Record Day, Retirement, Reflection

Wrong Kind of Record

Today was the last teacher day in our district, known as Record Day. Record Day is the day for all grades to be turned in, all classrooms to be packed away, all receipt books to be turned over, all keys to be handed in, a time to wrap up the old term and look forward to a few days of rest, relaxation and recovery.

Right Kind of Record

We had a farewell party to some of our staff who are retiring.  Cynthia Boyd our Language Arts facilitator, Mr. Allen who taught horticulture,  and Marjorie Harris, an excellent high school science teacher had their last Record Day and will now enjoy a good retirement.  We will be losing some teachers who will, for one reason or another, be gone from us next year.

This year marked my 18th year as a public school teacher.  I likely will be teaching at least 5 more years before I can enjoy full retirement. It's not something I am particularly looking forward to, except for the opportunity I may have to do more traveling while spending more time with my wife and my new family.

I really do enjoy teaching. I don't know what else I could ever be happy doing.  I also enjoy being in the classroom with the kids. Administration has no appeal to me, nor does consulting or some other education profession that doesn't involve being in a classroom with a group of students. For all the struggles I have trying to reach them, I love being involved in their lives.


I hope I communicate that to them.  To quote that great social philosopher Carol Burnett, "I enjoy the time we have together."

Last Day

Today is the final day of classes.

I had my final evaluation last week. (Not too bad, though there are some areas I will need to improve.)  My principal asked me how I thought the school had done this year. I told her that I usually think of a school year in baseball terms.  There are wins and losses during the season and pluses and minuses during the school term. So I think of whether or not we had a .500 season. Some years, I feel finished on the losing side or below .500. Sometimes it's a wash right at .500. This year I feel we finished at about .600.  We had more gains than loses.

Our gains came from learning new teaching techniques through the "Marzano method" that actually seem to have real potential for reaching our students.  I also think that our students have started to take learning seriously especially since they now have to pass several of the state exams to be able to graduate. We had 8 seniors fail to get the needed requirements, something noted by this year's juniors.

Our losses came from the fact that we still have problems with student behavior, particularly absenteeism. I think that, at least in my class, doing a better job of establishing classroom procedures will help with in-class behavior, but to deal with absences, we have more systemic problems. These absences are often caused by single-parent homes, health care concerns (for students and their siblings), drug abuse, in short, all the problems attendant to poverty in our culture.

We are optimistic about our students' test scores this year. The preliminary data looks promising. If we do show gains, our students will gain confidence that they can succeed if they attend to what goes on in class.

We will have many new teachers next year. We are losing some good instructors. We are also well rid of some "dead wood" who don't want to pay the price to get with the program.

My plan is to prepare for next year right away.  I want to have my procedures, my syllabus, my goals well in hand at the beginning of the year.  So this will be a working summer (along with some vacation leisure time).

It's been an interesting year. Next year will be even more so.

Living on the Margins

I'd like to consider a few ideas that have come to me from watching the film The Pursuit of Happyness.

Chris Gardner

The film is based on the real-life experiences of Chris Gardner who managed, through dogged persistence, gain a position with a Wall Street stock brokerage. The actual story of Gardner's life is a good deal more complicated than the movie depicts, but that's not what I am concerned about in this post.

What has struck me about the film is just how marginalized Gardner's life is all the while he is pursuing his dream. Merriam-Webster defines the verb as "to relegate to an unimportant or powerless position within a society or group." I have always appreciated this metaphoric verb because it demonstrates to me how easy it is for some members of our society to be kept on the edges of life or ever pushed over the edge.

In the course of the film, Gardner has to deal with homelessness, unemployment, or to be more accurate underemployment, unpaid taxes, eviction, and single parenthood.  His ability to overcome these problems and succeed is a testament to his goal driven determination. Some would see him as a classic American success story right out of an Horatio Alger story.

Yet I feel the unanswered question is how many have pursued happiness without ever approaching it? How many other Chris Gardner's are out there who found themselves still marginalized despite their hard work and determination? Who is telling their story?

