Catching Up

The idea when I started this blog was that I would write every day. I haven't, obviously, but I have been getting a lot of other things done. Most of them haven't been related to work, because I'm trying to squeeze in all the life things that I don't have time for during the year, like visiting my family, helping a friend move, moving my father-in-law into our house, getting a new roof, and going to a lot of aikido classes. However, it's almost the end of July and I sat down with my calendars this morning to start getting organized for the coming month and the school year that will follow it. Here's my life right now:

By August 18th I needed to have finished:

• Senior Seminar Semester 1 Course Map - Done
• Senior Seminar Semester 2 Course Map - Done
• Senior Seminar Q1 Performance Assessment - Done
• Senior Seminar Q2 Performance Assessment - Done
• Senior Seminar Q3 Performance Assessment
• Senior Seminar Q4 Performance Assessment
• Senior Seminar Q1 Unit Plans (including all daily lessons)

• Drama I Semester 1 Course Map - Done
• Drama I Semester 2 Course Map - Done
• Drama I Q1 Performance Assessment - 1/2 done (maybe another hour's worth of work to go)
• Drama I Q2 Performance Assessment - 1/3 done (2-3 hours left on this - I have to do research)
• Drama I Q3 Performance Assessment
• Drama I Q4 Performance Assessment
• Drama I Q1 Unit Plans (including all daily lessons)

Some of these items I'm still having a hard time wrapping my brain around. I am hesitant to try to write my end-of-year exams because I honestly don't know what my kids are going to be like. I understand that I'm supposed to be teaching to an objective set of standards and that I should test the students on those once they've been established, but I don't want to be unrealistic in my expectations, and I would really like to know a few things like how many SPED students I'll have and what the overall grade levels of students in Drama I are. Those things affect the end game.

Also, I'm supposedly going to get feedback on everything I submit. That hasn't happened yet, and I submitted some things before school ended in June. I'm going to communicate with my administration about that, but it is possible that I'm going to end up with a major time crunch at the end as I try to make adjustments that I could have been making while I still had a lot of time to think about things.

As for today, I scanned in all the texts for the Q1 and Q2 Drama I exams, which took about 20 minutes. Then I had to format them all into GoogleDocs. That took another 20 - 30 minutes. Then I started my research for the Drama I Q2 exam, which I gave up on after about 20 minutes because I was distracted by all the pounding the roofers were doing. I took a break, and this afternoon I've spent about 20 minutes organizing my personal calendar with all the Drama-related PD that I know about, another 15 minutes registering for an unrelated PD.

The PD calendar goes something like this:

• Aug. 11 & 12 - Student Orientation: I still haven't decided if I want to do this or not. I'll get paid, but it means giving up part of all of two days, and depending on how done I am with the to-do list, I might not be able to give up that time.
• Aug 13 - PD for teacher-facilitators regarding teacher orientation
• Aug 18 - EVERYTHING IS DUE!
• Aug 20, 21, & 22 - PD at school all day
• Aug 27, 28, & 29 - PD at school all day
• Sept 2 - Students Return

I'm beginning to feel the crunch. Time to get back to work.

I *Actually* Got Work Done

I will confess to being lazy over the last few days. I've spent time celebrating my mother-in-law's birthday, working out, gardening, cooking, and playing Dominion, but I haven't gotten a lot of anything done since Sunday afternoon when I was reading in the car. I've opened my Google Drive several times and stared at the test I was trying to write, but I haven't successfully figured out what I was going to add to it in terms of exam questions.

Writing a good exam is a lot like writing a good poem - it has to be full enough of stuff to make people think, and not so all-over-the-place that it becomes a fruitless exercise in guessing at meaning. I wrote, deleted, and re-wrote the same test question about six times before I figured out how I needed to phrase them so that I could tell whether the students actually understood the reading or were just lucky guessers.

I have succeeded.

I am now essentially done with two of eight exams, though I still need to create rubrics for them, and I have a third one formulated in my head that I need to organize on paper. By the end of today, I hope to have another exam fairly well completed.

