List of Grievances

I have a joke for you.

It’s two days before spring break. You’re coasting on a useful and important writing unit, a practice that your students have been forbidden up until after the state test because writing is not tested.

And you get notice of a formal observation to take place in 36 hours, with a pre-conference taking place in a meager 12. But wait! You aren’t going to be there tomorrow because you have to spend the morning in court, so your conference will take place the morning of.

Did I mention that the observation takes place the last day of school before break?

I choose to laugh, because otherwise I might cry.

I’m not making excuses; I understand that I can be observed at any time and really do work hard in every class. But observations at a school are more like a checklist and a series of “gotcha” moments. Did she use group work? Did she time independent reading to under twelve minutes? Did she include the words “in order to” in her objective? (Oh no, she did not).

And this is my final formal observation of the year.

Outside of the curriculum. The day before break. No time to make changes after the pre-conference like there should be.

Last summer a teacher told me she keeps a private running list of grievances on her desktop as therapy. I get it now.

On a positive note, during my observation my kids joyfully, enthusiastically, and with great mayhem shouted out the definitions of simile and metaphor and personification and figurative language. It doesn’t look neat and tidy but they sure were involved, with me standing on a chair and shouting the key words.

I think I got marked down for that.

The Paradox of Standardized Testing

There is a problem with testing.

At my school, the frenzy is excruciating. We held a pep rally for the state test. There were other school's marching bands, step teams,  cheerleaders, a radio host, and relays that revolved around the students answering multiple choice questions.

My school has not given me more than 1,000 pieces of printer paper all year, but they did manage to get t-shirts and lollipops with the phrase "Rock the MSA!"

Everyone's job is reflected in two days' worth of scores. This is what will be remembered from a student's and teacher's year of work. This is what reflects on how administrators are holding teachers accountable. And at a school like mine, which has had such low test scores in the past, it reflects on employees from the state department of education who have been intervening to raise our test scores. There is a long list of adults' names attached to these scores; it isn't all about the students.

And I think it's quite a bit of codswallop.

I do understand that tests allow us to really know if we are teaching all students to the same standard, which is important if you work in schools like mine where the students haven't been taught to the same standard. Ignoring that or pretending like it doesn't exist isn't going to help matters. The tests are needed because we need to know that all students are learning.

But the fact that every single teacher I talk to is ecstatic about testing being over so they can actually teach baffles me. We spent 7 1/2 months with administrators in and out of our classrooms, planning lessons that forbid activities such as writing or vocabulary exercises to leave room for teaching only tested standards.

Isn't the test supposed to be a catalyst to learning, not an inhibitor?

My 8th grade students cannot write. And I have been forbidden to teach writing. I was able to sneak it in here and there, but as a first year teacher, all eyes were on me and my classroom to see whether I was following the curriculum.

Is it fair to my students to send them to high school with only 2 months of preparation in writing rather than 9 1/2 - because my school wanted to boast better test scores?

At the same time, is it fair for my students to not perform as well on something that is going to be more immediately accessible than their writing to next year's teachers? This test is how they will be tracked into classes next year; it is likely that it will determine the group of students they are with and the level of rigor they might receive.

Does any of this make a bit of sense?

Testing today was painfully stressful. From 8:30 - 11:30 we administered three different sections. We had administrators left and right popping in with inspirational messages. It was the most positive I have seen my school.

But it was hyped up. The kids picked up on the sense of urgency and 35 students in my cramped room quickly became claustrophobic and I became short-tempered. Trying to keep 35 teenagers near-silent for 3 hours is laughable.

I always imagined testing days as a teacher would be relaxing. They are exhausting.

But after the test, I had students running up to me in the hallway. "I annotated the whole thing!" "I read every passage!" "I stretched my arms and took deep breaths when I was getting tired!" "I killed that test!"

No matter what I think about standardized testing, it feels so good to see my students feel like they're successful.

Those Kids Are Mean

"Why don't you just go back to Colorado?"

"Get the fuck outta my face."

"You can't control your class!"

"Ms. Z, those kids are mean!"

Apparently the day before big tests for my kids has in the past consisted of watching movies and sitting on the desks making idle chitchat. I always know when I'm breaking my kids' long-held habits of the past because quotes like the ones above become a lot more frequent.

My resolution to stop giving sarcastic retorts was tried dramatically today; to "get the fuck outta my face" I managed to respond with a mild and convincingly confused "I'm not not in your face", as I was as far across the room as I possible. Which drew one laugh from a reasonable child who moved up in my books, but drew a lot of scowls from the rest.

At my lunch break, a few students came in to pick up make-up work. That's when I got to hear "those kids are mean!" This shrewd observer was one of the girls from my second mod which is my class with the worst attitude. I don't know how to explain that class but to say that there is just a negativity that permeates everything. Those kids are mean.

