Day One: Killer Tacos!

We landed in Guadalajara City gaping for market tacos. We found many, and we share out findings with you, dear viewers.

Can't talk... writing TPEs

Well, I'm deep in the throes of TPE madness. I've got 5 of 13 done. Crazy stuff. In a way, it's like a game: they give you a 200 word assignment that's packed like an Incan stone wall with action verbs, all of which you have to explain your use of, and you have 400 words to do it. Did I say game? I meant cruel game.

For those of you asking what the hell is a TPE, it's a Teacher Performance Expectation. Candidates for credential have to write 13 of them and provide artifacts, (e.g. lesson plans, rubrics, assignments, clumps of hair) to explain how they meet these expectations.

The expectations themselves are understandable in content, but nearly incomprehensible in delivery. That is to say that the expectations seems justifiable... just very hard to write about in a brief manner. And the way they describe the expectations is madness! Take a look at the firt half of TPE 3:

Candidates for a Teaching Credential understand and use a variety of informal and formal, as well as formative and summative assessments, to determine students’ progress and plan instruction. They know about and can appropriately implement the state-adopted student assessment program. Candidates understand the purposes and uses of different types of diagnostic instruments, including entry level, progress-monitoring and summative assessments. They use multiple measures, including information from families, to assess student knowledge, skills, and behaviors. They know when and how to use specialized assessments based on students' needs. Candidates know about and can appropriately use informal classroom assessments and analyze student work. They teach students how to use self-assessment strategies. Candidates provide guidance and time for students to practice these strategies.

Mmmkay.

In TPE 4, I count at least 20 action verbs that candidates for teaching credential regularly execute. All words like "sequence", "distinguish", "reinforce", and "spelunk". Well, good teachers do all these things every day. Implication properly inferred: I suck.

Think about it: for each action verb in the TPE, candidates get 20 words to explain how they do it. (Word count in last sentence: 20)

To be honest, though, I get a perverse enjoyment out of the task, because it reminds me of the times I've packed up my car to move, and have found I have two times as much stuff as can fit. The processes of refining, sifting, evaluating and cramming are well suited to the writer's temperament.

And so is complaining.

But you know who I really pity? The teachers who just started teaching last January. I started in August, so I have an extra semester's worth of plans and quizzes and units and sundries to help me write these TPEs. Without these artifacts, and indeed the in-class experiences they represent, I would feel like I'm drawing on a shallow well.

But now just look at how much time I've spent here! Got to get some coffee and get back to the grind!

Small Schools Fair

Went to a Small Schools Fair in San Francisco over the weekend. What a wash that was. I'm glad we had plans in the City that night, or we would have been mad about the wasted trip.

Let me get this straight, folks. You call yourself a small school, but you're housed in a massive, prison-style building with four other small schools. And you have no restrictions on teacher-student ratio beyond what is mandated by the state. And you're run by SFUSD. Riiiight. I think that I would rather work for one of the bigger schools, because then at least there might be more resources.

(and, and as an aside, I went in to make some last-minute copies before class today, and both copy machines were broken--both! And, yes, that means that for a school of 1200 kids, there are two photocopy machines. One, actually; the other is an electric gestetner. Wondering what the hell a gestetner is? Three clues: chunk-chunk-chunk!)

So, I was talking with one representative of a "small school" and she was saying that for next year, they need a teacher who can teach 10th grade English, a 12 grade elective, and a newcomer class. What's a newcomer class, you ask. It's for ELL students who have been in the U.S. for less than a year. What grade levels in the section? 9-12. How many kids? 37 at last count.

Thirty-seven! 37 kids from 10 different countries, I imagine, with performance abilities all over the map, each with a particular set of strengths and challenges, all crammed into a room with one teacher. Can you think of another profession that would require its professionals to do such a ridiculous and impossible task day after day?

And then, while we're in the car, listening to NPR (state-mandated required listening for liberal educators) and there's some kind of panel talking about the state of education. How timely. People are wringing their hands, wailing about how we're failing our children, gnashing their teeth and groaning with confusion and despair. One guy flat-out blamed the teachers. Teachers today, he bemoaned, are more worried about their contracts than providing excellent education for our kids. Grumbles of assent from the panel.

Teaching is fast approaching police work as the lowest paid, hardest, and most thankless profession in the nation. The "Small Schools Fair" was not my brightest day.

Procrastination: Is Lesson Planning Any Good Without It?

I'm heading into a new unit on the short story. I'm using Gary Soto's Living Up the Street as the cornerstone, and bringing in a few of my favorite shorts. The idea is to get the students to understand what goes into a short story--elements such as voice, plot, and point of view; devices such as metaphor, use of imagistic detail, foreshadowing and symbolism.

Who knows if and how this is going to produce many good stories. My hunch is that those students who turn in good stories would have done so before the lessons I'm poised to give. That's always the big question for me as a teacher: how much difference am I making? I'm going to try to answer that here in a stream of consciousness manner.

First, although the already good writers may learn little directly from me, there is rarely any harm done in practicing what they already know--and usually some good comes of it. I'm helping in that way: I'm providing practice, as well as demonstrating that this sort of thing is okay and worthwhile to think about and do... which is a kind of modeling.

Second, of the students who frankly don't give a damn about how to write (or thoughtfully read) a short story, I might be getting through to one or two with some aspect of my presentation I may not even be aware of. Hurray for accidental influence!

