Wind, Breezes, Blowing and Reeds

Whoa...first day of the second year of teaching is SO different than the first day of the first year of teaching. It didn't dawn on me until today how badly the difficulties of the first year are stacked against you. On top of knowing nothing about teaching and constantly feeling like I was failing (but needing to appear as if I was earning at least a "proficient" mark), I had no relationships within the school system my first year of teaching. I've since come to realize that a significant part (probably the most important part) of teaching is cultivating relationships, and on that first day of that first year I had zip, zero, zulch in that department. 

Today I saw familiar faces, faces that I was happy to see and faces that seemed happy to see me. I have a few of the same students in my classes, and I have two whole freshmen classes that were less familiar with the school than me. Granted, I wasn't a huge help giving the freshmen directions (I'm still unable to tell anyone exactly where room 323 is), but it felt good knowing I have a place in my school's community. I'm not expecting this year to be a breeze, but I'm already feeling like I might be able to scrape by with a solid "needs improvement" this year and I won't have to fake anything to anyone. 

I just thought of a my own middle school's old slogan, which I probably haven't thought of since I was in middle school over ten years ago. The principle used to say, "The wind still blows warm across Swampscott Middle School." Today I felt warm breezes blowing down the English corridor. I love breezes, especially the ones that connect me to the scenery around me. Maybe that's what Yeats was talking about when he wrote "The Wind Among the Reeds"; when you feel the wind blow over your arms and body while also seeing and hearing it blow through the reeds of grass, suddenly it all makes a bit more sense. 

OMGosh! OMGosh! School starts on Monday! I can't believe it. I'm one mixed bag of excitement and nerves...mostly excitement though. My mom has been kind enough to use all the gift certificates she gets as a first grade teacher (a huge advantage over teaching at a high school mind you!) on a going-back-to-school/girl day for the two of us. It's the perfect end to a mostly perfect summer. I'm going skydiving as well tomorrow; it seems to be a fitting end.

So I was getting my hair cut this morning and talking to the hairdresser about lots of stuff, and we talked a lot about the media, advertising and the youth. I think I found words for what I want to change about education. I want education to provide students with a sense of self, sense of meaning in their lives, and a sense of purpose. Isn't this what life is about anyway?

The best example I can think of relates to consumerism. Everyday I see girls and boys walk down the school hallways dressed to impress, and for most of them this means wearing as little as possible or flashy as possible. I had a particularly difficult time with a student who I will call M. M is very good at basketball but had to quit the team when he failed his first class. Quitting the team coincided with M adopting a new look and one flashy, shimmery, cheapy gold watch. It seems that once M was no longer to play basketball and be an athlete he needed to adopt a new identity so he would be somebody, if anybody, in the eyes of his peers. M (and his gold watch) was one of my most difficult students all year and I believe my inability to connect with him on a meaningful level contributed to the painful demise of one of my junior sections. The kicker is, as it seems to be in many such cases, that M is smart, quick mentally and is open to exploring the world from multiple perspectives.

I believe M has become apathetic towards his life because he doesn't know who M is, he has no sense of self. Self is not a basketball, a jump shot, or the way other people treat athletes. Self is not a watch, it's not the way other people look at that watch, and it's not respect gained from others by being disrespectful to teachers. All these things are not an identity and really don't provide us with a sense of self. If anything, they leave us feeling emptier because somewhere deep down we know that these things do not reflect our innermost feelings about whom we are. Of course I don't know if this is the case with M, but given my own experiences growing up and my complete lack of sense of self as a teenager, I feel that I might understand what M is going through at the moment.

The paradox is that I have no idea exactly what a sense of self is. But I know that it's the most important thing I've learned in my own life so far. Everyone's sense of self is completely different, so I would pretend to know the sense of self that my students need. But I know that education should be a way to help them strip down their protective identities (basketball player, tough guy, sexy girl, etc.), and help them get in touch with something deeper. And I can't say what deeper is, I just know it's there.