Some time this weekend I'll be getting together with a colleague to help her with some exam writing for her classes.

Car Time

One of my favorite parts of road trips is being able to read and daydream uninterrupted. Today's in-car reading was a bunch of essays that I'm thinking about using in my Senior Seminar class next year. I read three essays and then sat and pondered how I was going to integrate them into my class, what the linking ideas were across the texts, and how I was going to help the students see the connections among them. I ended up with a list of four essay of varying lengths and difficulties for my students to read, but I'm still working on how, exactly, I'm going to guide them to linking all these ideas together. I'm also debating whether or not I want to have the students start looking at text structure and organization so early in the year. All told, I think I worked for about 40 minutes (I read really fast).

Additionally, my morning was spent having a discussion-debate with my family about other issues in education - funding, magnets, bussing for racial diversity, and local school councils. It was a good conversation, but definitely highlighted why a one-size-fits-all model is a bad idea. What works for Akron, OH is not necessarily going to work for Chicago, IL; the experiences and expectations of the people in those two places are just too different.

Dear world, please let educators educate and doctors doc and lawyers law and stop trying to tell people how to do their jobs!

On another note, over 500 CPS teachers are being laid off. So far neither my partner or I are on the list, but it's only June 27th.

We Interrupt This Blog For My Regularly Scheduled Birthday

I wasn't planning on doing anything yesterday for my birthday, so I was expecting to get to do some work. That is not what happened. Now my to-do list is filling up with uncompleted tasks. I still have to finish that 2nd quarter Senior Seminar exam along with starting to think about exams and rubrics for Drama I.

This is very similar to what happens during the school year with grading papers. A small pile that looks like it can be put off for a day or two while I do something else, like spend an evening at a friend's birthday dinner or go to see a play, ends up growing and growing until I have way too much paper to get through in the course of an evening, but I have to, because my students need their work back to look over, correct, and use to move forward.

Off to work I go.

An Actual Weekend

Today is Saturday. I spent it doing martial arts, eating a hamburger, and walking around downtown in the rain. I wanted to spend my evening enjoying a nice fire, but it's still really wet outside, so that's not going to work as well as I wanted to. I did absolutely nothing work-related today, and that makes me happy.

Tomorrow I'll be back to it and I plan to finish my 2nd quarter Senior Seminar exam. Then I'll be switching gears to work on stuff for my Drama class throughout the week.

6:53pm and the Next Day

It's 6:53pm, and I'm going to save posting this for tomorrow, but I wanted to make a note for myself that I've spent the last 20 minutes responding to an e-mail from another Drama teacher at my school who wanted to know more about assessing students using process journals or processfolios.  These are sort of like a portfolio, but instead of containing only a student's best work, they contain examples of the student's works as they progress along with metacognitive/reflective writing about both the process and the product. As I think about assessing students in a Drama class, a processfolio makes a lot more sense than a single end grade, because I'm trying to teach the students both what high-quality theater-arts work looks like, as well as the processes that actors, directors, and designers use to get there.

Ok, I'm really, seriously taking my first day off today. No working on exams. No working on planning lessons. No thinking about my job... Oh wait. It's too late for that. I am (almost) always thinking about my job. For example, yesterday I was scrolling through my invitations and suggested events on MeetUp and I came across this interesting-sounding convention - MuseCon. (You can read all about it here.)  As I was looking at the offerings, I started to get really excited; there are classes about things I've always wanted to learn, like how to play the Celtic harp. But then I started thinking about whether those were the *best* classes for me to take, and my internal dialogue turned in to this:

MeA:  Oooooh! Celtic harp! I would love that! I could take the one in the basement and actually learn to play it!

MeB:  Damnit. That's at the same time as Renaissance Dance. Which one should I do?

MeA:  Harp! I've wanted to learn since college!

MeB:  Yeah, but I could probably use what I learn in the dance class for teaching Shakespeare, or in Drama I, or something.

