Teaching with Tim

I feel completely overwhelmed every time I begin trying to summarize a week.   Last week I tried the “plusses and deltas” format, so this time I’ll try something different: quick updates by general category.  Any feedback on which format is the most reader-friendly would be welcome! 

TEACHING AT GOMPERS:

We’re building up to the defining day of the summer school program: Tuesday, August 1, when the students take the final examination.  Our class goal is an average of 80 percent.  To give you some idea of just how ambitious that is, when our students were given the same test we are going to give them on Tuesday at the beginning of the summer, the class average was 36.5 percent.  We used the test as a diagnostic and did not return scores or correct answers to the students.  The final test will not actually count towards our students’ grades because we had to turn those in on Friday–to our complete shock.  The Assistant Principal told us a few days before Friday that ”this is the way we always do it.”  So why should the students even bother coming to school for the next week if their grades are already in?  To learn, of course–but the school’s requiring us to turn in grades this early robs us of one of the most powerful motivating tools we have been using to get students to show up.  Administrative problems with the Summer School program have been rampant, but I’m still confident that the students will show up and make that 80 percent goal on Tuesday.  I’ll post the class average on my blog as soon as it’s in!  Teaching continues to prove itself the most challenging and rewarding experience of my life.  Thursday and Friday I did two playing-cards-themed lessons: the first was the “Royal Editors,” which asked the kids to look at one another’s paragraphs for certain types of errors depending on which card they were dealt (example: Kings corrected errors in capitilization).  On Friday I did a story/magic trick (the three bad Jacks) which I linked to main ideas and supporting details review.  I also had a review jeapardy game in which the students were divided and called upon based on which cards they were dealt.  In terms of student engagement, these lessons were a a couple of my most successful thus far, but I’m still not entirely sure how much of the content is actually getting across; Tuesday will be a good measuring stick.  I’m dying to show my students their first-day test scores and compare them with sky-high final exam test scores… I just hope that we have given them the tools they need to achieve that success. For many of these students, mastering ELD level A material right now is absolutely critical to having any chance of success in high school English courses (this is especially true for students like Jose Gonzalez-Lopez, who just arrived from Mexico at the age of fourteen). 

TEACH FOR AMERICA TRAINING:

The quality of our Curriculum, Literacy, Execution, Diversity, and general corps member training sessions has improved of late.  The flow of busy work has subsided to a trickle, and I had an amazing training session on Heterosexual privilege last Friday.  We looked at ways to make gay students feel more welcomed in the classroom. I choked up when one corps member told his story of coming home in tears from school every day because of gay-bashing classmates.  He urged everyone to follow the suggestions for creating a welcoming environment that we had been discussing–such as integrating discussions of homosexuality into the regular classroom curriculum and strictly adhering to a “zero tolerance” policy with regard to words like “fag.”  I found the discussion we had–which ranged from ways of teaching gay literature to strategies for addressing harassment–powerful and applicable.  More nuts-and-bolts training sessions like “asserting authority” and “unit planning” have also given me some useful tools, although I wish we were given more lesson planning time because my sleep-per-night average is still hovering around four to five hours. 

 LOGISTICS

My roommate, Elliot Scaife, and I signed a lease on a two bedroom apartment today.  It’s near McArthur park, between Downtown and Korea Town–an area not dissimilar from those in which my students will be living.  But the facilities are good, the parking is gated, and we got a $175 rent discount for being teachers!  I’m excited about the arrangement. I’m still working out the details with LAUSD regarding my health clearance (my history of seizures raised some red flags), and I have some planning to do regarding getting my stuff from Seattle to L.A., but all the pieces seem to be falling into place.  

WEATHER

Too hot!  110 degrees last weekend.

SOCIAL LIFE

Huh? 

CONCLUSION

Well that’s all I have time for at the moment… can’t wait to come back to Seattle and see friends and family August 14th!      

Teach for America has us all thinking in rubrics, so I’ll give this quick blog update in the form of a “plusses and deltas” teacher observation rubric–that is, things that are going well at Institute and Gompers and things I would like to change.  So that I can end on a postive note, I’ll start with the DELTAS:

–NO time and no SLEEP!  Last night, for instance, it was nine o’clock and I still had four five-step lesson plans to write, transparencies and handouts to prepare, and a raffle prize to buy.  I’ve been getting 4-5 hours a night, and it is taking a toll.

–A few friends of mine at Institute have dropped out, and others are thinking about it.  We have all had at least a few rough experiences at our respective teaching locations and the TFA curriculum is almost impossibly demanding. 

–As I alluded to before, TOO MANY RUBRICS!  I literally go through about 80 pages of printer paper a day.  For example, here is a typical night’s printer spending:

Three four-page lesson plans, four copies of each (one for myself, one for my faculty advisor, one for my CMA (corps member advisor), and one for our classroom observation binder) = 48 pieces of paper.

Two double-sided handouts for my class, one for each of my eighteen students = 36 pieces of paper.

Four copies of my math literacy hour agenda = four more pieces of paper.

