Musings on My Music Teacher

This might be a departure from my normal posts, which generally about my life in the classroom. Tonight, I wanted to, in a way, pay tribute to one of the most inspirational teachers in my life, my high school music director Warren Torns.

A few weeks ago, I attended my first rehearsal with the Cuyamaca Community College Concert Band, which is Warren's newest directing gig. He had announced the opportunity at the end of summer band this summer, and I was immediately considering joining, but the fact that CCC is pretty far from my house was nearly a dealbreaker for me, not the mention Wednesdays being my really long days with no prep and often a 1-2 hour department chair meeting after school. But it was a conversation with several of my lady friends -- and something that Bethany said in particular -- that clinched my decision to join the band. Granted, I missed the first rehearsal because of the first day of school, but I signed up and have spent my last few weeks worth of Wednesdays there.

It's a small-ish group, at least compared to the last couple years' worth of summer bands, but it had a fairly decent instrumentation mostly, minus some french horns, bassoons, and a bass clarinet. I don't really know anybody -- I know almost all of the clarinet players by sight, but not well. Warren picked some decently challenging music, I would say, for the group -- I think Persichetti's "Pageant" is pretty challenging because it's like musical pointillism, so you never get a sense really of how your part fits in unless everyone plays their part correctly (heh...).

But I'm sort of digressing from my point, which is that Warren is an amazing teacher of music. What's always been sort of a weird thing for me to realize, now that I'm a long ways out of high school, is that this is a man who spent his life teaching high schoolers to be musicians. High schoolers! I know I teach high schoolers, too, but I look out at them and can't fathom doing what Warren did for so many years. I always felt like Warren treated us like adults, at least as much as he could, which I guess is why it's mindblowing to me that in actuality, he was dealing with the same teenagers that I do everyday. Plus, he's a stickler for detail and commitment, and I mean that in the absolute best of ways. He might have gotten frustrated with us and lectured about practicing and not expecting to pull an amazing concert out of nowhere, but he praised us when we did well and molded us into not just the musicians that we were (and some people continue to be), but really, into the humans we became. Warren's high expectations absolutely affected my obsessive need to be early to important things, my appreciation for hours of practice of anything that's important, and my additionally obsessive need for perfection (though I think I had a healthy dose of that before being a Marching Sundevil....). But ... high schoolers! I put up with HUNDREDS of high schoolers every year! This just blows my mind every time I think about it.

Some have complained that Warren was too hard on us, or yelled too much during rehearsals, or had expectations for us that were too high. But those complainers just clearly didn't appreciate the life skills Warren was instilling into us. And really, with a band of over 400 high schoolers, how do you control that without yelling? Cattle prods? Land mines? Many of my high school friends I'm sure would agree that whether we play our instruments still or not, we still embody the values instilled in us by Warren and our experiences as Marching Sundevils. We all still recite the motto that "to be early is to be on time, to be on time is to be late, and to be late is unthinkable." And this is why I always have a book in my car...

Anyway, I have been reflecting often during the last few weeks, after it has been clear that a fellow bandmate who didn't know me didn't know that I've been playing the flute for a long time, that I started playing the flute 19 years ago this fall, and that I first joined the Mt. Carmel band 15 years ago. I realized in a nearly-blinding flash on the drive home after my first rehearsal that I have probably spent more time under Warren's influence than any other teacher in my entire student life. I've been a part of three music groups besides my high school band that Warren has conducted; it's almost like I'm a groupie, I guess. But between four years of high school direction (and in the fall, this was two periods a day), four years of Wednesday night rehearsals, trips to Scandinavia, Indianapolis, and Sacramento, community band in Grossmont in the old days, and more recently what I think is five years of summer band, I have watched Warren teach more than any other teacher I've ever had.

