Take Two

The overall impression of my second video is that I seem more confident and ready to respond to the unplanned. I don't talk quite as slowly because it's not like I'm just reading a script, and it's easier for me to focus. 

I seem to have a good rapport with students who regularly answer questions and a rocky rapport with students who regularly get consequences, but the students who are in the middle don't get enough of my attention. 

The bad news first:

-There are several heads down throughout this video. It's first period in the last week of school, and students are not into it at first. The bad thing is that I'm used to so many management issues usually that having heads down seems like a very minor issue when I'm up there teaching.

-There's too much noise during Guided Practice, and I'm once again not consistently issuing consequences.

-I tried to fit too much into one lesson and should have left more time for Independent Practice. 

-I don't make it around to enough student desks during IP. It seems like my student interaction has dwindled in this video.

-The first half of class always drags and the second half is always rushed. I see that here.

-The relationship with a boy who was giving me trouble in the first video has only gotten worse. He thinks I single him out to get him in trouble, and now he refuses to come up to the board to write his answer like everyone else has. Later that week he would tell me that I did not let him come to the board to write his answer when everyone else got to go to the board.

Improvements:

-I make it easier on myself by having student helpers. I have a student erasing the board and other students passing out papers.

-I get all but a couple kids to the board in this lesson! The kids that did not go to the board chose to not participate in the activity.

-I change the lesson up and integrate math by having students graph coordinates for their quiz results. It was cool to have students tell me about the x and y axes in my English class. It was like airing out a musty room. They were confused about why we were doing this in English, but I saw a few students light up. "M'Schmidt, it's rise over run!" 

-When I notice that several students are confused about graphing, I pair them with someone next to them who has finished the activity. 

-I seem less scattered and repeat directions a few times while standing in one place rather than wandering around while giving directions.

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Bam! Spice it up!

Watching the video of myself teaching is not horrifying, not painful, just bland and boring. I watch it with the same eerie detachment that I’ve felt at the end of many summer school days. I notice more of what is going on in the classroom--like, who threw that tiny wadded up piece of paper at me? How did I not notice that when it happened? I rewind the video four times, and I still can't tell. How on earth am I supposed to know in the moment? 

Impressions of Ms. Schmidt:

1. I talk really slowly. One of the second years told me to think of having a $100 bill for each class period. Each word is $1, and once you spend your hundred, you have no more. The kids aren't listening. Well, in the video, it's like I think $1 will be tripled if I just say one word in the amount of time it generally takes someone to say three words. It's so boring. 

2. I move around too much while giving directions. I'm usually looking for a handout or trying to locate something as I'm giving directions for an activity. This is very distracting, and it makes me talk in an even slower and disjointed manner because my mind is in two places. 

 3. I have good movement across the room, but my movement doesn't look methodical and purposeful enough. Sometimes I look like I'm ambling about senselessly, and other times it looks like the waitress effect--I rush over to any student who has a question.

4. I’m not consistent with consequences. I tell them one thing-- “This is a silent activity”--and then let a buzzing undercurrent wash through the room. I think back to what Dr. Monroe told me after observing me, "I was telling myself, 'She seems confident and like she knows what she's doing. Why isn't she giving out consequences?'" 

What surprised me was how much work students were actually doing. Much of the class period was Independent Practice because students were revising persuasive essays, but it surprised me that for the most part students actually did what I told them to do. It seems like just being up there as the teacher does give me some automatic power. 

Overall impression is that I seem calm and pretty confident, but I don’t seem on fire about the material. It doesn’t seem like learning the material is very important because I’m not excited about sharing it with the class. 

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Ms. Schmidt or: How I Learned to Stop Worrying and Love the Bombed Days

Haunting moments and affirming moments resurface daily from the summer. It's like I have a pensieve that I peer into every night, and all these memories come swirling into view.

"M'Schmidt, why can't you get some order in here?"  "Are y'all real teachers?" "I don't appreciate the way you been lookin' at me all summer. You lookin' at me like you don't like me." Then there was the girl who would ask every day on her way into breakfast, "You teachin' today?" "Yes, I teach every day." Blank stare. There's the image of one of the students cleaning up the room on the last day and taking down the "Classroom Teachers" sign, tearing off all the names except "Ms. Stewart" and "Ms. Lawrence," and then taping the sign back on the wall. 

