keeping it all in place and even piling more on.

And through all of this, I went to school every day and taught my ass off. For what might have been nothing.

See, the thing about being pink slipped as a teacher is weird. You don't just get laid off and that's that. There's all this somewhat silly Ed Code protocol to it, where there's a pre-warning, and then an official lay off, and even then, it's not ever really actually a lay off until it is the first day or so of school and you don't have a job. But the pink slip doesn't mean you suddenly just stop teaching. You have to keep teaching that school year regardless of your status for the following year. And though that seems obvious, here's the rub: you start to feel like your attempts to better yourself -- better your craft, better your art, better your passion for teaching -- are completely and utterly useless. Why revise that test? You might not need it next year, and that thought is depressing.

Suddenly every assignment, every essay prompt, every quiz and test that you fleetingly ponder changing becomes a hideous reminder that at some point soon, none of it will matter. All this time you've spent creating material, sitting at Starbucks with your team mates until 8:00 at night and walking home in the dark because the time got away from you, or getting up at some fictitious time in the morning like 5:00 am to meet colleagues in your classroom to plan and create materials because you don't have any other time to meet -- all of these things will essentially have meant nothing to your career. To the kids, sure. And this is why we do this, which I'll get to later. But the visceral terror of being jobless in a profession where getting a job was becoming increasingly impossible keeps bubbling to the surface every time you open a document to double-check and revise.

And every time you spend a little too long looking at all of the stuff in your classroom and suddenly imagining it all in boxes.

And every time a student in third period asks why you've been crying on your second period prep.

And every time the newspaper publishes some hateful "blame the teachers" article lambasting how terrible we are at our jobs.

And every time you have to explain to someone -- a student, a non-teacher friend, a family member, that no, the fact that I'm Department Chair of the English department doesn't matter; no, the fact that you love me doesn't matter; no, the fact that I coach Speech and Debate and Science Olympiad and teach AP and CAHSEE Prep and teach technology to teachers and sit on the AVID Site team doesn't matter. None of this matters. All that matters if the hire date, printed in black ink on white paper in your personnel file. And though through your brave face, you explain to these inquisitive and generally well-meaning people that you'd rather it be that way because then your principal and district people don't have to decide, American Idol-style with Polaroids and some grotesque teacher version of Hollywood week, who stays and who goes based on something completely subjective and arbitrary, in reality, on the inside, you're desperate to scream, "THIS IS SO UNFAIR!" because you know you're working harder than a lot of people, not just in your profession, but in many other professions, too.

And every time you spend six hours at the local Starbucks, or the library, or the park, or the zoo, or wherever you've managed to find a quiet, shady spot to grade, grading essays and realize that though this is one of the most wretched part of your job, the alternative is so much scarier.

2009 was bad. I didn't really know for sure until midway through the summer that I would, in fact, be able to return to Poway High. And this was after being the one who has to build the English schedule, plugging in "Teacher X" for my own course load, hoping with crossed fingers and "K. McMillan" would replace "Teacher X" by the end of the year. It took longer than that, but it happened eventually.

2010 sucked, too, though this year, only a handful of seasoned pink slipped veterans huddled in our principal's office, being told for the third year in a row that we might not have jobs. And though you'd think the third time around, it would be easier to hear. Easier to swallow. Easier to brush off and power through.

But it's not.

It's harder.

At least it was for me. Because at some point, you know you can't get lucky that many times in a row. At some point, the pink slip is going to stick. What else can a district do to cut expenses? And they haven't hired anyone in English in the district since the whole pink slipping adventure started, and teachers I worked with and loved and still miss dearly did suffer as a result and had to find jobs elsewhere -- I figured at SOME point, I'd be next. So that third year was probably the hardest. Plus, given that this year, there were maybe only eight of us holding pink slips, the rest of campus seemed not to care; they seemed mostly oblivious to the fact that this year, there were still teachers with jobs in peril, so it became increasingly annoying and frustrating and sad to walk into the staff workroom and overhear comments about salary reductions and union/district/school site leadership -- comments from colleagues whose jobs were safe, and had been for all three of those years. I would walk out of the staff lounge wanting to scream. Or kick. Or punch. But I would just go back to my classroom, pull my door shut a little too hard and sink down into my desk chair and stare at the computer screen.

And that third year, again, I wasn't entirely sure I'd have a job until midway through the summer. All in all, I think I've lived a collective total of 12 months with job uncertainty hanging over my head -- that's a year, people. One year out of the last three worrying I may lose my job.

