Gladly Would I Teach

One of my students saw my earlier post about the marshmallow and sent me another marshmallow test with children. Thanks, Brian!

The Marshmallow Test from Igniter Media on Vimeo.

A sample math question from Georgia’s Power Standards:

A company that produces pens has n pens in stock at the beginning of a certain day. It produces these pens at a constant rate r for the entire day. If that day, pens have been produced at a greater constant rate, write an equation that can be used to determine the number of pens the company has in stock at the end of that day. (Georgia Department of Education. Information for GPS Math Implementation. May-June, 2007)

I have a better question for the Georgia Department of Education:

In 2009 Georgia suffered a terrible recession/depression and many teachers lost their jobs, endured salary reductions, and experienced furlough days. If in the fall of that same year of pay cuts, the Georgia Department of Education (GDOE) prints pens inscribed “Georgia Standards.org” and distributes them to thousands of teachers across the state, write an equation that can be used to track the lack of intelligence, social awareness, empathy, thoughtfulness, and fiscal responsibility that accompany such an act.

I know it is just a simple little pen, but did all Georgia teachers receive a pen? If so, with over 90,000 teachers in Georgia (NCES: Digest of Education Statistics), those little pens cost big bucks, big bucks that perhaps could have been used to

• save teacher jobs,

• prevent salary cuts,

• reduce furlough days.

We know about the pens because they were distributed to teachers. How much more money has the GDOE frittered away on inane objects without our knowledge? At a time when private citizens are curtailing their expenses, shouldn’t frugality reign in government? Does it make any sense to squander tax money on such trivial items?

Surely the GDOE doesn’t really think it needs to provide a special pen to teachers, many of whom spend their final classroom moments each day picking up discarded pens and pencils from classroom floors and adding them to the stash of writing utensils inside their desk drawers. If the GDOE needed pens, Georgia teachers could have given them some from our stashes.

Please tell me that a company donated the pens to Georgia teachers.

Why didn’t the GDOE at least add another line to the inscription:

Enjoy your furlough days!

Gallery of Writing

Here's a new site sponsored by NCTE that gives schools and organizations the chance to set up writing galleries to showcase writing from students and teachers. Once you set up a gallery, it takes 5 days for the request to be granted. It looks like a nice opportunity for publishing student work online. Once a work is published in your gallery, each piece has a unique URL where students can then share the work with other people.

On a recent online discussion forum for my AP English classes, students described teacher traits that frustrated them. Listed in order of most frustrating to frustrating, here are the top characteristics or teacher traits that trouble my high school seniors.

• Negative views of teaching or their jobs
  Students repeatedly expressed the idea that teachers who hate their jobs should find other jobs. (Please see Sunday’s post for more about this student frustration: Teachers Who Hate Teaching

• Busy Work and Lack of Variety in Class Activities
  Students are disturbed by assignments that do not build their skills or knowledge. I wonder if the work they abhor is truly “busy work” or if teachers just need to do a better job of explaining the purpose of assignments to students.

• Arrogance
  Students are exasperated by teachers who belittle, disparage or demean them. Instead of supporting them, students feel that some teachers treat them with condescension.

• Lack of knowledge
  Teachers who teach straight from textbooks frustrate students because they often are unable to answer student questions in greater detail than what is provided in the textbook, nor do they apply lessons to the real world or to examples outside the textbook.

• No Interest in students
  According to students, some teachers make little effort to get to know their students, know little about what students do outside of class, and, unbelievably, some teachers make little effort to even learn the names of their students.

• Reluctance to answer student questions
  In some classes students are rebuked for asking questions. According to students, some teachers belittle students and state they should already know the answer to a question or the teacher cannot answer questions with clarity. This appears to be a by-product of two other frustrations: teacher arrogance and/or teachers’ lack of knowledge.
• Apathy
  Students reported that some teachers do not care about their students, their classes, or the activities within a class. Students very quickly determined that if the teacher didn’t care about the class, they shouldn’t care either.

Also mentioned: frustration over lack of good work ethic in some teachers (slow in grading or teachers make few marks on papers so students don’t know what to do to improve) and frustration with teachers who show favoritism

Even though students had no trouble explaining teacher traits that frustrated them, almost all students prefaced their statements by expressing their respect for teachers and underscoring that most of their teachers have been well-prepared, caring, knowledgeable, and often inspirational.

Please see yesterday’s post for Teacher Traits Students Appreciate

via prestwickhouse.blogspot.com

Make sure you read the comment someone left at the end of this post. Funny!

On a recent online discussion forum for my AP English classes, I asked students to describe teacher traits or characteristics that they believe are most important for teachers. Here are the top 6 characteristics they provided, listed in order of importance.

• Compassion / Interest in Students
  Most of us would probably think that older (12th grade) students would not be as concerned with whether or not their teachers really understand them or are interested in them. Students participating in this activity, however, cited that the teacher's interest in students both inside and outside of the classroom was the most important trait that teachers could display. According to these students, good teachers know students well, care about them personally, want all students to learn the material, and encourage students to excel.

• Passion for subject
  Good teachers thoroughly enjoy their subject and display enthusiasm that captures the attention of students. If the teacher is excited, students are much more likely to find the subject interesting.

• Thorough Knowledge of subject
  Knowledgeable teachers apply the subject to many different areas and explain why it's important for students to learn the subject.  They go beyond the lesson in the textbook in order to maintain student interest. Because they love and understand the subject, they welcome student questions and are better able to simplify concepts that students find difficult.

• Inspiration and Encouragement
  Good teachers are personable, happy, cheerful, and optimistic. Students enjoy being in their classrooms and want to learn. Several students mentioned that good teachers push them to learn more than the student ever thought he could accomplish simply because good teachers believe in students and serve as cheerleaders.

