Trying to Wing It

One of the best parts about being a lit major was that a significant portion of my grade came from answers that could be fudged. Some may call them BS answer; I call it using semantics to my advantage. After several degrees in this field, some might call me an expert in answering a question that you have no idea how to answer, but more importantly for me these days is my ability to spot the non-answer in my students’ work.

Lucky for me, I teach middle school. By the time they leave high school, students have learned how to play the game, what words to use to subconsciously persuade the teacher that they do know what they are taking about and aren’t just guessing blindly. It is MUCH easier for me to spot the kids who are winging it. They are starting to learn the tricks of the trade, but they have not mastered this craft.

On tests, I can often spot the non-answers to open-ended questions through their vagueness. Give an example of the theme “You must fight to survive.” “The main character fights through it all and in the end survives.” “This is shown in many parts of the book including when she fought to survive.” Nice try, but even the first-year teacher would recognize that as a big flashing, “I don’t know.”

Other times, the BS can be spotted because of the awkward and illogical response scribbled on the page. What is the symbol in this passage, and what does it represent? “The gray mist represents how maimed their passion was.” “His foot represents a new beginning.” (By the way, there was no mention of a foot in the passage I provided for this question.) Neither of those answers makes any sense. It wasn’t that you didn’t read the book the students are referencing; those answers make no sense because the students didn’t read it either.

But, my favorite non-answers to spot are the I-didn’t-study-vocab-but-I-will-wing-it vocabulary sentences. My school stresses knowledge of parts of speech, and it does come back to haunt me a little bit on vocab tests. Students write vague sentences with the word as the correct part of speech, and I get to determine if the sentence is BS or worth points. See if you can spot the kids who don’t know the meaning of the italicized word.

-The character was very frugal.

-The vermin was planning a plot of revenge.

-His legs were astride at the roll call.

–Indulgently, I helped the little boy onto the train.

-She was bewildered to find out about the good news.

None of these students earned credit, but there is a possibility that all of them studied and just weren’t sure how to properly use the word or that they were completely winging it. One day, they will be better at faking their way through a test, but for now, I usually win. I’ve added that to the list of reasons I love teaching middle school.

Just an Ordinary Day

Situation: You and me at a party, chatting, laughing, commiserating about whatever political fiasco is dominating the 24-hour news cycle. You ask how my classes are going this year, because you’re a nice person, and it’s polite to ask how others are doing, or so your mother told you when you were but a little thing.

I’m now torn between the truth and returning your politeness. I am taking a huge risk if I begin to complain about my work, so to anyone out there who has heard one of my many complaints, take it as a compliment, I trust you and trust that you understand me. The reason it’s a risk is because, and I’m sure every teacher has faced this retort countless times, I get summers off.

“It can’t be that bad. At least you get summers off.”

Yes, very observant person standing at this imaginary party with me, you are clearly astute, and thank you for bringing to my attention something I hadn’t considered before I began to complain.

“Oh, I hadn’t thought of that. Yes, you’re correct. Everything about teaching is fine because I get summers off.”

I know you mean no harm, but really, do you honestly think all the red tape, hoop jumping, kissing up, and other BS in my job is less stressful or upsetting or time consuming since I have summers off? It’s actually the opposite. Take your 12 months of to-do items at another job, and now condense that same list into 9 months. I don’t have less to do; I just have less time in which to accomplish it.

There are days I am certain that I’m a cartoon mouse scurrying around the building, poking my head into rooms, up and down stairs, eating while I walk. So, I thought I’d break down a fairly average day for me. I’m not going to exaggerate or squeeze in multiple high-stress situations or ludicrous incidents in order to make my point. This ordinary day for me is none of the following:

• It’s not a faculty meeting day, meaning I have to stay after school for an extra hour.
• There’s no 7:30 am teacher meeting called over the speaker at the last minute, throwing my morning routine into a tizzy.
• It’s not a parent meeting day, when a parent will come in to speak to my team and me for 40 minutes, eating up one of our planning periods.
• It’s not a high-drama day when there is a medical emergency, fire drill, tornado drill (because we do those where I teach), bomb threat (because we had one of those where I teach), stranger-in-the-building lockdown drill (because every school has those these days).
• It’s not when I’m on lunch duty, thus losing a planning period in order to monitor the Poptart intake of 300 savages (see earlier post about the cafeteria).