In the film, Chris interviews with Dean Whitter Reynolds

One key point in the movie illustrates what I mean.  Chris makes a deal with his landlord to let him and his son stay in their appartment despite the fact that the rent is 3 months overdue. (Chris has been an unsuccessful salesman of medical equipment up to this point.)  Chris has an interview for an unpaid internship with Dean Whitter Reynolds in the morning, but he gets a call from the San Francisco police with a warrant for his arrest for unpaid parking tickets, which came about because he has parked in several hospital zones while rushing from one sales opportunity to another.  He has to spend the night in jail, use his phone call to arrange for his estranged girlfriend to pick up their son, and barely has enough time to run to the interview while still in his painting clothes. During the interview he sits across from the men who will decided whether to let him into the internship program. Chris, who is black, manages to convince his potential employers, who are white, to accept him. If the men did not, Chris would have few options to fall back on considering the fact that he is also being hounded for back taxes he has not been able to pay and a job that offers little hope of getting him out of the hole he is in.

Now, all the forces working against Chris are working within the systems we have in place in our world. The landlord has to collect his rents. The police are just doing their job according to the law. The IRS is enforcing the laws of the state.  Dean Whitter has the right to choose whom they wish to invite into their firm and who they won't.  However, for someone like Gardner, the odds are all stacked against him.  True, he overcomes those long odds, but for one Chris Gardner who succeeds, what happens to the many thousands who don't. 

We see the results of those who don't or just can't in our statistics on poverty, drug abuse, crime, imprisonment, school drop-out rates, child abuse, homelessness, divorce, and violence in American society. 

While I celebrate the Gardner's of the world who manage to step away from the margins, I mourn the thousands who still find themselves on the margins fighting not to be pushed over the edge.

The Pursuit of a Goal

Another easy day since the seniors were out of the building doing their community service project at Britton Elementary School.  I have two classes and seniors. Their graduation is this Saturday. They are supposed to be back the following week for three days (Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday, since Monday is Memorial Day). I really don't expect to see too many of them. What on earth is here for them to come back for?

My juniors are viewing the film The Pursuit of Happyness, staring Will Smith as a man who goes out to get a better life for himself and his family by pursuing a dream of becoming a Wall Street broker. I see it as a continuation of the Everyday Heroes story they read yesterday.  My objective is to get them to see that they need to have a goal for themselves and do what they need to do to achieve that goal.

Tomorrow, however, I will be with them on a field trip to Oklahoma Community College for something called "Senior Shift", which I believe tries to prepare them for going into their senior year.

I'll see how well that all works out.

Everyday Heroes

We have been studying the idea of the hero's journey or quest in my junior classes.

Today we read a chapter out of an anthology that I really like entitled Everyday Heroes. These are biographical stories of people who have overcome personal hardships and tragedies to succeed in life. None of the people are famous or celebrities. They are, just as the title says, common people who have made something good out of the kind of problems my students face: drug abuse, homelessness, abusive parents, poverty, and so on.

For the most part my students like reading the stories. They are written on a middle school level and have questions at the end that help them to acquire vocabulary and critical reading skills.

Today, we read about a woman named Catina Washington. Catina's life included being born to a 17 year old mentally handicapped mother who irresponsible living soon had Catina and her family homeless and dependent on charity handouts. Despite this, Catina graduated from high school and college and was voted outstanding woman of the year for Northern California.  At the time the book was printed Catina did volunteer work for a homeless hotline in Oakland, California. She planned to go to law school.

What I emphasized in the book is that Catina, like the archetypal hero, learned from her time living on the margins of society and took those lessons with her as she proceeded through life. In fact, she used those lesson to help people in her community much as the archetypal hero brings a boon back to the world she came from.

What I hope to do to enrich the lesson is to get my students to reflect on what they have gained through this year that can help them in the future. Each of them is on an heroic journey.

The Sea of Monsters

The Sea of Monsters by Rick Riordan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I enjoyed this book somewhat better than "The Lightning Thief" probably because less background exposition was needed. Also, Percy is a bit more 'grownup' in this book. In "The Lightning Thief", he was very whiny, just this side of annoying. Now, Percy has understood some of the reasons for his troubles and is working to deal with them.

The story is a retelling of "Jason and the Golden Fleece" with a little of "Odysseus" thrown in. Both of these are my favorite Greek legends, especially Jason. So I was glad to see how Rick Riordan worked in both myths into the novel.

