Done with State...

It feels nice to be done with everything at State. I'm excited to have student teaching as the only thing I really have to focus on. I think I can really go back to being the enthusiastic teacher I thought I would be every day, the one that disappeared in mid-february and reappeared on random Thursdays or Fridays. For a really long time, the funnest part about student teaching has been the time before and after class when I was able to talk to students about anything in the world.

I'd like to do something nice for my students at the end of the semester. I remember my history teacher senior year in high school made a cake for all of us. We were the WORST students, though. It was a really nice thing for him to do. I remember when he pulled the cake out of this cabinet with a knife and everything, I didn't really trust the guy. His face kind of resembled Patrick Bateman from American Psycho, but others said he looked more like Patrick Swayze or Stretch Armstrong. But I'll always remember how even though we were monsters in his class, at the end of the year there were no hard feelings. I'm just wondering what I can do other than baking a cake. Ha. Maybe putting together a little personalized book for all of them would be decent. Who knows? All I know is I have enough time now to make it all happen.

The semester at State went by so quickly. I remember being in the basement of Burk Hall for the first time for that interview a year ago. And now there's a whole new crop of credential program folks that are finishing up their first semesters. I just found out the other day one of my master teachers has a new student teacher! I'm being replaced... Alright, gotta get to the park to relax some.

That Disruptive Student...

That disruptive student I wrote about back in February is a lot less disruptive these days. For the wrong reasons though. Before, he would attend nearly every class although he'd be occasionally tardy. Now there are lots of days when he simply doesn't show up. When he is in class, we've managed to have some productive talks where he could at least explain to me his situation. His basic reasoning for not doing any work in class is that he has to take English in summer school anyway, so he believes it doesn't matter what he does in this last quarter. He actually told me that he wouldn't do any work, but he would "just be quiet" in class. He has managed to drastically improve his classroom behavior, but I feel like there are other factors outside of school that have caused him to be quiet and keep his head down during class.

I asked him to turn in any kind of writing sample to me, and he turned in a story about the carbon cycle that he wrote for a science class. Although his mechanics weren't as polished as other students' writing, he did experiment with complex sentence structures, used dialogue in his story, and showed flashes of being really descriptive. The next day in class I gave him an individualized grammar assignment to work on, and he completed it. I'm starting to see that the more individualized assignments I give to him with his name written on top of the page, the more likely he is to do work.

One day he was willing to participate in a vocabulary drama activity in which he acted out a skit representing the word "effervescent." He was a natural in front of the class, and the class seemed to pay closer attention to his performance. He even shouted out some guesses to other students' skits although he guessed random words that were not on our vocabulary list. I'm going to try to find more ways of getting him engaged in activities like this, perhaps some role playing based on scenes from the book we're reading, Lone Ranger and Tonto Fistfight in Heaven. There are four weeks left, and I really need to get more creative at getting this student to "be a student." He recently told me that he passed the Exit Exam already and I've seen his writing, so he can't lie and say that he doesn't have the skills. It's just about motivating him to do work.

The Home Stretch

After looking at my kids' grades for the second grading period, I noticed that the distribution was pretty much the same as the first grading period, except for there were some students whose grades dropped and other students whose grades shot right up. I took the time to email a student immediately after my grades were finished to let her know that she had gone from an F in the first grading period to a B-. I had spoken to her father on the phone late in the first grading period, and he showed a great deal of concern for his daughter's performance, so I wanted to make sure that he would hear about the good news as soon as possible.

In the email I thanked the student for her hard work, told her to be proud, and told her to let her parents know she did well. A few days later I received a really touching email from the student's father. If I were to never teach again after this semester, this one email would be enough to make me feel like I accomplished something as a teacher.

The email was the forwarded exchange of emails between the father and student. Apparently, my student had forward the email I sent her entitled "Second Grading Period," and added "**this should make your day" to the subject line. Typing in all capital letters she told her dad to LOOK AT WHAT HER TEACHER SENT HER! The email I received included the parent's reply to the student as well as a message to me. In his message to me he expressed his appreciation of my taking the time to inform him of his child's performance, which made me feel nice, but it was really nothing compared to seeing what he had said to his daughter. He basically expressed how he knew she could improve her school performance, to keep it up, and that "YES! it did make [his] day.]

Emails are nice. I'm glad that I wasn't able to find this parent's cell phone number and had to resort to the email. If this were all done over the phone I wouldn't have this awesome email. Way better than any emails I've ever received from any ex-girlfriends. So much fun.

Sophomores vs. Juniors

The other day I was thinking about how my student teaching experience would be different if the order of my classes was reversed. Right now, I teach a 10th grade class during 4th period and an 11th grade class during 5th. I seem to have far less management issues with my juniors compared to my sophomores. Usually ending my day with the juniors leaves me feeling more hopeful and confident about my future as a teacher. I have a feeling that if I ended the day with my 10th graders, though, I'd be banging my head against a wall.

