Have a Good Life

This is a sad post. I have a student that we will call Liza. She started out the year with a little bit of rockiness--trying to find herself, dealing with moving to a new area, and deciding what groups she would identify with. We had authority struggles while she was still a loner, and then I saw that she befriended a semi-goth but very bright girl and I thought she would do just fine. A couple months into the year, a girl named Rachelle moved into our school and was clearly not a good girl. She constantly skipped class, didn't do her work, and had an awful mouth. Then, with about two months left in the year, Liza started hanging out with Rachelle. It was amazing to see how fast her grades dropped in all her classes. Her attitude was a complete 180 degree change. She swore constantly. She stopped wearing her pajamas to class and started wearing the same style as Rachelle. It was really interesting to see how she went from being relatively good to sliding down this slippery slope to be like Rachelle. It is so tragic that Rachelle had SO much influence on Liza. I knew Rachelle was bad news as soon as I met her. I wish I knew how to teach my students to choose friends that will help them grow into better people, not denigrate them into followers of filth.

As I finish my first year teaching, I have opportunity to look back on how the year has gone and see where I have been and what I have learned.

#1. I did not do a very good job at planning. That is a real struggle for me. One thing that I am really good at is "winging it" and the problem with that is that I don't plan ahead as well as I should. For instance, I would plan my days by saying, "What do I need to do tomorrow?" There was no over-arching plan for the whole, or even for the whole quarter. One thing that I liked about college was that each teacher gave a syllabus for the whole semester. That made it really easy to budget my time as a student and plan for big assignments. It is a little easier in college to use/create a syllabus, because there is less new information, and more depth. In middle school, at least here, it felt like there was a lot of new information for my students. I don't think it is impossible, but just more difficult.

Contributors to #1: Grad school made it very difficult to have enough time to prepare really well each day. Homework, research, class time, and driving to and from school during the week takes a lot of time. My own laziness makes it hard to plan as well.

Changes I should make regarding #1:

• I should create an overarching theme for next year.
  
• I should give a syllabus for at least each quarter.
  
• If I know where I am going, it will be easier to get there.

If I can do these things, I think that I will have a better year. Knowing when and what I need to do for my students for the whole year will make the day-to-day planning a little easier. That way I can have an idea in my mind of what we need to do.

I used 21classes.com for my students' blogs.

I didn't like it that much. It was nice for each student to have their own blog, but I think that I next year I will have a blog for the whole class, ask questions, and have students posts their responses as comments. I use blogger for my personal blog and for my education blog . I think I will like blogger better than this 21classes. I set up an account at Google so that my students could all have email addresses that are firstname@jethrojones.com and that has been nice. I have had a couple students get on at home, and chat with me during class to make sure they understand the assignment. That has been a very worthwhile experience. Right now, I email the students a question at the beginning of the week, and they post the answer on their blogs. The thing I didn't like about 21classes was that they had ads to support it if you don't pay. The problem is that their ads were like this: "Are you GAY? Take the quiz and find out now!" I am not sure that I would like my students to learn about their sexual orientation while doing an assignment for my class. The site costs $8.95 a month to use without ads, and there aren't really any other benefits. Blogger also has a much better design. The other problem with 21classes.com is that customer service is non-existent. There is no option to go back to the ad-supported site (as I was planning to do over the summer) without deleting the entire thing. That is kind of frustrating. Also, when I have problems, and I need to know why none of my students can post on a particular day, I try to contact someone, and there is no phone number or anything like that, so I have no way to contact them. Any email links to report problems all pop up with my email address in the field. It sounds very sketchy and probably is. I will delete the whole thing as soon as all my students finish their blogs, so I don't have to pay for another month.

My class average for my ninth graders on the CRTs was 48.68/85 (57%) and my seventh graders scored an average of 69/82 (84%). I figure by posting this now, I can get my info out before it shows up in the newspapers, and therefore it will be old news by that time.

The good news is that now that I have been through it, I know how to prepare for it better next year. Even though I will not completely teach to the test, I can still improve my teaching. I will be requiring more writing next year, and I hope that will help my students do better. I will also hopefully give more tests than I have this year. Being in a testing situation often does help them do better on tests. I just didn't have time to write tests. When will I ever have time for anything?

In other news, I signed up for my ARL courses to get my license. I will take four courses this summer and they recommend that I only take two. After this summer, I will only have two more courses to take, and then I will have my required courses completed. I am really excited to get this done. It is difficult trying to do grad school and certification, but I am sure it will pay off in the end.

This week we are doing Language Arts CRT (Criterion Referenced Tests). There are four sections and it takes one section per day and a makeup day on Friday. It is so boring because I have to walk around the room all day and make sure my students are marking their answers in the right place. I know there are some things on the test that I specifically taught my students, and other things that I even thought were hard when I took the test. Hopefully, my students will do well, otherwise, I will have my name in the paper--and not for something good.

I really like thinking up ways to creatively punish students. This student continued to text on his phone during class, even after I asked him to stop. In reality, he wanted his hair cut anyway, and I suggested that we do this to teach the other students a lesson...but don't tell anyone.

This morning I emailed a bunch of teachers, that I did an inservice with earlier this year, asking them for help about how to teach Greek and Latin roots to my ninth graders. It was really neat to get five or six responses in just a couple hours. I really appreciate that.