The Ones Who Got Away

This week was pretty normal. It was my first full week back in the classroom since before spring break (I was absent for Education Interview Day and Honors Day last week), so I definitely was exhausted by the time Friday was over.

For some reason, I have gotten out of the habit of holding my students accountable for their behaviors. That, combined with some of their natural adolescent sassiness and our trip to the book fair, caused me to lose control of them on Thursday. Friday, I tried to make some adjustments and introduced their new set of lit centers. We established their volume level for lit centers, discussed expectations, and I gave them the option of doing exercises out of their grammar book if they could not follow instructions.

However, I did not have alternative activities prepared for students, so that became an empty threat. I ended up assigning six or seven different students silent lunch, but some of the kids were acting so defiant that silent lunch alone seems to no longer be doing the trick.

When discussing this with my placement teacher, she suggested that I investigate some of Harry Wong’s techniques he teaches in The First Days of School and begin practicing these techniques in class. Wong, long considered to be one of the foremost authorities on classroom management, says that establishing procedures is vital for a well-managed classroom.

As I was speaking to Mrs. Ramsay, she suggested that I need to change the way I get students’ attention. I have been using “Look at me if you hear my voice,” but students are now continuing to talk over me when I do that. From now on, I plan to use Wong’s “Give Me Five” approach. Whenever I say “Give me five,” my students are supposed to count to five out loud with me. This is a way of taking their talking and redirecting it. Each number in “Give Me Five” represents a direction: eyes on the speaker, be quiet, be still, hands free, and listen.

I forgot to ask Mrs. Ramsay if the students in the period are already familiar with “Give Me Five”. Many of those students tend to forget what they are told, so I will introduce “Give Me Five” including the five directions when we go over the behavior contract on Monday.

Also, because they are no longer responding to silent lunch as a consequence, I am planning on assigning work during their silent lunch if they earned it. If it continues past that, they will have to create a written response addressing their behaviors in class in addition to the silent lunch assignment.

Although I put one person in charge of getting supplies at each table, there were a few (who I purposefully did not allow to be that person in charge) who were out of their seats for no reason. I think what I will do starting Monday is return to direct instruction. When I have my own classroom from day one, I will hopefully be able to train them to work efficiently. However, since I only have two weeks left in this classroom, I will not be there long enough to truly train them for that level of independence. 

How I Learned to Love the Interview

By nature, I'm an introvert. When I was very young, I refused to speak to most strangers (unlike my little sister who has never met a stranger). Even as a young adult, I still struggle with the more social side of things like networking and interviewing.

As of about five years ago, my interviewing skills were horrible. I didn't know what professional dress was, nor was I particularly good at expressing myself verbally. After all, at heart I am a reader and writer. 

As part of the application process for RA's, we are required to re-interview for our jobs every year. For me,  this has always been a torturous process. I frequently felt as if I was a fraud during my interviews, and my interviewers were just trying to prove that I was. 

For the record, I was an amazing RA. I'm not trying to boast; I've had every supervisor tell me that for the four years I served as one. However, I lacked the confidence to act like I was great in my interviews, and it negatively impacted other people's impressions of me. 

Based on my previous experiences with interviews, who could really blame me for being terrified of Education Interview Day? I thought for sure that nobody would want me. 

As I was expressing concern for my performance during interviews, my placement teacher asked me why I was so worried about interviewing. When I explained my checkered interview history, she told me that I have shown tremendous growth in my confidence over the past semester, and I should not be so concerned. 

What she said to me next is what gave me the confidence to walk in the door to the recruitment room the next day. My teacher told me that regarding content and pedagogical knowledge, I was advanced beyond most interns that she had ever met.

While this statement did not make me become an extrovert or overly-confident overnight, I was able to walk around the room with my head held high, sign up for interviews, and meet with each of the schools I wanted. I even got a second interview with one of the school systems!

The Dreaded Ten Days

Since my penultimate year of college, I've heard about the "dreaded" ten consecutive days of teaching. The people going through internship whined about them constantly. "You'll never be so tired or emotional," they've said. Frankly speaking, I never got what they were complaining about, especially since this is the first real taste of what it is like to get to be a teacher.

I've been nothing but excited to teach all day for ten days.

