The long and winding road...

superlatives are always a bad idea.  asking my for my greatest success or greatest failure is pretty difficult.  i've had a lot of success, and i've had a lot of failure.  but i have difficulty siphoning it down to the GREATEST.  here we go, regardless.

i think my greatest success this year was getting my students to read and write better.  with regards to curriculum in other classrooms, i didn't talk to many of the other teachers until around december.  and, when i did, i was a little bothered by the lack of difficulty or rigor in the material.  i realized i had been pushing my kids to read much more, write pages more, and analyze numerous literary elements that other teachers had not required of their students.

as we moved closer and closer to the writing portion of the state test, i was able to split my students into ability groups, focusing on their problem ares - planning, composing, editing.  the activities and practice i devised for the writing process worked really well with the students.  we were able to tie into the curriculum every resource that teaching tolerance has for high school (and even some junior high) students.  they liked writing when it was pertinent to their lives.

soooooo i picked issues that would be meaningful to the students - drinking age, corporal punishment, driving age, the castle law, and the legalization of marijuana.  we worked and worked and edited and edited and worked and worked...and were ready.

on the day of the test, i watched my little ducks marching down the hall to take the writing portion of the test, being blessed by my slow clap and loving "pats" as they walked by my room.  i had to hold homeroom for six hours, all the while wondering how they did.  when they were finally released for lunch, i popped my head out and talked to some of them.  the first thing i asked was, "did you feel prepared?" the response?  "ahhhh md. cooooooooke, they axed the EXACT same things you made us do.  you see dat test befo we did?"  i just laughed and told him to move on.  throughout the day, my students continued to tell me how they felt prepared and were comfortable with the test.

throughout the year, there were so many times i felt battered down, like there was no way to make them understand the material they needed to understand.  they couldn't tell me what a "verb" was, let alone figure out how a metaphor helped to create a specific mood.  we went over the same things every day, it seemed.  at times i would just sit silently in the back of the room, frustrated that they weren't picking up material they NEEDED to collect and store.  as we got closer to the test, i put more and more of myself into the lessons - making them do massive amounts of timed drills and then painstakingly explaining and exploring each answer - right and wrong.  

i had been extremely strict on them throughout the year, and the closer we drew to the test, the more i broke out of the disciplinary mode and went into the tutor mode.  i encouraged them when they gave correct responses, and tried to understand why they weren't grasping the things they needed to.  

writing was a simple task for me to break down with them.  as a general rule, "writing" for state and district assessments tends to be very formulaic and lacking any personal touch.  this makes it pretty easy to teach.  we went through the steps, details, and did it TOGETHER.  i kept track of attendance in a very visible way, rewarded students for staying for extra help, and pushed until the day of the writing test.  i definitely saw a chance in my kids, and they were so confident after the writing test.

i could not have asked for more.  it felt good.  real nice-like.

aaaaaand my greatest failure.  i'm torn between several different issues, but i think my failure, as a teacher, was doing the exact OPPOSITE of d-walt.  she mentions in her blog that she stayed organized, kept up with all her worksheets, notes, handouts, and everything.  i kept next to NOTHING of my lessons.  some of that is my own doing, and some of that was beyond my control.  

because of the resource situation at my school, i didn't copy very many things, and i didn't do overhead notes or power point presentations.  i had a lot of inclusion students, wherein i lost TONS of copies of tests, activity directions and supplemental materials that i had acquired.  (by the way, come up with a no-fail system of taking inventory of things you have, and when you send them out with an inclusion student, make SURE you get them back, even if you have to truck it down to the room and repeatedly remind them that those are YOUR satp books and you need them back.)  

the curriculum and instruction binder i was supposed to keep up for my district was a joke.  it never was looked through - it just is an item on a checklist of things that i as a "teacher" need to have.  to be honest, i could've had the empty binder in my room, instead of it being filled with lessons i never wrote or used.  

and my lesson plans?  the "official" lessons that were turned in were made by the english II teachers.  but, since my class is a remedial addition to that, i obviously couldn't teach what they were teaching.  i mean, if you're using stories out of the literature book (which i didn't even have) to teach theme, i can't rightly read the same story and teach about theme.  i can't use the lessons out of the satp book to teach subject/verb agreement when that's what you're teaching.  i can't use the "write source" books (which i didn't even have) to teach brainstorming techniques.  but that's what the lessons said.  

MY lesson plans were comprised of the other teachers coming to me and saying, "we worked on transitive and intransitive verbs today, and they didn't seem to get it.  can you go over that tomorrow?"  any personal schedule i had planned on or thought out for my classroom was trampled all over by the over-arching academic plans.  

i have a pretty good memory, so when i look back at the curriculum, i know (for the most part) what i taught and the activities that we did, but i have no way of just looking back at a lesson plan and feeling completely set.  i feel, as a teacher, that's a pretty huge failure.

along with that i feel that i failed:

-my nine girls who got pregnant sometime between august and may

-my twelve students who were expelled for fighting

-my students who did not pass the state test (numbers are still out on that one)

-my colleagues for not working more as a team

-my colleagues for not being more supportive of their clubs and organizations

-myself, at times, for not pushing myself more to do a little more, each day, to help EACH student succeed

the good thing is that, with these failures (and allllll of my others), there are a lot of things that i can learn.  i came up with a really good way to keep track of my lessons, a really good way to work on attendance, some innovative ideas for collaborating with other teachers, and a pretty simple way to stay involved in school and community activities.  i think i learned a lot this year, perhaps moreso from my failures than from anything else.  i think i've been really lucky to have experienced the situations i did this year.  and, oddly enough, i'm looking forward to more failures next year, as it seems they're bringing out the best in me.

