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Earlier in my career I used to hear boys complain about reading and writing. They considered most of the books we read to be GIRL books and most of our essays to be essays for GIRLS. Math and science and even history were true BOY subjects.

Many parents also considered English to be a subject that boys had to endure: “He’s never liked English, but we tell him just to push through it, and it will be over before he knows it.”

Along with most English teachers, in the past I included works that I thought would interest males. A Separate Peace by John Knowles, Golding’s Lord of the Flies, Shelley’s Frankenstein, Huxley’s Brave New World, and lots of Shakespeare, particularly Macbeth and Hamlet, became staples of English classrooms because the works were timeless and sufficiently interesting to males. In other words, they were not GIRL books or plays.

In the past two to three years, however, I have seen and heard a change in how males regard English classes. I no longer hear “girls’ subject,” nor do I see boys trying to evade English classes. Instead, most of the males that I teach like English and have a favorable view of English teachers.

What has prompted this change and is this a trend across the country or something only happening at my local school? I have a few theories, but no real answer.

Since I teach all seniors, possibly older students are more interested in reading and writing than younger boys.

Since I teach AP English Language and Composition, a course that stresses nonfiction reading and writing, maybe the boys are more interested in nonfiction literature instead of novels, plays, and poetry. Authorities on teaching boys emphasize the need to include more nonfiction literature in schools.

Is the Internet with its emphasis on reading and writing indirectly increasing boys’ interest in English?

Although I have no proof of the rationale behind the change I am experiencing in the attitudes of boys, I have a sneaking suspicion that the real reason may revolve around the English Department in my high school. For years I taught in schools where the English department was composed almost exclusively of female teachers. Usually, we would have one or two male English teachers, and they were men who worked well with low achieving students or reluctant readers.

Today, eight of the fifteen English teachers in the department where I teach are male. What a change!  Throughout their high school careers, male and female students will have both male and female English teachers, and I suspect that is one of the main reasons why we rarely hear the complaint that English is a girls’ subject. When boys have a coach who loves Shakespeare, why would they regard literature as only for girls? When boys have an English teacher who can quote 18th-century British poetry with as much enthusiasm as he spouts NCAA college football statistics, why would they consider poetry as a feminine subject?  When boys have a male teacher who plays in a band and also loves to write, why would they believe writing is a subject just for girls?

Is English still considered a girls’ subject in your school? Have you seen a change in how boys regard reading and writing?

Over my long career, I have been astounded by how much technology has advanced and enhanced my ability to teach.

For example, when I first started teaching in 1977, it took an hour to read through a huge catalogue and select a movie to show to my class, another hour to complete the proper form and mail it, and weeks before the movie arrived in the mail. When it arrived, I usually had two days to show the movie before I had to pack it back up and return it. I don’t even want to describe the frustration of learning how to thread the movie through the projector and create the proper loop so the movie would not pop throughout the viewing like a “silent” movie in the 1920s.

Years later, VCRs and video cassettes replaced movie projectors.

Years later, DVD players and disks replaced VCRS.

Now, we have moved on to digital downloads. Who knows what will be next?

No aid, device, or piece of technology, however, has made my job easier than a course website that contains information about my class, due dates, information for parents, links to websites that provide additional help, and most of the assignments that students must complete in my class.

I created my first course website about 8 years ago and suffered through learning FrontPage. Today, I use a blogging platform (WordPress) that allows me to add information through pages. This process allows me to post updates and add new information in only minutes.

As the years go on, I keep adding and refining what I have on my website. When students needed more examples, I started posting papers from previous students (with their permission). When I create new assignments, I add a new page and show the assignment. When I stop using an assignment, instead of removing it from the website, I simply type the note “We will not complete this assignment this month.”

Many teachers who look at my website express the idea that they do not have the time or the skills to create a comparable site. What they may not understand, however, is that I built my site a little at a time over the years.

