On Parent Conferences

Another post I wrote and never posted. This I emailed to myself November 16th, right before the Thanksgiving break:

I need to re-read How to Teach so Kids can Learn. Every time I go into a conference (today during my conferene period, today after school, and then set up another for Friday) I feel I’m under attack. I’m in defensive mode, ready to deflect any and all criticism toward me (which is, in my head, each and every word uttered by the parent or student).

Things have been better at this school, because the counselors are AMAZING. I always schedule conferences with a counselor, because I feel the need to have a third party there. This afternoon’s meeting, however, had no counselor… too many meetings, parent wanted to meet before the break, so we met. Just me and the mom. I hated it. Too tense, too defensive, too angry (me, not necessarily the mom).

It probably didn’t help that I was observed today. I think it went well, but I started second-guessing myself the second the bell rang to end the period. ARGH!!!

Is it Friday yet?

I can’t complain: we have ALL next week off. And with the economy the way it is, my job security is all but guaranteed. And I do like my job. I just need to remember I like it.

***

Here we are, again a week out from a week off (Spring Break). But I have finally been brave enough to be honest with myself and admit that I do not, indeed, “like” my job. I like my paycheck and I like my job security — the job itself? Pure hell. And, on a side note, tonight is “Open House.”

Sure, it was written on the calendar, so we “knew” about it. But other than that? Not a mention of it. Which is why I completely forgotten it was happening, until I heard a student in the hall this morning asking another kid if we got out an hour early today because of it.

Awesome. I’ll be here until 9:00 PM.

On Resolutions and Expectations

I found another lost post. I wrote it the week (or so) before school started, then must have completely forgotten about it because I wrote a new post that I actually posted on here. Since the beginning-of-the-year stuff doesn’t really matter (and I wrote about it anyway, even though with a different, not-quite-so-morbid tone), I cut that part out. This is the part that I want to share with you know, when all the illusions have come crashing down for the last time:

Now, the flip side of this fresh, new beginning every August is the high expectations for utter perfection. We all know what we need to be – we’ve seen the movies of the superhumanly inspirational teachers who save the world. The Freedom Writers, and the Mr. Hollands with their Opuses, and the Akellahs and their Bees. The Mother Teresas of teaching.

And we’re all expected to be just like that.

The problem is, in your school, there’s going to be someone who excels at one of the many individual facets of teaching, and you – and kids, and parents – will compare yourself to each in turn. And now, August, is when you remember all those things, and vow to live up to those (most of the time unreasonable) expectations.

Your classroom must be perfect – posters perfectly aligned, desks in a productive yet open and friendly configuration, files color-coded to allow for instant access to student’s records and that lesson you taught that one day like three years ago on that thing about plants where the kids made that diorama and you showed them all off at Open House, remember that lesson?

Lesson plans ready the Friday before (by noon, preferably), with differentiated instruction noted for each student with an IEP, higher order thinking skills present in every activity, multiple intelligences and learning styles included and celebrated throughout the lesson, and brilliant anticipatory sets and thought-provoking lesson conclusions.

Constantly and eternally available to students, whenever they may or may not need you.

***

That’s when I stopped writing. But this is one of the reasons I gave up: the bigger they are, the harder they fall. Expectations are set so high for teachers; set by the teacher herself, by the parents, by the administration… and when that teacher realizes that she’s far from the ideal (because the ideal is, truly, superhuman), she crashes. She can’t take it.

Or, rather, I can’t take it.

So I crashed. Again. And this time I’m staying down. TKO’d.

On Bi-Polar Thinking

I found a post I wrote a while back and never posted.  I figured I’d go ahead and throw it out here, just for grins. I probably wrote this in December or January.
Sometimes I wonder if I just barely made “sane.”  As in, you need a 70 or above to score medication, and I got a 68.

I’m hating my job right now.  And I’m doing a terrible job at it — the students have been working on their semester exam reviews, so I’ve just sat at my computer NOT working.  A lot of time is spent on Twitter, Google Reader and personal email.

But then again, part of that time is spent looking into new technology (stuff like Moodle) that I discover through Twitter, or activities like the RPM Challenge or February Album Writing Month.  Part of me is getting ready to attack next semester, and incorporate outside-the-box stuff like teaching Spanish by having my students record songs, but when I’m at school, face to face with the students, I can’t stand them.  I’m done with them.  I don’t want to bother trying, because they stopped bothering so long ago.

I have all these lofty plans, but my bubble is so thin looking at it pops it.

Because I’m insane, I’m also trying to start an after-school writing group.  Is this just one more task I’m adding to my plate, adding to my burn-out?  Or is this the little ray of light that will help me get through the week?

