An Odd Occurance

One time when I was putting together final grades I rode my bike home at 5 a.m., only to find the electricity was off in our building. After carrying my bike up 19 flights, I couldn't take a shower because the water tank on the roof was empty because there was no electricity.

Another time I couldn't get out of the building. Every door was chained closed. It was stupid o'clock a.m., and it took me ten minutes of wandering around to realize that if it had been locked from the inside, then someone must still be inside who could let me out.

Those are the highlights of grading stories for me.

Today we had to have grades submitted for progress reports. In our jr. highs, they get progress reports midway through each quarter, so 8 grades per year. These grades are due, will be due, at midnight tonight. I found myself in the very odd position of being done at six o'clock this evening, fully six hours early.

I didn't quite know what to do. I'm still kind of reeling. Just waiting for something to happen. An urgent phone call telling me that I've screwed up.

Instead I'll probably get ten or fifteen urgent phone calls next week from parents telling me that I've screwed up.

My first real assignment for Baker is due Sunday night at midnight. I should be working on that, but instead I am going to go to bed. It is a reasonable hour, and I am working a volleyball game tomorrow for some extra bucks.

One positive thing I heard today. Edith, my mentor teacher, told me that one positive thing she's heard about me from many people is that I am good at forging a rapport with the kids. Granted, that is not sufficient to be a good teacher, but it is an important aspect. One which some teachers never quite get.

For one week I got to change classes. I had been working as a para with Edith, but another teacher, Charlotte, had kids who needed help in her learning strategies class. So I got permission then switched. I helped some kids in there to get over some tricky ideas, and they actually told other teachers that I had been helpful. Word gets around.

I suppose I should throw in a word or two about learning strategies class. It was formed for kids that have trouble learning (obviously), especially in the language arts. They don't have documented learning disabilities,

I like this job, but it is a lot of work. The first year of teaching always is. Learning the system, the curriculum, how to deal with the kids, it all takes more time than I have. I hate to say it, but it's so much easier with Horyon and Maxine out of the house. I miss them so much that I can't put words to it, but if they were here I would be even more tired than I already am.

We talk on the phone. Sometimes on Video Skype. Maxine doesn't really have the focus for prolonged video conversation. She actually does much better on the telephone. She's picked up all kinds of fun mannerisms that I hadn't noticed until now. She says, "I'll talk to you later, okay?" much more clearly than any almost-three-year-old should.

I finished the last of their laundry with a load of mine last night. Maxine's clothes are cute and small. And they don't have her inside them. I want to pick her up and spin her around. Horyon says Maxine is gaining a lot of weight in Korea. The diet must agree with her. I don't care. I'll still pick her up and swing her around.

That's enough whining for tonight. I've got a busy day tomorrow and Sunday, so I should get to bed.

Peace,

Rob

A Good Feeling or Two

Today I had my first evaluation from Baker University. It was a fairly typical class for me in a lot of ways, both good and bad. One suggestion that the professor had was that I make a file in my drawer labeled "Encouragement" or "Cheer Up" or something like that. In it, I should make note of the times that I have been complimented on my teaching, and I should throw in notes that students write to me. It should be something to help me on the days when I feel like throwing in the towel (or a ham grenade).

I had dinner with Mom and Dad today, and Dad suggested that I also throw in things that students have said or done that made me laugh. Smart guy, my Dad is.

A quick side note on dinner, as I rarely mention a meal without going into detail. We ate a Buffalo Bob's Smokehouse, and it was a reminder of days long gone. When I was a student at K.U., my parents would come to visit fairly often, at least once a month. When they did, they always took me out to dinner. One of my favorite places to go was always Buffalo Bob's. There were five reasons for this:

#1 Meat.
#2 Big pile of it.
#3 Curly fries piled on top of that.
#4 Hunting trophy heads mounted on the walls.
#5 Classic Rock n Roll being played, but not too loud.

