Snow day! Oh, snow day. Um, snow day?

This last week, school was out Monday and Tuesday. On Monday, I had seven job interviews at a college interview day. Tuesday, we had in-service. Wednesday, the students were back to work with us, but this is what it looked like outside by lunchtime:

Like the palm tree? It's about 5 inches tall and inside on the windowsill.

And it didn't stop coming down for two days. Our area had over fourteen inches of snow fall. Suffice it to say, we had a snow day. Then another. Then a weekend. As I write this on Sunday, the weather experts are predicting another foot or more of snow tonight and tomorrow. So, a snow day tomorrow is a real possibility. When we Kansans were lamenting the lack of precipitation in our area for the last year, I don't think we were asking to get the backlog all at once!

As children, we saw a snow day as nothing more than an unexpected day off. Sledding! Hot cocoa! Movie marathons! And I will admit that as an adult, an unexpected day off is just as appealing. But, to teachers, snow days test our ability to adapt. Of course, every job requires adaptability and a snow day may require some people to work from home or to work extra hard when they get back in order to catch up. Some people may luck out and not really have to do much other than come back when the roads are clear. But for teachers, we have to take our plan, which we have packed full of meaningful, interesting, engaging learning tasks, and tweak it until it squeaks. We have to get all that learning into fewer days. For me, as a student teacher, my unit for my portfolio project for licensure will have to be shortened. My observation this week will perhaps not be the spectacular lesson I was planning, but something different and hopefully just as impressive. The students won't be ready for that spectacular lesson with two or three fewer classes ahead of it. I'm doubting that particular lesson is going to survive in the form I was planning. Bits of it may work themselves in here and there, but I won't have the luxury of an entire class period for that particular activity. We have a lot of reading to do, a lot of Shakespeare to decipher, interpret, and apply. So what will we do? We'll do what we've been practicing all along. We'll reflect, adjust, and we'll get to work.

Snow, oh snow, wherefore art thou so deep?

Seeing Strengths

As teachers, we are constantly asked to reflect, as well we should. Without reflection, we can't improve. We need to note what problems we have so we know what solutions to seek from colleagues, books, research, and mentors. But, I think we tend to focus on the negatives too often. As we reflect, we look to improve, but we should also note our strengths. What do we do well? How can we use those strengths to make our teaching stronger?

My cooperating teacher does many things well, but one thing I especially appreciate is the volume and quality of feedback he provides on my teaching. Every time I teach, we have a discussion on what went well and what could be improved. I like how his feedback, combined with his teaching experience, can help me see solutions I didn't see on my own. As the school year progresses, we have moved more toward a collegial relationship rather than one of simply expert and student. The collaboration on lesson plans and the overall vision for the semester has been, I believe, a benefit to us both and to the students. In reflecting on my teaching, he is very good about helping me see my strengths, as well as my weaknesses. With one recent lesson, I was reading with the class as a whole. I was a little frustrated at the end of class over some minor problems. Our reflection and discussion on the class revealed some simple solutions to my frustrations. But the biggest thing I noticed in this particular instance was that the list of strengths he had written down was much longer than the list of things to improve. I was too focused on fixing my frustration to see all the things that had gone well. Reflecting on these strengths and discussing them can be as illuminating as trying to fix the problems might be. By noting strengths, we can be sure to use those techniques and strategies again and to build upon them.

We know to look for strengths in our students in order to build on them, just as a house builder starts with a strong foundation and latches every other part of the structure to it in some manner. We look for those bits of sparkling granite in our students. We should also be looking for them in ourselves.

By this point in our education as teachers, we have been reflecting, improving, and polishing. We have climbed a mountain. Sometimes, it's far easier to focus on the pebbles we want to sweep away from the path in front of us than it is to notice the rock on which we are standing. Notice the rock. Don't wander off a cliff chasing after pebbles. Feel that mountain below your feet and take a moment to be proud.

The Job of Finding a Job, or The Big Payoff

So, this is it: the semester I've been working toward for three years, the big payoff, crunch time. When I charged ahead on this journey toward becoming a teacher, I knew it would be a long road. I knew it would be hard. Most of all, I knew it would be a lot of work. What I didn't know was how much I, and my entire life, would change and grow throughout these three years. Finally reaching this point, when everything I do is important and everyone is watching to make sure I can pass muster, I am filled with mixed emotions. I worry that I won't be able to get it all done and save my sanity. I worry that I won't be able to find that job that fits like an old pair of jeans. Will it be worth all the stress and sacrifice of three years? As I feel myself getting tense with worry, I remind myself to breathe, make a list, relax, and rock it.

This isn't my to-do list, but the advice isn't all bad.

One big item on that list? Getting a job. Finding a job is no small task. Before I even began working toward becoming a teacher, I thought about this step. Where do I want to work? Who do I want to work with, what students, teachers, administrators, and districts? What do I want my life to look like? It all feels a little uncertain. I know what I want, and I know I will work hard to get it, as I have been all my life. But I don't know that what I want will be available, much less that they will want me as much as I want them. So, I make plans on top of plans. First choices, second choices, a hundred little (and big) choices that will shape my life, possibly for the rest of my career.

