Ruth’s Neighborhood

Freakonomics...
Well, is it ok to admit that I may be more excited about reading Philip’s post about this book than I am about writing my own?  Comes as a shocker many, I know, right?  But seriously, I heard he was working on an outline at some point. 

This post will by no means be outlined and the later it gets and the earlier I realize I have to wake up, it may not be coherent at all – but I do have a few thoughts rolling around in my head that I might try to translate onto this screen.  I will start by saying that these thoughts were of course provoked and inspired on the balcony of Square Books with my fabulous intern friends. I like to think of them as colleagues.

One of my favorite points that was brought up is that this whole book is set up to provide a reasoning for many things: how the KKK came to an end, why crime rates lowered in the early 90s (?), why teachers cheat on their students standardized tests and how to detect if they are doing so… the list goes on.  Much of the evidence provided for why or how these things happened sets out to disprove common held theory – theory that was arrived upon by EXPERTS.   Experts as in the people who study a very narrow field of information and over the course of time have looked at all the contributing factors affecting that very narrow field and have reached very specific conclusions.  So it makes perfect sense then that the authors of this book can dispel these conclusions and very easily in two paragraphs or three convince the reader of some completely different reasoning – and because of their smooth talking no one ever questions anything… WRONG. 

Well, ok, I might not ever question anything because hey, it’s summer and sometimes I just want to read a book without thinking critically or analyzing everything to the smallest detail.  But thanks to the brilliant people whom I somehow have the same job as, I can see this book a little more objectively and realize that although it is a fun read… the identification of incentives don’t quite provide an explanation for everything.  I mean, look at our conversations during the last book club – that wasn’t so easy, now was it?

Lunch with some of the interns at L and M's, which is closing its doors Sunday (*tear* as last summer's intern, Lauryn, would say).  The discussion was about Philip's blog post (which has sparked some good comments online):

Lunch

Evaluating My Performance During the Year:

1. Select a "learning goal" where the students were successful.  Tell why:

Participles.  By the end of the year most of them could identify participles and participial phrases.  Why?  Because I labored with it; I spent hours and days and weeks on participles, incorporating them into a thousand different lessons in a thousand different ways.  Eventually the repetition effectuated some learning.

2. Select a "learning goal" where the students were not successful.  Tell why:

My students were not any good at higher-order thinking skills.  Why not?  Because I have not found a good way to teach those sorts of things; in order to effectively teach skills like this, one of two things has to occur.  You either have to:

                                   1. have a school that encourages outside-the-box thinking

                                    or

                                   2. know what the hell you're doing as a teacher.

Neither one is true in my case, so teaching integration and analysis is still not easy.  I guess it's all about repetition, the same way it is with participles.

3. Give a general overview of your year in order to make sure you don't get a bad grade.  Tell why:

By the end of the year I was teaching things;  It took a while to establish my classroom in such a way to allow me to do my paid job.  At the end, I was teaching "Romeo and Juliet", and I was (no small accomplishment) teaching it.  Everything you need to know about the English language (and about interaction between people) is found in Shakespeare.   To (semi-)effectively teach a real masterwork gave me the feeling that I was inching towards being a real teacher and not just another jackass sitting in a classroom to serve some ulterior motives.

Now, with my freshmen, I didn't get anywhere close to teaching Shakespeare.  We were still remediating during the 4th 9 weeks: phrases and clauses?  plot and setting elements?  having students say, "We didn't know there was more than nouns and verbs"?

I don't really know what else to say.  I've already had to write another "end-of-year" evaluation blog.  I'm sort of tired of talking about my last year.  I'd like just to teach another.

Photos of Oxford are up, courtesy of Servati:

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this

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this

Here is the article with video:

There was an interesting editorial in the New York Times a few days ago about ACT test preparation in Chicago. A study came to the conclusion that test prep was taking away from class time, and NYTimes editors concluded that this was disasterous. This is a topic of great interest to me as I was given a course last year described by the counselors as "just an ACT class".

An even more interesting read is the reader response to the issue. Personally, I am in favor of test prep to a certain extent, particularly in underprivileged communities. You cannot "test prep" someone to a perfect score. I think that intelligence is still the major factor when it comes to testing well. Some might worry that too much time is spent on test prep, but if it means the difference between college or no college, graduation or no graduation, I think there should be no question. I understand the fear, but it's worth it to give everyone a (more) even playing field....