Buffalo Bob's is not an expensive place to eat, but on a college budget it kind of is. Right now I'm kind of on a college kid budget. I'm not even paycheck-to-paycheck, as I am still waiting for my first paycheck to finish coming in.

We had a nice dinner of ribs, and talked the whole time about a variety of topics which I will not go into here, other than the one I started with:

Keeping track of the happy times to get you through the hard times.

I've decided to do that here, starting now. Here are a few things:

One of my algebra students, an eighth grader, told me last week that the work we did in my class really helped him in science class. This, I am told, is an amazing thing to happen, especially this early in the year. Jr. High students are just not inclined to compliment their teachers. At all. I felt good when he told me that my class helped him, and even better when I started to hear about how rare it is for students to do this.

Today the teacher I share a room with, Sharon Dwyer, told me (and my Baker prof. and our resource teacher, Jackie) that she thought I was doing a great job. She said that I have a lot of energy in front of the class, which is something they need. She has spent more time in my teaching classroom than anyone else, so I'm taking that in a good way.

A couple of weeks ago a student teacher followed one of my students around for the day. At the end of the day she told me that my class was the most interesting of the lot. That's good to hear. And I'm pretty sure she meant the good kind of interesting.

Our vice-principal, Lisa Clipsham, has mentioned to me that when she pops into my classroom, I project an air of authority and control. "That's a big part of the game," she continued.

There are times when I do not feel in control. Those times are more frequent when I have not planned well, but they sometimes happen when I think I have a great lesson planned. While this can be frustrating, I know from experience that it will get better. When I started teaching at ELS, back in Korea, it was an intense split-shift schedule. Usually four hours in the morning and seven in the evening. I would go home in the afternoon and sleep.

[Another incomplete post, but worth putting up there.]

First Full Two Weeks Complete

How long until summer vacation again?

Never mind.

This was a good week, though tiring. I need this three-day weekend. Mom and Dad are coming to take us to dinner tonight, which will be fun. On Monday, I will take Maxine to the lake, leaving Horyon at home to rest. She needs to get over her morning sickness soon, because Thursday she leaves for Korea for a whole month. It's a long enough plane ride when you're in good health and dragging Maxine with you, but with constant urges to revisit your previous meal it would be downright miserable.

At this point I can't say for sure that being a Jr. High teacher is what I want to do for the rest of my life, or even for this next chunk of my working life, but I am not ready to quit, either.

I have learned a few things talking to my fellow teachers and dealing with students, though. I know that many of you reading this are teachers, but for those of you who aren't, I may have to fill you in on President Bush's No Child Left Behind (NCLB) policy: In a nutshell, students are tested regularly, a couple of times a year. Overall scores for the entire school are compared year to year, and each school is expected to make a certain amount of progress each year. If that progress is not made, federal funding for the school is cut. The basic idea behind this is that teachers who do well are rewarded for doing well, and teachers who don't do well can be canned.

There are some problems with this idea, but it is revolutionary in a couple of respects: First of all, teachers are actually being held responsible for all students that come through their classroom. Responsible in the sense that our jobs are on the line if our kids don't improve as they work their way from first grade through high school graduation. This is such a common sense thing that you may have assumed it was true all along, not taking into account the idea of having tenure. NCLB pretty much trashes the idea of tenure, though it may be a challenge to deal with older teachers who have been "grandfathered" in.

The other revolutionary aspect is found in one word I used in the previous aspect: ALL. As in ALL students are tested. This means that there is now a big disadvantage to sending a kid out of the classroom, whether to time out for a period or two, or ISS/OSS (In and Out of School Suspension). If our salaries are hinged on the grades of all of our students, then we have to keep the trouble-makers in our classrooms, otherwise their grades go down.

If you are my age, or even a little younger, you knew kids who got through school spending a huge amount of time out of the classroom, dealing with the principal. And what can I say? My first inclination is to let a kid fail if he (or she) wants to. That's how I did it when I taught college kids in Korea. But NCLB has made mandatory what many teachers did naturally: it requires us to give students motivation to do well when that motivation is not being supplied elsewhere.

