Ten things I say in class…
1. I love you. Now shut up and write.
2. Really? No; REALLY?!
3. How’s that workin’ out for you?
4. La-la-la-la-la! Don’t TELL ME these things!!
5. Read that out loud… do you talk the way you write?
6. You? YOU! Are my favorite kid right now.
7. Did you read the instructions? No? I didn’t think so; go back and read the instructions. REALLY READ them…
8. … and what would you like ME to do about that…?
9. Close your computers.
10. I love you, too.
HOW DO YOU KNOW YOU ARE A TEACHER?
by Jeff Foxworthy
1. You can hear 25 voices behind you and know exactly which one belongs to the child out of line.
*I can totally do this. What freaks the kids out is that I can tell who is WHISPERING. My eyesight may suck, but my hearing is PERFECT.
2. You get a secret thrill out of laminating something.
*Not so much laminating, but I love turning stickers into magnets.
3. You walk into a store and hear the words “It’s Ms/Mr.> _________” and know you have been spotted.
*heh
4. You have 25 people that accidentally call you Mom/Dad at one time or another.
*this happens to me more often than I expected, given that I teach high school…
5. You can eat a multi-course meal in under twenty minutes.
*I usually keep my lunches simple
6. You’ve trained yourself to go to the bathroom at two distinct times of the day: lunch and planning period.
*Yep
7. You start saving other people’s trash, because most likely, you can use that toilet paper tube or plastic butter tub for something in the classroom.
*I do this, too, but more for the art teacher than for myself.
8. You believe the teachers’ lounge should be equipped with a margarita machine.
*Actually, we’re campaigning for a wet bar…
9. You want to slap the next person who says “Must be nice to work 8 to 3 and have summers off.”
*Don’t even get me STARTED!
10. You believe chocolate is a food group.
*Isn’t it??
11. You can tell if it’s a full moon without ever looking outside.
*I can also tell who’s expecting her period
12. You believe that unspeakable evils will befall you if anyone says “Boy, the kids sure are mellow today.”
*DON’T JINX US!!!
13. You feel the urge to talk to strange children and correct their behavior when you are out in public.
*Yeah, but I wanted to do that even before I was a teacher…
14. You believe in aerial spraying of Ritalin.
*Not so much with this, but I DO want to regularly hose the kids down with Lysol, the little germ factories…
15. You think caffeine should be available in intravenous form.
*DUH!
16. You spend more money on school stuff than you do on your own needs.
*This is true. I was astounded when I added up my “teacher receipts” from last year.
17. You can’t pass the school supply aisle without getting at least five items!
*Hi, I’m Mrs. Chili, and I’m an office supply addict…
18. You ask your friends if the left hand turn he just made was a “good choice or a bad choice.”
*Not so much with this one…
19. You find true beauty in a can full of perfectly sharpened pencils.
*I do
20. You are secretly addicted to hand sanitizer and finally,
*I am
21. You understand instantaneously why a child behaves a certain way after meeting his or her parents.
*Oh, dear GOD! You have NO idea how true this is!
Filed under funniness, little bits of nothingness
When writing a note, email, or letter to an English teacher, it’s probably best not to use words like “gonna,” “wanna,” or “hafta.”
I added to it to expand my point, i had an incomplete for my grade, I’m guessing that meant i could re-work it. If you wanna look at it that would be great. thanks.
-Sharon
Also, “I” as a personal pronoun is always capitalized.
That is all…
Filed under bad grammar, dumbassery, frustrations, little bits of nothingness, really?!
My teacher- and blogging buddy Ricochet posted an interview over on her site. I was just thinking this morning that I haven’t posted here in a while, so I’m posting this. Thank you, Honey, for posting the questions by themselves; I wasn’t sure I could manage not peeking at your answers before I wrote my own.
My background information is that I am in my 5th year of teaching in a high school (though I have taught at the junior college and university level, as well) in the Northeast. I teach English, writing, literature, poetry, public speaking, critical thinking, and film as literature.