Article about the Mississippi Teacher Corps:

1. Describe Yourself as an Instructional Coach

As a coach,  I like to look for little mistakes that may escape detection but will become important later on.  For instance: when teachers do not verbally specify their plans for the day or their expectations of the students.  That is something I think is important, and I try to reinforce it in my coaching.  The students must always be told exactly what is expected of them, and what they need to do.

2. What aspect of coaching has been most difficult?

The physical exertion.  Honestly, I have no idea. I can't say that coaching has flummoxed me.  Perhaps what's difficult is that I don't know if i'm giving good or bad advice.

3. Describe how your coaching techniques have developed.

Um, I've only been "coaching" for 2 weeks.  That's not a lot of developmental time.  If anything, I've learned to be harsher with Parks than with Hayley and Jen.  Parks needs to hear how bad he is; Hayley and Jen are awesome teachers.

4. How has coaching impacted my own teaching?

Well, the things I "coach" are the things I've found myself emphasizing in my lessons: clear delineation of plans and expectations, firm discipline, confident command of the classroom.  I don't know if it's coming across, but I'm trying at any rate to emphasize them.

One of the reasons I find this blog hard to write is that I didn't do a very good job setting 'learning goals' for my students. I was so preoccupied with keeping my head above water all year, that I had a hard time trying to think ahead  - and create those big goals. This year I've got big aspirations; not only am I going to spend July unit planning, but I am going to create units with tangible goals -- and measure them. I'll have my freshmen take a practice SATP the first week, and then work the four competencies as rotating units in my curriculum. I plan to see some improvement in their post-test, and I'll have the data to show me what learning goals were met, and which weren't, come December.

But I didn't do that this year,  and as a result, I am a little less sure of what kinds of tangible progress my students really made. But I will take my best shot:

Most Successful
I think the learning goal where my students were the most successful, in all my classes, was definitely in the general area of reading skills. They were more comfortable readers, faster readers, and closer readers when they left my classroom. The number one reason, I believe, is that I am passionate about reading. My grammar lessons are about as fun as cement, but when I teach reading, I am bounding, cheering, pulling the students along in my excitement of the story. The days where they all laugh at me and look at one another shaking their heads, "She crazy. You crazy Ms. M". They roll their eyes, but they are enjoying it. I can't make grammar fun, I rarely make writing fun, and I often don't even make reading fun -- but I do show them how much it means to me, and how important I believe it is for them to read -- and that passion really makes a difference.
 
That passion also influences me to work harder at reading skills in general - I think about worksheet formatting, variety and pacing of worksheet questions, individual silent reading vs. reading groups, lessons on close reading and inferences, what types of texts, how much reflection, etc and so forth all the time- an amount of analyzation I would never engage in for a subject I dislike or even feel ambivalent about.

The other major reason my students' reading skills improved was the sheer volume of reading done in my class. We read a sizeable amount almost every single day. In addition to poems and short stories in all classes, my learning strategies classes read 2.5 books and a play (the .5 was their own book at the end of the year- to be finished on their own time in the summer), my English 4 kids read a long epic poem, a play and a longish novel, and my English 3 kids read a looong novel (250ish pages), and a play. It may not seem like much, but three months is not a very long time for all this, in addition to the other English skills. And I think, at a certain threshold, pure time invested makes a big difference.

Least Successful
The least successful learning goal in my room this year was probably my students' writing style. My students could spit out a 5-paragraph essay with good topic sentences and supporting details and the whole drill. No problem. But the actual sentences they were writing were, at best, bland, and at worst, horrible. Even though most of my seniors had subject-verb agreement down fairly well, and their spelling/mechanics were decent -- their sentences were canned, short, and boring. And the worst part is, I know exactly why. Without a state test looming over my head, I barely touched grammar and sentence structure except for the necessary basics. Also, I was just overwhelmed by the sheer logistics of improving so many different levels of ability for such an individualized skill. I have trouble differentiating among three big basic divisions (the talented, the mediocre, and the struggling) in my room, let alone 20 different kids with 20 different writing abilities/styles/issues. So I took the easy way out and let it slide.

This year I am going to spend more time on sentence construction - especially since I have ninth graders. We are going to practice all different "types" of sentence, making the kids construct lots and lots of them until they feel comfortable, perhaps, using a sentence that flows with multiple clauses in a paper, without prompting.

I am also going to work on that grammar thing.