I decided to stop teaching Geometry on April 4th. Starting April 5th, my students did review worksheets, watched movies, worked on projects (supposed to be learning experiences), or took meaningless, repetitive notes. The first question in my mind while planning for periods 5-7 became “How am I going to keep them quiet and away from me?” instead of “What should they learn?” or “How can I most effectively teach this?” I became the babysitter teacher.
Here’s a journal entry (copied, pasted, and bleeped) from April 4th about my Geometry students. FYI, my district policy is a mandatory 80% pass rate on tests, and my Geometry classes had 28+ students in each:
They don’t work. They don’t care. They copy other people’s work. They don’t study. If I force them to do their own work, they don’t think on their own so I get driven completely f**king nuts doing and explaining everything. If I let them work in groups, no one works; no one does anything except the really motivated people, and everyone else just copies. They don’t learn anything, then the test scores are bad. If tests are too bad, I have to retest. They’ll all fail on Monday because they won’t study the study guide. Or maybe they will.
F**k this. I’m tired. I’m mad at myself for not teaching them today. For saying f**k you to them. I’m just too tired to teach Geometry anymore. I explain it on the notes and then have to explain it again and again and again. I hate it. There are too many kids. There are too many kids. There are too many. Too many. If my classes were half this size, I might enjoy it, but I’m just burnt out now. I’m so f**king tired of teaching them. I’m not going to teach them anymore. I don’t like doing it.
I needed a vacation. My students needed an invested teacher. I didn’t quit the position, but I did quit caring about their learning. That is certainly failing as a teacher, and I consider it my biggest classroom failure. But is disinvestment a sign of failing/failure under the conditions at HSHS?
I don’t think so. Even though I stopped designing stellar lessons, I still gave the students who cared the opportunity to learn. Even though I reached my breaking point, I didn’t break. If I had pushed myself any harder, I would’ve left HSHS altogether by April 9th. Giving up class lessons was the only way for me to remain in the classroom and keep trying to teach someone something. It was definitely not an ideal solution, but HSHS has never had an ideal solution for anything.
Despite everything, I’m sorry.
On August 6, 2007, the principal of S.V. Marshall High School stood in the middle of the gymnasium and introduced the new teachers -- as usual, about 1/3 of the faculty -- to the assembled students. Four new math teachers were introduced, and the school year started with the following line-up:
7th grade - Ms. Gordon
8th grade - Mr. Arandt
9th grade - Mr. Ray
10th grade - Mr. Nastrom
11th grade - Mr. Naklicke
When the year ended the staffing pattern of those positions looked like this:
7th grade - Ms. Gordon / Long-term Sub / Ms. Clark
8th grade - Mr. Arandt / Long-term Sub / Mr. Collins / Long-term Sub / Ms. Walker
9th grade - Mr. Ray
10th grade - Mr. Nastrom
11th grade - Mr. Naklicke / Long-term Sub / Mr. Chisholm / Long-term Sub
Those are facts. It's also a fact that in August 2007, 26 MTC members started as 1st-year teachers and 24 were still there on the last day of school. To us in MTC, those numbers (92%) suck; anyone who quits in the middle of the school year is a tremendous disappointment. But in comparison to my department last year, which had only 40% of its original teachers at the end of the year and had lost 2 mid-year hires on top of that, 24 out of 26 isn't so bad.
In light of these numbers, I marvel at the internal worry in MTC over whether we're qualified to be there or whether we have good motives or whether we do any good at all. Now, after a year of teaching, the answers are so obvious the questions are barely worth asking. And a year ago, when I agreed to join MTC, I really checked at the door all reason to gaze at my own navel about these things. I signed up to do a job and that was that.
But that's just me, and I've been wrong before. Maybe I still should be looking deeper. Or maybe -- probably -- almost certainly, I really believe that I can do some good in a critical needs school, and self-doubt has no place in this theater of operations.
If the history books are right, Mississippi has always been a place for people willing to make big decisions in a big hurry and back them up with whatever it takes. I suppose that's still true.