Interview:
How was actually teaching different from what you expected it to be when you went into teaching?
Teaching is both better and worse than I expected it to be in college. Truly, nothing that happens in a college classroom can prepare one for the experience of being a teacher; despite their best efforts to get us prepared for classroom management and curriculum design and all the day-to-day stuff that happens, there’s really no substitute for being in it. Honestly, I don’t think that someone who hasn’t taught in the field in the last few years has any business teaching a class that prepares teachers for their jobs; I have no problem with someone who’s never (or not recently) taught giving classes in the respective disciplines, but the classes specifically designed to teach people how to function in an honest-to-Goddess classroom should only be taught by people who actually do it (or have recently done it). Maybe that’s just me.
Anyway, I realized that I’m not answering the question. I guess my answer would have to be that I didn’t expect to do as much on-the-fly teaching as I do. I mean, I knew that I wouldn’t be following a plan word-for-word, but I find that I can go off on any of a million different fruitful tangents depending on what interests the students. A kid will pick up on some little detail or ask a question that I didn’t expect, and we’ll spend a whole class period exploring where that takes us. Personally (and professionally), I have no problem with that – in fact, I think it’s really wonderful – but it sometimes leads me to have to recalculate my trajectory for the semester.
What do people not know about schools or teaching that you wish they did?
I wish that people understood how emotionally invested in our work, and our students, we teachers are. Of course, there are the exceptions – I know for sure that I had teachers who were just going through the motions – but I would have to say that the greater percentage of people who go into teaching do it because they love their disciplines and they love their kids. I CARE about how well my students do; I know I have something to give them that will help them get along in the world, something that will ease their way and make their lives richer and more productive. It matters to me that my kids are safe and well cared for. It matters to me that they be given the space they need to grow and change and to sometimes fall flat on their faces. I know I didn’t go into this work for the money (she says with a sharp edge of bitterness in her voice), and I resent the fuck out of people who discount the work that we do because of their perception of the hours that we (supposedly) work. These people take no heed of the fact that teachers are building human beings – the future citizens of our world – and that is no small thing.
What do you think is the biggest problem facing educators today?
The single biggest problem that faces education is that we SAY we value it, but we don’t BEHAVE as though we do. I won’t even tell you how much money I spent out of my own pocket because there are simply no funds for things like paper and pens and books. I hold book fairs and bake sales and I beg my friends and family and the members of my community to give our school the things we need because we don’t have the money to buy them. We talk a good game about how America needs to be on the cutting edge of science and technology, yet we do practically nothing to serve the kids who are in our schools right now.
There’s a bumper sticker that says something like “it will be a great day when schools have all the money they need and the military has to hold a bake sale to buy another bomber.” Our priorities are NOT what we claim them to be, and until we start behaving as though education matters, it will all be just so much lip service.
What is the best thing about teaching?
The kids, without question. I ADORE my students, and I bear each and every one of them a particular variety of maternal love (though I will admit to loving some more than others). I have formed great relationships with most of my students since I began doing this work, and it is the exchanges and interactions I have with my students that I find most rewarding about this job. There is little that equals the high of seeing a kid finally GET something that she’s been struggling with for however long we’ve been working on it; the look of “Oh, my GOD, I GET IT!!” that crosses their faces is just fantastic, and the fact that they’ll never think the same way again is something that I treasure. I’ve been fortunate to witness a lot of those moments (I call them “Helen Keller moments” in honor of the famous scene at the water pump), and the potential for more is what keeps me hooked on this work.
I’m also in love with my discipline, and getting to share that with a new group of kids every year is more fun than I expected it to be. I get to read and talk about books for a living! Really; how can that be bad?!
Where do you see yourself ten years from now?