When I was in college the first time around, I thought I could do it all on my own. I didn't really avail myself of the services available to me to help me make the transition from college to life. This time around, I'm well-versed in crafting a life, and I know that taking all the help you can get is a smart thing to do, especially when you have experts on hand. My resume has been reviewed by co-op supervisors, career services, and friends and colleagues. I'm compiling a (hopefully) impressive list of references. I'll be listening to everyone's advice and using what works for me to help me get that great job. This extends to using the tools available on job boards to help make monitoring new listings easier. My smartphone is my partner in crime. Notifications from RSS feeds straight to my phone will hopefully help make that job-trolling easier and more effective. I am accepting help as well as helping myself.

Finding a job really is a job of its own. When added to the job of student teaching, the job of completing the requirements for licensure, the job of trying to make some money, and the jobs of raising kids and having a relationship, it can seem like too much. But real life is hard and like everything else, this phase is only temporary. Eventually, I will get a teaching job, and because of everything else I have done, I will be prepared to be the best teacher I can be. The list in front of me may be long, but the list of tasks completed is much longer. I'm nearing the end of this journey and getting ready to embark on something new, and I have to know it was all worth it.

How to Eat Lunch, for High School Teachers

First, make a healthy lunch at home. You can make it the night before, or the whole week's worth on Sunday, or a month at a time, or even randomly grab a container of leftovers from the fridge that morning. But, no matter what, make sure you bring your lunch. You have no hope of eating otherwise.

When the bell rings announcing that your hallway supervision time has ended, you can finally, perhaps, just maybe sit down for a minute with no students calling out your name. Make a break for it. Zip into your classroom and turn off the light. Or go to the department workroom to eat with other teachers. Or maybe even make your way to the teachers' lounge to see teachers from other parts of the building. (Just kidding. Who wants to sit with those whiners?)

If you need to warm your food, I hope you have a microwave in your room. If not, prepare to spend time waiting and chit-chatting. Wonder if maybe you should have risked running off for a fast-food lunch just for the alone time in the car.

Now, whatever you do, do not, I repeat, DO NOT talk to any students. If you talk to a student, it's over. Your lunch will grow cold, your stomach will rumble, and your hope of any tiny respite of lunchtime quiet is forever lost. Until tomorrow, anyway.

Some days, you may have asked a student to come sit in your room during lunch. Perhaps he needs extra help on an assignment. Perhaps she needs a little time to consider her classroom behavior. Perhaps you have made the ultimate error and invited an entire club to use your room for a meeting. Chatting, bubbling, negotiating, making decisions, these students froth with a thousand ideas and a pinch of “go-get-'em.” Have fun with that.

No, really. Have fun with that. Because your students are fun. Really! They're energetic and creative and clever. Maybe, just maybe, a quiet leisurely lunch is overrated. So enjoy your colleagues when you're waiting in line for the microwave. Enjoy those students who just have to tell you something. Right. Now. Enjoy that club meeting that excruciatingly illustrates exactly how your students are learning to govern themselves and become leaders. Enjoy it today, and tomorrow, and every day. And snuffle that lunch down discreetly.

But take some time for yourself for your after-school snack. If you can.

The Perils of Writing Assignments

A lot of my time lately has been taken up by grading student papers. As as part of a lesson I taught, I assigned (at my cooperating teacher's request) a narrative paper. Somehow, I found myself agreeing to grade the other classes' papers as well, in the interest of consistency in grading and to gain the experience. This experience has taught me several things about myself and about assigning and grading writing.

Piles o' papers!
The top piece is my assignment sheet with revisions for the future.

1. Set boundaries.

I have a habit of just saying, “Sure I can do that!” when asked to take on extra work. I like to gain new experiences. I like to be able to help out. And I seem to think I have an unlimited amount of free time in which to do these extra tasks. I do not. Saying no, or at least managing/scaling back the task, is perfectly reasonable sometimes.

2. Work on writing with students constantly.

Making a writing assignment in a vacuum without proper scaffolding is a waste. All we're measuring in grading an assignment like that is the skills the students came to the classroom with already and their ability to follow a rubric. If those are things we want to measure (say, in formative assessment) there are better ways to do it.

3. Make your assignments specific.

If you throw too much stuff or too many options in there (again, without having proper scaffolding) it just muddies the waters. The students get confused about what to to and the teacher gets confused about what to focus upon when grading. Keep it simple, targeted, specific.

4. Give the students some freedom.

This may seem like a contradiction to what I just wrote, but it's not. Giving the students freedom with aspects of what they write is certain to generate more engaged writers and more engaging writing. It's amazing some of the stuff these students write! I get chills when reading some of their stories.

5. Go with your gut.

It's OK, maybe even advisable, to consult with others on what to include or how to format assignments. But, don't take all of their suggestions as law. I included a few things on this assignment that I would not in the future. I knew I didn't want to include them in the first place, but I did it anyway because someone more experienced than I am suggested it and I thought it was worth a try.