MeA:  But... harp!

MeB:  Be a good teacher! Be a better teacher! Learn something you can teach your kids!

MeA:  BUT THIS IS A CONVENTION I WANT TO GO TO FOR ME!

MeB:  HAHAHAHA! TOO BAD! YOU'RE A TEACHER AND YOU'RE GOING TO KEEP THINKING ABOUT TEACHING ALL SUMMER! EVERYTHING YOU DO WILL SOMEHOW RELATE TO TEACHING! EVEN THINGS YOU WANT TO DO JUST FOR YOU WILL NEVER BE JUST FOR YOU!!!!!

MeA: /le sigh

I should note that, if I do actually go to MuseCon, having now had this argument with myself, I'm going to do the harp class if there's still room in it, because it's something I've wanted to learn for a decade now. I even bought myself a small harp to try to teach myself, but I don't play it often enough (as in never) for that to be effective.

On a related -I always think about teaching- note, I went to the gym this morning. As I was resting between sets on the leg press, I had this thought:  I wonder if having stronger legs will give me more stamina for teaching on the block next year.

In short, there is no escaping my job. Even when I'm not working, I'm thinking about working.

Writing Exams Is Always A Challenge

In today's episode of "It's Summer!" I've spent the last hour finding and formatting the texts my students will read for their 2nd quarter benchmark exam in Senior Seminar. The standards they are being tested on have to do with being able to integrate information from multiple types of informational texts to answer questions and solve problems, the creation of questions to guide inquiry and research, and the ability to identify key information in texts.

In order to test whether these are skills my students have, I can't ask them questions about texts we've already studied in class; I'm striving to avoid "parrot syndrome". So, instead of asking them about the content we'll have been reading and writing about for ten weeks, I had to find a completely new set of texts on a completely new topic. They have to be complex enough to make the test challenging, but not so complex that students won't be able to understand the issue at hand. I have four texts right now, one of which is a graph, and the other three are semi-scientific articles. I still have to come up with all the questions and finish formatting the entire thing. Then I'll have to develop a rubric for the open-ended questions and determine how I'm going to assign points to the multiple-choice questions.

However, since it -is- summer, I'm going to give myself the rest of the day off to have lunch, go to the gym, and spend the evening at my martial arts class, something I don't get to do ten months out of the year because the class ends too late for me to get enough sleep. (Please note that the class ends at 9:30pm, which is not "too late" in most people's minds, but they don't have to be ready to deal with teenagers for a minimum of 7.5 hours, starting at 8am.)

The "Last" Day

Today is the last day of the school year for me. It seems like I should be celebrating, but instead I've just finished setting up the coffee maker to auto-brew at 5:30 tomorrow morning, because even though I'm technically on summer break, I'm going in to work from 8:00am - 4:00pm. Between now and then, I'm working on some planning for next year.

I know that it seems crazy to non-teachers that I'm already thinking about next school year, but the fact of the matter is, that teachers don't actually get summers off. The students come back on Sept. 2nd, but I have to turn in curriculum maps, learning plans, assessments, rubrics, and other bits and bobs some time around Aug. 18th. Then, I'm back at work for three days of training from Aug. 20 - 22, and again from Aug. 27 - 29. So yes, while technically after tomorrow is over, I don't have to go back into the building until August, I still have a lot of work I have to finish. I should also point out that, because I teach two classes, I have to do all this planning and organizing twice. Furthermore, while most people teach as part of a team where there are multiple teachers who teach the same class, which makes it easier to get all the work done since the load is shared, I don't have teams for either of my courses. While I appreciate the autonomy this gives me, I am doing all the planning and preparation completely on my own.

To be fair, I will be getting paid for my work tomorrow and my work in August. However, the amount of planning I need to do is not going to get completed in one eight-hour day, and all the rest of it that I have to finish is work I'll be doing without compensation. Exactly how much I'll have to finish and how long it will take me will depend on how much I get done tomorrow, and that will depend on how much time I spend sitting in meetings and how much time I get to spend actually working.