...i would have a school district that actually was focused on educating children.  i did venture into creating a school district that would do that.  below is the link to my school district plan.  i think one interesting thing about my school district is the different academic tracks i allow for my students - academic honors, core 40, and a general diploma.  the students have a LARGE amount of freedom in choosing their courses, but always are able to have an end goal in sight, which will help with retention and graduation rates.

This summer, I need to practice on three things:

i would like to dedicate this to scotty jiminez:

i asked a lot of my students to talk about my class, but some of the funniest responses:

i think there are a lot of different things that go into making summer school effective.  in my hometown, the school district's summer school structure was very defined, and very successful.  the school district is composed of seven elementary schools, three middle schools, and one high school.  though the district seems fairly small because of the number of schools, the high school has over 4,200 students, making it one of the largest school districts in the state.  

the summer school program is vast in its offerings, and structured in its policies.  you can take classes to get ahead in your credits, or you can take summer school courses for remediation.  the problem in that composition is pretty easy to understand - you have an extremely bright ninth grader who wants to take chemistry early to get ahead in the same class where you have a senior who just can't seem to understand the material.  this is the case every day in my classroom in jackson, but in a classroom that is OPTIONAL, it seems to be quite puzzling.

holly springs summer school, in my experience, had a little bit of this mixture.  in our classroom last summer, there were twelve students.  of those students, 10 were taking the english course to graduate early, one had just transferred into the marshall county schools system, and one was taking it for remediation.  thought we didn't know this in the very beginning, there was some indicators that we had a strange composition in the classroom.  different work and study habits were immediately noticeable.  i don't think this situation was common at holly springs, but it could be one that appears in the future.  i would hope, for the benefit of the students, that the classrooms are composed of students who need remediation and extra help, rather than a mix of advanced and students that have failed the course.

i think success for summer school students means, at the most basic level, that they pass the course.  i think, though mastering the material is very important, it is also extremely important for the students to learn how to think correctly and understand why they didn't have success in the course in the first place, and hopefully to change their work and study habits.  i think success for summer school students means that you won't see them in summer school again.  i think future grades and progress of students help you know if you have been successful with their learning and mastery of material.

last summer, we spent a lot of time on not just going through the motions of the material and rote and recitation, but also showing them how their thinking patterns should be developing, how they should be taking themselves through the material, and how they can successfully end up at the proper endpoint.  we focused a lot on independent work, trying to shape their thinking processes.

i think some of the recommendations in the article are good, but i also have problems with a lot of them.  i do think that, in an attempt to help out students who have failed, summer school needs to be available.  i think the idea that "summer" school needs to be a year-round practice is something that is kind of strange.  i think that giving students extra practice, attention, and assistance in october with the foresight that they'll go to summer school is the same as tracking students by ability, which i am against.  i also think that, if students are monitored and tracked throughout the year, the possibility that you can meet them with techniques they weren't exposed to during the school year is slightly unrealistic.  using personal experience with my inclusion students, they receive the material in numerous ways throughout the year, and if they were to go to summer school,  i doubt you would be able to find a way to teach them material that they hadn't been exposed to yet.  i also think, tying into the idea of summer school, if you want teachers that are quality teachers, you're going to have a lot of information slip-ups.  if you recruit teachers from outside who don't know the students, they won't be familiar with the techniques used on the students.  i think that bringing in teachers with whom the students are not acquainted takes away some of effectiveness of summer school in general.  

i do think, that for students who have failed critical courses (math and reading) should be required.  in agreement with rudy crew, the former chancellor of new york schools, i think it should be compulsory attendance.  in an article found on the new york times from august 26, 2000, "two remedies for school failures" (http://query.nytimes.com/gst/fullpage.html?res=9800E0D91331F935A1575BC0A9669C8B63&sec=&spon=) the idea of compulsory attendance and the effect on summer school success is discussed.  i don't think it should be up for debate when it comes to courses such as reading and math, but i think other courses - science, social studies, physical education - should be offered, but not required for students who have failed the courses during the regular academic year.

i don't really have much to say on this one.  my community consists of:

I can only begin by saying most of this is my own opinion.  I have a fairly strong foundation for the following opinions, based on personal experience, trial and error at my school, and the philosophy of my school district.  After reading "The Need for Calendar-Based Curriculum Mapping" from Heidi Hayes Jacobs, the opinions and personal thoughts I have about curriculum mapping are solidified.

so, as one would expect, my schedule is much like my ladyfriend's...only with less humor and more sarcasm.  so, in pictures and words, here it is:  a day in the life of an inner-city high school english teacher.

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like my ancestor sam cooke (i promise) pointed out in '68, "there been times that I thought I couldn't last for long, But now I think I'm able to carry on.  It's been a long, a long time coming, But I know a change gonna come..."

and what's that change?

for me, no more notebooks.  their damn notebooks were the bane of my existence.  they were difficult to grade, i had to keep them at school, the kids were writing whatever they wanted wherever they wanted, tearing out pages for "looseleaf" on which they could do their work, doodling on pages...it was insane.  so no more of that.

everyone gets a 2-pocket folder with prongs and 6 sheets of looseleaf.  they use one sheet for contact information and semester goals to keep in their folder, one sheet for contact information for me to have (that i keep in a binder at home so i never have to move numbers from school to home), one sheet for their in-class work for today, and three sheets for the road.  they only have to have a writing utensil (blue or black ink) and about 50 sheets of looseleaf for the entire semester.

it seems simple, but you have no idea how much stress those damn notebooks caused me.  this will, hopefully, keep my kids more organized, focused, on task, and up to date with their assignments.  for me, it keeps my life organized, structured, and simplified.

thanks for the encouragement, sam.