Makes me wanna gag and hurl. The students at Harvard are by-and-large herded into careers that put people before profits (shoutout to my boy Philip Parham '09 who appears in the video, however). It relates to another discussion going on as well.
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.
It's strange to write a blog evaluating my teaching. It's kind of like writing a blog analyzing my walking or my speaking, I can't be purely objective. Plus I have too much information about it to summarize neatly-- trends, exceptions, reactions under a variety of circumstances, etc. But, I'll give it a go.
My most successful lesson/objective was what I called "Really Really Long Equations." Basically it was just equations in one variable, no powers, that involved combining like terms and then solving a two-step equation: 3x +5 -29x +56 +2+2x -100=54, solve for x. It's not exactly in the frameworks, but I wanted my students to be comfortable solving intimidating equations. I figured these would help build my students' confidence. My students responded pretty well! They were proud when they solved the equations, they actually tried a lot harder than during my other lessons, and they voluntarily tutored each other! I think this was met with success because it is a very routine procedure. I think the intimidation factor helped a lot because getting the right answer to a mega-equation feels like more of an accomplishment than solving something with two pieces. So, it was an easy procedure with a big payoff. Nothing like rote processes!
My least successful lesson/objective was proofs in geometry. Definitely. Hands down, say it again. Proofs. It was so bad I just quit and moved on. I know, the only useful thing that comes out of geometry is the ability to do proofs, but it had to go. I made the biiiig mistake of trying that in October, when I still had 30-36 kids in every geometry class. That was mistake #1: trying to teach critical thinking to big classes. And, it was before I had my classroom management tightened down, so my kids were giving me "feedback" about the lessons in disrespectful and draining ways. And I had no materials (not enough texts and no supplemental materials) or administrative support, and my class basically went into revolt if I ever tried to teach them to think. If I had to do it again, I would've held off until the spring and then taught it veeeerry slooooowly. I think it could've been taught to my classes, but only after my classroom was managed and I had the common sense to introduce critical thinking very slowly. I'm still not convinced it would've worked. The top 40% would've gotten it just fine, but at least 50% of my students have been programmed to respond with hostility, anger, or disinterest whenever they are required to think. I'm not exaggerating-- half of my students purposely disengaging the minute they sense that a task will not be strictly procedural. I've tried to combat this all year, but I stand by my mantra: students in our schools will not learn when they are sharing the teacher with 28 other (unruly) students.
Overall, I think I did the best I could given my inexperience and lack of administrative support. I explained things carefully and tailored my worksheets, activities, and tests to each lesson. Next year, I want to teach the critical thinking processes. I stuck to procedural stuff this year because of the reasons above, but I want to try that next year. I want to have the courage to force my students to think, and the control to make them. I will have that for next year, so I'm excited for the changes in my teaching.
I feel that the learning goal that was most effective for me involved teaching the Middle Passage to my 8th graders in U.S. History (prior to 1877). Very simply, this lesson was highly effective because I showed the students a movie as oppose to talking to them (lecturing?) or giving them something to read. The students were glued to the TV screen and actively asked questions about what they saw in front of them. I've been conflicted about using movies in my class as the main means of instruction in any particular lesson. However, in light of this lesson, I've come to see their utility in teaching certain material. The collective audio and visual representation of historical events in conjunction with the fact that the average teenager in this country--or adult, for that matter--spends many more hours each day watching television than reading. I guess the students just get more out of that.
If I could describe my first-year of teaching in one phrase it would be “long strange trip”. Despite the summer training, advice from first years, and repeated delta-autumn readings, there was no way I could anticipate what lay ahead of me in the upcoming year. I learned a great deal about myself, mostly through the comedy of errors that was my teaching experience. Ultimately, I feel as though I gained a great deal of knowledge about myself, not only as a teacher, but as a man.
The tools I gained through my first summer in Teacher Corp as well as my fall methods class were reasonably useful. I picked up teaching strategies that I definitely applied in my classroom from Dr. Monroe’s class. Veteran teachers from my building pulled me aside and gave me useful tricks of the trade. Some of the Professional Development meetings I attended were even useful. Mostly, though, things were learned from trial and error. I tried things that I thought would work wonderfully and saw them fail miserably. I spent all night working on activities that seemed to have boundless potential only to face blank stares and bored students.