Sound familiar? It should. That's very likely what your parents did. It was no surprise to me that there are parents who don't teach their kids that school is important, but it did surprise me how that manifests. Example: a kid was called to the office this past week. His mother was here to pick him up. He came back before class was finished. With a haircut. It was shocking enough to make me include it as a sentence fragment right here in the Roblog. This was Ashley's class, in which I am a para, so we got to "What the hell?" about it without having to tell the story.

My guess? Mother works evenings, kid has football practice, the weekends are too inconvenient. So pull him out of math class for a haircut. What message does the kid receive? Being in class is less important than getting a haircut.

So now on to the problems with NCLB. First of all, is cutting funding really the best way to get results? Remember, we're trying to steer an awfully large ship that has been heading in one direction for a very long time. There is not much flexibility built in. It seems to me that if teachers were to use this method on their students we would spend a lot of time holding their heads under water. And that is my minor gripe.

My next gripe is one of statistics: What are the chances that each class in a school (all 7th graders, or all 9th graders for example) is exactly the same in ability as the same class from the previous year? I hate to ask a question to which I don't know the answer, but the anecdotal answer seems to be "Not likely." I'm sure that if you have a large enough student population they start to become indistinguishable, one from the other. That would not be the situation at any Jr. High School I've ever been in. Some years you have a large handful of bright students that pull the average up, and some years you have a couple of classes made up of kids who have learning disabilities and/or serious behavioral problems. However much progress you make with problem classes, they just aren't going to look as good next to the clever classes, and it isn't anybody's fault. Unless you are NCLB, in which case you judge that the teachers are responsible because they haven't worked hard enough, so you threaten to take away funding the next year. If you are the school being threatened you have no choice but to hope and pray that the next year's class will balance out your round of bad luck.

Here's the real downside to this aspect of NCLB: If your school has a reputation for working well with problem kids, and getting results from them, more of them will go to your school! Naturally! Guess what that does to your chances of having a class with a higher percentage of at-risk and low-performing kids? Never mind the simple effects of geography. We don't like to admit that there are some neighborhoods that have more money than others, and that some neighborhoods are more likely to have parents who are not as supportive as others, but it is true. Think that doesn't have an effect on test scores? Think again. NCLB paints every school with the same brush, not taking into account the different populations by geography and time.

Here's my big gripe: NCLB puts pressure on one third of the parties responsible for the education of children, the teachers.

The first neglected group is the administration. Administration at the building level are pretty much in the loop. Their jobs are on the line because NCLB targets individual buildings, not entire districts. The superintendent of schools makes seven or eight times as much as a first-year teacher (in Lawrence, anyway). Guess what penalties are leveled against him and the school board by NCLB when schools fail? None. It is up to the cities to deal with these problems, which makes it a political matter. The ones who are better at passing the blame come out clean, and keep their jobs. Their higher-paying jobs. Their jobs that directly impact education without having to deal with the messiness of being in a classroom.

This manifests in some subtle, but telling ways. Our 7th grade math book is a lovely piece of work, with units focusing on practical application. It's an incredibly real-world approach that would be fun to teach, and might give kids a sense of how math is used in a variety of careers. The problem with it is that it flies boldly into the face of NCLB. And like a bird flying boldly into the face of a brick wall, it comes out bloody and unable to fly. Here on the ground, we teachers have to make up for it by redesigning the curriculum as we go, skipping around in the book, pulling resources from elsewhere, and spending TIME that could be spent focusing on students. I am fortunate that my coworker, Edith, does spend time on it. We also have a list of topics and chapter references from a group of math teachers in another building to draw upon. Nevertheless, anything that draws a teacher's attention away from their students is a waste of time. The purpose of administration is to minimize wastes of time. My understanding is that the administration for Lawrence Public Schools is better than many at this, but my point is that they are not held accountable by NCLB. Not here, nor anywhere else in the United States.

