I had a date... with Data

I think I had my first "regular" week of school. Nothing terribly interesting happened aside from my projector bulb dying at the start of the week thus ruining any chance of higher-technology being used in my teaching, and nothing incredibly drab happened either. I taught, my kids learned and worked, but they also got off task, needed to regain focus, and missed assignments. We covered theme for two days, then brought back summaries, voice, and text to self connection. I taught some solid lessons even though the kids were confused that there was no powerpoint, and the students produced a good amount of writing. Thankfully, my students' work seems to have improved for the most part, as grading the essays was a lot less "decoding" and more of just reading

Speaking of grades, I gave up yet another weekend. Saturday was spent at the second of three "Gifted/Talented" training sessions, which was about as fun as watching paint dry. Actually, less fun than that, because if you watch paint dry, you can probably comment on it as there is no expectation of you to listen and not create excess chatter. I was smart though, and took some work to grade while listening, which burned up maybe 2 of the 8 hours we were there. Our group was supposed to be at the training for 10 hours, but I managed to ruffle some feathers and get us out early by occassionally mentioning that the conversations were going off topic. And boy, if some of those other teachers got angry. I don't really care about that though, because they were trying to hijack the meetings to discuss their own situations that had absolutely nothing to do with "Gifted/Talented" students or information that might be pertinent to the rest of the group. I wasn't that much of a horrible person though, as several other teachers thanked me afterwards for taking the bullet and getting the gabby teachers to hush up. Heck, I didn't even get out early to go do random things, as I quickly got back home, graded some more, and then went to UTPA, (University of Texas-Pan American), for their annual HESTEC (Hispanic Engineering, Science and Technology) conference. The MythBusters were there along with Billy Ray Cyrus, (don't know what he had to do with Engineering or Science), and several of my students. I'm happy to say that out of 49 different high schools, ours managed to get first place in the robotics competition. I had not one, but two students on the winning team. Woo hoo!

Sunday was again ruined by grades. My students' Six Weeks exam is coming up as well as their Progress Reports, and I wanted to get a jump on grading. Since many of my students neglect to turn in their work and I'd like to not fail them unless they really try at not succeeding, I'm giving them this week to turn in some of the key assignments. I've already given students zeros on assignements that they've had weeks to complete, but since a few of the larger assignments (namely rough drafts) will be used in the coming weeks, I wanted to make sure they get them in and for a reducedgrade. Hopefully my kids will take me up on my generous offer, turn in their work, and make sure to turn in the rest of their work on-time.

Who am I kidding.

Student Gems

When asked to make a "Text to Self" connection with a story called "Oranges" by Gary Soto, a story about a boy who is forced to pay for his girlfriend's chocolate with an orange when he doesn't have enough money, a student wrote:

"That reminds me of back home when we would buy stuff with tacos."

Training To Be Awesome... or Subbing to Skip School

This week was an interesting one, if only for the fact that I taught only Monday and Tuesday. Last week, my principal told me that I was going to represent our school at the SharpSchool training and become a "Trainer of Trainers". In layman's terms, this meant that I would be spending Thursday and Friday learning about our district's new web hosting/template system so that I could be our school's webmaster. The training was quite fun, and the system is pretty user friendly. I had a few qualms with the design system, as it's a little limited and will be frustrating to set-up initially, but it's better than most web template services I've seen. I'll be sure to post the link when I've got it up and running.

Since I'll be serving as the webmaster for the entire school, I've decided to push back creating my own website. Perhaps my thinking will change and while I'm working on the school site I'll need a break and some time to be creative, but I really need to get the school page up and running as soon as possible. Right now, all I really have is a random image script in place for the main page so that it switches between 8 different school photos (that I can change often and easily), a few classes set-up, and all of the students in as users. I still need to meet with the principal and administration to see exactly what they would like for the site, and I will have a lot of data entry to do with the teachers and classes. (Getting the students in the system was much easier because we could use a spreadsheet with their student numbers... teachers might have to be put in manually, by me, and their classes will definitely need to be put in by me). Basically, this means that I have a lot more work, but at least it's work that I know I'm good at and can finish with little stress.

What happened to Wednesday?