6. Sometimes things are worth a try.

Not all of those suggestions I took paid off, but some did. You won't learn anything if you never try anything new.

In the future, I plan to workshop this kind of assignment with my students extensively. I think the work we did in class with my one lesson about it was a good starting point, but we need at least three more sessions of workshopping to really scaffold this particular assignment. Another benefit of more extensive workshopping is that I can grade more along the way and less on the final product. Their grades will reflect their work and the development of that work, not just the words on one piece of paper turned in at the end.

KATE Conference Wrap-up

Last Thursday and Friday I, along with my pre-student teaching classmates at WSU, attended the KATE (Kansas Association of Teachers of English) conference. For most of us, this was our first professional conference as (soon-to-be) teachers. I believe it was a beneficial experience for several reasons, but the top of my list was the opportunity to spend time with other English teachers talking about what we do, how we do it, and how we can do it better. "Better" is a subjective term, of course. I think for most of us, we want ways to engage students, teach more effectively, and maybe even have some fun. I think I can put a check mark next to all of those!

The two keynote speakers were both authors of young adult fiction, and they were both great in different ways. Brent Crawford, author of Carter Finally Gets It and its sequels, spoke from the point of view of a former "bad kid." He was a jock in high school, not a great student, and if the content of his books is any indication, he and his friends pretty much spent their time thinking about girls and goofing off. Yet, he credits his teachers with planting the seed that grew into his career as an author. He writes books that might appeal to kids like him. We as teachers can learn something about reaching out to every student from his stories. We never know what little spark may grow into a flame, now, tomorrow, or long in the future. The other keynote speaker, Rachel Hawkins, is a former English teacher. She said that the characters in her books (Hex High and sequels) are inspired by former students. Her time spent with teenagers informed her writing of teenage characters. She understands our struggles as teachers and spoke at length about her time as a teacher and the challenges she faced. Some of us may even see a little of ourselves in her.

The breakout sessions were very informative. I was lucky enough to be able to attend a session in every time slot. My favorites were the sessions that gave me concrete ideas of things I can use in my classroom. Grammar Strip Tease gave some fun and effective ideas for teaching grammar using fortune cookie sentences. The session on using comic books in the classroom gave me some great resources for where to get more information about comics and some recommendations on what comics to use for different purposes. Fiction to Non-Fiction was part presentation, part brainstorming session. I left with some wonderful suggestions on ways to select informative texts to pair with literature, as well as some great examples of real ways real teachers have done so in the past. I may even be using some of these ideas in the next few weeks at my pre-student teaching placement. Finally, the session on using children's books with high schoolers and community college students gave me not only some fun and genuine ideas, but actual copies of lesson plans to use and/or adapt for my own use. I love how this lesson uses the writing of children's books to assess grammar in a more interesting and genuine way.

On Friday, I was honored to be one of the students chosen to do a reading of my genre reflection. My work Discovery was my most recent post here on my blog. Being given the opportunity to share my work with other teachers and hear their reactions to it was an honor, a joy, and a wonderful way to close out the conference.

Discovery (Genre Reflection #1)

As I reflected on my teaching life in preparation to write something, anything, about it, my immediate reaction was to think of my students and what they are to me. I thought of the poetry I've been reading in preparation to teach it to my students. Intrigued by the idea of autobiographical poems, I set out to write one on the subject of my students and our student-teacher relationship. The resulting poem (included here) began as one thing and progressed into something completely different. I started out thinking about my students and how they quickly become more than just my students. They become my kids. I'm not just concerned about their progress in English class; I'm concerned about their lives, now and in the future. As I wrote, the poem steered itself into something more about them and less about me. It wasn't about what they are to me, but what they are to themselves. I discovered a focus I hadn't realized was there.

As we write, our original intention frequently falls away or goes to wait in the corner for another time or place. As we follow bunny trails of thought, we may discover something new, something that we didn't know was there, lurking under the surface of cognition.

In the process of writing, I surprised myself. My hope is that my students will also find these little Easter egg surprises hiding behind the tufts of grass of other thoughts while they write. Maybe the Easter egg will hold something wonderful and deep, worth further exploration, or maybe it will be little more than a fleeting colorful thought. In any case, it will reveal something that the writer didn't anticipate. What a joy, to discover something new within ourselves!

In these written excursions, I want my students to find themselves and their voices, to discover what they think and what they have to say about it. Then I want them to say it! I want them to have the skills to express it all so the rest of the world can come along and follow their bunny trails. Perhaps their readers will hop along some bunny trails of their own, the process of discovery continuing.

Discovery

by Lara Engle

My students,

Full of energy,

Want to have fun.

“Work? Not now.

We'll get it done.”

Curious

Quick

Busy

Emotional

Powerful

Inspired

Harness it.

Direct it.

Feel it.

Connect it.

They find a thread.

They pull it loose.

Unravel it,

Follow it,

Sew it into something new.

“Ms. Engle!

Come here!

I want to show you what I did.”

Unexpected

New

Unique

Is it good?

What do you think?