Gladly Would I Teach

Students learn to write through writing. It’s a simple concept. If we want students to write well, they need lots of practice. Mondays are writing days in my AP English course. In addition to outside writing assignments, students write a 40-minute timed writing in my class each week. I am amazed at how much my students improve during the semester.

“You’ll hate me on Mondays,” I warn them, but you’ll thank me one day . . . years from now.

Since I know that students will be absent occasionally or will be worried about tests in other classes or will just go blank when they see the assignment, at the beginning of the semester, I give each student 2 free passes. They are allowed to pass in a pass whenever they decide they do not want to write the paper.

Today, three weeks before spring break, many students decided they just didn’t have the energy to write, particularly when they discovered that the writing assignment from the 2003 AP test was about BIRDS.

While students were writing during first period, a flock (or gaggle or skein) of geese flew overhead and made us laugh.

Although I am often tempted to create a couple of free passes for myself, I haven’t yet. How relieved I would be to collect 70 papers and then return them ungraded and say, “Today I’m using one of my free passes.”

Tempting!

Today I might as well have used a free pass. I only had 12 papers from first period, 8 papers from second period, and 17 papers from 3rd period.

It’s been an easy night!

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

After my sermon to seniors yesterday about the evils of senioritis, another problem surfaced today. With all of the budget cuts in Georgia, state colleges and universities may have to make drastic reductions in the courses they offer and the people they employ. As in most states, we are experiencing troubling times, and I didn’t know just how worried some of my students are until today.

Last week The University of Georgia, a popular school for many of my students, announced that if the proposed state budget is approved, UGA will have to make major cuts, including retracting the admissions offers they have already extended to 500 freshmen!

What do you do if you are 18 years old and you have worked hard for years in order to win acceptance into UGA and then you discover there is a chance that your acceptance will be revoked?

What do you do if you are 18 years old and NOT accepted in the first round of admissions at UGA and you find out they may not admit additional students?

As I tried to ease the worries of many of my students, all I could do was emphasize that other than voicing our concerns or protesting budget cuts, we have little control over the legislature; we only have control over ourselves and what we do. “Study hard, do your best work, and prepare for college,” I cautioned, “and you should be just fine.”

I don’t think UGA will cut 500 students they have already admitted into the freshman class.

I hope I am right. My students are much too young to have to endure such troubles even if some of them are already coasting until spring break.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Wikipedia is one of the few sources that tackles the definition of senioritis:

The main symptoms of senioritis include chronic procrastination, lack of motivation, a drop in academic performance, and “coasting,” which is the act of going through classes with very little concentration or application of intent. This usually happens in the last year of high school, college or graduate school. One of the most notable symptoms of senioritis, is that all attempts by educators to curb senioritis tend to actually increase senioritic symptoms. High school seniors experiencing senioritis after admittance to college are fed up with high school; as they see it, they have achieved high school’s goal of getting into college and don’t understand why they are still expected to work.

Halfway through the semester, many of my seniors are suffering from senioritis. The quality of their work is declining; they are counting the days until spring break and until graduation; a couple have been in In School Suspension; three are suspended; and several start nodding off each class period.

Today I delivered my annual Senioritis Speech and warned students that if they coast until graduation, they may discover that colleges that have already accepted them into the freshman class may indeed rescind that offer. I challenged them, “Read the fine print in that college acceptance letter and see what it says about ‘pending acceptance or review of final transcript.’”

I have good kids and I want them to enjoy the end of their high school careers; I just want them to hang in there a few more weeks and save the coasting until May. By then, we should have a little more time to play and celebrate their achievements.

As I spoke with the kids today, I told them about a parent who exploded at me about a decade ago when her daughter failed my class and did not graduate. The mother admitted that the student had been failing the entire semester and that I had phoned her to warn her that her daughter was in danger of failing. In the end when the child failed, however, the mother blamed me. When I asked why she thought it was my fault that her daughter had failed, she replied, “You were too nice to her. Since you were so sweet, she didn’t think you would actually fail her!”

Interesting logic!

I now make it a point to tell seniors, “I may love you and I may laugh with you, but if you don’t meet the requirements of the class, I will indeed fail you and keep you back with me another year where I will love you and laugh with you for another year!”

I think there is a special place in Heaven for teachers who work with high school seniors during the spring.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Despite budget problems, my district next year will adopt new high school English textbooks. For the past five – six years, I have used The Norton Reader for AP English Language, and I love it. The book is filled with a variety of essays on different topics and with different writing styles. Since the textbook is a college textbook and only available in paperback, our poor books are heavily worn, and many of them are falling apart. I hoped that we would be able to adopt the new edition for next year. The new edition didn’t even make first cuts!  I don’t know why; we were never asked to contribute our opinions of the books we are now using.