Teachers are the first in line to help students climb the ladder of success. (Sorry. If I think of something less cliche I'll throw it in later.) Administration need to be in there doing their part. The third column supporting our students is, of course, parents. Most students are in my classroom for about 50 minutes per day, five days a week, only when school is on (and they are not out getting a haircut). And this for one school year only. Compare to how much time they spend, and have spent, with their parents.

Unfortunately for some of our students, they spend more time with me than with either parent. I accept that reality. Still, most of our students spend time with their parents, and their parents pass on their attitudes about education, studying, and working. So why does NCLB ignore this reality?

I could go on and on about how most of President Bush's policies ignore reality, even to the extent of publicly claiming that they create their own reality, but my focus here is on NCLB and how to fix it.

What is the one surefire, guaranteed way to make parents take an interest in the education of their children? Before you go on to the next paragraph, try actually thinking of an answer, and let's see if we can agree on this. Go ahead. Think. What gets everyone's attention?

Yeah. I was thinking "money" too. Remember those tests that students have to take, and upon which school funding is based? What motivation do students have to do well on that test? They can be grouped like this:

The "good" students: Will always do their best on a test, even if it is not attached to the grade they get in class.

The "pleaser" students: Will do well on this test if their teacher asks it like a personal favor.

The "screw-you" students: Don't care. About their grade, what their teacher wants, what anyone wants. In fact, if the "screw-you" student discovers that scoring poorly on this test will have a real, negative impact on the school, they may intentionally score poorly. Hey! Power trip!

So how do I as a teacher motivate an s.y. student? I have to earn their trust. I have to catch them up on skills that they may have skipped over in previous years, because an s.y. student is not created in one year. I have to make them believe that they can do well. That's all. If you are imagining me sitting down and having a one-on-one with a scruffy kid, making a connection that is the beginning of trust, thank you for your faith; but don't forget to imagine the other 15 kids in the classroom going nuts, talking about boys, ignoring the assignment they've been given, and doing their best to listen in on my conversation, making the scruffy kid feel uncomfortably un-cool. So much for making a connection.

Right now the government gives people a tax credit for having dependents. All you have to do is have children. What if the amount of that tax credit were performance dependant? Imagine this: After test time, the parents get a notification of their child's test score, and with it a check. The amount the check is for depends on their child's score. Cap it at, say, $500, maybe an even grand, perhaps making that a sliding amount dependent on family income. After all, the kids from rich families will probably get this check passed on to them completely, while the poor families will need that money to pay bills. Let the percentage of that $500 be equal to the score the kid made on the test, adjusted for officially documented learning disabilities.

Do you think it would change parents' attitude towards their children's education? The beauty of it is that you could pull it right out of that tax credit for any children of school age. It would require some serious public education, but if this is a priority then it needs to be addressed.

So there's my first two full weeks of school. I know. Not much about the classes. I'm just now starting to feel like I know my students well enough to write about them. They'll be up here soon, as anonymous as ever. I'll have to keep track of the names I make up for them so I don't get confused. That will be the least of my organizational issues, I'm sure.

Horyon and Maxine head for Korea on Thursday. I will miss them, but it will be nice to sleep without interuption, come home and not have to feed, shower and put Maxine to bed. These are duties that Horyon and I usually share, but the morning sickness has severely limited what Horyon can do. She barely gets through a shower by herself without spitting up, and Maxine makes it more difficult. I have been putting Maxine in bed, praying with her, then leaving the room for the last couple of nights. I poke my head back in if she is hollering something, but mostly let her cry. I'm finding that she actually gets to sleep faster that way than when I lie down on the floor by her bed. Of course, when she gets back from Korea I'll have to go through it all again, but I'm already planning to speed up the program. Hopefully it will register with Maxine that staying at Grandpa and Grandma's house is just different, and there's no point in crying about it.

