Play with words
Many of my best ideas are not my own.
Teachers, as it goes, are thieves. We borrow and steal ideas – attributing them when it’s fitting and modifying them to be our own when it’s working. Then, when it makes sense, we share what works and it becomes part of our collective practice.
Through my three years teaching, I’ve taken a lot. Paying close attention to my mentors and their classrooms, my ears perk up when I hear a good idea. Familiar with the ins and outs of a middle school classroom (at my school, anyway), I can tell what will work and won’t. I pass on the ideas that seem short term and artificial, knowing my students will ignore it or feel limited by its use.
But when I hear an idea that stands out, you’ll see me writing it down for later reference and, after some deliberation and forethought, making it happen. Everything is an experiment. Sometimes it works like I imagine, other times it fails - unsalvageable. But most often, it just needs some adjustment to work for me and my students.
Such was the case with a recent acquisition. It was an idea I heard during my first year teaching, but it took a while to integrate into my classroom. It required space and some front-loaded time and patience to create. Like the refrigerator magnet poetry that made its way into every college dorm/20-something’s kitchen in the 90′s, this was an attempt to make words, and putting them together, fun.
At this age, a student’s vocabulary is expanding at the rate of nearly 7 new words a day. They aren’t writing these words down or repeating them in new sentences. They are hearing them used in dialogue, without definition. My school learning group recently read an article that made clear “people develop vocabulary effectively and almost effortlessly as long as they see words in meaningful contexts.” Adopting a more robust vocabulary is not something that needs to be done through repetition (although that might work at first).
Based in this research, most schools require teachers to post their content words in the classroom. Called a “word wall,” this space is meant to expose students to vocabulary that fills their classroom discussions. These word walls are usually bland things, written on index cards and stapled to the wall. So in an effort to accomodate my school’s word wall requirement, and add a level of meaning (and even fun) to the process, I took on this new idea.
The picture really tells it all. Basically, white index cards are cut to size for a variety of general and commonly used words and conjunctions. Once the common words are ready, just apply magnetic tape (get a role from a craft store for $2.99). Then, as your vocabulary list grows, just add colored index cards, cut to size, with the new words written on them. Suddenly, you have a life size word wall, fit for a kitchen fridge but applied to a classroom whiteboard.
I call it Playing with Words, and the kids love it. During the morning free time or after a test is done, or when I need a kid to refocus, they get to play. Some of the sentences are poorly crafted, others just plain inappropriate. Every now and then, though, I notice a new sentence and it makes my day.
It was a great idea that I took and made a reality and I’m glad I did. On a small scale, it made the words we use in class more accesible and fun.
By now, you’ve decided if this idea is something you like. If you do, take it. You can steal it, change it, try it and scrap it. Then share it.
- Jeff
Unplanning the lesson plan
I write lesson plans every weekend. It takes about 2 hours to plan for 5 days, 2 preps a day = 10 unique lessons total. Mind you that’s just the plan. Then I have to create the stuff that makes the learning happen; the worksheets, the passages, the activities, the homework, the research, the assessments. It’s a process, but I actually enjoy it. I get to exercise my imagination in new ways on a weekly basis. With my students, there are few limits to what I can try – so even the risks aren’t as risky as they seem.
Every lesson starts with an objective – the learning goal we’ve got laid out beforehand – and you go from there. But sometimes, all that planning goes out the window. I’m starting to think it might be better that way.
Today, we were reading our most recent History Book Club novel, Does This Make My Head Look Big? and identifying examples of conflict. We got to a part when the characters (16 year old girls in high school) were impersonating one of their teachers. I looked around and they were all in it. They were in the story and reading and loving it. And it was 2:30 on a Friday and my room was kind of hot and muggy and I’m sure all that was on their mind was the weekend ahead. But they were reading with me – choosing to read with me. So we stopped reading.
And for the next 15 minutes they took turns impersonating their teachers.
For 15 minutes today, my students weren’t reading. They were characters in a book. Couldn’t have seen that coming and I sure didn’t write that in a lesson. But damnit it was the best teaching I’d done all week.
