the good, the bad, and the...everyday?

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.