Well, that already puts me over eighty… you get the picture.  I mean, I know we’re here to save the kids, but what about the trees?? (j/k)

–Lacking a car, having trouble locking down housing arrangements, missing my Seattle family and friends.

–I’ve given several decidedly mediocre lessons this week.

Now, the PLUSSES (which do outweigh the deltas):

–My students are AWESOME.  I could write you an essay on every one of them.  Their names (Yesenia Romero, Jesus Najera, Geovanni Vinalay, Rony Llanes, Gaby Lopez, etc) diagnostic scores, personalities, and needs dance around in my head all the time. 

–My teaching has been improving and my kids have been fully engaged, laughing, and having fun the whole time during my two most recent lessons.  My faculty advisor called my Thursday lesson on rhyme and repetition in poetry “the ideal ELD lesson” and says she is going to save my lesson plan and incorporate it into her school’s ELD curriculum because it worked so well and the kids were so engaged.  Yes!

–I’m still enjoying meeting all the other TFA people and making new friends, etc.

–The Cal State Long Beach cafeteria food is surprisingly good, especially the oatmeal chocolate chip cookies.

Institute thus far has been a rigorous but rewarding learning experience, and I’m still happy about the direction things are headed.  I’ve learned so much about how really bright kids can get truly reamed by the inequalities of our education system–but at the same time I’ve gained faith in the difference good teachers can make.  I can’t wait to finish jumping through all the hoops–LAUSD processing, credentialing, housing arrangements–and have my own classroom in the fall.  I just need to keep expanding that Spanish vocabulary…

I have so much more to say than I have energy to type!  The schedule here is a 5:30 a.m. to 1:30 a.m. gamut of activity, and I haven’t had a free moment to update my blog.  Once I’m teaching at my actual placement I plan to have more lengthy, reflective updates, but for the moment I’ll just give a bullet point run-down of a few general trends:

My first three days teaching ESL 2A (beginner’s level) at Gompers Middle school, one of the lowest-performing middle schools in the nation, were extremely difficult.  I have been solo teaching a double block period of High Point ELD 2A that comes at the end of each day.  In the first few days I had one student run out of class and leave campus, I felt incapable of bridging the language and cultural barriers between me and my students, and my inexperience as a teacher made it difficult for me to effectively fill the time and move students toward learning objectives while simultaneously keeping them interested.  The combination of my teaching responsibilities and massive loads of paperwork, coursework, and other TFA time committments had me riding pretty low in the water for a while. 

But then yesterday and today came along. 

I’m loving my job, and I know that now, after having tasted just a little real success in the classroom, I may well be addicted for life.  My lesson yesterday, in which I taught active reading strategies and note-taking using an audiobook of Octavia Butler’s “Parable of the Sower” combined with modeling on the overhead, a guided practice using the students’ High Point ESL text, and then (and this was the kicker) a three page Sandra Cisneros story called “Eleven”–was a huge success.  “Eleven” was the first REAL reading material that many of these seventh and eighth grade students have seen in their American educational careers.  Their High Point curriculum provides only two-hundred word fables like “The Mouse and the Lion” and other material that is not at all age-appropriate, so I felt the need to supplement.  When the students got their hands on that Cisneros story, they rallied around the challenge of decoding it using the strategies I had taught them.  Today was great, too–I taught paragraph structure using a juggling demonstration with a red apple, a green apple, and an orange.  I had a student volunteer grab one fruit out of the air.  Of course all of the fruit spilled all over the ground, but that was the point: if you’re missing one piece of your paragraph, it all falls apart (I had a coinciding color-coded poster and handout that had the red apple as the topic sentence, oranges as supporting details, and the green apple as the concluding sentence).  My observing faculty advisor was extremely enthusiastic and encouraging about the results of these lessons.  I really feel like I’m engaging the students and building personal relationships with them.  I’ve got their tests from this Friday waiting to be graded next to my desk, and the initial results already show 50-100 percent improvements in mastery of High Point ESL objectives over the diagnostic we gave them at the beginning of summer school a week and a half ago.  I’m not taking credit for that, of course–I’m part of a three person collaborative team working to move this particular self-contained class forward, and any success that we have seen has been the result of a team effort.  But it was so rewarding to see the concepts I was trying to teach the students actually click.  Also, my class is made up of highly intelligent and hard-working students who actually are eager to learn. Exciting stuff! 

I’m still missing family and friends in Seattle, though.  I can’t wait until the hectic time constraints of Institute/Summer School teaching are over and I have my own classroom and more time to stay in touch with you all!   

Map of my fall placement area courtesy of Uncle John: Southeast Middle School

Today I moved from L.M.U. along with all the other L.A. corps members to Cal State Long Beach, where we will join T.F.A. trainees from the Bay Area and Las Vegas to complete our five weeks of “institute” preparation.  Starting Thursday I will be teaching summer school literacy program called “High Point” at Gompers Middle School.  It is just one of the many summer school placements that corps members here at Cal State received today.  Tomorrow we get up at 5:30 A.M., take busses down to our respective summer school sites, and learn exactly what our positions will entail.   Stories of whatever small successes or head-over-heels failures might accompany my first days of teaching L.A. summer school students coming soon.