Teaching is not my calling

I’ve been reading John Ortberg’s If You Want To Walk On Water, You’ve Got To Get Out Of The Boat. Chapter 3 is about your calling, what God wants you to do with the gifts He gave you.

God wants me to realize teaching is not my calling. And He’s not shy about beating me over the head with it:

If Palmer had taken the job, think of what the results would have been in his life: fatigue, discouragement, a loss of joy, lack of energy, and a sense of inadequacy. This is one of the causes of what psychologists have come to call the “imposter phenomenon” — the sense that people (especially successful people) often have of spending too much time and effort trying to conceal their inadequacy from others. If he were like most of us, Palmer then would have been tempted to think that the problem was that he had joined a dysfunctional organization, or that the board had let him down, or that he had a troublesome faculty.

Or, if Palmer were a teacher instead of the president of this educational institution, he would have been “tempted to think” the students were rude, disrespectful and apathetic, the counselors were inept, the administration was antagonistic, and the faculty was stagnated, bitter, and burned out.

While some of those things may be true, the bigger fact is that I am in the wrong job.

I already quit teaching once, May 2006. Then I couldn’t get another job (for a variety of reasons), so I went back to teaching. I thought the problem was I was not an elementary-school teacher, that if I went back to high school I’d be okay. Turns out I was wrong.

Back in December I was pretty sure I was wrong, and each day, since I’ve allowed myself to tell myself that this is not where I need to be, I’ve felt more and more strongly that I need to GET OUT. But I can’t, until June. But that’s a topic for another blog post.

Now that I know what my calling is not, I need to figure out what it is. I still want to be involved in education, just not in the classroom (for my sake and the students’.)

On TAKS

Tomorrow is the Reading/English Language Arts Texas Assessment of Knowledge and Skills.

That’s about all I’m going to say about that, because, really, at this point words fail me.

However, someone else has better words than I. Please read the following posts by Not Quite Grown Up (she says it better than I ever could):

Testing frustration

Reading testing!

Who’s ready for an education revolution?

On The End of The Grading Period

I spent most of Wednesday, Thursday and Friday emailing back and forth with a student athlete’s mother.

I don’t want to get into the details of WHY I’M RIGHT, but trust me. I am. And she’s wrong.

But I caved. The student’s principal was involved into the ridiculous conversation, and the parent even went up to school to meet with the principal late Friday afternoon. So I caved. Not because the principal made me, but because I was sick of dealing with this stupid mother, and I didn’t want to inflict her on anyone else (she was, more than likely, going to go to the head principal with this, I’m sure).

This kid does not deserve to pass and play. She is smart enough to do the work, she just chooses not to — which is the most infuriating kind. There are kids who can’t do the work, or struggle with it; she’s capable when she wants to be. She just doesn’t want to bother, because she’d much rather flirt with the other worthless lumps in the class.

I graded her assignments fairly. I made an allowance for her taking the late assignment the mother wanted me to take. I made an allowance taking the late assignment turned in incorrectly (wrong file format; I did not take the wrong file format from other students because I have to click on seven different things to open the bleeping file. No, not a big deal, but when you have to take an extra minute to open the file 90 times, because you have 90 students in that course, then that’s an extra hour and a half, isn’t it?) I made sure to grade her test the same way I graded the other students’ tests.

I entered all the grades.

Her average?

68.53

Seriously.

I took the shreds of remains of my principles that were left and threw them down the garbage disposal as well, and added 10 points to each of two quiz grades to give her the 1.5 points she needed to move up to a 70.03.

This makes me want to throw up. Which might happen, on this student’s face, if the student dares say A WORD to me about grades tomorrow morning.

“A Few Honest Words”

I used this as part of my lesson Thursday and Friday last week, after the Inauguration.  I had the students compare and contrast the message in this song with that of Juanes’s “Odio por amor” (we also did CLOZE activities with the song, etc.)  I came across the link through one of the people I follow on Twitter, and I just felt the song had to be shared.

“A Few Honest Words” by Ben Sollee feat. DJ 2nd Nature

On Writing Research Papers and Feeling Lost

My dissertation is written.  Finally — it definitely took long enough.  I’ve sent it to a few people to read and give me feedback.

One problem is that the dissertation is in Spanish, so my pool of potential readers is rather limited.  Mainly, it’s my family, which generally are a terrible group from whom to get objective feedback.

Another problem is that my master’s is through a university in Spain… so I can’t really pop in to my professor’s office hours to get her opinion, now can I?