Today, as I prepare for a new semester, all I will have to do is update my syllabus and due dates and make the changes on my website.  I will then direct students to the website, teach them how to use it, and explain that they will need to print assignments when we get to them. I save myself hours simply by reducing the number of assignments I have to duplicate for students,

If you don’t have a website for your class, it’s an idea you might want to consider. Course websites increase communication between teachers and students, teachers and parents, and teachers and other teachers. Each week I receive one or two emails from new teachers who ask permission to use my assignments or who just express thanks. We are all accustomed to sharing ideas with the teacher down the hall. Course websites allow us to share ideas with teachers across the globe.

Here’s the link to my AP English Language & Composition website:

Parrott\’s AP English Language and Composition

A couple of days ago, I wrote about how shocked I was to find that one of my elementary schools had been closed and abandoned.

Hours after I walked around the deserted grounds of Cedar Grove Elementary, I drove into Atlanta to find West Manor Elementary, the first school I ever attended. Although I attended the school almost 50 years ago, it is still shiny, still pretty, still just as welcoming as it was so many years ago when I walked into Mrs. Newby’s kindergarten class and cried when my mother told me I had to be a big girl and stay there by myself.

I walked around behind the building and discovered that several wings had been added to the building, and, unlike so many new projects, they blended in with the original building and looked as though they had always been there. If one of the wings had not been placed right on top of a large sandbox where I remember playing, I may not have even noticed the “new” additions. (For all I know, the wings could have been added 30 years ago! In fact, since I spent second grade in Mrs. Likens’ classroom in the adjacent church, I suspect the additions must have been added many years ago.)

When I walked around to the back of the school, the area I most wanted to see was the huge playground at the bottom of a hill. To my relief, it was still there in all its splendor. The paved area for basketball remained as well as a large swingset and play area. The ramp leading down to the playground was just as I remember except in my memory, it had been much steeper. Six and seven year olds view the world quite differently from adults. Interestingly, a fence now confines children to the walkway and prevents them from falling down the hill, something that probably should have been installed when I was in school there.

In response to my post about the abandoned school I visited, John Spencer stated,

I think there is a powerful pull to geography and memory. Schools are not simply “places” but entities in and of themselves.

John is absolutely right.

As I walked around West Manor, I didn’t just see an old school; I saw my childhood.

I saw the area where we used to have May Dances every year.

I stood on the spot where I joined my first private club, complete with a secret handshake, and then learned how wrong it was to exclude people from clubs.

I stood in the parking lot and remembered those terrible days in the early 1960s when we were told to leave school early and walk home so we would know how to get home on our own in the event of a nuclear attack. (Oh, we were all, even adults, so naive in those days!)

I remember crying when the head fell off of my elephant costume during my performance in a play, and I remember Mrs. Guy, the principal, who put her arm around me, led me into her office, and convinced me that I had been a spectacular elephant in the play.

I remember getting into trouble for sneaking down the hall to another teacher’s classroom because she had a visitor who had fought in World War II, and HE WAS STILL ALIVE!  (My mother had to explain to me later that my own grandfather had also fought in WWII and was still very much alive.)

I remember standing in line with my classmates and picking up sugar cubes that inoculated us against polio.

I remember loving Wednesday mornings, long before the cumbersome dictates of No Child Left Behind, because Mrs. Farner’s husband came to school and taught ballroom dancing to her third graders and then gave us candy.

I remember sitting in the classroom floor listening to my teacher read a book to us after she told us, “President Kennedy has been shot, but I know he would want us to keep working hard and learning.”

I remember gathering with other classes around the few black and white televisions available and counting down 10-9-8-7-6-5-4-3-2-1 as rockets launched at Cape Canaveral, long before Neil Armstrong walked on the moon.

I remember singing “She Loves You, Yeah, Yeah, Yeah” just like the Beatles with my friends while standing in the cafeteria line and waiting as the “lunchroom lady” pulled the handle on the big machine that said “Atlanta Dairies” and filled our glasses with cold, cold milk, long before plastic containers and milk cartons entered school cafeterias. And, I remember sitting at the cafeteria table and not being allowed to leave until all of our glasses were empty.