Wednesday I was supposed to teach. Tuesday I was supposed to be in training for Open-Ended Rubrics, (so the kids can do better on standardized tests). Unfortunately, neither of these proved to be correct. When I did not receive a sub for Tuesday, I was forced to skip training and scrounge together a new lesson, since there was no reason to teach the "substitute lesson" and I couldn't teach Wednesday's lesson out of order and confuse the heck out of the kids. Imagine my surprise on Tuesday when I heard that I didn't have a sub and that I might be in training on Wednesday... not the OER training, but a different one. Interesting, since had I attended the OER training I would have only taught on Monday.

Now, when I say I couldn't teach the substitute lesson, I'm being fairly liberal with the meaning of "lesson". Every teacher on my campus has said that the best you can do with a substitute is worksheets. "Don't ever try to give them a full lesson because you'll only have to teach it again the next day", said everyone else. Me, being the naive, dapper young fellow that I am, tried to push it a little bit. I figured that I would use worksheets on Tuesday and give the students writing time on Thursday and Friday for their rough drafts. It shouldn't have been that tough, even for a sub, who can technically be an 18 year old high school graduate who has taken a weekend class to become a certified substitute teacher.

The worksheets went amazingly well, and the substitute seemed more than competent, (he used to work with the school's disciplinary department). However, I had a different substitute on Thursday and Friday, and I guess my "quiz/rough draft writing" was a little more than the kids could handle. Some of them did very well on the quiz and the writing, but others... well, I don't know what I can say because they had a substitute. I was told to only give the kids worksheets, but I didn't want to lose the better part of a week. Maybe I did. Maybe I didn't. I guess I'll just find out tomorrow.

Pics of the room

I finally got some pictures of the room, so here they are. It's smaller than the other rooms, and doesn't look like a typical teacher room, but it's mine, and I'm comfortable with it. Heck, at least the kids notice the movie posters and asked me about them. They didn't say a dang word about the traditional educational ones though. Maybe I was on to something with my idea to "educationally" vandalize popular movie posters.
*click to see the full size pictures

Student Gems

Not really that funny, but I'm sure all you other teachers have heard it a million times.
"Why did you fail me sir?" - generic failing student
"I didn't give you a failing grade. You earned it by not turning in any of your work" - Me
"But why did you fail me?" - same generic student
*Smacks head* "Turn in your work and maybe you won't be failing. Let's take a look at your grade after class." - Me

Grading

Progress Report grades are due tomorrow at 9 AM. I spent a few hours on Saturday working on the grades, and the greater portion of today grading as well. Luckily, Alexia was willing and eager to help me grade as well, otherwise I would be up until the middle of the night getting all these grades done. I'm convinced that English is the hardest subject to grade, at least down here in the valley. I tried to put comments on all of the papers, circling spelling mistakes, crossing out unnecessary words, putting in all the correct grammar markings, and giving comments on the papers. Normally, you wouldn't think that this would be a big deal. However, the majority of my students do not know how to write correctly and spell phonetically, or not at all. Sometimes I would just circle words because I didn't recognize them in English or Spanish. Those made it quite the challenge to understand the essays. Fortunately, these were just rough drafts, and it is the start of the semester.

I'm quite nervous though. If it took me THAT long to grade a few weeks worth of work, and the student essays were between 1 and 2 pages a piece, how long is it going to take me to grade their much longer assignments?

All I know is that I'm tired, I'll update more tomorrow, and hopefully I'll have pictures later this week.

Oh, and next time the students write drafts, I'm having them peer edit.

Any ideas or suggestions from all you other teachers out there in internet land?

Anger Management

This past week was a mix of feelings. The kids were more or less amazing, partly because of their four day week. I, on the other hand, had the pleasure of getting up on Saturday for a day long "Gifted and Talented" training. I don't know why it had to be the whole day, or even the two-hour shorter than scheduled 7:30 AM - 3:30PM. The trainings that I have been subjected to mostly amount to me being talked at as I look at 3 ring binders full of Power Point slide print-offs. That may have come off a little harsh. The trainings are helpful, and I do try to get the most out of them, but it just seems that the time could be managed much better, especially since I have to give up almost an entire Saturday and a Friday night just to be there. (That's what they didn't tell you when you signed up to be a teacher: almost every other weekend you will not have a Saturday to sleep in). Even worse is the fact that I have to do the same thing for the next 4 out of 5 Saturdays. Oh well, one down, several to go.