There are a bunch of factors that could be playing a role in this all. I've spoken to one of my master teachers about this a number of times. (She also teachers 10th and 11th graders.) Some of the factors I feel like I've had little control over such as the control each master teacher had over the classes during the first semester, the seating arrangement in the 10th grade class promotes talking, the fact that juniors are just more mature than sophomores. Perhaps even taking over a text that my master teacher had begun in the first semester played a role in the difference. I was able to get a fresh, clean start with my juniors.

I still keep learning the different things that work and that don't work with my sophomores. It seems like my sophomores control themselves best at the opening of class if I begin the class with "important announcements," usually information about upcoming tests or assignments. So many students in that class do not take the in class writing/journal writing prompts as seriously when I begin class with them. I've also realized that beginning class with a short pop quiz will also corrale the students.

One thing I've noticed that doesn't really work with my sophomores is group work. I've tried "counting off" to make more random groups. Many students completely ignored what numbers they had and formed their own groups. Although doing things like handing out group instructions to each student improved the way the group work went, a number of students make it difficult to let the class separate into various groups.

I guess the good thing is that I'm actually getting a feel for what works and what doesn't work. The disruptions that occur during class just seem to get me down a little bit though, especially when they occur while other students are trying to read. I guess I just need to keep building my arsenal of strategies to deal with disruptive behavior, but thank goodness I end the day with my juniors!

Movie Reviews

One thing that excites me about something that has happened in class is that I feel like I've had a success with an assignment I came up with, but I also feel like I can improve the way the assignment works the second time around. Basically, I had students begin by writing movie reviews for a movie of their own choosing. We had looked at a movie review for The Crucible earlier in the semester to figure out possible structural features of a movie review. After reading the first few chapters of Catcher in the Rye, I had students write a movie review about the same movie, but this time from the perspective of Holden Caulfield, the narrator and main character of the book. We looked closely at tone, diction, and the use of slang among other things to prepare for writing in his point of view. The results were pretty impressive. The majority of the movie reviews sounded both believable and original. One of my favorites was a review of Casino Royale, the new James Bond movie. Boy, was that a good movie review. He was both complaining about how James Bond was some phony British spy, but in the review he also admitted how James Bond was pretty handsome. That was a subtle little thing that Holden does in the text that I was glad a student picked up on.

The biggest thing about these movie reviews was that they were so much fun to read. I've procrastinated in actually grading them, but I've read through all of them already just for enjoyment, and have read a few others several times. They kill me.

If I were to do this again, I'd really want to work the Internet into the equation, but I'm not sure what would be the best place to organize all of these movie reviews. Blogs do not necessarily seem like the ideal format for these movie reviews unless it were an ongoing process throughout the year. It's possible that I could have students return to these movie reviews later in the year, writing from the perspectives of other important characters from our readings such as George or Lennie from Of Mice and Men. If I stick to just using the reviews for Catcher in the Rye, though, I'm thinking I would want to have students sign up for some sort of free message board/forum. I've only looked around briefly for nice message board/forum setups where I could have students post their movie reviews for their classmates to read and respond to. I haven't exactly fallen in love with any message board formats just yet. (Let me know if you have any good links I should check out.)

Using a message board as the arena for these movie reviews would allow students to take a little more pride in their movie reviews and also make more realizations about the way Holden writes, speaks, and thinks. A number of students in the class are still reluctant to volunteer to share their own writing in class, so using the forum approach would allow students to avoid any extra anxiety. It would probably also save a little class time. I'm thinking we could go to the computer lab once to register for the forum and begin writing rough drafts of their movie reviews and another time to post their reviews and begin responding to each other's reviews. I would probably assign each student to respond to a specific movie review and let them choose at least two other reviews to respond to in order to avoid some posts from not getting any replies. The message board would be accessible to students while they are at home as well, so they could have time to read as many movie reviews as many times as they wish. These movie reviews were a lot of fun. I really recommend doing something like this for Catcher in the Rye because it plays such a large role in the novel, but I suppose this assignment could work with any first-person novel or with characters who have a memorable way of speaking. I'm excited to try to work this technological aspect into this activity the next time around.

Stump the Chump

I recently started teaching Catcher in the Rye in my Junior American Lit class, I can't believe how much fun I've been having. The last major work we read in class was The Crucible, and to get everybody to read this novel differently, I gave a quiz that required students to recall specific and subtle details from the book. Since this was a big change from mostly all of the other quizzes I'd given in the past, I felt like I should do something to make it up to the students or to let them have their own fun. So we played a little game called Stump the Chump.