• Excellent Work Ethic
  Good students are open to learning new techniques, are available when students need extra help, grade work thoroughly, return graded work promptly, and ensure that students learn the material.

• Humor
  Good teachers like to laugh and maintain cheerful classrooms where students feel comfortable and have fun.

Interestingly, students rarely mentioned anything pertaining to how much work teachers assigned in class or for homework, nor did they mention grades.

Tomorrow I'll list the teacher traits that students find frustrating.

New York teen faces charges after threats on Facebook | Voices – syracuse.com

"The honors student told police 'she did it because she didn't want to go to school and have the summer end,' said her lawyer, Patrick O'Connell."

Never before have students been so immersed in nonfiction works. From online newspapers and magazines, to Wikipedia, to even social networking sites, students have greater exposure to nonfiction than fiction. While most schools do a good job of teaching students how to read and analyze fiction, poetry, and drama, most students need much more direction in reading and analyzing nonfiction.

Most English teachers, however, think nonfiction reading is a skill that Social Studies and Science teachers should teach, and most teachers outside of English Departments fail to realize that reading nonfiction is quite different from the reading that most students complete in English courses. Reading and analyzing nonfiction is such an important skill that it should be taught and reinforced in all courses.

One of the best methods for including more analysis of nonfiction is to give students an article  and have them write a one-paragraph annotation for the article. While the difficulty level and length of the article will differ based on the grade level and course, writing an annotation is an assignment that almost all middle school and high school students can and should complete.

Steps for Writing an Annotation

• Give students a copy of an article or essay to read. For their first attempt at an annotation, make sure you provide an article that is short, easy to understand, and of sufficiently high interest. The article may appear in your textbook or it may be a duplicated article from a newspaper or magazine. For English classes, the article most often will be a persuasive essay or an essay that presents an argument. For other areas, the article may be primarily informative.

• Ask students to read the article carefully and to highlight or underline (if not in a textbook) the major points the author makes.

• Teach students to write the proper citation for the article based on the format you require for your class (MLA, APA, University of Chicago, etc.). This should be written at the top of the page. If you do not normally require students to write formal citations in your class or if you have younger students, you can require students to write only the title, copyright, and the author of the article.

• Next, have students write a one-paragraph summary of the main points the author makes in the article. Limit students to approximately one-half of a page, depending on penmanship.This is a difficult step for many students, even our best students, because they want to list each piece of information they find instead of summarizing the main points succinctly.

• At the end of the summary, tell students to write 2-3 sentences that state the usefulness of the article and note possible bias that the student might have located. For example, students might write that the article gives a good explanation of a new procedure, or it presents the author's beliefs about a complicated issue, or the article is not sufficiently informative because the author tells only one side of an issue, or the article is not a good source because it includes out-of-date information. The final sentences where students evaluate an article will be the most difficult sentences for most students to write initially.

• After writing annotations, allow several students to share their work by reading their paragraphs to the class. Many students who struggle with this assignment initially may learn best by seeing or hearing sample annotations.

• Finally, students will benefit from discussing the article in class.

Reading and annotating articles improves reading and writing skills while also improving students' ability to work with complex subject matter. With repeated practice in reading and writing annotations, students will become much faster and more proficient in reading nonfiction texts of all types.

If you want an article to try an annotation with your students, try one of these:

Growing Up Scripted

If Anne Frank Only Knew

Pat Conroy's Letter Against Censorship

To All the Girls I've Rejected 

via www.edweek.org

This study supports what my own students indicated in a survey I wrote about yesterday. Many teachers are unhappy with their jobs.

I always enjoy giving students treats or small gifts at opportune times during the semester. Sometimes I just distribute candy when we need a little excitement or fun Sometimes I bring in a cake and congratulate my seniors at the beginning of the school year. As the year progresses, I love to give individual students books that I have inscribed for a specific occasion because I think it's fun to surprise kids with small gifts to commemorate their accomplishments.

I suspect most teachers would like to reward students like this, but who has the money?

I absolutely love TEACHERS pay TEACHERS because I am able to earn money that I can turn around and use for classroom items, curriculum materials, and gifts and treats for my students. If you are not using TpT, you are really missing a great opportunity.

Paul Edelman, a former New York City teacher, established TpT in 2006 as an open marketplace for teachers to sell their original assignments to other teachers. I first heard of TpT in July of 2006 and started uploading assignments that I had created through the years. In the beginning, I wasn't so interested in making money. Instead, since I was nearing retirement, I loved the idea that I could pass along my assignments to other teachers for a nominal fee, and I didn't have to do anything extra to send the files to individual teachers. In the first few months, I earned little money, but my earnings have grown steadily since then. Today, I have roughly 60 assignments on TpT that sell from $2 to $9, and I earn between $200-$400 each month, a nice stash of money that I can use to buy items for my students and for my classroom.

In addition to providing a great place for teachers to sell materials, TpT is also a wonderful and inexpensive place for teachers to purchase materials from other teachers. It can be a tremendous time saver, particularly for teachers who may be teaching a unit for the first time. For example, if you need a test, search for one on TpT and you may be surprised that you can find exactly what you want for under $5 and then download it immediately. What I would have given for such a service 30 years ago when my only option to obtain materials was to pay $25 or more for published materials when I may have only used one or two assignments from the book.

If you are looking for a place where you can buy and sell teaching materials, take a look at TEACHERS pay TEACHERS. Whether you use the site to help you acquire new teaching materials, sell items to make money for your students, or sell materials to make a little extra cash for yourself, I don't think you will be disappointed.

In the past few months, I have painted my classroom, purchased new rugs and bean bag chairs for students, and bought and distributed books for individual students, all paid for through my earnings from TpT.

Don't miss this opportunity!