Now that I'm halfway through it, I understand the stress a little bit better. I have been tired, but I also think that is from fighting off the spring pollen floating around here. I am still able to wake up early and go to school, and I am still able to go to work every night from 5-10PM, Monday through Thursday.

I think that part of the reason why I am surviving is because my placement teacher and the other teachers at my school are so willing to help me and give me advice. After school on Friday, while I was getting all of the 9 weeks grades submitted, one of the other teachers walked in. She shares an adjoining door with our classroom and is also my placement teacher's mentor.

She asked me how everything was going with my ten days, and I expressed the fact that I was working on rubrics for the students' final products for Thursday. As soon as she heard that, she had me come into her classroom and showed me this grading system she'd come up with (it's like the GPA scale and honestly, I don't know why we haven't done it all along). She also shared some of her rubrics and told me how she approached creating them (hint: it involves not "reinventing the wheel").

Sitting at my computer and finalizing the details for what I expect the products to look like, I can't help but be overwhelmed not by stress, but instead gratitude. I'm so grateful that I have a placement teacher who is so open to collaboration and trying new things in the classroom. I'm grateful that the other sixth grade teachers are so willing to share their knowledge and experiences with me, so I can learn from them.

As I realize I only have about a month left in my internship, I am saddened to realize that I will be leaving all of these wonderful people far sooner than I would've liked. But that's a post for another day...

Tabula Rasa

This past Thursday and Friday were rough.

So rough that at the end of the day, long after most of the other teachers had gone home, I had a bit of a breakdown. I always thought that the interns who told me that they went home and cried every night were being hyperbolic. Not that I do that now by any means, but I can completely understand why they would feel the need to cry so much. 

I also now understand why they tell us that we should try to avoid having a job during the internship. It's hard. 

Working until ten every night and getting up between 4 and 6, depending on the day has left me extremely sleep-deprived on some days. Those days are the hardest because my emotional stamina is not as high.

Not that this gives me an excuse to strive for any less than a well-managed and productive class time every day. 

But I digress...

Thursday was the first day of regular class since two-thirds of the sixth grade were gone to space camp. It was also the day I was supposed to begin regaining control over my first period class. 

We did a warm up where they had to answer why they think we have rules and laws. They could tell me EXACTLY why we have them (safety, responsibility, no laws create chaos). Then we went over their behavior contract. They were able to analyze each rule, reward, and consequence. I also created a noise level chart to help hold them accountable for talking out of turn or above an appropriate volume. 

So you can probably imagine my surprise when I had to assign seven or eight students silent lunch. 

When reflecting on my lesson with Mrs. Ramsay, she told me not to get discouraged. I have to be a wall of consistency when it comes to enforcing rules. Students will have to constantly hit against my wall before they ever learn the appropriate behaviors. 

Instead, I feel like I'm the one ramming my head into a wall. 

Friday, I ended up giving almost the whole class silent lunch during first period. However, after stopping class to do some major redirecting, all but two earned it off. At the beginning of lunch on Friday, I sat down and talked to them about their behaviors. They knew exactly why they had silent lunch. They told me it was their decisions that led to silent lunch, not mine. 

I leveled with them and asked what would help them to achieve appropriate behaviors in my class, offering the school incentive of orange tickets. In so many words, they basically told me that orange tickets would not work as an incentive, so I asked what would. One of them said "cheeseburgers".

He was being serious.

In a split-second moment to make a decision, I informed the child that I would bring him a cheeseburger the week after next if he could keep his behavior on-target for the next week. I know that there are many teachers our there who would say that this was a major misstep on my part, but I did what I thought would work for him. I made it clear that he had to be on his best behavior. Additionally, I informed him that because I'm a broke college student, I couldn't do this every week.

Now, do I think he can earn that cheeseburger? I hate to say this, but not really. At least, not right now. He is one who has consistently had his name on the board for silent lunch at least once a week.

However, I'm hoping that I can graduate him from this extrinsic motivation to an intrinsic motivation over the next couple of weeks by showing him that things in class go a lot more smoothly when he cooperates with my directions. I'm actually hoping that all of them will begin to see this through my repetition of procedures, rewards, and consequences in addition to me addressing their behaviors when assigning punishments.

So, for Monday, I have written the words tabula rasa at the top of the board. For those of you who don't know, tabula rasa essentially translates to "blank slate" in English. Etymologically speaking, it comes from the time when wax tablets were used instead of paper. The Romans would heat the wax tablet and scrape it until it became smooth again, erasing all marks.