I tried to maintain high hopes. I would attempt different classroom management strategies. I tried to come up with creative teaching techniques. I got involved with extra curriculars. The one thing I realized is that energy was a difficult thing to maintain. Teaching is tiring. I often thought, what if I only had a couple more hours. Especially when work bled into your personal life and you could never successfully recharge after a the weeks started stringing together.
I set high goals, but I can't say I successfully achieve any of these goals. Not only because I'm a bad person who isn't very good at setting and achieving goals, but, much like the idea of teaching, these things are a progress and not set destination points . You think you are making progress in your classroom management, and the quiet kid who never says anything explodes into a firestorm. The kid who is always goofing off and never on task, displays a remarkable knack for pneumonic devices and its up finishing incredibly well. Kids fluctuate. They respond to external stimulus, both positive and negative, and need you to model consistency. This, for me, was the hardest part of teaching. In many ways, you get thrust head first into adulthood. Its not only that feeling of all your time going to teaching that makes your first-year brutal. Its the additional feeling that you're becoming your father (or whatever older figure that you don't want to become just yet). You start doing old people stuff, start railing ag.ainst the music they listen to or they're faux rebellious style they comport themselves with. As the teacher, you end up on the wrong side of the cool spectrum; because all your time is dedicated to the profession, you feel the worse for the wear as a result.
Overall, however, I enjoyed my first year. I learned a great deal and got to take part in the lives of some very unique young people. To some degree, I feel as though I am working towards a larger goal, towards a larger purpose. Being a semi-useful vessel for this purpose is not always clear or confidence-inspiring, but it does give some direction and sense of meaning. I know that I have done good work and, hopefully, can make strides on improving in the upcoming year.
Um..
So, if I had done all of the statistics that my district wanted me to do, I could just look in my files and spit out some numbers for you. I didn't. I'm really kind of pulling at straws for this one.
most successful learning goal:
Grammar and mechanics, maybe? My Do Now nearly every day was a DOL exercise, and I feel like this was pretty much the most effective method I used teaching grammar. I could really see progress from the beginning of the year to the end. Perhaps it was because these were fairly simple concepts to understand, unlike many of the skills I attempted to teach. Perhaps it was because I used tickets most consistently with my DOL to encourage participation. Maybe it was just because we did it so very often. I'm not sure.
least successful learning goal:
I think this was parallel structure. Of course, it's possible that this was just the most recent failure of mine. Who knows.. Why did it fail? That's a very good question. I taught it in a way that seemed to make sense, but apparently did not. I have yet to find a successful method of teaching it.. Of course, one of my wonderful first-years is teaching it soon, so maybe she will have the key. I'm crossing my fingers. Ok. Why... My students don't know enough grammar. I didn't realize soon enough that I really needed to emphasize the basics, so I didn't get a chance to cover as much basic grammar as I would've liked. Because they didn't have a horribly firm grasp of sentence structure at the beginning, the concept of parallel sentence structure was a real stretch. Also, I had run low on motivation to come up with creative, exciting lessons by this time, so they weren't really that into it to begin with.
My performance this year was lacking. As we've said over and over, the first year is about surviving. I survived. Barely. I let my students bad behaviors get under my skin and got frustrated. I associated school with misery and frustration, so I avoided anything that had to do with it. I dreaded lesson planning, so all of my lessons were boring, so the students hated my class, so they acted up, so I got angry, so I hated school, and so on and so forth. It was fun!
I've said this before, and I'll say it again. This year, I will do better. That's my resolution. I will try my hardest to keep a positive attitude no matter what happens. I will look at my long-term goals for my students. I will work slowly, incrementally, and patiently with my students. I will plan ahead. I will bring creativity into my lessons. I will not feel sorry for myself, attempting instead to focus on my students. Lofty goals, eh?
The children of Humphreys County Junior and Senior High Schools always get an extra smile the day after Mr. Amutah takes time to partake of fried catfish at The Varsity.
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Mississippi Teacher Corps Updated: May 15, 2007
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