Expanding my comprehension of comprehension

I feel so many inadequacies as a new teacher. There are far too many to enumerate. I always leave my readings feeling like I'm now even more aware of what I am NOT doing to help my students, but where is the energy and the time to develop all of these strands of improvement? It often seems like some kind of voodoo is required to harness the powers of all of these strategies of assessment, classroom management, and literacy aligned with the curriculum and still be a living, breathing human being.

How will I get through this? Will I go get through this? Certainly I will but at what cost? My health, my friendships, my family relationships, my sanity, my faith in human kind, my faith in myself?

Ok, I'm kind of in a rut, and I'm at home sick with a throbbing sinus infection, so I'll try to focus on practices for expanding comprehension, as I'm called to do.

Over and over I have been told that we need not only teach our curriculum but also teach strategies for thinking through our curriculum. For example, our students do not know how to go through the internal questioning process required to determine which of the eight parts of speech this word "sleep" actually is.  I need to model for them how they should be approaching this task. "Is this word a person, place, thing, or idea? If yes, then it's a noun. Does this word show action? Is this word a form of "be"? Does this word describe something?..."  I need to give them a framework for thinking through these problems.

I've also found that my students overlook key words that clue in skilled readers to important parts of the text. "Where is our most important reason in this paragraph? .... Do you see any words or phrases that clue us in to one reason being more important than all the others? ... Yes, there it is, the phrase 'most of all.' And which reason follows that?"

At first it was a bit baffling to me that all but a few of my students did not register this type of distinction in text. All of the words seem to look the same to them, and the importance of the words they read seem to lack hierarchy. Unfortunately I feel like I have done little in these thirteen or so weeks to help them see those distinctions on their own. I continue to guide them through these questioning techniques but have done little to give them the tools to do it without my direction. I found the "List of Common Connecting Words and What They Signal" to be helpful in spurring ideas for how I could present these text clues to them.

Other resources that I found helpful were the illustration of text mapping, the opinionnaires, and the class discussion strategies. I feel like partner and group work would greatly benefit my students. My sixth-graders find it very difficult to stay quiet in the classroom, and they all want to make a comment at the same time. However, I'm still in that novice/insecure teacher mode of not feeling confident enough to take the risks that come with group work.

Let's keep this in perspective. Six months ago I knew almost nothing about teaching or managing a classroom. I've had my own classroom for four months. At this point, I may be learning more than they are. I suspect that they are learning something in spite of my learning curve.

Five rollings and October's gone

I wrote this mid-October:

The funk of October has set in without my permission, and yet it feels like October is extinguishing itself. I drift in and out of days and weeks like a long morning sleep--not to be confused with my actual abrupt wake up at 5:15 a.m. October feels like a waking dream;  it's almost black when I pull out of the driveway in the morning, and before I can shake off the mental replays of the day, it's dark again. 

How am I already halfway through the month? It's crept in and out like the vanishing day-lit hours I get to live at home. It was set up to be the great white shark lurking in the water. It's more of a lingering, nagging dark albatross than a great white. 

Funny thing is, I'm a creature of the night. It was very difficult at first for me to force myself to go to bed at 10:00. I love the darkness and the adventurous, unknown landscape that night provides. Late night drives, impulsive hour-long e-mails written to old friends about the latest life revelations, sitting and staring to music, reading my favorite poetry call-and-response style with Englishy friends…whatever it is that kept me up until 2 a.m. most nights for no real reason. 

The difference between the night then and the night now is that the darkness feels oppressive. It means that I'm that much closer to the next cycle of school day. Darkness means time to go to school in the morning, and at night darkness means time to plan my next day's lesson. Darkness does not mean adventure and wandering freedom; it means responsibility and obligation. 

I've reflected on the questions, "What's the deal with October? Why do people loathe it so?"  While I was resistant for awhile to giving October the special attention as "the most difficult month," I must admit that it got the best of me. There are the obvious reasons: the accumulated tiredness, the end of the honeymoon period of student behavior, the classroom floor getting streakier and streakier by the day, and the papers piling up. 

In my case, I noticed that I was a bundle of emotions for the last half of the month. I felt like I had regressed. School seemed more daunting again; one Monday morning, I literally cried my way out the door. I think that after the first nine weeks came to a close, I felt more pressure on myself. I could see clearly my failings from the first nine weeks, and as I became more knowledgeable and gained more experience, I had the classic consciously incompetent person's revelation: I know close to nothing about what I'm doing. I was terrified that at parent-teacher conferences I would be discovered as a fraud. This type of scenario was playing through my head: "Yes, I teach your baby. Do I know why she got such a low grade on test 3? What did she not understand about the material? You know, I can't really pinpoint it, but it may have been the fact that I taught the material in a confusing order, and by the time I figured out how to teach it the right way, all the students were bored with the material." 

The self-examination set in. What am I doing here? Am I helping anyone? Am I teaching anyone anything? Why am I putting myself through this experience if I'm not even helping anyone? 

But there were excellent, affirming moments, too! Like when I received a letter from a student on a day when nothing seemed to go right:

"Dear Ms. Gray,

You are a nice teacher and I love your class very much that I want to go to your class in 1st period but it be board in Homeroom time.

So sometimes you are not mean you are nice on everything you have or got and I promise that you are not going to have a fit on every student at school.

From: KJ

P.S. Ms Gray how old are you?

And another thing: you are sweet like candy."

On the non-school life front: 

The Holly Springs community seems to be heartily welcoming Lloyd and me. This is evidenced by the fact that our house has been rolled or attempted to be rolled with toilet paper five times in the last three weeks. Each one is a story. The common thread is that all the stories involve Lloyd and me chasing the Marshall Academy kids down the road; the variations involve our injuries (sharp pebble lodged in the bare foot, large asphalt cuts on the palms) and our tricks  (hoses, a sawed-off baseball bat, vegetable oil, Mrs. Butterworths, taking hostages, calling police, and sprawling on the hood of a getaway car). I've seen something very strange in myself in a couple of the instances. When I'm roping in those private school rollers to clean up our yard, I hear Mrs. Gray. I never would have said those things to those kids before I was a teacher. Mrs. Gray had edged her way into Catherine.