Third, for those students in between apathetically unskilled and apathetically skilled--the majority who are most prime for learning--the art and craft of teaching really comes into play. It's for them that I have to make calculated moves; present rubrics and exercises that are full and engaging, but not too complex; assignments that are challenging, but doable... and repeatable.

I know that if I were a really good teacher, I would be burning the midnight oil every night, trying to figure out how to reach every single one of my students with every single letter of my lessons, but I'm not there yet. For now, I'm limiting myself to gearing my lessons for the middle majority, and catching the others as I can. Would George Bush be proud of me? I wonder.

It Begins in Earnest + This and that

Last semester, the program I'm in was heavily front-loaded--which is to say that there was a lot of reading and work in the first half of the semester. This semester seems like the opposite. As a result, I'm just coming out of what feels like an eddy of serenity in a raging river of academic chaos.

Can there be such a thing as an eddy of serenity? Perhaps.

It's the kind of thing I'd be tempered to underline in one of my student's papers.

Funny aside: I was talking with a friend of mine last Friday night and he pulled out his mobile phone to check the time or something. Before I realized what I was doing, I reached out and started to take it away from him. As I would one of students. Now, that's a tired and confused teacher.

I'm hearing exacerbation and disillusionment from many in my program. It's sort of the opposite (again!) of last semester. Back then, I was one of only a few students who were teaching at the time. For everyone else, all this stuff was merely academic. They didn't mind spending every class session discussing the subtleties of Vygotsky at length while I quietly ransacked my weary brain for what to do for my next day's classes.

Now, this semester, I've got a bit more experience, and I'm having an easier time, while my compatriots are taking their first dives into the classroom in earnest. The first few class sessions for our program were stressful--teachers were edgy, eager to get to the meat at the center of the theory... eager to get some practical help.

I have no illusions about teaching being for everyone. It may, in fact, not be for me. I have a feeling that some in my program will ditch out before the end of this semester. I wouldn't blame or look down on anyone who did this. Teaching is in some ways the most absurd job in the world--as anyone who has just begun the occupation can tell you.

Virtual Classroom

Today one of the classes in my credential program is having a synchronous online discussion in lieu of a regular class meeting. Like a class conducted via instant messaging. I'm a complete nerd about such things, and tend to get really excited about doing mundane things in new technological ways. The moment they invent virtual vacuuming and dusting, I'll be there, man!

The virtual class should be interesting, and hopefully fun. I'll post some reflections here afterward. I wonder if I should wear pants.

Dove Catcher

A fellow teacher and blogger asked me about my approach to Salinger's Catcher in the Rye. With thanks, today's entry is for you, Poppy.

Catcher was the third unit I did with my freshmen this year--which is to say the third Language Arts unit I've ever done. Without the benefit (or constraint) of master teacher tutelage, I relied on of our school's stated focus for freshman English--character composition--for a central purpose.

Then I thought about what I wanted the ending assessments to look like. I decided that an essay about some aspect of Holden's character would be appropriate, and then a creative project that would allow students to write their own informal narrative in the style of Holden.

Given those two objectives, and the focus on character composition, the unit kind of wrote itself backwards. I divided "character" into four parts: Decisions, Observable traits, Values, and Environment. Don't ask me where I came up with these parts, but they seem to work, and their acronym spells DOVE. Decisions and Values clearly go into what makes a book's character who he is. Adding Environment makes sense as well, since there is always interplay between a character's past and present Environments and his Values and Decisions. Those three work really well together, and the students seem to get the flux and flow between them.

Observable traits is kind of a catch-all for the sundry and assorted character attributes that the author gives a character as a means of revealing something about him. For example, Holden has these really nice Gladstone bags. That's not exactly a Decision or a Value, but it has a bearing on those things. It's something you can observe that informs who Holden is. I tend to think of Observables as the et cetera bin.

I modeled taking "DOVE notes" for the class as we read the book together in class. The students all had pages in their notebooks dedicated to taking DOVE notes. Each major character gets his own page--in the case of Catcher, Holden is the only major character, and the subject of the upcoming essay, so note taking was pretty uncluttered.

Whenever we came to a spot in the story where Holden reveals some aspect of his Values, or makes a significant decision, etc., I would get up and make a note of it on the board thusly:

(V) Holden wants to protect women, fights Stradlater (75)

Interestingly, for me at least, such observations can often be ambiguous: the fight with Stradlater can also be viewed as a decision. I used such ambiguities as a way to let the students hash out their differences in perspective. In the end, I usually suggested they used both (V) and (D). I mean, what's the harm?

By the book's end, the students generally had about two or three notebook pages covered with DOVE notes and page numbers. This is the part that really made me happy: I was able to show the students how easy it is to create a well-supported persuasive essay from their notes because they had Holden's character diced up into four categories and had page numbers for everything.

For the informal narrative assignment I brought in some models from blogs and so forth and discussed with the students how effective personal narratives reveal aspects of the writer's values, decisions, and environment through the telling of a story from her life.

Finally, I started the unit with a Salinger bio, some context-setting literature about World War II, a description of Post-Traumatic Stress Disorder, (which I argue is central to Salinger's work) and Salinger's short story "A Perfect Day for Bananafish."

Oh, and for fun, get some Bebop music to play at the beginning of class. It's period specific, and sets the tone for Holden's world very well. Enjoy.