Another problem is I hate research papers.  And, not counting the ones I wrote in middle school, I’ve done a grand total of three research papers in my entire life.  No, I didn’t pay someone to write them for me in college; only one class required them.  And we just wrote three.

Okay, maybe I wrote one in high school.  Which would bring my grand total up to FOUR.

You might think to yourself, “Duh, Señora, you work at a high school.  Can’t you ask any of your Spanish-teaching colleagues to read the paper for you?  Can’t you go ask any one of the bazillion English teachers on your campus to help you with the research paper aspect of it?”

Ah, there’s the rub.

Asking my colleagues is laughably out of the question.  The idea of “helping” is not a concept with which they are familiar.  Not only are they not available AT ALL after school (one coaches, the other rushes off to his second job the milisecond our contract time is up), it has been made clear to me that any extra time spent at school or with colleagues is time spent in this manner under duress, and they would not be open to this idea in the least.

I wish I were exaggerating, but I am not.

Given how kind and inviting my colleagues are, the people in my very department, why would I possibly think people at the other end of the building would want to help me out?

Yes, I know it’s likely I could get an English teacher to help me.  But I don’t even want to ask, because I feel I would be asking too much.

This attitude, being made to feel that asking a favor is a huge intrusion, is one of the reasons I am done with teaching.

Sadly, to be done with it, I need to get my bloody master’s degree so I can get a decent job outside of education.

To be honest, I don’t think the university cares that much about these dissertations.  I read some of the samples they had of past works, and I know mine is better than most of that stuff.  I don’t know about the content, but definitely the language.  So maybe it doesn’t matter than I don’t have the perfect research paper format/framework/etc… but still.  I don’t want to sent it in, and have them send it back.

Then again, they might send it back because the statute of limitations on my coursework has run out, it’s been so bloody long since I took the bloody classes…

Like Whitesnake, “Here I Go Again”…

Regardless of how I feel about things now, in January, I have to finish the semester through June.  As much as I may dislike my job — and myself at my job — right now, I’m not going to quit mid-year.*

Since I have to stay, I might as well give it one more shot; try to do things more my way and perhaps be that little seed of change (instead of spending the rest of the semester reading from the textbook and passing out worksheets, as the rest of the Spanish department at my school does).  See if I get over this slump, if that’s what it is, and I can stay beyond June.**

It’s scary, though.  Daunting.  Can I cut it?  (Right now, all signs point to NO.)  Can I outwit, outplay, outlast the students for the next five months?

Should I plan everything out?  Plans are good, but they are also clear markers of failure.  If I plan, I’m stating what needs to be done, how, and by when.  This aids in success: a clear goal toward which to strive.  However, when the plan backfires or fizzles out, there is now documented proof of that failure.  Should I just wing it?

Teaching is full of fresh starts.  Had a crappy first period?  Second period is a whole new batch of students with whom to start over — IF you can let go of first period’s baggage.  Had a bad day?  Next day is a chance to start over (kids have short attention spans and poor memory retention, for the most part) — IF you can let yesterday’s baggage go.  Each Monday, each new grading period, each new semester, you can start over fresh — IF you can let everything before that moment roll off your back.

I’m notoriously not good at that.

*I have thought about applying for other jobs starting now, so if I happen to be offered my dream job, I could see myself quitting teaching to take it.  But that’s a very big IF.

**Yes, fine, I admit it: I like the time off.  I like summers, and a week at Thanksgiving, and two weeks at Christmas.  Also, if I’m going to write YA, what better place to do research than a high school?  (And who can forget, in this economy, the job security of teaching?)

On Bi-Polar Thinking

Sometimes I wonder if I just barely made “sane.”  As in, you need a 70 or above to score medication, and I got a 68.

I’m hating my job right now.  And I’m doing a terrible job at it — the students have been working on their semester exam reviews, so I’ve just sat at my computer NOT working.  A lot of time is spent on Twitter, Google Reader and personal email.

But then again, part of that time is spent looking into new technology (stuff like Moodle) that I discover through Twitter, or activities like the RPM Challenge or February Album Writing Month.  Part of me is getting ready to attack next semester, and incorporate outside-the-box stuff like teaching Spanish by having my students record songs, but when I’m at school, face to face with the students, I can’t stand them.  I’m done with them.  I don’t want to bother trying, because they stopped bothering so long ago.

I have all these lofty plans, but my bubble is so thin looking at it pops it.

Because I’m insane, I’m also trying to start an after-school writing group.  Is this just one more task I’m adding to my plate, adding to my burn-out?  Or is this the little ray of light that will help me get through the week?