Friday hit me with quite a surprise, which made me legitimately angry enough to rip a phone book in half (and without using the scientific way to rip it apart). At the start of the year, I had pegged one of my students as being in need of modifications, or in layman's terms, special ed. The student had a horrible time trying to read, would not read aloud, and got frustrated enough to shut down for the rest of the class. Being a nervous and shy child, I figured that it might take some time to build up the kid's confidence to attempt reading aloud in class. Nevertheless, I spent several hours with the head of the special ed department talking about said child. When I received the student's modification folder at the end of the first week, I was aghast, as modifications were required for every class but English. I expressed my frustration, and the SPED department head said she would look into his file and see about getting him tested again. Without any additional information, and holding a file that said my student was supposed to perform as a regular student in my class, I trudged along through the lessons.

When I gave my class their reading diagnostic, (beginning of the year test to let me see where they are), I made a point to try and test him extensively for reading comprehension and fluency. I started him off with a 6th grade text, to which he would not even attempt to say even the first word. Feeling his frustration rise, I quickly switched to a 3rd grade level text, and asked him to read it aloud to me. I encouraged him, told him that he would do great, and it was not for a grade. I let him know that it was ok to not know the words, and that I just wanted to be able to help him. Again, I was stonewalled. I tried pointing to the words and having him read along, only to get barely audible gasps that I would expect out of someone on the verge of death. Again, I switched out the reading passages, and gave the kid a Pre-K passage. The passage began with "Joe saw a Goat. Joe liked the goat. The goat walked up to Joe." The kid took one look at the paper, looked up around the room at all the other students taking the test, and promptly shoved his face into his hand and looked down at the floor. With no other options, I turned to my aid (I have enough modified students in order to warrant a teacher's aide), and asked her to take the student outside and see if he would read anything else. Since he had actually gotten out a few words before looking cautiously at his peers, my best guess was that he was embarrassed to be at the front of the classroom. That, or he was incredibly intimidated by me. The aide didn't have much more luck than me, as he only read through the Pre-K passage before giving up. He was on the verge of tears when the aide tried to get him to come back into the classroom.

I met him at the door and promptly apologized. This kid was emotionally beaten. I know some teachers might have told the student to return to their desk and finish the test, or tell them to stay after class and scold them for not doing anything. Noting that he did not want to leave the safety of the threshold to the room, I left his test on a table near the door, told him he could keep working on it if he wanted to, or leave it there. I also told him that it was ok to return to his seat or stay right where he was. Within two minutes, he picked up his test, wrote one word, and looked at a few more passages until the bell rang.

Luckily, our school started "team teaching" this year. I'm paired with three other teachers who all have the same students, but for Math, Science, and Social Studies. One of the teachers mentioned that she had been able to get my student to produce some work in her Math class and actually finish assignments. We talked for about an hour about how to help our mutual student, and parted ways with her saying that she would try to figure out what his interests were. We both thought that it was possible that he was intimidated by my presence (I am a large, tall, white male, and some kids tend to have a problem with this, or so I've been told). I needed something, anything, any kind of "in" so I could help him. I got my "in" the next day, and almost blew my lid.

The Math teacher had a chance to talk to the district head of the Special Ed department, who knows all of her students files by heart. Our student, as I learned, was dyslexic. Hmm... let's think about that. He's got modifications because he's dyslexic, but for some reason he DOESN'T need any modifications in an ENGLISH class? Yeah, that sounds about right. Reading disorders are much easier to deal with if you don't actually address them.

*Note*
I received an e-mail not 30 minutes later from the head of our school's Special Ed department about my student, confirming his disorder. I really like our special ed department, as they truly care about the kids. I was just absolutely livid at the fact that for some reason, no one from his 8th grade (or sooner) campuses felt the need to include in his mod file that he was dyslexic.

Thanks. I feel really great now that I forced him out of class and further lowered his self-confidence. I'm sure he really needed that - and it's a darn good way for me to start the year helping him.

Student Gems

From some of my diagnostics -
"What are descendants?"

They are very slow people.

"Did Amelia Earhart have a good imagination as a child? What in the story made you believe this?"

Yes, because it said she was a horrid little girl.

One Week Down...