- Jeff
Let me explain
My students are sexually active. It’s really not something I’m fuzzy or confused about. It’s actually quite obvious. Pregnancies at my friends’ schools (and, yes, even my own) are not unheard of. But beyond literal insemination, my student’s conversations in the hallway, and their references to sex acts and the such make it clear that they’re far more advanced than I was at their age. In the midst of growing up, I forget my first exposure to all things sex-related. My parents never sat me down for “the talk,” so I must have picked it up from someplace. Regardless, I don’t think it happened in middle school. Then again, that comparison isn’t really very useful anyway. The point is that my students, at my school, are definitely having sex.
While I don’t necessarily condone it, there isn’t the space at my school to even bring it up. As their history teacher and part time mentor, I haven’t found the right place or time to interject my own thoughts on sex at 12 years old. While I think they can assume my position, it’s better ignored in favor of their own moral (or hormonal) compass. My philosophy, as it has been for a long time now, is that young people need access to information about sex at a young age. The more mysterious sex is, the more glorified it becomes, and the less they realize the real-world implications. For this reason, I wanted to play a role in de-mystifying it all.
I posted a list of micro-reforms I wanted to achieve by year’s end back in February. Included on that list was the goal of setting up a sex ed workshop series aimed at educating my students about their bodies, choices and, above all, contraceptives. Although my administration was hesitant at first (“this isn’t really a problem, is it?”) they embraced the idea after rallying other teachers to echo the same sentiment, and collecting a few risque notes that were intercepted during class. Let’s just say my student’s sexual vocabulary is broad and impressive.
I contacted the school district to get their approved organizations for sex ed resources and, upon seeing Planned Parenthood on the list, jumped at the opportunity. So over the last month, Planned Parenthood came in to present three workshops covering a good breadth of topics: from reproductive anatomy and making choices about sexual intimacy to abstinence and contraceptives, we made some good ground. The kids were mostly immature and giggly the whole time, but the mere mention of sex in school must have opened a whole new space to express themselves. The taboo attached to the word “sex” probably became less intriguing when I joined the conversation, and with a straight face, said things they likely didn’t expect to ever hear in room 801.
Our last workshop took place on Friday, after a long day of babysitting 8th graders while the other kids were on a field trip. To keep things rolling, we watched Avatar before the workshop got started. And during the session itself, after getting frustrated with their giggles and loudmouths, I said “We watched Avatar and now we’re talking about sex – what more do you want? Now be quiet.” It shut them up for a bit.
At least until we discovered the presenter left her plastic penis condom-dummy on the desk in our classroom. And after snapping a quick photo, I hid that in a jiffy. I can’t imagine the phone calls I’d be getting from home.
- Jeff
No rest for the wicked
I can’t even wait to get home for this one.
It’s been a real challenge to teach in the heat this week and last. With a sharp increase in the temperature outside, our students have become lethargic and slow. It doesn’t help that my classroom can get to 85 degrees on the worst days, either. So today one of my 6th graders fell asleep during independent work. I usually just poke them awake, but decided to have some fun today.
I left Waheem sleeping as the bell rang, and dismissed his classmates in silence. I whispered to stay quiet as my next class crept to their seats. We started class, and about 5 minutes later he awoke to some chatter and realized what had happened. The look on that little boy’s face was priceless. Obviously embarrassed and probably terrified, he got up and left my classroom. I felt kind of bad about it, but it’s a lesson he won’t soon forget.
It got me through the day, at least.
- Jeff
14 to 24 to 34
I was only 14 during the last census, so I don’t really remember much about it. Undoubtedly counted in my family household, I didn’t really participate. I do remember, though, reading through 2000 census data tables during college. There was a lot of information in those numbers, and so I’ve really enjoyed being a conscious citizen (and 24 years of age) during the most recent enumeration of our country’s population. I’ve also found it to be the perfect teaching opportunity. Just like the recent Presidential election, I had to take advantage of teaching the census since it doesn’t come around all that often.
And so I tied the census into my African American History curriculum and explained the relationship between representation and the 3/5th clause during slavery. I also got to bring in a guest speaker from the census, and copied my blank census form for the kids to fill out. They walked away with a good understanding of its purpose and history, and we had some fun with the same numbers I crunched in college. All in all, a good opportunity to think about the intersection between history and the real world.