Percy also finds family he didn't know he had and learns to accept and love them for who they are.

Great values are being taught in this series by making use of mythology and a bit of history too.

View all my reviews

The Lightning Thief

The Lightning Thief by Rick Riordan
My rating: 4 of 5 stars

I had seen the movie before I read the book. The movie was a disappointment, but I'm glad to report that the book was far better. This is definitely a "Young Adult" book, written at the middle school level, but this old man really enjoyed it. I particularly admire the way Rick Riordan wove in Greek mythology with modern technology. Having Ares as a motorcycle punk was particularly inspired in my humble opinion. I have some students who have read and enjoyed this book. I am thinking of starting a book discussion group around this book and the other books in the series.

View all my reviews

On Teaching in a Fishbowl

Friday was an interesting day, symbolic, to me, of what is going on in our school.

We have several groups and institutions interested in what's going on at Centennial HS, Oklahoma City, Oklahoma.  There are the usual interests: students, parents, building administrators and so on.  To these we can add representatives from the Oklahoma State Department of Education, consultants from Pearson, the educational corporation that provides much of our curriculum, even my union, the American Federation of Teachers has teaching "coaches" called PARS, which stands for "Peer Assistance and Review, who are there to help new teachers in our building.

Friday, I had visits from several of these interests, altogether, all in one class period.

They showed up during my 1st period English 11 class. First, I had a woman who has been designated (by whom I'm not certain) as my "teaching coach" from Pearson. She came at the beginning of first hour to observe how the students come into the room, what beginning activities I have assigned them, what the objectives of the day's lesson were, and how I managed the class.  Then came Principal Johnson with another Pearson representative. Ms. Johnson was for my formative assessment that the district requires of all teachers.  The Pearson rep was there to provide his insights about my teaching.  A few minutes after those three had  arrived, the PAR teachers came in. I'm really not sure why they were there. I am not in our school's PAR program, so they must have just come in to watch me teach.

The really funny thing about the situation was that the number of observers nearly matched the number of students learning the lesson.  We are experiencing a lot of student absences as we wind down to the end of this term.  This period, which has always been small, only 14 on the roll, had only 6 students that Friday. 

The lesson went well enough.  The lesson was to compare how theme of personal responsibility is taught through film, using the movie Cars, and through a fairy tale about two intelligent brothers. I began by having the kids talk about their responsibilities for their families, their education, and their personal lives and used that to examine how responsibility acted as a theme for Cars. Then we read the story about the two brothers and did a Venn Diagram comparing and contrasting the different genres. The students were engaged, most of the time. in the lesson.

Afterwards, I conferred, first with the woman who is to be my teaching coach and then with Principal Johnson and the Pearson consultant (still waiting to hear from the PARs). They all apologized for "ganging up" on me and explained that each did not know that the others were going to there right then. (I'll save a discussion on communication for a later posting.) They all had helpful suggestions to help me as a teacher: things like having clearer goals for my students, finding ways to deepen the lesson, and doing assessments to insure by students really learn the objective.

These are all good things, but I think this incident is a metaphor for what can happen as we travel down the Road of Good Intentions. Conservatives complain constantly about government regulation. Liberals, like me, point out that those regulations exist because something needed correction.  Our school has many things in need of correction. I need to improve my teaching.  All of the people who came to my class want to help us make those improvements.

But it is easy for these things to get out of hand.  I want the help these good people want to provide me, but I can't help but get the feeling that someone is always looking over my shoulder as I teach, that I'm "teaching in a fishbowl" and it is stressful to do so.

A week ago Friday, I "hit the wall" and needed to step out of the fishbowl for a day.  (Pardon my mixed metaphor.) This week, I felt better and finished strong; however, I know of several teachers who have hit their walls.  We a big problem with teacher absentees.  We are all having to cover classes for teachers out of the building for various problems. In addition, we have many "long term" substitutes covering classes for teacher who have just given up.   Some of our  teachers say they don't plan to be back next year.  There are a number of very good teachers who have had real success in the classroom whom we will miss very much if they go.

Perhaps, in our zeal to improve, we are knocking a lot of good people into the wall.