But besides really loving music and being able to play my flute in a group and having that kind of relaxing and transcendent experience when I'm playing, I love being a part of Warren's bands because of his insistence on practice and perfection. Warren expects a lot out of his musicians, and having played in other groups run by other directors, Warren can somehow get more out of his groups than other directors. I mean, maybe I'm biased, but I've worked under at least seven or eight other directors in my 19 years as a musician, and I never feel like the group is as successful under anyone else. Warren runs a tight ship during rehearsals, something I've learned is not always the case, and this is why this most recent band experience has been weird and why I am finding myself deep in reflection on every late night drive home.

See, during most of these rehearsals, Warren was in "teacher" mode. Which is a total trip for me, because it has been a LONG time since I've seen him that way. Maybe not since my last band camp in 1999? I don't know. I don't feel like he even did some of the things he did last night with Wind Ensemble, but I could just simply be revising history. But given that he's brand new to this particular band, it's only natural that he would have to establish his norms for class, norms that I've been familiar with for fifteen years. But as he was explaining/lecturing about the need for a pencil on one's stand, the need to practice the hard parts, I was paying attention (really, Warren, I was!) but I was also thinking about how jarring it was to see him doing the kind of deliberate teaching that I do. I don't often think of Warren doing the same job I do, or of having worked with the same age demographic that I do.

And then, of course, I started to wonder how much of who I am as a teacher is because of Warren. Most of the time, when teacher friends and I are comparing notes about our biggest influences in why we became teachers and the models we follow, I tend not to think of Warren first. I think about all four of my English teachers, and I know that I use elements of all three of them -- heck, I use their LESSONS. I've borrowed (er, stolen) many lessons from Bob Pacilio and Karen Harkins (9th and 11th grade respectively), I've stolen content elements from Scott Currie, and I certainly borrow elements of Jack Mosher's approach to teaching text. So for me, I look to them for inspiration. But like I said, I've spent far more time under Warren's supervision and direction than any of these others, probably combined, and so I have been looking critically at my practice and methods over the last few weeks to see whether or not that influence has translated into my own work.

Now, methodologically, it's hard to tell, because my job in the classroom is so different than Warren's was/is. I'm trying to teach reading and writing; Warren teaches music. Yet, in many ways, learning to write well is very much like learning to play music well. Writing and music both require practice, even of the things you think you're good at. Once you have the foundational skills of each, you can start to take risks and improve and create art out of both, and so I do try to allow students as many opportunities as possible to practice and refine those skills.

I think the biggest way I see Warren's influence on my teaching is my high expectations for my students, but with the same support I always felt like Warren provided us to meet those expectations. Like Warren, I'm clear with my expectations, and like Warren, I definitely try to find multiple ways to explain what I want -- I remember vividly Warren telling the flute section, after several tries of not playing a section of "Apocalypse" the way he wanted, to play the section "orange." As in, the color. Orange. And, weirdly, this was what clicked. Orange. So I think about that -- about the need sometimes to provide multiple explanations and examples for what you want to make sure that all of the students in front of you know and understand what they need to do to be successful. (In tandem with this particular observation, when I feel like the students are not doing everything they need to do to be successful, I am equally apt to get upset with them and lecture them, a la Mr. Torns, about how they can't expect to pull perfection out of the orifice of their choice the night before something is due...)

Oh, and I also invoke the Warren Torns "No Yuck" rule to texts that I love. I tell the students they aren't allowed to dislike a piece of text we read, especially if it's one of my favorites, until we're done discussing it. I invoke this rule with the following pieces, generally: "Young Goodman Brown," "A Rose for Emily," The Great Gatsby, and "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock." Like Warren, I know what my students can do well with and will "play well." Just like a piece of music, I sometimes think of reading a text with my students as playing a song together -- each of them contributes something to the analysis of the piece that helps the whole class understand the objective of the text.

So here's to you, Warren. Thank you for 15 years of high expectations, amazing musical experiences and opportunities, and just generally being awesome at what you do. You inspire me to be a better teacher every time I watch you direct and I feel so very lucky to have had all of the circumstances of life align so that I ended up at Mt. Carmel as a Marching Sundevil. Every Wednesday night rehearsal this fall has shown me that every single one of us that ever sat under your direction learned more than we probably ever realized, and for that, I will always be grateful. Cheers!

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.