This Week in Teaching

I very nearly begged off of this week’s post.   I’m tired.   This time of year, I’m always tired.   I entertain extreme fantasies of quitting my job and winning the lottery.   Notice, that’s backwards.   This time of year, I’m backwards and I don’t care. I have enough experience with myself and with life that I can refrain from following through on the beginning of this fantasy.   I know that this too, shall pass.   It always does.   The sun will come out tomorrow, and etc.   Plus, I need the paycheck. This week, we didn’t have students on Friday because in this district they cancel school for Parent Teacher Conferences.   That’s right, twice a year (once in the fall and again in late winter), students sleep in and lay about watching YouTube in the comfort of their own home instead of in my class, and instead of wrestling with angsty teenagers, I wrestle with delusional parents. To be fair, they aren’t all delusional. ...

This week, on Wednesday, a broken young man took out his anger at the world on former classmates and teachers in Lakeland, FL, killing 17.  He used a semi-automatic rifle to do this. On Thursday and Friday, I had to explain to my classes what we would do in my classroom in the event of an "active shooter incident."  There isn't a closet in my room, and the wall we formerly lined up against in lockdown drills is actually a shared wall with the hallway.  It is plaster and tile, no match for bullets.  I instructed the students that we would now line up on the far wall which is at a 90 degree angle to the hall wall, and explained my reasoning. Students looked at me soberly while I spoke, and offered suggestions:  "We should rush the door, if someone comes in," "I'll help you stack the tables, miss,"  and "We're all going to die anyway, so we may as well fight." It makes me sick that I have to think of things like this, and talk to m...

On Wednesday of this week, we had our regularly-scheduled department meeting before school (8:00 a.m. to 8:30 a.m., scheduled by the school once a month). Usually this meeting is for the department head to tell the rest of us whatever wonderful flavor-of-the-month has been gestating at leadership meeting, or remind us of upcoming deadlines (or both).   This week was no different.   We were to discuss chapters 3 & 4 in our SIOP books, and come up with a department-wide consensus of its most-important points. To back up a minute here:   the department chairs are released from teaching one class so they can participate in a bi-weekly “leadership” meeting during the school day.   I think this year it takes up 3 rd period.   All the department chairs, the principal, the assistant principals, the instructional coach, and the counselors (or maybe there’s just a counselor representative) go to the leadership meeting.   I’d be jealous of the extra brea...

Night School started this week.   I volunteered to teach Night School (for the first time in 18 years of teaching) last year, when it became obvious that one of us was a PhD candidate with classes to take, classes to teach, a study to conduct over multiple years, and a dissertation to write and one of us was not.   The mechanics of Night School are as follows:   we have a six-week block, Monday through Thursday from 3:45 p.m. to 5:30 p.m.   In that time period we help students reclaim a half credit (basically, a semester) that they lost, usually due to lack-of-turning-it-in (a chronic problem for some students), but sometimes for lack-of-coming-to-class.   Offered classes are usually the required classes (math, English, history, science) and sometimes we get an elective in there (students need a certain number of electives to graduate, too).   There are generally two English teachers, because English is required all four years of high school and stud...

This week, I demonstrated that I can (despite all appearances) be taught.   I put a child’s best interests ahead of my own, for the umpteenth time. And I dragged 8 th period ahead, instead of behind my car.   So all in all, a good week. If I am to write in chronological order, I put the child’s best interests ahead of my own before the demonstration of lessons-have-been-learned.   But interestingly, the two are intertwined in the complex way that most of teaching (in general, but English teaching in specific) goes. I have taught this child, X, for parts of three years.   He and his twin sister were in the same sophomore honors class, then I had only the sister in AP English Language classes (but heard through his English teacher that his internal battles continued), and now I have him in my regular English 4 class.   X is tightly wound, and battles anxiety and who-knows-what-else on a daily basis.   He hasn’t as yet come up with a successful def...

Today I went to a training for Synergy, my school district's attendance/grading program.  I've been teaching at Centennial for two years already, but when they sent out an email for new teachers to be trained on the program and said other teachers could come if they were interested, I signed up. The training was to begin at 9 a.m. in the computer lab in the library at Centennial.  I was glad for this because that's my school so I know where everything is.  One of the quirks of "professional development" (PD for short) offered by school districts is that they are offered at random places in the district, so sometimes I have no idea where to park, where the library is, or how to find a bathroom.  It's nice when those are not problems to take into consideration. The other quirk of district-led PD is that often it is offered by people who are not professional presenters, usually because professional presenters cost more money than just paying the regular salar...