Once students allow themselves to appreciate themselves they will uncover a meaning in their lives. Talents and gifts begin to shine because they are not restricted by the superficial identities we have adopted in high school. I still role play to the identities I took on in high school, so I'm not claiming that education can rid us of them or that education should. Yeats wrote about masks, actually tons of writers have written about masks, and most of them agree that they are essential part of humanity; however, it is just as essential to understand what lies beneath such masks. Once students can discover their essence of their talents and gifts then the purpose of their lives will unfold--the place where or a way they can utilize*

*I got cut off and couldn't finish this, but I will.

Are You a Dreamer?

Crazy Dreamers

Ray LaMontagne

Here's to all you crazy dreamers

Dream your crazy dreams

Don't let them go

Deep inside your heart I'm sure you know

Deep inside your heart I'm sure you know

Here's to all you crazy lovers

Love the one's you love

And serve them well 

Give yourself some time and time to tell

For he to love another got to love himself

Here's to all you crazy dreamers

Dream your crazy dreams

Don't let them slip away

There's more to life than living day to day

There's more to life than living day to day

Here's to all you crazy lovers

Love the one's you love

Don't let them go

Deep inside your soul that love will grow

And deep inside your soul that love will grow

It Only Took Twenty-Five Short Years

I have a new guru--my mom. She's amazing. I don't where to begin. She teaches first grade, which is so different than teaching high school. But her insights to teaching are so authentic, experienced and inspiring. I spent the whole first twenty-four years of my life trying to be something different than both of my parents.  I wanted to be my own person. But the more time  spend with my mom the more I realize she is the inspiration for the person, the teacher, I am now. She's in her late fifties (I'm sorry for putting that out there Mom), but she's not jaded. Despite it all, she laughs, she loves and she teaches. She knows so much--all the various movements of the last thirty years and can describe them in first-person detail. She's been there through it all. It's like listening to a history book that speaks aloud with fire and reflection. Thanks Mom. I'm sorry that it took me so long to realize that trying to not be like you was a fruitless effort. These day I want to be just like you.

The Rain In Spain Falls Mainly on the Plains...I Think I've Got It...

Alright, I've been brainstorming all day about how to do my Macbeth unit because I knew I couldn't rely on journals alone to make capture my students' interest in Shakespeare.  I was having visions of a repeat from last year while lying in bed last night, so today I planned away. Here's the plan:

I'm going to introduce Macbeth using a music simile. The objective of the lesson will be to have students make the connection that a Shakespearean play is just like a classic, top-twenty-five song of all time. We'll talk about how people cover these songs (like a performance of a Shakespearean play) and people also adapt the songs like Puffy did with the song "With Every Breath You Take" (like an adaptation of a Shakespearean play). This music simile will guide the rest of the unit. 

I've created a Macbeth Unplugged blog that will serve as the journals I was originally thinking about having the students write in. All homework assignments will be on the blog and depending on what we've read in class they will have to "cover," "adapt," "choose a song," or "choose an singer" for a selection from the text. I'll start off posting the selections, but I'm hoping as they get used to the format they will eventually choose their own to post. 

I hoping this will encourage the close reading that I was having trouble incorporating, get them to think about the decisions Shakespeare made and how the literary devices add to the meaning and complexity of the text, and allow them to think about what captures their individual attention in the text. I'm also hoping it will add a little competitive edge to the discussions, and students engage with the text so they are not "copying" the ideas of their peers.

After we have finished reading the play, students will review everything they wrote in the blog and look for patterns in their thinking. This will be the self-reflective part that helps them see the influence of literature on understanding themselves as individuals better. Here is where the literature will become the tool for self discovery.

During the unit we will look at different "covers" and an adaptation of Macbeth (The BBC's Shakespeare Retold, which is awesome by the way!), and their final paper will be to write a proposal for a Macbeth production to submit to the theatre I'm working at now. They can use the self-reflection part mentioned earlier to come up with a unifying concept for their production. I'm hoping that if I bring up the idea to the woman I work for, who happens to have a soft spot for teachers, something may come of this. Imagine if I could get the artistic director to read their submissions and select one! That would be amazing!

And the icing on the blogilicious cake--minimal correcting!!

