A Day in the Life

5:00 a.m. Alarm clock sounds. Husband tries to do 20 push-ups by the time I turn off the alarm. This is not the land of "snooze." No no no. If I gave myself the option to think twice about getting up, it would not be happening. I try to not trip over a dog, cat, or human before reaching the alarm clock in the dark.

5:10 a.m.-6:30 a.m. Shower, yoga, lounge, eat breakfast. I like some quiet time in my morning. I like my day to be bookended by something that resembles human life so that I don't wake up working and go to bed working. In the morning I shower and drink some coffee on the couch while reading Tupelo's Daily Journal or Internet roughage. These days I usually check the weather to see if there's any chance of snow. Some of my co-workers have started calling me their meteorologist because they know if they catch me at the copier in the morning, I will be able to give them a report of today's predictions. I've also added about 15-minutes of yoga to my morning routine in the past week. Before I leave the house, Lloyd and I have breakfast together at the table.

6:35 a.m. - Leave the house and begin the north-ward trek. It's about 18 miles to Byhalia from Holly Springs. At the beginning of the year when I had a functioning CD player, I would usually sing along to some mix of Lady Gaga, Arcade Fire, and Neutral Milk Hotel. Channeling the maniacal diva and painful anthems of growing up were pep-up talks to myself in August. Now I listen to WEVL 89.9 out of Memphis.

6:55 a.m. - Arrive at school. Battle the copy machine and take my post in the cafeteria for duty. Make kids take off hoods and hats and try to elicit "Good morning"s from students in a world of nods and "What's up."

7:30 a.m. - Homeroom. Sustained silent reading time. Sometimes this is the best part of my day. A sea full of quietly reading sixth-graders: beautiful.

8:05 a.m. - First period. This is like my honors class. They are my editors and my reference point for the day. They help me correct mistakes and loopholes in my lesson. I can often gauge how the rest of the day will go based on what happens first period.

9:05 a.m. - Planning period! Time for lunch with Mr. Gioia and making amendments to my lesson if necessary. This hour is also known as pointless meetings time and subbing for other teachers.

10:05-1:05 I'll just lump third and fourth period together. I'm in the thick of things. This is the toughest time of my day. Kids are frenzied and hyped-up in the hour leading up to and the two hours after lunch. What ever happened to post-lunch sleepiness? For me, it's like each of my students grows another head and two more arms after lunch. Post-lunch farting also becomes a significant issue in fourth period. (Sixth grade, go figure).

1:10-3:00 Glory glory hallelujah! The homestretch of my day is fifth and sixth period. I get a little bit lighter in mood and crack some jokes with students at this time of day. My homestretch kids see a much weirder me than my morning and lunch kids.

3:00-3:30 Class is over, and babysitting begins. I hold second load bus students this semester. If kids are in their seats and the room is relatively quiet, we're good. I put on BBC's Life, and students become mesmerized by a screen.

I usually get home around 4:30 after assessing classroom damage from the day and packing up. My home afternoons consist of some variation of ice cream at Tyson's Drug Store on the square in Holly Springs, petting a cat and dog, speaking in strange voices, talking to Lloyd, and e-mailing/Facebooking. Around 5:30 it's time to start working again. I flush out my lesson for the next day, call parents, and grade. I take a dinner break, and then work ends at 9:00 or so. Then it's time to dance and jump around the house.

9:30 p.m. - I write for 10-minutes in a journal and then Lloyd and I say Compline, ending our day peacefully and with prayerful focus. Then I crash.

What kept me here through dark months

I have never seriously considered quitting the program. I've thought, "Wow, this really sucks. Do I really have to do this another year?" I've thought, "I am not naturally engineered for this kind of stress and turbulence. I do not like this pace of life one bit." I've thought, "I'll put in these two years. After that, no question, I'm out. This is in no way sustainable for me." I've thought, "If there were any way for the way I feel now to have been implanted in me at the time I decided to join MTC, I would not have decided to do this." 

Why did I never consider quitting? These factors come to mind. 