I guess it's mostly the hauntings that pull me in.

The failures abound. Every day I came out of the classroom having no idea whether or not I actually taught the kids what I went in there to teach. All I knew was that someone flicked the overhead on and off, and five other people talked back when I gave out a writing assignment. I was so caught up in my living nightmare of management that I had no idea what kind of learning, if any, was taking place.

The weird and kind of scary thing is that I don't feel bad about what happened this summer. I feel almost embarrassingly at peace with what went on in English 11/12. The reality: two kids were expelled under my watch, and we could have prevented it; I could have prevented it with better management. Those kids needed that credit. The reality: there are kids in the class who should have failed but whom we could not in good faith fail because we did not have proper documentation. The reality: someone could have really gotten hurt in that room. And we were incredibly lucky that no one did. How can I be a good person and feel ok about this? How can I feel ok about utterly failing 27 kids who showed up every day, in theory, to learn?

The only explanation I have is that I know I did all I could with all I had every day this summer. I typically got 4-5 hours of sleep. If I wasn't planning for my kids, I was talking about them, trying to figure out what went wrong and how I could change the next day. I woke up at 5:30 and started over. I felt sick to my stomach many mornings, and I showed up. Every day I was there with a thorough plan, hurriedly navigated finicky copy machines, and forced myself to tell students things that would have been much easier unsaid in the moment. Every day I faced the students, and I faced myself.

This John Wesley quote comes to mind: 

“Do all the good you can,
By all the means you can,
In all the ways you can,
In all the places you can,
At all the times you can,
To all the people you can,
As long as ever you can.”

I feel like I did no less. Yes, there were countless mistakes and things I should have done differently, but I tried. I tried something fierce.

Ok, the affirmations, the little lights that flicker for a moment like a lightning bug in a night thick with Mississippi kudzu:

The three students who wrote on their evaluations that I was a particularly helpful teacher this summer. The several students who named one of my lessons as the favorite or most important thing they learned this summer. The boy who rushed in one morning and blurted, "Ms. Schmidt, I made a 20 on my ACT on my first try!" The girl who came to me during break one day--"Ms. Schmidt, I'm really having an issue with someone else in the class, and I wanted to let you know before something happens, and I disrupt the class." The boy who came in after a day of absence and said, "Good morning, Ms. Schmidt. I missed your class yesterday." 

I feel like resilience was one of the most important things we could have learned this summer. Showing up with a plan and ready to start a new day--sometimes that's all we'll have going for us this year. I made it through the summer. I made it through the summer. I can make it through the first nine weeks. And the second, the third, the fourth. Keep moving forward day by day. 

It's weird to think that only my students this summer will know me as "Ms. Schmidt." "Ms. Schmidt" will stay locked in time at Holly Springs High. I can see her at the overhead awkwardly positioning the transparency to fit on the screen. It's Mrs. Gray who will show up to teach sixth grade in August. Ok, class, let's try this again. 

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Here and there

I spend hour upon hour planning a lesson--making sure everything’s clear, flows well, will fit within a 50 minute period, and is relevant to my students’ lives. I walk into the room, and the moment the bell ringer begins, the material we’re learning that day is no longer my focus. It’s like I have a script for how we’ll go through the material, and my energy then shifts to making sure the room doesn’t devolve into chaos. This leaves very little room for the “teachable moment” because I’m plowing through my plan and afraid to deviate for fear of my lesson crumbling. 

There are the same students who act up day after day, and I feel torn at the start of every class. On the one hand, I don’t want to give them an inch to test me again. I want them to know I’m serious. On the other hand, I want them to start over new every day. I don’t want them to think I’ve pigeon-holed them. 

Small victories so far:

-I called a mom last Friday to introduce myself and to her update her on her child’s progress in the class. I told her that her daughter was doing really well in class, completing her work, and being respectful. The mom said, “Thank you so much for calling me. You don’t know it, but you just made my weekend. You really did. No one ever calls me to tell me that she’s doing well. I always expect bad things from her cause I don’t want to be proven wrong, but you just made me so happy.”