I wanted the new Norton Reader, but since a brand new book designed specifically for AP English Language was available, I wasn’t worried because I knew the new book would be excellent, and I looked forward to taking a good look at it. Since this textbook is touted by AP English Language teachers for its thoroughness and its concentration on teaching AP English and also preparing students for college, I knew it would be a great book.

It isn’t The Norton Reader, but it is excellent, and I set it aside to read during the summer. I knew I would need to recreate many of my plans and assignments, but I was excited to implement the changes.

Yesterday I found out that the county textbook committee adopted a different textbook for AP English Language, a book that was not even available when I looked at the AP books. I flipped through it today and was so disappointed. Instead of a challenging college textbook, the book is a watered down college book that includes vocabulary sections and scores of reading comprehension questions that emphasize literal recall. Most of all, the book contains few of the rich essays that my classes enjoyed discussing in the past.

I’ll use the textbook because I have no choice, but at a time when everyone is encouraging teachers to increase the rigor of classes and to demand higher standards from our students and ourselves, I am perplexed that we would select a lower-level book. What a disappointment.

I’ll still spend part of my summer reading the new textbook. It certainly will not take nearly so much time since it is so simple, and I’ll use the new book in the fall.

Over in the corner of my room, however, I suspect I’ll find the room to store a class set of my beloved Norton Reader.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Based on standardized test scores, this year my school has focused on improving our students’ reading comprehension. Every now and then we have been shown scores and have been encouraged to increase the amount of reading that we require, particularly the reading of nonfiction texts. We’ve had staff development on how to increase reading comprehension and have been asked to document reading activities. Recently, we were told that scores from our upcoming spring tests will measure how successful we have been this year.

We weren’t asked why our students reading comprehension scores have declined. If we had been asked, however, I could have immediately explained part of the problem. Until this year, my school embraced “Quadrant D” learning, or learning that is performance based (at least that’s how it was described to us). We brought in “experts,” who are no longer in the classroom, and they taught us what we needed to do to engage our students in more meaningful learning.

Kids don’t need to sit around and read and discuss Shakespeare, we were told. They need to be up moving around and performing Shakespeare or working on group activities, or working on computers. Traditional reading and writing activities were strategies of the past that no longer worked with today’s students.

So most teachers, particularly the young teachers with little experience that would have helped them filter the  suggestions from the “experts,” jumped on the bandwagon and constructed lessons that allowed students to spend more time performing, more time drawing, more time acting. Reading and writing declined.

Now our students’ reading comprehension scores have declined, something that any veteran teacher could have predicted (and did predict) years ago when we drifted away and decreased how much reading and writing we required from students. Our kids were so engaged, just not engaged in reading and writing.

I am reading Diane Ravitch’s new book The Death and Life of The Great American School System: How Testing and Choice Are Undermining Education. In the introduction, Ravitch chastises educators for jumping on the latest fad without any proof that the fads work.

We will continue to chase rainbows unless we recognize that they are rainbows and there is no pot of gold at the end of them.

Our kids declined in reading because we chased a rainbow that seemed so happy and colorful and enticing. Well-meaning people chased rainbows, and our kids suffered. I would like to hope that we have learned from this and that we won’t jump on the bandwagon of the next greatest fad, but I know we will.

Why do we always think that the “experts” who have little contact with children know best how to teach them?

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Because I live so far from the school where I teach, I spend an inordinate amount of time driving alone, roughly two and a half hours to three hours daily. That quiet time is great for thinking, great for listening to music or books on tape, or even great for talking on the phone on rural roads occassionally. That quiet time, however, is terrible for my health. Awaking at 4:00 every morning, arriving home around 5:00 every afternoon, and going to bed around 9:00 leaves very little time to exercise.

By the time I get home in the afternoon, I have a list of things I need to get done, and exercise falls farther and farther down my list until it falls off my list half the time.

So, last week I decided to learn a new skill: walking and grading. Since my planning period is before school, I have at least 30 minutes to walk the building in total silence long before most teachers or students arrive. Of course, since I have lots of grading and reading to do, I don’t have the time to walk exclusively for 30 minutes. If, however, I keep practicing, I should be able to walk and grade or walk and read simultaneously.

I know I won’t be a fast walker as I walk the halls and grade, but I will be much faster than I currently am as I sit at my desk and grade. Walking slowly and deliberately may not be the best way to walk, but it’s much better than sitting.

