http://paulrallison.blogspot.com/2007/10/this-year-marks-my-25th-year-of
This year marks my 25th year of teaching, and I feel like it's my first. This year, I've become a 7th Grade English Language Arts teacher for the first time. Two or three nights a week, I fall asleep while I'm trying to prepare my lessons, I'm so emotionally and physically drained by my current teaching assignment. Perhaps it's a good thing that I've been re-assigned away from my current classroom, and instead I'll be teaching an elective course in technology. But let's not get to the positive feelings so fast. Right now I'm feeling like I've been sucker-punched. I feel like my work isn't respected, and that I'm not liked. I feel like a failure. The hardest part of this story for me to admit is that I'm not a very good 7th grade teacher, at least not with the 115 young people that I've been working with for the past two months. My morning class, which meets from 8:20 - 9:25 every day has been going really well. I don't know how many times I've walked out of that class thinking, "I can do this! Maybe I can teach English Language Arts to seventh graders in a school in the Bronx." Reality often hits an hour and a half later when my break and lunch is over, and I start three 65-minute afternoon classes of 27-30 students each. By the time I see them, these young people have been yelled at, berated, punished, and threatened all day. After their screaming lunch and three hours of academic classes, they have nothing to loose. How do I handle this situation? Not as well as the social studies teacher does. The students say that they like her, because, "She understands and can talk to us." I've wanted to sit in this teacher's classroom to watch how she does it. I have always had a lot of respect for middle school teachers, but never as much as I do now. The students tell me that I'm too "soft," and that I get angry too fast. They say that I need to be more "up there" or respected. I've been very open with my students about how I feel when they act out in class -- yelling, throwing paper, but I haven't figured it out yet. Perhaps I never will, but it's been helpful to seek their advise. I've been slowly building a respectful, demanding atmosphere in my class. It has not been easy. This week was going relatively well until the end of the day on Friday, when my principal came to me to say that I would be re-assigned beginning Monday -- just hours from when I'm writing this. Instead of teaching my 7th Graders English Language Arts, I would be given elective classes from several grades in this 6-12 school. Wow! Although my learning how to control my class was a part of her assessment, she agreed with me that the problem was not just in my classroom. All of the other 7th Grade teachers were struggling with discipline issues as well. Her answer was that she had to do something about English because there is a state exam in English (and in math) in January that determines whether or not these students will be promoted to the 8th grade. A literacy teaching coach is replacing me on Monday. She will not be using computers, and she will focus on reading and writing workshops as specified by a local college. These approaches, both the literacy coach and the principal argue, will get directly to the meat of what students need to learn to pass the state exam and be promoted to 8th grade. What have I been doing with my students -- faster with my first period than my afternoon classes? The first thing I did was to set up a Google Apps Education account, giving all of my students email, docs, spreadsheets, and presentations. Then I created Google accounts for each of my students to that they could use Google Reader and Blogger. I set up a Blogger account for each student and associated each of their blogs with their Google Docs. Further I enrolled each of my students in the Personal Learning Space, and I went into each account to make it easy for them to collect the data from their Blogger posts into their Personal Learning Space blogs. This way each student would have a public blog that they could keep long after my class ended, and their work would also be collected into the "walled-garden," social network where they would be able to find friends, peers, readers. We had begun with James Beane's notion of asking students to do personal inquiries by posing for themselves ten questions about themselves and ten questions they have about the world. We also did a lot of work following Peter Elbow's descriptions of a freewriting / focused sentence / freewriting again... process of writing. In addition we had begun to explore reading together by reading and annotating (personal responses) the Wikipedia article about the Jena 6, and we did a "cloze" exercise with an article about Mychal Bell's (temporary) release from jail. The students had also written an essay in response to Sandra Cisneros' short story, "Eleven." Most all of my students had shared ten or more pieces of writing with me in their Google Docs by the time I was re-assigned away from them. Toward the middle of last week they had just started publishing to their blogs--after checking spelling, grammar, and sentence structure. It was all just beginning to come together! Of course there was plenty to fold in. This week I was going to show them how to find Creative Commons images and insert them into their Google Docs. Reading was an issue. I agreed with my friends who thought I could have started independent reading sooner, but their folders were set up. We were about to choose books, based on the themes (keywords and tags) from their 10 self and 10 world questions. And they were ready to begin Google Reader as soon as it seemed right. My vision was that students would be reading online in Google Reader or off-line in their books at least three times each week. Their responses to this reading would form the first of two-required blog posts each week. There's so much more to describe. My seventh graders had all learned their passwords, were responsible for one laptop, were learning how to use tabbed-browsing in Flock, and knew how to use Fauxto.com to create simple images. We were ready to roll, but the steering wheel has been yanked from my hands. It seems that I haven't been teaching an English Language Arts class in such a way that it would help my students to be successful on a state exam that looms over the principal's head. Seriously, it's not joke, principals must show improvement in their scores or they are going to be fired in NYC. You can imagine how hard it is for principals to take chances and try new things. So I don't blame my principal for wanting to go with an approach and an English curriculum that is more familiar to students, parents, other teachers, literacy coaches, and city and state evaluators. Tomorrow I start my new position. The principal, while expressing no confidence in my placement as a seventh grade ELA teacher, told me that she didn't want to loose me. I appreciate that. I don't know exactly what my program will look like right now, so I can't say too much, but I'm pretty sure that I will have both middle school and high school students, which will allow me to take a more active role in Youth Voices. Maybe I've been handed a gift, maybe it's not possible to bring so much of the 21st Century into a situation that is tied to a 20th Century test. Maybe I'll be happier in the margins of the school again. I wonder though, when this work will be the core work of our schools. At least for me, tomorrow I'll be able to teach students what I think is important for them to learn without the pressure of a standardized test or mandated curriculum.
