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.
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.
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:
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.
Back in the summer of '99 I had my first legal job at the Federal Public Defender in Detroit. In contrast to popular perception, I noticed that the best lawyers tended to be the most humble and asked the most questions. When I started working in private practice I saw the same thing: the lawyers with the corner offices and the seats on the executive board that ran the firm were the lawyers who were constantly asking questions. They would listen to anyone, even a summer intern or a lowly first-year associate who came to them with a carefully reasoned suggestion. They were the best because they didn't act like they were the best.
Being a second-year MTC member and ex officio coach I am thinking about those great women and men I worked for because the example they set is that no one ever stops learning. With a year of teaching under my belt, I have experience to share with the first-years. Not much, but more than them. They, in turn, have no years of teaching under their belts and thus are well equipped to take the edge off my cynicism. They are excited about teaching and trying things that I tried a year ago but gave up during the year because I was too tired or too cranky or too whatever-it-was. I didn't realize how much bah-humbug had crept into my thinking until the first-years arrived and started walking the halls of Holly High with excitement falling out of their pockets. It's persuaded me that the ideas I had last summer and early in the fall were good ideas even if I didn't quite know how to implement them at the time.
As for specific coaching techniques, I believe all situations are covered by these three principles:
1. Praise as much as possible. Everyone likes to have evidence of their goodness.
2. If criticism is necessary, get to the point. No one should have to speculate about what they can improve.
3. Encourage second opinions. Even when I know I'm right, there's a chance I might be wrong.
TMAO writes an incredible blog: a letter to a first-year, Teach-for-America-type teacher, describing in detail how life is about to change.
I am practically speechless at the perfect way he has captured so many of my own thoughts and feelings - I laughed out loud at moments, felt guilt twinges at others, and genuinely agreed with everything he has to say. I hope someday I might be able to write the the same clarity and insight about something so difficult to describe.