My reasoning for writing this on the board and addressing it on Monday is that I want my students to know that we start off with a tabula rasa every day, unless there is behavior that has gone unaddressed from the previous day.



My third/fifth period class was also an interesting experience on Friday, but I'll save that gem of a story for another blog post. This one is already long enough.

Reflection: Thoughts on Common Core/New Bill

Since nearly all of my students are away at space camp for the next three days, I thought that I would address an extremely pressing issue that has been weighing on my mind for quite a while.

As an educator, I tend to avoid revealing my political views because I know that I have the ability to influence many people. I want to instill a sense of responsibility and good citizenship in my students, but I want them to be able to think for themselves. Spoon-feeding them my viewpoint on various topics will not help them become critical thinkers.

The Alabama state legislature is attempting to pass SB 380, a bill that would rescind the adoption of the Common Core and push back the adoption of those standards until at least 2017.

Over the course of the past couple of years, I have heard murmuring about the danger of adopting the College and Career Ready Standards (most widely known as the Common Core). In preparation for this reflection, I tried to find and read as many articles on both sides of the argument as possible. After reading the various arguments, I have come to the conclusion that those who are against the CCRS are, frankly speaking, ignorant of the facts.

In fact, Tommy Bice, the Alabama State Superintendent of Education, recently wrote an article for the Montgomery Advertiser that addresses the fears that Alabamians have about adopting the CCRS.

I could only hope to be half as persuasive and eloquent as Dr. Bice is in his article, so I will let his writing do the work for me (thanks, Dr. Bice!).
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As an addendum to the CCRS argument, I would like to address something else I came across during my research. A Gawker article was published a little after noon today announcing that the Alabama legislature passed a bill that requires all students and school employees in the public schools to spend fifteen minutes every morning participating in Christian prayer.

I will not even begin to address the first amendment violations that this bill commits, as those arguments tend to be a bit subjective. Instead, I want to approach this from a mathematical perspective.

Fifteen minutes.

FIFTEEN.

Do you realize how much time that is in the span of a class period?

An average class period in every school I have been in, either as a student or as a student-teacher, is between forty and fifty minutes. Being an optimist, I will use fifty minutes as the measured class period. First, let us subtract fifteen minutes for the government mandated Christian prayer (50-15=35 minutes). It takes at least five minutes to prepare students to begin and to end class (35-10 minutes=25 minutes).

Twenty-five minutes.

TWENTY-FIVE.

That means I have twenty-five minutes to teach your child how to read, write, and think critically. This is all while trying to instill good habits that will prepare them to be properly-functioning adults and employees.

Think about that.

We will be spending about thirty percent of first period in prayer.

My question is this: could the students not simply wake up fifteen minutes earlier to pray in the morning instead of taking away crucial instructional time?

   

Riding on That Struggle Bus

The most strenuous part of my internship experience by far has been trying to manage the behaviors of my 1^st/2^nd period class. As a secondary education major, I have not had much experience with classroom management until this semester, and that has really hurt me when it comes to gaining and maintaining control of those twenty-two ten- and eleven-year-olds. I have spent so much time trying to correct/modify their behavior in the past that I am afraid the knowledge I am trying to share is not reaching them. On top of that, I am wearing myself out trying to constantly address their behaviors.

In an attempt to regain control over this class, I am starting back on square one so to speak. Thursday, when all of the kiddos come back from space camp, we are going to go over the behavior contract Mrs. Ramsay gave them at the beginning of the year. From that point on, my primary focus will be to reinforce the procedures she established with the students at the beginning of the school year. I hate that there is so much backtracking that has to be done with them, but I think that doing this now will save us all from a major headache in the long run.

Another technique I am planning to try with all of my classes is to create a noise level chart. All of my classes have an issue with getting too loud, and I thought that having a permanent visual point of reference would benefit each of my students. My plan is to create this chart and with every activity without exception, we will set the appropriate noise level. This way, when students get above that level, I have a way of demonstrating to them that they went above the level we agreed was acceptable.

All-in-all, despite my struggles this week, I still love teaching. It’s difficult. It’s exhausting. However, in the end, I believe that I have so much to learn and to teach this group. I am so excited to see what is in store for the rest of the semester.