Most of all, I remember being happy.

When I attended West Manor Elementary School from 1961 to 1966, all of the students were white. When Atlanta’s schools were integrated in the late 1960s, my family, along with hundreds of other families who were afraid of declining property values, afraid of other races who did not look like them, afraid of change, flocked to the suburbs. Today, this beautiful school in a gorgeous tree-lined neighborhood is composed almost exclusively of African-American children. I would like to believe we have learned something about getting along with each other since the tumultuous 1960s, but I’m not too sure.

As I returned to my car after walking around the school grounds, a female security guard approached me. I explained that I had gone to school at West Manor many years before and that I was just taking photos for myself. I don’t think she quite understood how exhilarating it was for me to find “MY” school preserved so well. We talked for a few minutes as I told her that I attended the school almost five decades before. She very sweetly and innocently responded, “I guess you didn’t expect it to be standing after so many years!”  I had to laugh, but it brought me back to reality.

After enduring the disappointment of seeing an abandoned Cedar Grove Elementary School (See Sunday’s post.), it was refreshing to drive up and see West Manor just as I had first seen it the day my mother drove me to school on the opening day of school. My dad had given me a dollar bill because I promised that if he gave me the dollar bill that I would go to school every day and graduate from elementary school, high school, and college.

I upheld my end of the bargain and even picked up a PhD along the way.

I think my father got his money’s worth.

During the final week of the semester, I sat in my classroom after class and talked to two of my students. We laughed about things that had happened during our class and plans we had for the holidays. Amid our discussion, Cortney stated, “I want to ask you a personal question.”

Like any good teacher, I always brace myself when students say that because I never know what they will ask, and, too often, their personal questions pertain to what I think about another student, information I would never disclose to students.

“Sure, ask me whatever you want to know,”  I responded.

“You don’t have to answer if you don’t want to,” Cortney added. “It’s just something that has bothered us all semester, and no one would ever ask you.”

Intrigued, I encouraged Cortney to ask her question.

“We just want to know why you always pour your tea into a paper cup and then put that cup inside a real cup.”

I’ve taught these students for 18 weeks, and their most pressing concern is how I drink my tea?!!

I explained that I put the cup inside another cup so I don’t have to wash the cup or worry about it getting too hot for me to hold or tipping over on my desk.   I started the practice when I used Styrofoam cups in the past that often leaked after a few hours of use.

“Oh,” Cortney responded. “I thought about the cleaning part, but then we wondered if you were just OCD or something.”

I suppose we can never see ourselves as our students see us. I consider myself easy going and approachable, someone students would have no trouble asking such a “personal” question, but I guess I’m wrong.

“We just want to know why you always pour your tea into a paper cup and then put that cup inside a real cup.”

Now, I wonder what I can do with my tea next semester to drive another class crazy!

I took a drive down memory lane today as I visited the elementary and high schools of my youth.  Memory trips can be enlightening and exciting as well as disappointing and devastating. Just as I had suspected, my emotions jumped from sadness to joy several times in only three hours.

As a 5th grader through 7th grader, my life revolved around Cedar Grove Elementary School in Fairburn, GA, a tiny school that included only one class for each grade level. Forget honors classes or special education classes; in the early 1960s, we were all just thrown in together.  Because the school was so small, we had Jimmie J. Lankford as our principal, but no assistant principal and no secretary.

When my family first moved to Fairburn and we enrolled in Cedar Grove, I was ahead of the class in math.  So, every day, my friend Mary and I would gather our books during math time and report to the school office where we collected the lunch money that teachers had already gathered from students. We then counted it, completed the lunch report for the lunchroom manager, and then put all the money in a bank bag for the principal to take to the bank. Then we sat at the big office desk and completed our math work together and answered the telephone, “Cedar Grove Elementary. May I help you?’  We rarely had phone calls.

Not bad for 5th graders!