I Can't Include the Word "Summer" In Another Post...But I Want To

I'm getting really excited for school to start. I've been working at a local theatre, and one of the guys I work with is also a teacher. He's young, dorky and enthusiastic like me, but he's SO over teaching. He's on his third year and says he was naive and happy just like me after his first and now he's borderline quitting. Dear Lord, please don't ever let me feel that way. My role as a teacher has completely merged into my identity (in fact, it's not a role so much anymore) and I love that. I don't ever want to be the burnt-out third year, ten year, tenure teacher. I hope that's not my path. 

Anyway...I've been prepping a lot lately for my junior class, and I can't wait to see how things go. For the first trimester I'm teaching freshmen, who I love, but the junior course is really the highlight of my year. I have to wait for a third of the year to finish before I teach it, and I'm really hoping my enthusiasm for the course hasn't subsided on day sixty of the school year. Only time will tell. 

I've come to the conclusion that at this point in my life I have two goals for my students: first, to rekindle their innate curiosity for life and learning. Actually, that's one goal. But I think that encouraging them to travel and see the world beyond their limited town walls directly affects their success of achieving that goal. So I've come up with a new warm-up activity to replace the grammar warm up for juniors (I'm hoping I've drilled it in enough freshman year that we'll having something to work with  so that I don't need to rehash the difference between "there," "they're" and "their" for seven straight classes in a row). My only goal is to help pique their interest in the world beyond Massachusetts and hopefully their interest in exciting, unfamiliar, and new (to them and me) cultures. 

I'm calling it Where In the World Is Miss Rasselas? Each Monday I'll show them a picture of some place I've been to abroad. Then on Tuesday, Wednesday and Thursday I'll give them small one-word clues. For instance, if the picture was of the Aran Islands, Tuesday's clue would be "fish," Wednesday's clue would be "curragh," and Thursday's clue would be "Liam O'Flaherty." They must put their guesses in my Where-In-the-World-Is-Miss-Rasselas box by Friday at 2:15. Monday morning I'll reach into the box and pick (actually, I'll place that burden on students) a winner from all the correct answers. Five bonus points (one homework assignment) will be awarded to the winner. By the way (English teachers have this weird habit of spelling words out), I'm no longer a believer in free homework passes, but that's a blog for another day. I'm hoping this will get them looking online to learn things about the world. I'll award an additional bonus point to a student who can answer a question about the place that they would most likely know from doing the research during the week. Hopefully this will encourage them to think of the world beyond what they can see now. I guess I'll find out if it works. Last year I found that students love seeing my pictures from traveling. I'm just hoping to plant some seeds.

I'm trying to figure out what to do with Macbeth. I'm not going to lie--Macbeth is hard for me. Well, Shakespeare is hard for me. I like to spend a lot of time with the Bard's work and mull it over a great deal. In a sixty-day course I don't have a lot of time to teach two texts (Le Morte D'Arthur and Macbeth) and teach students the joys of mulling. I can't wait for five years down the educational yellow brick road when I've figured out how to teach Shakespeare half decently. 

This year I've divided my course into two parts. With Le Morte we are going to focus on literature and the community and with Macbeth we are going to focus on literature and the individual. I'm looking forward to emphasizing the reader-response theory with Macbeth. I want Macbeth to mean something to them, reveal something about themselves to them. I'm thinking I might ask them to keep a Macbeth journal. For each scene they will need to pick out one passage and explain what it means to them and write a page or so on it. I'm hoping this will foster some interesting discussion and close analysis, but I'm afraid they'll get bored with the repetitiveness of a journal and the textual work. I'm a big ideas person, and my students respond well to that. I'm afraid I won't be able to hack it with the other approach. Most of these kids get ecstatic about applying to the local state college. Actually, the few that go to college get excited about the local state college and the majority have no idea what they are doing after school. I want them to see Macbeth (any piece of classic literature really) as a tool for self discovery. I'm just having a bit of trouble trying to figure it all out. I already know not to focus on plot details, but with a limited amount of time and a new teacher at the steering wheel, do we go big or go close-reading home? At this point in my career, it seems extremely difficult to do both well and simultaneously.  Ooo...this is a teaching crossroad for sure. Which way to turn? Which way to go? Scary. Empowering. Exciting. I can't wait for school to start.*

*See blog entry in two months entitled "What the Hell Was I Thinking?"