Just last week, I found this great website by the Census Bureau that shows the participation rate at national and local levels. You can even zoom in on your county or neighborhood (they call it a tract) and see the percentage of people who have turned in their census. It even compares your neighborhood’s participation to the last census, and to the state and national average. Color-coded for ease of comparison, the colorful map can tell stories on its own. Scrolling through Philadelphia’s map, I can compare a wealthy neighborhood, like my neighborhood (58-67% submitted), to a low-income area, like the neighborhoods along Broad street (33-38% submitted). Take a gander and play around a bit. You’ll probably be surprised by how much fun the census can be.
It’s strange to think that the next time the census rolls around, I’ll be 34. And my students – the same ones who scream when someone farts – will be 24.
- Jeff
My favorite day so far
I’m sitting at report card conferences right now. It’s day three, hour 4. And despite the pile of grades I’m sitting next to, I’d rather just pretend they don’t exist. I pride myself on never writing letter grades on my student’s work. In fact, I’ve never actually written a grade on any assignment – I feel like it’s too definitive and absolute. A percentage or a marking takes the focus away from the evaluation and opens up the assignment for review, reflection and maybe even a chance to learn from mistakes.
So I struggle to explain to parents what an A, B or C really means. It could be as insignificant as one missing assignment, a few points on a hard test, or a misplaced absence. When it comes down to it, the grade isn’t a very accurate reflection of who that student is, how much they’ve learned, or grown. It is, though, a relatively easy way to satisfy the question “how’s my kid doing?” And sadly it becomes the go-to measure of success for a lot of our kids.
I like to think differently. Real learning, and our evaluation of it, must be more holistic. Case in point: as part of our world history curriculum, I’ve been teaching world religions for the last three months. We’ve learned about the basic geography, principles and history of Buddhism, Hinduism, Islam and Judaism (I kept Christianity ’til the end, and we ran out of time…oops). I’ve tested them throughout the unit, and I can identify the objectives and topics they struggled with most. But when it comes down to it – the purpose of my teaching isn’t based on that basic content knowledge. I couldn’t care less if they remember the five pillars of Islam, or the name Siddhartha. What I really want is for my students to leave my classroom with a better understanding of the world, the people they will interact with, and their place within it. And that means having a sense of familiarity with other religions. I would guess 90% of my students are Christian, maybe 5% are Muslim. The rest, by self proclamation, question religion altogether.
In my own experience, I’ve found religion to be a powerful force in people’s lives, and in determining how they act, what they believe and how I interact with them. Beyond encounters of discrimination or difference, religion (or the lack thereof) can be a meaningful variable in any given relationship. And even though I’ve always tried to actively learn about other people’s beliefs, I myself don’t have many friends who aren’t Christian or Jewish. And those friends I do have who identify as Muslim or Buddhist or Hindu (or anything else) haven’t made their religion a part of our relationship. I’ve never been a mosque, a synagogue, a temple or anything in between. I’ve lived a Christian-centered childhood, and spent plenty of time in Catholic and Baptist churches. It’s all I’ve known, and as I came to find, all my students know, too.
So in order to make up for this lack of exposure and diversity, and to make some real-world connections to my teaching, I planned a one day field trip to visit a mosque, synagogue and Buddhist temple. The trip itself was hell to plan – contacting sites, setting up dates, ordering kosher food… the list goes on. But the preparations aside, this trip gave me a real sense of what my students had learned from me, and gave me some confidence that it was actually something meaningful. It’s hard to really measure a “good day” teaching, but this was, by far, my proudest day as a teacher. It wasn’t so much that I led a discussion or even facilitated their learning. It really had nothing to do with me. The learning was happening independent of a teacher, of a classroom, of a book. They were interacting with the world around them in a way they never
had before: asking questions to an Imam, making references to reincarnation in a synagogue, and meditating in a temple. Yes, 50 kids were sitting on a mediation pillow and reciting the “Om” in near silence. I had to ask myself several times throughout the day. “Is this real?”
