This Week in Teaching

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...