My intention is to keep doing what I’m doing, though I can’t say for sure that I’ll be doing it WHERE I am now. I teach at a tiny charter high school whose long-term future is somewhat murky (between funding and the disposition of the Department of Ed toward charter schools, we’re not sure whether we’ll see ten years though, in a fit of optimism, the board signed a 20 year lease with our current landlords, so….). Mr. Chili jokes that I’m his retirement plan, so it’s a good thing I like what I do, because he plans on my doing it for a while. I’m okay with that; I’m still excited to get up and go to work every morning. Someone once said that if you find something you love to do, you’ll never work a day in your life. I think that someone was exactly right.
…before I pop a freaking vein.
Oh dear GODDESS! After the weekend spent listening to students’ excuses about why they couldn’t finish all their work (and grading the work they DID do), this was EXACTLY what I needed to see.
I’m taking a cue from Mamie and listing ten things that I say (often multiple times in a day) over the course of my professional life.
1. Less talking, more writing!
2. I don’t know; what do YOU think?
3. You know I can hear you whispering, right?
4. ONE butt to a chair, please.
5. Did you REALLY just say that out loud and in front of witnesses?
6. ….AND….? Give me more!
7. Oh, DO quit your whining. You have to do ONE homework assignment; your teachers have to grade and enter them ALL….
8. If you don’t ask, the answer is always ‘no’.
9. Stop saying “like” (this usually renders them temporarily speechless, often amusingly so).
10. You know I love you, right? (usually uttered before the delivery of some form of verbal smack down).
I discovered the other day that some of my freshmen are keeping a running log of the things that I say that they think are funny. I know for sure that they copied down “I need to take up coffee… or maybe rum,” the other day, which was my response to their being completely wound up and uncontrollable at 8:00 on a Monday morning. When the list gets to ten, I’ll publish them for you; I think you’ll be surprised by some of the things that get said in my classroom…
You’d think, given my lack of consistent posting, that I wasn’t doing anything worth writing about. Nothing could be farther from the truth. In fact, it’s been a couple of hellacious weeks at CHS, so much so that I’ve not really had time to do much writing beyond what has been strictly required for work.
The short version is that we’re all neck-deep in Alice in Wonderland (and the kids STILL think that Carroll was a stoner pedophile… sigh), and we’ve got about three weeks before grades close for the quarter, so I really need to light a fire under their collective butts to get a major writing project done early enough before the quarter ends for me to have sufficient time to grade and register them. We managed to get through mandatory state testing (hallelujah!), though, and I’m feeling pretty confident that everyone is finally clear on the new English Department standards for the culminating project that is required of every student, so YAY on that!
The next few weeks will bring some plot and character analysis, along with a little bit of play with symbolism, for the freshmen and a crash course in how to interact with scholarly articles for the juniors and seniors (I’m going to write, in a day or so, about the complete and total FAIL a couple of my kids pulled the other day – watch this space; it’s going to be a doozie). I was able to get my credentials reinstated at Local U (many thanks to my once and future supervisor!) so I’ve been combing the databases looking for articles my kids can sink their teeth into without feeling so inadequate that they give up on the idea of college altogether. Really, I’m trying to be for them what I wish *I* had when I started college; I remember jumping into my first “real” critical analysis and wondering whether there were something essentially and terribly wrong with me. I could understand all the words, but the way they were put together made NO sense to me the first, oh, I don’t know, 2 dozen times through. If I’d had someone to walk me through how to unpack those dense and complex articles, I’d have felt much more confident about myself. I don’t want them to have to freak out on their own; I’d much rather they freak out with me there to reassure them that they ARE smart enough to run with the big intellectual dogs.
Lastly, I want to give you this. I very rarely laugh out loud over this sort of thing, but this one hit me exactly right. I’m only glad that I hadn’t just taken a sip of something when I opened it…
Filed under little bits of nothingness
Yesterday, I posted an entry on the Blue Door in which I said that I was too busy to blog about some things, and one of the things I was too busy to blog about was the fact that in every single class I ran on Thursday, I was able to pull off what I call “Helen Keller” or “light bulb” moments; that glorious few seconds when a kid leaps from “I don’t get it” to “OH! NOW I see!!“ I live for these moments, and the fact that I was able to execute the same one in all three of my core English classes was kind of a record for me. I needed to share.