1. Commitment to community - I have a lot of respect and faith in what my school and administration are doing. I do feel like like we are a team and like progress is being made at my school. I feel like MTC is a key player in that change. I knew that the conditions at my school did not compare to the scale of stuff that happens in the Delta, and my generally having a distaste for what I was doing and the considerable stresses involved were not enough of a reason to quit.  I knew going in that this would be tough. Many MTC folks said there was really no way to describe how difficult it would be. I took listened and decided to commit anyway.  I felt no considerable threat to my sanity and well-being, so I knew I could stick it out. 

2. MTC camaraderie in my school - This ties in to commitment to community, but having several other current and former MTC teachers at my school makes me feel fortified. Even if I do not communicate with most of them at length daily or even weekly, just seeing each other in the hallway or lunchroom while shuffling boisterous kids to lunch and out to the buses makes a big difference. Sharing knowing, empathetic glances with other teachers on a parallel mission during the day is comforting and helps foster loyalty to my school. I can't imagine being in a school on my own without other MTC teachers. Beyond the casual daily encounters with other MTC teachers at school, being able to collaborate with another first-year on grade-level business is invaluable. Matthew and I suffered through summer school together in the same classroom, and now we continue to troubleshoot together. Having a partnership has been immensely helpful pragmatically and spiritually.

3. Saturday reunions - Although Saturday classes are generally unwelcome, I feel like Saturdays generally give me a new boost for teaching. They make me reflect on why I came here in the first place, and I usually leave with those reasons renewed in a way. While a lot of Saturday is a vent session, I am often able to see a school problem I've been having with fresh eyes. 

I know I haven't offered any suggestions here for what MTC can do to improve. I've just been trying to unlock what has kept me here. One suggestion that comes to mind is not adding obligations and responsibilities to a class mid-year. We experience so much change and inconsistency in our work that I have found I cling to stability and knowing what to expect in other areas of life more than I ever have. While I was not opposed to call logs, I feel like that would have been better implemented with the next class and that it caused much anger and frustration among first-years. 

Turn this into a life that we can live

I'm becoming human again. Slowly. It starts with ten minutes each day devoted to writing. Add a little space for stillness in saying compline before bed each night with my husband. Mix in a neighborhood walk every other day or so. Even, dare I say, plan a weeknight dinner with friends. 


It's happening. Humanness returns. Little bits of self shine through even while I am teaching. It's becoming easier to see this time as plain ol' life rather than some sort of strange, glimmering torture I have committed myself to for two years. Each day is still a testament to the servitude of teaching, but it does not require forsaking all else. It does not leech energy from every corner of my selfhood. 


I've passed the threshold. I will survive. Scratch that. I will thrive. Let it not be said that I came here to wither. Let it not be said that I came here to surrender. Let it not be said that I came here with dreams and left with fears. 


This time is a heavy gift. I am a different person in many ways than I was in May. It was inevitable. My directness of communication at school has flowed into the way I communicate with family and friends. I'm not afraid to deliver words that I know people will not want to hear. I am more appreciative than I ever was before for the unconditional love of family and friends and the comforts of home. We were without heat and warm water at different times over the winter, and Lloyd and I became so grateful for those things afterward, keeping some of my students in mind who have neither heat nor warm water. 


Teaching could be an exercise in temporal acceptance. Oh, my husband has chipped nearly every one of our dishes in the sink? Not a big deal. I'm at home with someone who loves me, and no one is asking for a pencil sharpener or lead. Oh, we got locked out of our house at 11:00 p.m. on a Saturday night and have to break a window to get in? Not a problem. Nothing can mar the sweetness of Saturday, a day when no one will be saying, "Can you tell him to stop tapping his foot on my desk?" 


At times I have said that I never want to work again after these two years, that I have put in my working time. I have thought that I would make an excellent professional crafter. I could crochet and knit, quilt and make cards with sewn-on fabric and buttons and ribbons. They would involve a lot of bird and cotton boll images and things in the shape of Mississippi. I could make candles and mixed media clay sculptures. This would be a peaceful life. 