Welcome to my summer "off".

The Funniest Phrase I've Ever Head: "Teachers Get Summers Off"

It's almost time for summer break, and I've been thinking that the first day off of school would be the perfect time to reboot this blog as well.  As the national conversation about education continues to center around teacher pay, test scores, charter schools, standards, and various bits of legislation, it is clear that teachers' voices are still not an equal part of the dialogue, let alone driving the conversation.  Furthermore, most of the public seems to be perfectly content with this fact, as the pervasive perspective seems to be that anyone who went to school must be as much of an expert on it as those people who have studied teaching and learning and have experience doing and refining, day-in and day-out, what they studied.  And so, in the process of adding my voice as a teacher into the conversation, I want to address some of the perceptions and misconceptions that often come up in conversations about teaching and learning. To do this, I want to paint a realistic picture of what teaching looks like on a day-to-day basis, both the successes and the challenges, and especially what it really means when people say that teachers are so lucky that we "get the summers off".

Energy

In traditional magickal teachings and energy manipulation, the chakras are the energy centers of the body, and the seven of them run from the base of the spine to the crown of the skull. Each chakra has its own designated color:

Root - base of spine - red

Belly - abdomen - orange

Solar Plexus - beneath rib cage - yellow

Heart - center of chest - green

Throat - hollow of throat - blue

Third Eye - middle of forehead - purple

Crown - top of, or just over top of head - white

I am not fond of these designations. I was thinking about them as I was falling asleep last night, and I kept thinking, "But that's all wrong for me. My heart isn't green. It's red." (For some reason I keep wanting to type "red" as "read".)

Since these colors aren't working for me, I decided to create a body map of my own energy centers, tapping into my own sense of color/body energy correspondence. Here's what I discovered:

Hands - green: Hands are for making things, creating things, growing things. Green is good, creative, positive, healthy, healing energy.

Head - blue: Blue is my color of thinking. It's a cool color. It's a color that means being relaxed, of letting my thoughts flow. It's the color of the sky, so it corresponds to air, which is all about intellect.

Mouth - white: I think this is because I tend to not think before I speak. When I see something, I say something, and often the unvarnished truth comes out at inconvenient times. So white is for clarity, for purity, for a lack of obfuscation.

Third Eye - yellow: Yellow is another intellect color for me. It's the color of far-seeing, of true-seeing, of seeing things in the "light of day". It's a sunlight color, so it also means looking at the world with warmth and seeing the good in people, seeing how they can shine.

Heart - crimson: It's not just red. It's blood. It's passion. It's life.

Groin - blue surrounded by yellow: I'm still thinking about what these colors mean. Creative potential, joy, energy, happiness... that's as far as I've gotten.

Neck - orange: Orange is my pain color. My neck is where I hold my tension.

Spine - crystal clear: It's actually more like a column of liquid diamond, if such a thing could exist. All the colors sparkle and flash in here, running up and down.

Quads - green: This is where the most powerful muscles in my body are. This is the center of my balance. This is my stability, my grounding, my connection. I spend a lot of time sitting on the ground, so my thighs are my connection to the Earth.

Calves - blue: This is the blue of running water and rolling waves. This is where movement and motion, travel and adventure come from.

Shins - white: I don't know what this is about either.

Feet - red arches, surrounded in brown, with a black outline: I have a love/hate relationship with my feet. When I stand strong I am grounded, connected, channeling energy, but when I'm not, I'm just a mess.

Aura - dark violet with golden-yellow flecks: Yes, I can see my own aura. No, I'm not going to explain it to you. Any questions?

I'm still working with all this, and playing with energy and colors and imagery. Snakes seem to be becoming important. Something about slipping their skins and being born again new, and yet the same. That fascinates me. Snakes are Fire creatures, but they live within the Earth, and Fire and Earth are my two weakest elements.

And if any of this makes me sound crazy, just you try explaining your religion to a skeptic and see how it sounds in their ears. =)