It was, and it still is. The kids returned with a sense of accomplishment, and I’m sure a familiarity with people and places they previously had viewed as foreign and even dangerous. The mystery was demystified. The uncertain was made more certain. Religion was no longer just a Christian God and the Bible. There was the Torah, Moses, Muhammad, the Qur’an, and gongs. This trip served as a reminder of the teacher I want to be…as a foreshadowing of the kind of teacher I could one day be. If done right, at the right moment, with everything else in the right place, it works. The kids learn something that will stick with them forever.
But it sure as hell doesn’t make it to the report card.
- Jeff
Oh, yeah, I’m a teacher
March has been a bit hectic. I’ve neglected my posts for a reason – mostly because I needed to focus on being a teacher and stuff. Ironically enough, my lack of blog posts has stressed me out more than writing them. When I go without reflection for this long, I begin to sense that there is a teasing void that needs to be filled. So I’m filling it.
These past few months have presented me (and every other teacher in Philadelphia) with a bit of challenge. Interrupted by snow storms and holidays and constant field trips (my students will have gone on 5 this month alone), my curriculum has become nearly irrelevant. As a history teacher, I thrive off of connections from one lesson to the next. There is rarely an isolated moment in my teaching that doesn’t require some background from the previous week or unit. So, it’s been difficult to guide my students with any sense of continuity with our recent stop-and-go schedule.
Presented with a challenge, I have not capitulated, but rather, am rebounding – trying to take advantage of the clutter and make some sense out of it. If the usual and constant is order in my teaching, then I needed to do the opposite – create a little chaos…put things (carefully and thoughtfully) out of order…mix things up. And so I did.
My solution was not, in any way, revolutionary or innovative. But it has been effective. And it’s as simple as centers. By centers I mean isolated stations that allow groups of students to rotate practicing a variety of content-based skills.
The benefits of centers:
- student-focused and operated
- cater to diverse learning styles
- cover a broad scope of material
- can be evaluated in a variety of ways (quantitative/qualitative)
The drawbacks of centers:
- so much planning to prepare
- management can be a problem and add to chaos
- real learning can be avoided by determined students
With all this in mind, I gave it a serious try twice in the last two weeks. Both times the room was quiet with only the buzz of learning to be heard, and students engaged with the material on their own terms and at their own pace. In an effort to capture the beauty of it all, I shot this video:
We are studying Islam and the basic principles and practices of the religion. They had the chance to interact with religious artifacts like a prayer rug and Qur’an and were able to read, write, watch and listen at the five stations I had set up. Regardless of the true success (I’ll know once I grade their assessments and assignments), the experience gave me some motivation to keep thinking about ways to break up my teaching and put it into the hands of my students. That is, I think, where it belongs.
- Jeff
Using data better
If there’s anything lacking at my school (and most) it’s not tests. In a 9 month period, my students take dozens of tests, including those from their teachers and those mandated by the state. There are four levels of testing that most students endure throughout the school year. Just for fun, I adapted the Homeland Security Advisory System to fit with the four levels of testing. With each level, the stakes become higher.
Schools have become so driven by these tests that the most important of them all (high stakes) takes only two days of the whole year, yet determine most of the curriculum, cost the most money and demand the most energy. In Pennsylvania, it is called the PSSA – and has already taken over the daily grind in most schools. PSSA this, PSSA that. In the end, each school is usually aware of their student’s progress to date and ability to perform well on the state test. They measure this throughout the year on various tests that attempt to mimic the PSSA in word choice and content. These are the predictive tests that are administered 4 + times throughout the school year.
This year, my school decided to order an external testing service to measure our in-house progress from September through the PSSA in April. Unfortunately, we went on the cheap and didn’t order anything more than the tests themselves. That meant no scantron, no grade sheet and a lot of time deciphering our student’s data. We were given the test booklets and instructions to fill out a two-sided grid for each of our classes. The grid (seen below) was confusing, manually entered, unarchivable, and ultimately useless.