Cedar Grove was an Andy Griffith type of school, a school where parents knew the teachers would take care of children, a place where everyone knew everyone else, a place where few students misbehaved because we knew our misbehavior would be dealt with swiftly at school with follow-up punishment at home. Cedar Grove had an outstanding principal who loved children and who took special interest in older, struggling students in a day when coddling students was frowned upon and when retaining students (or flunking them as we called it) was the normal practice. Cedar Grove had so much heart that even a mentally retarded man in the community was allowed to play kick ball with kids during recess. (Just writing this post resurrects so many good memories.)

Cedar Grove was a strong school where students learned their “lessons” while also acquiring self-confidence, character, and determination, the kind of school most of us want for all children today.

For over four decades, my Cedar Grove memories included beautiful images of a special school, but those memories vanished immediately as I pulled into the parking lot of my former school and discovered that the building had been abandoned years before.

Abandoned.

While visiting London a few years ago, I walked around in a park built over a London church that had been destroyed during World War II.  Since the land had been consecrated for a church, church authorities converted the land of the bombed church into a park to prevent any further desecration of the land.

That same protection of consecrated land seems appropriate for schools as well.  It’s unnatural and even unholy to walk off and abandon a school that once housed the laughter, hopes, and dreams of so many young children. I can’t blame the school system for leaving the school and moving away because they built a newer, beautiful school a few miles away, and I have no doubt that the new school fulfills the needs of students much better than this tiny, old school ever could have hoped to serve students. Fittingly, the new school is named Renaissance Elementary School.

I just wish the school system had brought in the heavy machinery and leveled Cedar Grove to create a park instead of abandoning it.

As I walked around the back of the building and looked down the hill to the huge open fields where I had spent recess every day for three years, all I saw was underbrush and pine trees.

I hope principal Jimmie J. Lankford, an educator who took such pride in his school and who taught students how to plant flowers around the school each spring, never saw Cedar Grove in this shape.

I know he never would have abandoned the school.

Despite its dilapidated condition, Cedar Grove will always remain holy ground to me.

Throughout my career, I have seen teachers celebrate during their 30th year of teaching, their final year of work. They laughed during faculty meetings when they learned of new programs, new procedures, and new paperwork for the following year because they knew they would not have to do it.

They celebrated a year of lasts: last first day of school, last Open House, last report card, last research paper,  last. . . last . . .last.

With ten years of teaching experience, I laughed and celebrated with these teachers. With twenty years of experience, I celebrated their retirement, but I was also secretly envious.

With 32 years of teaching experience today, I am just stumped and often avoid the issue of retirement.

I started this school year with big plans to retire from high school teaching and find a job teaching college. So far, I have had little luck finding a new job, and I’m starting to wonder.

Do I retire anyway?

Do I retire and then teach half day?

How much longer can I continue to make such a long daily commute (2 1/2 hours)?

If I retire, will I get bored?

If I love my students and my job and am effective, should I retire?

Ten years ago retirement seemed like such an achievement, a reward for decades of service.

Today, the decision just seems too difficult to make. I welcome all advice.

Glory to God in the highest, and on earth peace, good will toward men.

Yesterday I started thinking of the things I need to accomplish before returning to school after Christmas. Thankfully, I have very little that I must get done, and it struck me how things have changed through the years.

Many years ago when I taught on a quarter system, it was common practice for teachers to require students to turn in research papers before Christmas so we would have the break to get them graded.

What were we thinking?

In those days we used to budget our vacation time by tabulating how many papers we had to grade daily in order to finish them on time. It was a thankless job because when we returned the papers the first day back from Christmas vacation, we then had to suffer student complaints about grades and return angry parent phone calls.

This morning I remembered a particularly interesting time of collecting research papers many years ago. My eighth graders had to give me their research papers on the final day before Christmas vacation. As I remember, the papers had to be 7-8 typed pages. In those days, I used to have a small, colorful Snoopy trash can I used to collect papers. As I walked around the classroom all day, students placed their papers into the can.

As happens in many schools, the day before the break included lots of fun, laughter, and food, and we were all exhausted at the end of the day. I supervised students and waved good-bye as the buses pulled out of the parking lot.