This is something I pretty much stole from my favorite English teacher in high school. Back then we were reading Slaughterhouse Five, and my teacher told us to all write 10 "quiz" questions of our own that ask for really specific and obscure details from the novel. We then competed against other groups to stump our teacher for extra credit. I still remember asking my teacher what was the color of the owl that Billy Pilgrim walks past, and he said "Jade green" with no effort at all. I thought I had stumped him, but he nailed it.

I won't say how many hours I spent preparing for this game, but I will say that I wouldn't have been able to do it if there were credential classes this week. Anything from the first 9 chapters in the book was fair game (Exactly 66 pages). In class I put the students into 6 groups, and let the controlled madness begin. Out of about 30 questions, they only stumped me twice, and actually only one group was responsible for both of the questions I couldn't answer correctly. (To defend myself one of them was a 2 part question, and the other was just pretty vague.) All the students were engaged. Multiple students read questions for their groups, and some students even stood up to ask me the questions. There were a lot of smiles throughout the game, huddled students conferring over what question to ask next, and others flipping through the pages of the novel like madmen to find harder questions to ask me. I feel like I've really succeeded at getting a large majority of these kids to enjoy the novel.

I can't remember the first question they asked me, but I know that it wasn't too difficult. I still played it up, though, pretending that I had trouble remembering what the answer was. Students were pretty excited at first to see me struggle, but when I said the answer a lot of students seemed to be shocked that I could remember something so "trivial." The game was fun for me. I had an excuse to be extra animated in class. For students, I feel like it's always good for them to see their teacher in vulnerable situations where the teacher can possibly make a fool out of him or herself. This game was a lot of fun for me and for most of the students. If you have a crazy amount of time to prepare in one night, I definitely recommend playing something like this. I can see this game working really well if you're a full-time teacher that teaches multiple sections of the same class. By the third or fourth time, you'll really be in the zone and know every kind of question a student could ask you. I honestly cannot wait until I can teach Catcher in the Rye again to another group of kids to see how they compare to the Juniors I have right now. So much fun.

Cheating...

Last week I caught two students attempting to cheat on a vocabulary test. On Mondays, I will usually distribute a half or a third sheet of paper with all of the definitions and parts of speech for the vocabulary words to the class. Last semester, when my master teacher went over vocabulary words, she would write down the definitions on the board, and students would spend time copying the definitions down. I originally thought typing the list of vocabulary words out for the students to keep would be a good idea. The one thing it did do was free up more class time to focus on the studying texts and also time to actually do activities based on vocabulary words.

I suspected typing out the definitions for students on a smaller sheet of paper could possibly tempt students to cheat. The first month of my teaching, though, I did not catch any students using their list of definitions to help them during their test. During tests, I typically circulate around the classroom to monitor students' progress on the test and also lean against my desk/table in the front of my room. On this particular day, while standing in the front of the class, I caught two students using the list of definitions. The first student, a special ed student, tried to keep his list directly under his test sheet. I caught him lifting up the test and peaking at the definitions underneath it. From the front of the class, it was easy to see that there was another sheet of paper under his test. I walked towards him and tried to lift his test up. He actually tried to hold the test down to keep my from finding the sheet. Luckily, I caught him trying to cheat fairly early into the test. He had only attempted to answer two questions. I simply took his cheat sheet away and crossed out the two questions he'd answered.

It seemed out of character for this student to cheat. He was visibly shaken up by it all. For about the next ten minutes he simply looked at his test without writing anything down. I had to tell him to at least guess on the other questions.

Another student actually tried to keep his list on his lap during the test. As I approached him, he tucked it under his oversized hooded sweatshirt. He tried to deny cheating at first but eventually caved in when I told him that I saw the sheet. This was also very early into the test, so I also crossed out the questions he had attempted. After class I ended up asking these students if they would prefer me to inform their parents of what happened, or if they would write me an apology letter. Both students chose to write the apology letter. For the second student, it happened to be his best writing of the semester. In his letter he apologized and also thanked me for giving him a second chance.

After the test that day, though, I had a little talk with the class as a whole about their behavior during tests. I told them we would "practice" taking tests "the right way" and made my behavioral expectations and the consequences extremely clear. During the next test just this week, the class was dead silent. Students' eyes did not even wander, and students who finished early sat quietly, rather than cracking jokes the way some have done throughout my student teaching and last semester. I always felt I was explicit about my expectations and consequences from the beginning of my teaching, but I suppose I should repeat these strict and explicit expectations before I give any other test. Looking back, it seems that doing this will actually make my job of dealing with cheating easier. Instead of debating over how to handle future cheating, I won't be as reluctant to simply take a student's test away and give him or her a zero. So I'm disappointed with some of my students' behavior, but hopefully this instance will improve future behavior on tests.