-There was a boy in Photo Club who never wanted to take any photos. Finally I pulled him aside and just put a camera in his hand. I asked him if he had used a camera before, and he said, “No.” He was a shy boy, younger than the other students in our group, and didn’t have much confidence, so I didn’t want it to be obvious to the other students in our group that he did not know how to use a camera. I just guided him in setting up a shot, demonstrated where the button was to take the photo, and modeled how to zoom in and out. The next few days he was more open to using the camera. The next week he was passing me on the way out of breakfast and fist bumped me as he said, “Yeah! Photo club!”

-One of the boys in my class has opened the door for me a few times and greets me with, “Good morning, Ms. Schmidt” or “Have a good afternoon, Ms. Schmidt.” I have an official greeting duty at the door to the cafeteria during breakfast, and more and more students are starting to look me in the eye at 7:30 in the morning and say, “Good morning” back rather than walking by with a blank stare. 

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Reluctant Disciplinarian

"How often do teachers get to witness a totally out of control classroom? Rarely, if ever. Yet it is only by observing such a spectacle that teachers can truly appreciate how important discipline is” (Rubinstein 38). 

 

Thank you, Mr. Rubenstein. I could not agree more. As a matter of fact, I get to witness a totally out of control classroom on a daily basis and often find myself at the center of this mayhem. In the past week, one thought that has returned to my mind over and over again is, "Thank God I'm in the midst of such a horrible mess of a classroom right now because I will definitely not be a softy by the time the school year arrives." 

I burst out in raucous laughter when I read fellow English 11/12  teacher Mr. Gioia’s invitation to our class:

"Mr. Rubenstein says that it may be far more helpful to see a classroom out-of-control, and on that note I want to invite everyone to come to the 11/12 EN classroom at some point in the next two weeks and witness the absurd spectacle that is the power struggle between myself and my class of really garrulous rowdy boys (and a couple girls) who just wanna have fun!  Come one come all."  

I extend this invitation to any of my lessons, in which you may hear a student call me “Ms. Snitch” and see another student taking off his shoes and urging the girls around him to smell them and then protesting, “But my feet hurt!” when I demand he put his shoes back on immediately. You may also find a student asking me at the height of mutiny, “All these teachers in this school--have y’all taught before? Are you real teachers?” and I may respond hesitantly, “Yes, we are teachers.” I can only imagine the showdown that will happen this week when the students realize that Mr. Gioia and I will be teaching them all day every day with the exception of Ms. Stewart’s occasional lessons. 

I think I’ll have to spend the next two weeks trying to redeem myself as a “real teacher,” as Rubinstein describes. This means that on Monday, Mr. Gioia and I need to give a rules speech. Our rules have been treated as suggestions in the past two weeks. We need to practice procedures. I need to be decisive and able to answer a student with a one-word answer in two seconds. I need to whip out that textbook and not be afraid to bore them with worksheets and copying down notes. This is obviously what they expect real teachers to do, and we are not convincing them. 

One thing that I really disagreed with in the Reluctant Disciplinarian was Rubinstein’s comment that you should not waste your time on a parent who believes their child is perfect and won’t believe you when you say that he/she did something wrong. Rubinstein suggests, “Don’t waste your time with this type of parent. If you don’t accomplish anything in your five minute time limit, just end the call and try to avoid contact with that parent in the future” (86). I think that is completely unreasonable and a horrible solution. I don’t think you should ever cut off communication with a parent because every parent deserves to know about his/her child’s progress, and simply cutting off communication and ignoring the problem is not a solution. Document, document, document. If you have enough documentation, I think most parents will work with you. 

The Reluctant Disciplinarian came at a good time in my teaching journey. I’ve had enough experience in the classroom to be able to relate to the examples and also enough exposure to shenanigans that I am hungry for some classroom structure. Here’s to killing reluctance. 

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Ready or not...