When I returned to my classroom later that afternoon, I discovered that my colorful Snoopy garbage can was EMPTY.

I ran through the halls and discovered that the custodians had moved through the halls quickly in order to empty the trash because they wanted to begin their vacations as quickly as the rest of us. The garbage from my hall had already been dumped in the dumpster at the back of the building.

Another teacher and I opened the dumpster, saw all of the garbage interspersed with half-eaten holiday treats and paper streaked with holiday punch.

“Do you really want to pull out all of this garbage and rescue those research papers?” she asked.

“What would you do?” I replied.

“I would close the dumpster and forget the papers.”

And, I did.

I had a lovely holiday that year, and when January rolled around and I told the students what happened, they laughed, and I never had one complaint from a student or parent. Since this was back in the dark ages when students actually typed their papers on typewriters, students did not have back-up copies that they could submit, and it would have been cruel to make students go back and rewrite the papers.

It was a quiet, stress-free, happy holiday!

Of course, I never again used a trash can to collect student papers!

My undergraduate education courses never prepared me for all of the online tools I would need to include while teaching. Since the Internet did not exist (at least for the common folk) when I graduated from college, however, I certainly can’t complain.

I love the Internet today because it  opens opportunities for most of us that we never dreamed possible only a few short years ago.

When I first created a course website seven or eight years ago, it took weeks, but once I had the site online, it saved me so much time. Instead of printing out everything for students, I could direct them to information on the website. I loved it, and students appeared to like having ready access to information at home.

Much to my amazement, parents were thrilled with the website, and, virtually overnight, I stopped having to field phone calls and emails from parents who wanted to know more about my class, assignments, and due dates. Instead, parents  emailed me to thank me for making the information available for them to peruse.

I love my course website . . . on most days.

Two years ago I moved my website from a stand-alone site I created with FrontPage to Typepad, a blogging service that my school paid for. Although the site was a bit cumbersome, it was free, and I could tolerate a great deal from a free site.

In the past couple of months, however, I have become so frustrated with the service that I decided to move the site to WordPress over the holidays.

I started moving it yesterday, but, as luck would have it, Typepad’s Export doesn’t Import correctly into WordPress.

I’ll be resolving errors for days.

One day two or three months from now I’ll have a student who says, “I couldn’t find that handout on the website.”

I’ll reply, “Then look again; it’s right where I told you it was.”

After we go back and forth with this conversation several times, I’ll finally realize that the file is not where I thought it would be.

And, I’ll have no idea where it is.

It will have been eaten by the Import/Export/Internet gremlins!

Some days, not many, but some days I think it would be easier to return to the pencil, pen, paper, book, and ditto days of the 1970s.

Sunday night I started writing my final round of teacher recommendations for college acceptance. For as long as I can remember, I have had to spend part of my Christmas vacation writing college recommendations, primarily for The University of Georgia.

UGA and Georgia Tech are the most popular college choices for my students. Students who apply to UGA for early admission do not find out if they have been accepted until the weekend before the final week of school before Christmas Break.

Students who are not accepted must then write several essays and obtain a teacher recommendation by Jan. 15th. So, on the final week of the semester when teachers are swamped with final grades and worried about submitting grades on time, we must also try to sound happy and offer encouragement as  crestfallen students approach us during our final week and ask us to write recommendations for them.

Sunday night I opened my large folder to review the files of 14 students whose recommendations I must write. They are all good students, but several of them forgot to attach a stamped, self-addressed envelope. Two students neglected to attach forms that list their extra-curricular activities, and one student gave me a counselor’s form to complete instead of a teacher recommendation form. I sent emails and asked for the needed items.

Twenty-four hours later, only one student had responded.

I worked on recommendations all day yesterday, and I’ll spend another day writing letters today.  Thankfully, this year UGA provided a way to submit recommendations online.

At least I don’t have to spend part of my vacation standing in line to buy stamps at the post office. Besides, if I didn’t have good students, I wouldn’t have to write any recommendations.