The entirety of CHS is reading Alice in Wonderland. Several of the kids have read it before (and a number of them are familiar with bits of the story through various film interpretations), but none of them has analyzed it yet; they’ve read it for the surface stuff, but really haven’t taken the time to really think about all the weird shit that happens in the novel. I had suspected that the kids were blowing through the book without really getting what they were reading, and I suspected that they were missing some of the funny stuff, so I decided to point something out to them to see if I was correct.
At the very outset of the story, Alice impulsively follows a waistcoated white rabbit down his hole and finds herself falling for what feels like forever; she has time to observe the walls around her and to investigate an empty jar of orange marmalade, and then she starts thinking about how she’s going to apply this experience to her life when she returns to it (though she doesn’t really give a thought as to how she’s going to get out of her predicament; her impulsivity is something which serves as a constant through the novel). She thinks to herself:
“After such a fall as this, I shall think nothing of tumbling down-stairs! How brave they’ll all think me at home! Why, I wouldn’t say anything about it, even if I fell off the top of the house!” (which was very likely true.)
I read that passage aloud and asked the kids to really think about what was being said here, both by Alice and by our narrator (who, it turns out, has a flair for snark). They read it, and read it again, and really didn’t see anything much to it. Just when they started thinking that I was seeing something that wasn’t really there (“because English teachers do that all the time, you know; they try to find something deep and meaningful in everything!”), one girl gasped and her eyes got HUGE and I pointed at her and said “SHHHHH! Let them work it out for a little longer!”
Of course, this got them all riled up; they HATE it when one of them is in on a joke that they don’t get, so they went back to the passage and tried to will themselves to figure it out. One by one, a few more kids got the joke, and when about five of them were bouncing in their seats wanting to explain it to all the other kids, I pointed back to the first girl and said “GO!”
“YOU GUYS!” she said, “The narrator is telling us that she wouldn’t say anything if she fell off the top of the house because she’d be, like, DEAD! She LITERALLY wouldn’t say anything about it because she’s be a smear on the sidewalk!”
Yes, my lovely; that’s it exactly.
That scene played out, in almost exactly that way, in all three of my classes. It was awesome. My hope is that this little exercise will inspire my babies to read more carefully, and with an eye toward the snarky and ironic. We shall see if my hope is well-founded.
I love my job.
* The first progress reports are done. Next week we run parent-student conferences for three days straight (Bob; rum and Coke at Chez Chili every night!)
* I feel like I have fewer failing students than I’ve had in the past, but those who are failing are doing so with gusto. I also have at least two students with perfect scores. Everyone else is in the middle. It would be interesting to see a graph of how that settles out.
*I’ve got this one kid, let’s call him Terrance, who sends me emails that look like this:
can u tell me whr i can get the book
That’s it. No salutation, no capital letters, no punctuation and, in some cases, no English words. Even better, some of the papers he’s handed in for a grade have text-speak in them, as well. I’ll be beating proper grammar conventions into his entire class next week. I hope his classmates appreciate it.
* I’m working on co-creating an outreach club at the school. I have connected with an activist mother to get some students mobilized with the goal of promoting acceptance for GLBTQ kids in our community. I feel like we’ve got that issue pretty much knocked inside the walls of CHS, but I know for sure that it’s not that way in the town at large. More info on this as it happens; we’re literally in the nascent, “how-do-we-make-this-happen” stages. I’m really excited about it, though; I can’t just sit by and let another baby take his own life.
How’s YOUR school year going so far?
Filed under little bits of nothingness
I’m gearing up to show my Film and Lit kids The Empire of the Sun. I think that may be why this song has been in my head, off and on, for the last few weeks.
I asked Punk’s flute teacher to bring her the music, and they practiced it today. Once she gets the timing down, it’s going to be tear-worthy on the flute.
I’m betting that Murphy doesn’t know this song (yet; he’s in my Film and Lit class….). If it’s still in my head tomorrow, I’ll hum it for him