So, here’s my new goal. I’m going to walk and grade 20-30 minutes each morning before 7:00.

For now, I think I better stay away from the stairs.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

I started my morning dealing with an intelligent and talented senior with great potential who has been goofing off most of the semester. I ended the day with two students who made really bad choices and will suffer serious consequences. Just when I thought the day was over, I discovered that a student earlier in the week had skipped my class and then lied to me.

Usually, I work hard, find a way to reach kids, and celebrate their successes.

Every now and then, I’m just angry and disappointed. This is one of those days.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Last week I wrote about a terrible theft problem that my school endured a couple of decades ago. If you didn’t read the original story, you might want to read it before reading this post:

Watch Your Pocketbook

As a reminder to those of you who read the original post, while we were having an after-school faculty meeting to warn teachers not to bring their purses into the building because students had stolen two teacher pocketbooks from filing cabinets on that day, someone stole the administrator’s pocketbook from her office!

First we laughed at the irony and then we took up a collection to give to Sue, the administrator, in case she had an emergency while driving home that night. We all got home a little after midnight. What a day!

The next morning, Sue called me to tell me that a really sweet girl had called her at home to tell her that she had found her wallet on the way to the bus the previous afternoon. She had wanted to return the wallet to Sue, but she was afraid she would miss her bus; so, she took it home. Sue thanked the girl and asked her to bring the wallet to school with her on Monday.

Sue had only been in the school for a few days and knew few of the students.

“Sue, who was the student?” I asked.

“Oh, she was a really sweet girl. Her name is Cindy” (fictitious name).

“Was it Cindy Jones?” I asked.

“Yes, that’s her name. Do you know her?”

“Not only do I know her,” I replied. “I’ve already suspended her twice for STEALING!”

Sue then tried to convince me that the child seemed really sweet and didn’t think she could possibly have stolen her pocketbook. Besides, it didn’t seem logical that a student who stole would call to report the theft. That didn’t make sense.

I assured Sue that some of our kids were both dishonest AND not real bright.

That afternoon I drove to Cindy’s house, met the mother, and retrieved the wallet. (We later found the pocketbook itself on the school yard.) I’ll never forget Cindy’s house because it had burglar bars on every window on the ground floor, the only house in the neighborhood with such security.

The following Monday was a whirlwind of student interviews and unpleasant encounters with the mother who swore she had “never had an ounce of trouble” from her daughter.

In the end, Cindy served a few months in alternative school.

She returned to our school months later and resumed her thievery.

I’m so glad I decided to return to teaching instead of continuing in administration!

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

Each Friday morning, my classes spend 10-15 minutes at the beginning of class watching “Around the Mountain,” a student-produced weekly video program about our school. Each segment includes news, interviews, humorous segments, and student spotlights. I am always astounded by how creative students are, and it’s great fun for me because about half the kids on the KMTV staff are in my AP English class. Under the direction of Jackie Collier, an inspirational teacher, our students produce work that is comparable to work usually found in small colleges.

If you are interested, take a look at Friday’s program. Last week, I wrote about our Valentine Dance for Special Needs students. The segment on the dance can be found on this video a little beyond the 9 minute mark.

KMTV Feb. 26, 2010

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott

I am often amazed at the opportunities that students have today.  Since I teach in a school that includes a Math and Science magnet program, we have many intelligent and diligent students who are thinking about becoming doctors in the future, a career interest for many of the students I have taught through the years.

Oh, but what opportunities kids have today!

Our senior magnet students are required to complete internships for one semester during their final year of high school. Some students who are considering careers in the medical field intern with doctors, and a few of the lucky ones get to spend weeks working with energetic and compassionate surgeons who are willing to mentor a seventeen or eighteen-year-old student.

That’s right – surgeons!

Students get their own scrubs and have the opportunity to enter the operating room and watch as surgeons complete operations, not once, but many, many times during the 18-week program. Every semester I have wide-eyed students who tell me all about what they see during operations, and our conversations almost always revolve around the amputations that they see.

Yes, amputations! (I would run away, but for kids who are interested in medicine, this is an experience of a lifetime.)

Imagine being eighteen years old and interested in becoming a doctor. How much would it mean to you to be able to walk into a doctor’s office or a surgeon’s office and shadow him during part of the day? Without question, students who have this amazing opportunity will remember it for the rest of their lives, and this experience will indeed help them decide if a life in medicine is what they want to pursue.

I wish all of our students had the opportunity to shadow caring professionals who are willing to devote part of their day to prepare future generations for careers.

  Copyright secured by Digiprove © 2010 Edie Parrott