This is an ordinary day for me:

6:45 am: Pull out of my driveway and head to work.

7:15 am: Arrive at school 15 minutes before I have to be in the building because I want to run copies, and if you arrive any later than 7:15, you will NOT be able to make copies before first period, despite the fact that the person in line in front of you doesn’t have a first period class and could easily run copies then.

7:25 am: Go to copy room to find that the copier is jammed. Walk downstairs to find that the other copier has a line of people who want to run 2-sided packets, hole punched, and stapled…really people.

7:35 am: Finally un-jam the upstairs copier and run my copies. (Notice how I’m omitting the detail where the copier continues to jam, and despite the fact there is no paper on the paper tray, the copier believes there is and won’t continue until, exasperated, I shut it down and restart the entire mammoth contraption. Nor am I including the moment when there are no staples in the copies, so I now have to hand staple 120 packets for my students. I’m leaving out those details because I want to show an ordinary day, not my Murphy’s Law day – that’s tomorrow.)

7:45 am: Return to my room to find two students waiting for me with questions about their research. S1:“Can you read my paper?” Me: “I’ll read part of it. What part are you nervous about?” S1: “The whole thing.” S2: “If you’re going to read his, can you also read mine?”

7:50 am: Phone rings. (This could be that I have to cover another teacher’s class because that teacher is out for the day, but that’s also not part of my ordinary day. Notice how honest I’m being.) It’s the secretary telling me that the principal needs to see me for a moment to discuss the novel I’m teaching. (Unfortunately, it IS part of my day to check in with the office because someone in the main office always has a question for me.)

7:55 am: A colleague sticks her head in the door and asks about when we can meet to discuss the cross-country schedule for next fall. She has to set up meets and wants my input. I tell her that we’ll touch base after school.

8:02 am: My first period says the Pledge of Allegiance, and my day has actually started.

I teach five sections of eighth grade. In between, and sometimes during, those classes, here are other things I accomplish on an average day:

• Meet with the principal to answer his question about the novel.
• Receive email from parent who claims her daughter is having trouble taking notes and wants to know if I can help. The email chain will go something like this:

o   Me: We actually don’t take notes in my class right now, and she did fine taking notes for the first 6 months of the school year.

o   Parent: It’d be really helpful if you could send me your notes.

o   Me: Again, I don’t have any notes. The students are writing an essay; there are no notes.

o   Parent: Then why is my daughter having trouble with notes?

o   Me: Sigh and no response.

• Fill in IEP paperwork for two students because that paperwork is due today, and there’s no time left to procrastinate.
• Send my homework assignment to our website coordinator, who uploads it to the school’s site.
• Upload my attachments for my homework to my own web page, including vocabulary lists and rubrics, neither of which the students will look at, and both of which they will ask for extra copies.
• Realize that a student will be out next week on a family trip and that another student has been absent for three days with an illness. Hurry to gather their materials, track down the former student to give him what he’ll miss (although he won’t do it and will be annoyed when he gets back that he’s so far behind), and take the absent student’s work to the office. Email absent student’s parents to say there is work in the office.
• Receive email from a parent who wants to know if her son did the independent reading for this grading period.

o   Me: He did not.

o   Parent: But he told me he did.

o   Me: There is no record in the computer of your son having tried to take a test to prove he read a book independently.

o   Parent: This is very alarming. Can you take him to the library so he can take that test?

o   Me: No, your son is 14. If he can’t find the library, there’s no help for him. (Ok, I never send that email, but that’s what I’m thinking.)

o   Parent: Can you call me? I’d like to talk about the independent reading. I don’t think he understands what he’s supposed to do. (I’ll call her tomorrow, so I’ll leave that out of my ordinary day summary.)