If there's one image that I'll remember from these few weeks in my life, I think it will be looking out the front of the bus the moment before we cross the old, rusty bridge on Highway 7 between Oxford and Holly Springs. At 6:50 in the morning, it often has this mythical quality with mist hanging over its edges. It's beautiful. Every morning, I find myself centered as we cross: The world works its beauty and wonders no matter what will happen that day at Holly Springs High. And that bridge will still be there on the drive home. I will, too. 

I can't believe we've only been teaching for two weeks now. Each day goes by so fast, and yet, they're longer days than I've ever lived. On average, I go to bed at 1:30 a.m. to wake up at 5:30 a.m. Each day is different and distinct, and yet, they all run together in my mind in retrospect. I'm a teacher. I do the teacher thing and end up talking about the classroom and my students for much of the time when I'm not at school. I guess it can only be expected since our lives currently revolve around Holly Springs High School and our future schools. I'm a teacher. It's still kind of hard to believe.

It surprised me how easy it was on my first day teaching to live into my teacher persona. I felt pretty natural, and the class was under control and engaged. I felt so relieved, grateful, and downright happy about the way my first lesson went that I cried that afternoon when the bus got back to Oxford. The next two weeks, however, came with less ease. I felt my class testing me more and more as they became comfortable in our room and maybe realized the temporary nature of our summer school interactions. I've been happy about the way I respond to my bad days. If one of my lessons goes poorly and the students don't respond in the way I had hoped, I have been able to look at it pretty objectively and not be hard on myself. I think that's essential to surviving these two years. 

In the first week I felt like I was able to get to know a few of my students outside of class. At the end of the second day, one of the girls in my class told me, "Ms. Schmidt, you smiling all day. That's good." I thought it was funny since I had been trying to look a little bit more serious than I usually am, but I knew that I would not be able to keep from smiling for an extended period of time, as had been recommended to us by a few veteran teachers. 

Later in the week the same girl passed a scrapbook to one of her friends in the classroom. At lunch I told her I saw the scrapbook and told her I like scrapbooking, too. We talked about it for a few minutes, and the next day during one of our breaks, she handed her scrapbook to me and left it for me to peruse. That day at lunch I asked her questions about some of the things she wrote in her scrapbook--that her favorite trip had been to Jackson and that she was in the JROTC. The fourth day of summer school she and her friends asked me to sit with them at lunch. 

I've found that she is someone I can really count on in the classroom. If I ask for a volunteer, and no one responds, she will often volunteer. I've been careful to not be lenient on her behavior just because we've interacted so much outside of class, but it's good to know that there's at least one student in the room who respects me and maybe even likes me. 

I've learned so much in these two weeks, and I can only imagine all I will have experienced and learned after two years. 

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Questioning strategies

Dr. Monroe instructed us to utilize a new questioning strategy in the classroom, and I decided to try "cold calling." I tested the method during fourth period on a Friday afternoon after the students had just taken a long test. I wrote every student's name on a notecard and briefly described that we would be answering questions differently that day, that I had a stack of cards with everyone's name and that everyone would answer in the class period. There were no groans or moans, and the class seemed open to the idea. 

This was not an "on" day for me. I felt like my teaching was very forced that day and being in front of a group of students felt unnatural all of a sudden. The students were ready to wedge open any seam in my lesson. They were ready for lunch and for the weekend and were resistant to activities. Rather than buoying class enthusiasm by teaching in a more excited, "can't-you-see-this-is-more-important-than-anything-in-the-world-right-now" way, I became less confident, and the lesson became less cohesive. Calling students' names from index cards seemed to complicate the situation since I felt a bit scattered to begin with, and towards the end of class I gave up on the cards. 

It's hard for me to gauge my students' and my response to the cold-calling method from this day. It's definitely something I will try again since we often have the same few students responding to every question. In the past week I have randomly called on students, and it usually works well whenever I do that. It is difficult sometimes to keep from calling on the students with their hands up, and I think that having popsicle sticks or index cards would help with the flow of cold calling. I think cards would also make it seem less like I'm calling out someone who is not participating. 

Cold calling, you and I will meet again.  

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