I have a sneaking suspicion, however, that home may never be such a place of sweet refuge and glorious play as it is now. I may never care less about broken dishes or smashed windows because I can't really afford to worry about these things right now. There's too much else to worry about. Ah, what am I saying? I'll always play. This time is just refining my play. 

Sometimes it is a wonderful life

Written 12-11-10: 

It was like all of Holly Springs decided to turn Christmas on at the same time. One school night Lloyd and I drove down Chulahoma Street and saw more wreaths and lights in succession than I can remember seeing in a long time. In past neighborhoods where I've lived, decorating was staggered from house to house, but here it seemed continuous and coordinated. 

Maybe it's because it's my first married (merry-ed) Christmas or maybe it's the stark contrast between stress and spirit, but Holly Springs is really the perfect place for the holidays. I became so overjoyed by the lights and the spirit of the town that we drove through the square and decided to go sit in the light-strewn, decorated gazebo on the square. 

Of course it couldn't be a Holly Springs Christmas without noticing that the city had strung the lights the wrong way in half of the gazebo such that there was no outlet within five feet of the plug. I guess they just called it a day and went home. I also plugged in one unlit strand. And the lights that they had taken so much care to string like a canopy from the top most point of the courthouse were also left dark! But Holly Springs cheered me more than it Grinched me. 

I went to a Christmas tree farm for the first time to pick and cut down a tree. It was a small farm with some true Charlie Brown varieties, but the air was crisp and the cider was steaming. Perfect. It also would not be a small-town Mississippi teacher's Christmas without seeing one of my students wandering around in front of a trailer on a country road on my way back from the farm. 

Having a tree in my living room sparkling with my late grandmother's lights and handmade family ornaments casts a much brighter light on my weeknights. It doesn't even matter how many ornaments our cat, Fenian, attempts (and usually succeeds) to swat down or how many chocolate truffles our dog, Eppie, tries to sneak. 

I think it's comforting to see that life goes on as usual for the rest of the world around me. It's convinced me that my life goes on untouched by school in ways, too. Seasons come and go, and "this too shall pass." For now, Of course, the imminence of a true break certainly helps bring the cheer. 

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. 

Time to face the assessments

Assessment is a big weakness of mine right now. It just seems like there are not enough hours in the day to properly grade and process my students' work. As a writing teacher, I could spend countless hours reading the work of my 140 students and providing feedback. If I spend merely one minute on each student's work, that comes out to 140 minutes--2 hours and 20 minutes. And it certainly takes me longer than that...

On top of that, I started out with no real idea of what effective assessment looks like. How do I effectively measure student learning of an objective when there are so many variables: word choice and format of the questions, comprehension and recall, the amount of time testing takes? It's overwhelming at best and sometimes seems impossible. I have hope, however, that the more I get the hang of the everyday motions of being a teacher--lesson planning, issuing and documenting consequences, calling parents, attending meetings, handling paperwork--the more time and energy I will have to assess my students before, during, and after learning objectives.

The chapter we read on "Classroom Assessment of Literacy Growth and Content Learning" was helpful in providing ideas and models of assessment. I particularly liked the idea of having students create learner autobiographies in which they "examine their personal histories as readers, writers, and learners both in and out of school" (101). It would be helpful to understand a student's experience with and feelings toward the subject area in his or her own words. The Observational Checklist to Screen for Struggling Readers was also helpful in providing ideas for informal assessments. I liked its specificity in body language and the links between content comprehension and behavior.

I agree that effective assessment involves students as partners. I liked the idea of having students recommend possible assessment activities, create rubrics, use rubrics in grading their own and each others' work, and engage in self-reflection about their performance. I have used rubrics in editing and peer review in the past, but I would like to challenge students to create a rubric for an assignment in the future. I also liked the idea of fill-in-the-blank learning inventories such as: "This week I really liked ______ because __________; what really confused me this week was __________; and I would like to know more about ________ because _________." I think that for my sixth graders this would seem less intimidating and would provide more structure than simply asking questions reflecting on the material.

I think I will return to this chapter in the future as a resource for assessment ideas and as a guide for specific modes of assessment.