• Pass back graded papers in class and answer any and every question students have about it. Collect anything and everything from anyone who has ever been absent.
• Put grades for that late homework into the online grading system so that parents can see their child’s grades. (Parents either never check grades or obsessively check grades, and either way, it’s frustrating.)
• See special educator in the hallway. She asks about her students, so I spend 10 minutes relaying who did and did not turn in recent homework assignments and what tests and projects they should currently be working on. I then listen to her summarize her IEP meetings and what each parent said, even though I can’t really use this information; it’s just polite to let her vent.
• During one planning period each day, I meet with my department to talk about what we are teaching and to create lessons, handouts, tests, projects, rubrics, etc. I don’t complain about this because I like the people I work with.

 

My day ends with a study hall that I run as a Writing Center (this will surly be the topic of a future post). So my last 45 minutes every day consist of having students wander in and out of my room to ask questions about their writing, to work on computers, to work with other students, and any other manner of questions. After school, I’ll meet up with that teacher about cross-country. I’ll track down the teachers of students I tutor to see what they are covering in their classes and what is due when. I’ll print whatever I need for the next day. Then, I leave the building and wait to do it all again the next day.

I haven’t included any of the following in my ordinary, which, if you are not a teacher, you may not realize are part of my unspoken duties:

• Grade
• Create bulletin boards (in my building, having a current bulletin board is actually part of our formal evaluation)
• Hang student work in the hallways
• Email parents of students who are failing or missing work
• Meet with my team of core subject teachers to discuss our shared students
• Meet with my grade-level team to discuss schedule for eighth grade
• Distribute field trip permission slips; collect permission slips and money
• Coordinate with seventh grade teacher to find and train Writing Center students for next year
• Attend IEP meetings
• Attend curriculum meetings
• Answer any email any parent sends regarding any concern. I’ve included two instances above because I honestly get at least two parent emails a day, and by parent emails, I mean an online conversation that could be six or more emails back and forth to answer a single question. Most emails are benign, but believe-you-me, I’ve had some doozies too.
• Call the dentist…wait, that’s a different list, although I’ve been meaning to call my dentist for a week now and haven’t found time to do it.

But, in our imaginary, party conversation, I’ll most likely avoid telling you all this. It makes me sound bitter and like a martyr. I knew what I was signing up for when I chose to be a teacher. I’m ok, most days, with jamming all my stress into 9 months like the photocopier jams all my papers into a crumpled, hot mess. I suppose my purpose here isn’t to make you think my job is harder than other jobs, but please don’t try to convince me that it’s easier. And, if you don’t mind too much, please limit how often you use summers off as your ammo against me. I think I’ve earned that summer off.

Simply Superb Sponges

I’m sure you’ve heard the cliché that kids are sponges that soak up everything they see and hear.  You might be especially familiar with this cliché if you have children of your own because you may have had to curb your swearing after your beautiful baby girl-turned toddler yelled “damn it” when she dropped her pudding.  Language acquisition is fascinating with amazing statistics about how your five-year-old can genuinely absorb something like twenty new words every day; that’s over 7,000 words in a single year.  Unsurprisingly, that number declines rapidly as we age, in part because we don’t hear twenty new words each day and in part because we aren’t all Sheldon from The Big Bang Theory with infinite storage in our brains.  I’ve read that at the middle school level, my students can still genuinely learn eight new words each week, but to do that, they need to hear the words, see the words, use the words, and create meaning with the words, as if they were five.  That’s why they pay me the big bucks, and perhaps at a later time, I’ll reveal my secrets for how I accomplish that learning feat.

But language acquisition isn’t really what I wanted to discuss.  I am continually reminded of the sponge metaphor even though my students are young adults because in a way we’re all still sponges.  Who among us hasn’t heard a fantastic joke on TV or in person and retold it to a group of friends?  Who can’t retell a particularly awesome scene of a movie or thrilling play their favorite sports team pulled off?  We see things, and part of our brain changes, maybe ever so slightly, but I think it does change.