Great Summer Day

Went to school today.

Walking down hall when student who I kicked out of extended office detention once (at the time he swore at me) ran out of a classroom to say hi to me.

Felt good. 

Had AMAZINGLY productive prepping session with my coworker.

Psyched for next year.

Went with my coworker while he picked up students from a summer internship program.

Listened as they played the High-Low game.

Last girl in the van (former student of mine who failed my senior class) said the high of her day was seeing Miss Rasselas.

High of my week.

Good day.

Great day.

Too tired to write in complete sentences. Don't tell my students.

Why Educate?

I just returned from a trip to Boulder, the place where I first really began to become me. There's something about that Rocky Mountain air that breathes life into my soul, and imbued with a little Rocky Mountain high I'm going to write.

In my eighteen years as a student and one year as a teacher, I don't think I ever heard someone say why education is truly important. Of course, there are grades, jobs, "opportunities," etc. But so what? Honestly, who cares? I certainly don't think these are the reasons why education exists. If you think back to what the traditional models of education, people explored that world through various subjects and studied multiple areas slowly and methodically. They understood the world (or at least attempted to) through the words of famous writers, the paint strokes of influential artists, the mathimatical equations of the world's brightest, and the spectrum of sounds created by musicians. Education was long, daunting and meaningful. There were long one-on-one conversations, massive libraries, trips and travel; in essence, education was a way of life for one's youth. It was the molding of boy into a man. But education is no longer taken seriously like this. It has become one of the boxes to check off on our itemized checklist of life. The other day I told a woman I was an English teacher and her immediate response way, "Ugh, I hate reading. Oh English was awful." It struck me as a tragedy that this woman, now in her forties or fifties, was never shown how remarkably interesting it can be to explore the world through the eyes, the heart and the soul of a wise writer. 

All of our subjects, whether they be chemistry, French, computer apps, history, maths or English are essentially the same. The connections between the most divergent subjects are infinite, and the subject we teach is merely our individual vechicle that we have chosen to travel down the highway of life and glance out the window. We all look at a mountain and see the same thing but something totally different simultaneously. The chemistry teacher thinks about the fascinating composition of the rock, the French teacher is reminded of the Alps, the computer apps teacher may think about how a picture of the mountain could be scanned onto a computer and then manipulated (I actually have know idea about this field so I'm just taking a guess here), the history teacher may think how that mountain could have served the surrounding people during the Great Depression, the maths teacher may see fascinating geometric shapes, and the English teacher may wonder about how Hemmingway would have written about that mountain. In essence, all the ways we choose to explore that mountain are a reflection of our internal selves. Once a student is able to look at the world from multiple perspectives, he or she is able to look at the one thing that really matters using multiple perspectives--him or herself.

I believe a meaningful education teaches the student how to explore the world first and then how to explore his or her own internal landscape. The deeper a student looks at the world, the deeper he or she will look into him or herself. The deeper one is able to look inwards, his or her gifts to the world blossom more fully and beautifully. I think teaching is really the business of developing souls, heart and conciousness. But why is no one talking about this? Have we really lost sight of the purpose of education so much that we've actually forgotten why education even exists? I'm beginning to think that we have. I'm not convinced we know why we send our students to school and why we show up to school everyday. 

Declan Kiberd, the most amazing teacher I have ever met, once told me that the most obvious questions are usually the ones that are overlooked and never answered, and as I think more and more about my new job, I believe he is absolutely right. Why educate? I think once that question is answered collectively (within a school, a district, a state, heck, a nation), there will be a huge, massively exciting rehibilitation of the educational system in this country. I love to see people begin to talk about developing their students' souls and teaching them how to passionately connect with the world. Classes would become so much more three dimensional, departments would collaborate rather than compete for materials...well now I'm beginning to describe a teaching utopia and that seems like dangerous territory. But who knows? The possibilities could be endless, and that's one bandwagon I'd like to ride. Heck, I'd love to drive it.