But the girls that know that that class is malicious tend toward making callous remarks to me when they are all together in class. What is it about the groupthink mentality that makes the kids nasty to the teacher (and, admittedly, the teacher nasty to the kids) during class, and then outside of class they are great? It's as if we have specific roles to play, but only during class time. Outside of class we can be our nice, friendly selves. My next experiment is going to be pretending like it's not a class, and I'll sneak teach them.

Unfortunately, though, the uncaring attitude doesn't always stop outside of class. Today I admittedly did something stupid. I left my phone in one of the classrooms during a meeting. One period later, it was gone. Turned off. Goodbye, phone.

Maybe it will turn up tomorrow; they really are good kids, even if they say mean things.

An Experiment in Silence

After almost a week of rough days filled with rowdy children, yelling, and snide comments, I thought it was necessary to take my day in a new direction. So in an attempt to not shriek, or say anything to the children that I shouldn't, I figured the best path would be silence.

I heard the idea from a teacher who said she once got so tired of no one listening that she went in one day, indicated that she had lost her voice, and simply typed everything out. What a grand idea to add to my constantly evolving repertoire of attention-grabbing feats (which in the past have included speaking in an English accent, jumping on a chair, standing in tree pose for the duration of my instruction, and an impromptu brown paper bag puppet on which I drew a red uniform polo and spoke to as if it is the only student in the room).

So this morning I wrote the directions on the projector as the students entered and simply pointed and jabbed at the board over and over until they got the hint. My first period is my honors class, so they got the gist fairly quickly and sat down to silently read. During class, they quite enjoyed getting to yell out my typing at other students when they were misbehaving, and I started to think I was on to something.

Second period immediately proved this tactic would be a disaster. Not even two minutes in, I was resorting to wild arm gestures, tapping, clapping, jumping, and the largest all-cap words I could fit on the board telling them to stop what they were doing. I wish I could share a snapshot of the room, but that is illegal, so you will have to make do with these images:

-Three girls in the front of the room hitting each other - back and forth
-A boy lounging on his desk like it's his bed
-One boy frantically yelling out whatever I type, jumping up and down
-A girl yelling at that boy
-Another girl swaying back and forth in front of the projector
-Many, many, oh-too-many shadow puppets

Not wanting to give in, I tried and tried again, resorting to bribing the students who would read my words aloud with candy. By third mod I gave up and greeted them with a vocal hello.

Unfortunately the negativity I was trying to avoid was not lost by my attempt at silence; it was just converted. My yells turned into flails and the yells of other students, and it was still as hectic as ever.

It seems that in my classroom, negativity is a highly communicable disease. The kids say things to each other and about each other that I still haven't grown numb to, today a girl looked straight at me and said I was "dumb" (and that was rather tame), and then suddenly I'm running off with sarcastic comments back. But it seems that when I use my most polite voice, greet the students at the door with a good afternoon, how are you, THAT just flows away and is never seen again.

When I told one of the other teachers my dilemma, stating "I can't believe I said that to a child!", she responded, "Brittany, they are not children, they are grown."

But aren't 8th graders still kids? How do I teach an 8th grader how to be nice? I am frequently reminded "Ms. Z, you don't teach kindergarten", and always respond "(student), you aren't in kindergarten!".

I suppose I will have to start with some form of vocality - silence experiment failed.

The ridiculousness that has led me here...

I started out teaching with the idea to keep a blog. However, the first months teaching isn't really the best time to pick up new hobbies. In fact, most of my old hobbies came to a grinding halt as teaching sucked the marrow out of everything else going on in my life. I made one post to a blog when I moved and that was that, until now.

The moment an administrator put a date that was out-of-date by about 6 weeks on one of my official observation documents was the moment that I decided I had to write about it. My observation took place in mid-November; my review meeting took place in the beginning of January. This is a small example of the severely broken system that I am working within. I know it's broken. Many, many people know it's broken. But working in it is still absurdly frustrating.

So I tried to blog in January when that occurred. And I failed spectacularly yet again. But third time is the charm, right?

Reflecting as a I drove home today, I realized I needed somewhere to vent other than my poor boyfriend who has nodded and listened to what probably accumulates to over 24 hours of me - talking - about school. There's got to be another audience.

Things I admit -

1. I am a first year teacher and fully realize I mostly still have no idea what I am doing
2. I yelled VERY LOUDLY, with emphasis, at a 13 year old today. I was shaking. ("Ms. Z, you turning red.")
3. I care so much that I get annoyed and decide I don't care at all, which really just leads to me complaining while putting in a lot of work to something I do care about.

So this is a project to inject positivity into what sometimes become far too negative and attempt to marry my school life and home life together in a way that is not overwhelming but instead supporting. I am scared to get too invested in work because I don't want my work to flow out of what I have so far been able to relegate to at-school and Sunday morning planning. But when it comes down to it, my work is a huge part of my life; finding a way to balance them without pushing them each into two separate corners would be healthy and, well, miraculous.