And that’s one reason I have museum days in my class, days that I adore and part of the reason teaching middle school is preferable to any other level.  When I assign a project, I don’t want to be the lone audience, but creating an audience of peers can be difficult.  So, the day any project is due, all students display their work in the classroom and the entire period is spent in a scavenger hunt that requires all students to look at their classmates’ work.  Bam, genuine audience of peers.  Knowing that their classmates are going to peruse their work means that I no longer get crayon designs and a single piece of tape holding everything together.  If I taught younger students, I doubt they would care as much if their classmates liked their work; they seem to be teacher-pleasers in the elementary schools.

Reason 2 that I love museum days is that it allows students to absorb in their sponge-like ways their classmates’ creative ideas.  I know that there are parents who “help” too much, but regardless, by seeing what is possible, my students are often motivated to push themselves further on the next project and to emulate the best in the class.  When everyone has the same assignment, but everyone ends up with such different final products, students see that there are many ways to interpret and to accomplish the same goal, and I watch it drive their creativity on subsequent projects.  At a younger level, I’m not sure if the balance of student-parent work would be equal enough to merit spending class time to examine, and even if it were balanced, the students are too young to notice creative differences or to learn from them.

Students do textual analysis for one topic in a Shakespeare play. Displayed around the room in ABC order for Museum Day.

Reason 3 that I love museum days is that I design the scavenger hunt to act as a review for the unit’s content.  If we are studying Shakespeare, students look at their classmates’ projects to find facts that I will be testing; they have to find the answer and cite which project gave them the answer.  They enjoy looking at their friends’ work, and I know that they are reviewing important content while engaged.  If I taught high school, such a class activity would probably seem juvenile.  What sixteen-year-old wants to find an example of personification in a classmate’s poem? But if I call it a “scavenger hunt,” my thirteen-year-old students are instantly tricked and forget that they are doing work.

And the final reason that I love museum days is it makes grading much easier.  I’m a pretty busy person and projects are usually bulky and impossible to take home to grade.  While my students are on their scavenger hunt, enjoying the creative work they see, I am grading.  If you design a good enough rubric, you can quickly evaluate the level of success each project attains.  In a forty-minute period, I can usually grade between fifteen and twenty projects.  I am not carting home giant posters or scrapbooks or dioramas; I am evaluating during the class period and saving myself hours of work.

Now that I’ve convinced you that museum days are the best for students and teachers, let me share some of the brilliant ideas my students have showcased so you can see why I love teaching eighth grade.  I had a student build a refrigerator out of cardboard, with trays in the doors and everything to display his work.  I had a student engineer a flag to project from the center of his project with string while still allowing for the project to lay flat for transportation.  I’ve seen duct tape used in every possible way you could imagine, to decorate backgrounds, to create 3-D people and objects, to outline, for barbed wire; the uses of duct tape are truly endless.  Students have melted crayons and attached the remaining half crayon as well as used the melted wax as a drizzled decoration.  Projects that collapse often have door handles to open them (and by door handles I mean drink bottles, rope, pine cones, and anything else you could hold and pull).  There are flashing lights with on-off switches and music that plays because the student ripped out the inside of a signing card.  There are pop-ups and pull-outs and even a pack of tissues attached to one project in case it made me cry.

LA Clue: What Happened to Edgar Allan Poe? Students created a “Clue” style board game with a layout of our school. The “players” are various authors including Shakespeare.

It’s important to share with you the trials I’ve faced in my classrooms and my frustrations, but I need you to see the beauty of being thirteen as well.  I need you to see this tender balance between childhood, sponge-like absorbing of knowledge and adult creativity and brilliance.  This must be one of the few times in a person’s life when they can still learn like a child but start learning what adults should know, not yet jaded, still impressionable.  Museum days make me feel like I make a difference.