By counting the number of X’s in each question column, the naked eye must decide which questions and skills the most students struggled with. It was an imperfect system that gave me little information about my students’ performance, and took up way too much time. Multiply that across my school of teachers, and we are putting in tens of hours of work into creating hand-written grids that are hard to read and impossible to integrate into our teaching.
So, with the help of my amazing roommate and friend Becca, I created this:
An electronic form of the grid, this spreadsheet format now gives us the ability to quickly and easily enter the data into the grid and instantly receive information about our students’ performance by breaking the questions into skills, color coding each question item for its total correct score, and providing a PSSA equivalent category for individual students. From here, you can create graphs of student performance by class, group (special education, for example) or grade. With a few clicks of the mouse, the information can be manipulated and turned into something useful. It took about 5 hours to put together, and without Becca – would have been far more primitive. But I did it – and the results have been amazing. I gave a short workshop session to all the teaching staff and now everyone is on board.
It has been one of my more tangible accomplishments this year – and something that really excited me. I like the feeling of creating something to make my school more efficient and my colleagues better teachers. Next year, I’ll be advising my school to purchase everything with the tests – not just the test books. And I really don’t mind that the testing scantron machine will make my electronic grid obsolete. I don’t really care how we do it, I just want us to use our data better. If we’re gonna force these kids to take tests, the results better be damn useful.
- Jeff
Redemption
These were waiting for me as I walked into the house today.
In response to my consumer complaints, I got what I asked for – a $15 refund from United for losing my bag and $7 worth of vouchers to buy new Jolly Ranchers. Sometimes, asking nicely for what you deserve can pay off.
- Jeff
Listen up
As a history teacher, I’m always telling my kids about the importance of using primary sources in their learning. And when I teach about them, I usually reference things like diaries, photos and documents as places to look for information about the past. In my slavery unit this past month, I taught about the experience of slaves on Southern plantations using interviews of former slaves that were taped and transcribed for the Federal Writer’s Project in the 1930′s. They are amazing resources for my students to get insight into the daily lives of these important historical figures, but this type of rich and (practically) unfiltered primary source is rare.
During one of these lessons, all this talk about primary sources got one of my students thinking about the primary sources that we’ll be leaving behind. In other words, he wanted to know what the people of the future will be using to understand our history. It’s a fun thought experiment to consider – what are you leaving behind that will be around for someone to sift through, dust off and make conclusions about how you lived your life or what you thought? For me, it’s this blog, a few knick-knacks I’ve left around and probably some news articles that have quoted me. Not much, really – and probably more than most.
Even before I was a history teacher, and got on tangents about primary sources, I was interested in leaving behind something more. And I’m not the only one with this instinct. StoryCorps started as a small non-profit venture that set out to record the everyday stories of Americans from across the country. They wanted to capture the folklore of our day and cement it in the Library of Congress for all of posterity. I thought it was a fun idea, and I especially loved the idea of sharing our personal narratives with someone else. Check out the website for more information about how it works, but it really is quite simple. The website even gives little snippets of select interviews, like this one.
What started as a stationary booth in NYC has blossomed into a mobile listening booth that travels around the US and a second and third booth in DC and SF. They have expanded their mission and have collected tens of thousands of stories. And of those stories, I account for three. I’ve interviewed my closest of friends Diana and Gina, my grandparents Ed and Helen and my dad Mike. Over the last three years, I’ve gone to all three booths in NYC and SF and just recently interviewed my dad during the holiday. He wasn’t nervous at first, but I could tell the pressure was on – especially when I asked about his first kiss. The point of the interviews aren’t to role play Oprah or Dr. Phil – it’s more about revealing than revelations. I want to leave something behind that explains where my family came from and the people they were. My interview questions range form childhood memories to life regrets, and my partner can take it as deep or shallow as they want. If you are in any of the cities StoryCorps visits, I recommend making an appointment (hurry – they run out quick!) and picking a friend or loved one who you want to interview. It’s a great experience for both – and they give you a copy of the interview to take home – something you’ll have forever.
I just imagine the school kids of the future, listening in on these interviews, learning about our lives and the ways we thought and interacted. And the teacher who so eagerly uses the stories we told to teach his students about the past, a little more knowledgeable because of we left something behind.
- Jeff
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