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.
Showing posts with label school. Show all posts
Showing posts with label school. Show all posts
Saturday, June 21, 2014
Thursday, June 19, 2014
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.)
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.)
Wednesday, June 18, 2014
First Day of Summer - Eight Hours!
Today is the first day of my summer break. I got up this morning at 7:00, got dressed, poured some coffee and made some breakfast, and went to work. I got to school just before 8:00am and wandered my way up to my classroom. I spent the first hour working on curriculum maps for my Drama I course.
Then from 9 - 10, we met as a department to review all the Common Core standards and make sure that we're covering all of them across the sequence of English classes our students take. We had some good conversations about the standards, how to teach them, how to assess them, and what will be expected of our students when they take the PARCC.
[For those who are interested, the Common Core standards can be found here and sample PARCC assessments can be found here.]
From 10 - 11, I had some varied conversations with teachers of other English classes about how they're going to assess their students' learning, and specifically brainstormed some ideas about how to engage students with reading and comprehending issues of race in Othello. I also had a meeting with the curriculum coordinator about the need to differentiate the assessments in Drama I, which is a performing arts class, from the assessments in Senior Seminar, which is a college prep reading/writing class.
From 11 - 12 I tweaked my 1st quarter benchmark assessment for Senior Seminar and had some pizza with my colleagues.
After 12 I spent an hour on cleaning my classroom and packing everything up for the summer. I had to label all my furniture, figure out which books I needed to take home and which ones I could leave in the building, and put away all the exemplar work I'm keeping for next year.
From 1 - 2 I worked on adjusting the curriculum maps for Senior Seminar because I was still not happy with the sequencing of my units.
From 2 - 3 I spent time brainstorming with the Drama II teacher about how we're going to assess the students in Drama I and Drama II. Then I spent some time helping her think about how she's going to assess students in her Topics in Literature class.
After 3, I did a bit more organizing and started working on my 2nd quarter benchmark assessment for Senior Seminar, signed my time sheet, took the last load of stuff down to my car, turned in my computer, said goodbye to the office staff, and headed out the door.
At this point, this list is what I need to finish in the next two months:
Then from 9 - 10, we met as a department to review all the Common Core standards and make sure that we're covering all of them across the sequence of English classes our students take. We had some good conversations about the standards, how to teach them, how to assess them, and what will be expected of our students when they take the PARCC.
[For those who are interested, the Common Core standards can be found here and sample PARCC assessments can be found here.]
From 10 - 11, I had some varied conversations with teachers of other English classes about how they're going to assess their students' learning, and specifically brainstormed some ideas about how to engage students with reading and comprehending issues of race in Othello. I also had a meeting with the curriculum coordinator about the need to differentiate the assessments in Drama I, which is a performing arts class, from the assessments in Senior Seminar, which is a college prep reading/writing class.
From 11 - 12 I tweaked my 1st quarter benchmark assessment for Senior Seminar and had some pizza with my colleagues.
After 12 I spent an hour on cleaning my classroom and packing everything up for the summer. I had to label all my furniture, figure out which books I needed to take home and which ones I could leave in the building, and put away all the exemplar work I'm keeping for next year.
From 1 - 2 I worked on adjusting the curriculum maps for Senior Seminar because I was still not happy with the sequencing of my units.
From 2 - 3 I spent time brainstorming with the Drama II teacher about how we're going to assess the students in Drama I and Drama II. Then I spent some time helping her think about how she's going to assess students in her Topics in Literature class.
After 3, I did a bit more organizing and started working on my 2nd quarter benchmark assessment for Senior Seminar, signed my time sheet, took the last load of stuff down to my car, turned in my computer, said goodbye to the office staff, and headed out the door.
At this point, this list is what I need to finish in the next two months:
- Drama semester 2 curriculum map
- Senior Seminar benchmark assessments for 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarters
- Drama benchmark assessments for 1st, 2nd, 3rd, and 4th quarters
- Rubrics for all of those assessments.
- Daily lesson plans for Drama and Senior Seminar quarter 1 (including finding all texts, creating all activities and developing all formative assessments)
- Performance tasks and rubrics for Drama and Senior Seminar quarter 1
Tuesday, June 17, 2014
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".
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".
Monday, June 16, 2014
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".
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