I am offically a teacher. It's a little strange to think about it. I know that I taught this summer, but I didn't have 6 different classes, planning periods, and 130-150 students a day. Now that I do, I can honestly say that it's fun, frustrating, and exhausting. I'm not quite sure if I'm exhausted from dealing with 140 9th graders during a day, working for 9-10 hours, or from getting up at 6 in the morning. Right now, my bets are hedging on getting up at 6 in the morning. I know that right now my dad is laughing at me because of all those times I bugged him about getting up early every day and going to bed at 10. Well dad, you win. Getting up at 6 AM is not my idea of fun. I could work for 14 hours a day as long as I don't have to get up before the sun. I guess I'll just have to give it time and let my body adjust.

The kids were great. I actually had more show up than I was led to believe, but I still was only able to accomplish minimal amounts of actual teaching due to the ridiculous amounts of schedule changes the students were put through. Being a 9th grade campus, some of the students take elective classes at the high school, which is just down the street. Unfortunately, if the high school sees a need to change the time of that elective class, the student is then forced to change just about their entire schedule. I would like to think that these kinks have been worked out over the years, but as I noticed at least three of my students show up to different class periods throughout the week and tell me that their schedule got changed yet again, I find myself thinking that creating schedules is an art form not yet mastered by my district. At least the students remain in high spirits as they're jostled about from class to class. It puts a little bit more of a burden on me as a teacher, since now I have a few students that sit through two of the same classes or miss a class, and all of my group/partner work must be changed on the fly. I find time to laugh at it though when I see those same students on my roster for 4 different classes. They're getting quite the English education.


Snafus

Several of the other veteran teachers have been kind enough to inform me about the bureaucracy that is teaching in the Valley; everyone tries to be the winner of the "not my job" contest. I'm sure that I'll meet my fair share of snafus, but attendance is by far the worst that I've encountered in my first week. With all the schedule changes, I'm quite empathetic for the attendance ladies and the counselors, especially since everyone had to work with paper schedules for the first day. We were told that once we got our online gradebook up and running, we could submit attendance online. "Great!" I thought. "Here's something I can do that plays right into my electronic/technical wizardry that is going to save me time and energy." I stayed after school that night, determined to diagnose exactly why the gradebook wasn't working for the entire district. After about an hour of trying to install the provided "fix" using different prompts, I noticed that the computers were locked out of some essential permissions for running java scripts. Basically, I could do nothing else, so I told my tech guy what I found. Next day, there's a new patch that doesn't require any java scripts to be performed over the net. Interesting. Without gloating (hey, I didn't make the patch, and I could have been completely wrong), I happily began submitting my attendance online. I was happy, the attendance ladies were happy (it saves them TONS of time to have it online), and even the students were happy, because one of them didn't get to be "special" and take the attendance to the office. Wait... did I say that? Cause the kids LOVED that job. Anyways, not a day after submitting all of my attendance online do I get a visitor from the office with a new paper roster, saying that I need to give them a hard copy for the next two weeks. Bummer.

Unfortunately for a few of my students, I did not get my list of "mods" (students with special needs) until Friday afternoon. I can only imagine the confusion they felt when the lesson was nowhere close to what they needed in order to learn. By chance, I happened to teach to the modifications of about 80% of the students, and they did just fine. For the other 20% though... I'll make it up to them.

Distractions

I found myself a little bit distracted this weekend. I felt the need to play around with my copy of Adobe CS3 (specifically photoshop) which I am trying to teach myself how to use. I've got the basics down, from selections, to feathers, strokes, color sampling, and layers (which were a headache in themself to figure out initially). At Mizzou, I figured out how to create graphics using Photoshop that I could then chroma key out in AVID (video editing). For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, chroma keying is basically using a blue or green screen to create special effects, similar to what your local weatherman uses on his nightly segment. Anywho... I felt like I'd try and get a grasp on it so that I could design a flyer or two for the UIL Journalism group that I'll be a mentor/advisor to this year. Unfortunately, we don't have a room picked out, a time to meet, or our first meeting date. So I promptly changed my gameplan and worked on making a few icons for my desktop. Like I said before, it's a distraction. I'm hoping that during the year this will come in handy.

Student Work Gems

Not one, but TWO of my students said in writing that if they could change their name to anything they wanted, they would choose "Jet Li".

My students, particularly my girl students, are fascinated with my "colored" eyes. They ask if my eyes are really colored, or if I wear contacts. I have to explain to them that I do wear contacts, but my eyes are naturally blue. Funny thing is, they never say "I really like your blue eyes". It's always just "colored".