Now, granted, I didn't lose it. I'm still teaching. I have tenure, which I've actually had since about midway through my second year of teaching. But all those naysayers who are anti-tenure? It doesn't really guarantee me any kind of job security; in a Reduction in Force time, it doesn't matter. Not even a teeny, tiny little bit.

But here's the thing about teaching. It's a calling. Cliche though that may be, it really and truly is. I've known since I was in elementary school that somehow, some way, in some capacity or another, that I would end up in a classroom teaching students of some kind. In my younger and more naive years, I imagined teaching science, as I had always planned on being an aerospace engineering major. But really and truly, I've had teaching in mind as a career path since about the fifth grade. I love it. I breathe it. When I'm with Summer, it's almost all we talk about, and though we have our share of rant sessions, we both love almost every second of what we do.

Because we've been called to it. We can't not do it. Even if we weren't teaching, we'd be teaching. We'd be teaching significant others to cook something; we'd be teaching young children how to swing on a park swing; we'd be teaching parents how to use a semi-colon properly; or we'd be teaching anyone who will listen about why teachers deserve so much more respect than they get these days.

Why else would teachers put up with so little pay? Why else would teachers put up with sometimes abysmal working conditions? Why else would teachers sit up at night grading essays or marking exams or falling asleep on quizzes (like I did last night at about 11:30 pm)? Why else would teachers chaperone Prom every year, or take students on Speech and Debate tournament field trips, or spend hundred of dollars of their own money to make sure that they have pens and pencils for students to use and colored paper for long-term assignments? Why else would teachers deal with parents who don't understand that their kid is one of more than 200 they deal with a day? Why else would teachers come to work sick because they don't trust a sub with their class?

Because we can't help ourselves. We were born to teach; born with some kind of innate ability to impart learning to the youth of our country; born with a genuine, natural, inexplicable desire to spend a day in a 18x18 room full of 42 student desks, two big tables, a teacher desk, four book shelves, 41 students, 1 TA, and three plants... and ultimately enjoy the heck out of it.

We do this for the kids. We love them. They're weird and quirky and stupid and funny and brilliant and annoying and awesome and motivated and human and real. It is amazing to watch them progress over the course of the year; it is amazing to watch them work in groups and have a true moment of realization about a new concept or piece of text; it is amazing to see them all dolled up at Prom or dolled down at the end of a long week of AP testing. It is always a kick when they develop a class inside joke -- one that sticks the whole year, that they bond over and use as a little in-group bonding. I know a lot of people are terrified of what I do: I teach high school. Teenagers aren't cute like elementary school kids; they really do look like young adults, which makes it so much easier to fear them and easier to want to kick them because often they're bigger than you. But I LOVE teaching teenagers. LOVE it. They're a weird paradoxical ball of youth and adulthood, innocence and jadedness, intelligence and stupidity, thoughtfulness and idiocy, and it's absolutely an indescribable feeling to actually watch them grow up and gain consciousness about the world as a result of something you created: an assignment, an essay, a discussion, a group project. Watching consciousness-raising happen on the face of a 16 year old is both awe-inspiring and hilarious. The students are why I do this. I love them. I work my butt off for them. I try to mentor them, try to be a role model for them, try to teach them and mold them and discipline them and love them, and sometimes that last one is really, really hard.

So even though working through the possibility of not returning to the campus that has nurtured you as a teacher and helped you create this unbreakable bond between you and a few hundred students is heinous and awful, it's the kids that make it bearable. They're good at cheering you up and making you laugh and for that I am every day grateful that I have the wonderfully good fortune to spend 8 hours of my day surrounded by 15-17 year olds. Scary? Not to me. Exhilarating.

And why have I just spilled this much electronic ink waxing poetic about pink slips and teaching?

Because today, February 22, 2011, we received word from the district that they would be issuing no layoff notices this year. So for the first year in three years, I won't have to worry about not just losing my livelihood, but also losing what is nearest and dearest to me: my career that defines every fiber of my being. I am my job and my job is me; they're inextricable from each other, and the thought of losing my job as a teacher is essentially to be confronted with the possibility of losing a part of myself. And this year, I don't have to worry.

I might sleep through the night and not wake up tomorrow morning with a stomach ache for the first time since March 2008.

And, as I turn 29 in a few weeks, I will get to ACTUALLY enjoy my birthday without the fresh looming threat of unemployment.

And of course, my mom, ever so supportive, wondered what on Earth we were going to use as a theme for my birthday party this year, since "PINK SLIPS" have been the obvious fan favorite the last three years.

I'm sure we'll think of something.