They're staying for a month. In September I plan to focus on my teaching and on the class that I will be taking. Nothing else. The first month will undoubtedly be the hardest, and by the time my girls come home, I will have a routine that works. I will adjust it to make time for them every day. It will be tough, because I can no longer work at night. Waking up at 6 a.m. for me requires going to bed by 10 p.m. on a fairly regular basis. Planning for my classes is going faster than it used to, but it still takes time. By October it should be even smoother.

Can you hear the panic in my voice yet? Wish me luck.

Peace,

Rob

The Private Roblog

Hi everyone.

Feels weird knowing that the only people reading this are doing so by invitation.

I just wanted to point out that I am only allowed 100 readers. I sent out about 150 invites. Because I wasn't sure of which address to use, some of you may have received more than one invite. If you got two, please don't create two accounts! And if you can share with someone easily, please do so.

Once I've been at Central for a couple of years, I may open Roblog back up again. I think that once I have an established reputation, I will be somewhat shmear proof. We'll see.

The first full week has been rough. I'm tired all the time. I've been staying at school until past five o'clock most night, sometimes as late as seven, and once until nine. Teaching well is a difficult job, and the first year is always the worst. I've had a few first years, and this one tops all of 'em. Doesn't help any that we're dealing with morning sickness and Maxine, but the actual teaching and adjusting to dealing with large groups of adolescents has also been a serious challenge.

I had my first self-designed successful class today. It was my most difficult class, the Algebra kids. I'm trying not to celebrate too much, as I had an observer in the class, but it felt good for the class to go smoothly. Whereas before the flow of class has been constantly interrupted, today it felt more like interaction.

And today was a block day! On Thursdays we have only four classes, at about 90 minutes each. Granted, this class had lunch to break it up, but it's still a long time for kids to stay focused, and they did well.

Honestly, it's the first time since I started teaching (just a week ago!) that I've really felt that I could be a successful jr. high math teacher. I've always believed it, almost to the point of knowing it, but today I felt it. That is so important, because you can only push on with your will for so long, and so hard. At some point you have to have your heart invested in it. And now mine is.

All that said, I am completely unprepared for tomorrow, and I have to wake up in seven hours. So I will do a little work, then go to bed.

Peace,

Rob

Semi-Random Pictures

I feel kind of bad; I made some guided lesson notes together for class today, and wanted to include some pictures of my family. So I went to Roblog to look for pictures. You gotta go way back. So here are some pictures from the last couple of months.
Horyon modeling an eggplant. We both sort of noticed that it kind of looked maybe just a little bit like her head.
Horyon and Maxine at the zoo.
Maxine and Sophia, raking in the big bucks selling lemonade. LEARN MATH=MAKE MONEY.
Maxine and Elanor having an impromptu jam session.

You can thank me later for not including audio on this one.

That's it for now. I'll get some more up later.

Rob

Warning

Hi everyone.

This weekend I'm closing down Roblog to public access. I believe that if you go to the address, you will be asked for account information. You will have to sign up for a Google account, and sign into it whenever you want to read it. If you already have a Gmail address, you can use that login here.

I'm not absolutely sure this is the best thing for me to do, but I can see that this year is going to be a tough one. I don't need the added stress of my students bringing up my private life in class. Because they will eventually find this if I am annoying enough to them. And I am sure that for some of them I am already that annoying, after just one day.

Sorry for the inconvenience.

Rob

Help!

I need to get to bed, but I would appreciate it if you Roblog readers could do me a favor:

Tell me, would it make me a less effective teacher if my students found this blog and read any or all of it? It seems inevitable to me that they will find it. The chances of any jr. high student reading all of it are slim, but they could take pot-shots, hoping to find something interesting. And if I ever really annoy a student (how likely is that?), they might take the time to dig up whatever dirt they can.

So I am considering making Roblog an invitation-only blog.

Feel free to email me with your thoughts, or post comments here if you want others to read them.

Peace,

Rob