How Reading is Helping Me Hold It Together.

The library is keeping me sane.

No, really, it's true. As I sit here, typing my latest blog post in I don't even want to think how long, I would like to thank the library for this one small moment of sane thought. There are no screaming sixth graders here. No one is off-task (and if they are Facebooking or something, they'll go back to particle physics orTom Hardy's Tess of the d'Urbervilles or the meaning of life in a moment) and everyone is blissfully silent. The only sound is the cheerful  hum of monitors and the well-timed tapping of computer keyboards. No touch-typing in this establishment, no sir!

But more than the calm of the storm, it is the contents of the library that are keeping me tethered in this world rather than letting my mind flee to the next. In the first several weeks of teaching, I had nothing to call my own except facebook, and while mindless banter and endless acres in Farmville can be relaxing to a point, they are by no means helpful towards maintaining an even keel.

It was only after going to the library for a 'big kid book' (Clan of the Cave Bear, an excellent big kid book if I do say so myself) and reading a little bit before going to bed every night, as well as a little bit in the morning that I returned to my usual, cheerful self. I was a much happier person. It was not all school, all the time, and I didn't feel like there was a big, empty hole in my chest. I imagine this is becuase my students are expected to complete reading one book every two weeks. How was I supposed to expect that of them when even I wasn't reading every night?

About a month ago, one of my favorite professors posted on his own blog about the importance of having personal time while student teaching. Our first concern while teaching, he wrote, was to take care of ourselves first. 

But if you don’t make time for yourself and insist on taking that time, then you’ll never have it, because the responsibilities of a teacher are endless.You can always devote more time to students, always make more of an effort to prepare for class, always learn more about your subject, always spend more time on students’ papers, always devote more time to your colleagues and the community around your school. It can feel overwhelming sometimes, and the giving of yourself to others can be exhausting. (Theory Teacher's Blog, 1/30/2011)

 As a teacher, I was giving myself to everyone else, for six hours a day, five days a week. Only after I'd done that 'giving of myself back to myself,' so to speak, could I begin taking care of my students and then taking care of my curriculum. The reason for this was simple -- when we take care of ourselves, we become better mannered, better functioning human beings that students want to interact with. When we are happy, our students have a better chance of being happy. We will want to teach, and they will want to learn. After that, the subject matter follows.

Today I had a pretty rotten day. I wasn't nearly as prepared as I should have been, and while lots of learning went on, my co-operating teacher wasn't very...impressed with me, shall we say. That, however, is the past; nothing I can do will change it. Tomorrow, my students will come in with their rough drafts and that will be the end of it. We will edit them and on Wednesday we will be in the computer lab working. I can't change any of that now any more than I change the way the sunrise will look tomorrow. Tonight, I can only worry about tonight and the first few hours of tomorrow. I will go home, eat a very late dinner and read my next book. (Juliet, by Anne Fortier, which I am super excited for because I am an English major, and I miss Shakespeare.)

After that I'll go to bed and wake up ready for tomorrow.

Should Auld Acquaintance Be Forgot

Wow, what a heck of a way to end the year. No blog post until January Eighth. I'm losing my touch. And I had so much to blog about over the holidays, too.

It really must say something about my priorities when the last three or four blogs have started with some sentiment akin to "Gee, I should really update more often!" but there you have it -- Since starting this blog, my priorities have changed. And after updating my stories, talking with some old friends who haven't gotten a lot of face time lately, and clearing up some other lingering bits of business, I've been doing a lot of thinking about priorities, believe it or not.

This week I started my first round of student teaching -- two months in the middle school with a group of the funniest, sweetest, sixth graders a teacher could hope for. I was scared on Monday and Tuesday; I really didn't think I could make it through the rest of the semester. I didn't know any names, the kids all looked at me funny when I introduced myself, and my desk kept getting shoved aside. It wasn't a great way to start the week, especially when your roommate (who is also student teaching) comes home rhapsodizing about how well she and her teacher get along, how much the kids love her, how much she's loving student teaching and how much she's looking forward to the rest of the semester.

To put it bluntly, I was not getting the same warm fuzzies.

 I'm still not getting the same warm fuzzies today, but they're better, more confident fuzzies. We had a great conversation in the car on Thursday (after staying after for speech practice, because not only is my roomie incredibly confident that this is what she wants to do with her life, but she's also incredibly generous with her time at school and her participation in the school community. She wants to do everything.) about priorities, and Jackie said something really insightful to me, something I've wanted to hear someone say for a long time -- "Merc, I'm not saying this to be mean; you'd make a great teacher, but I think you'd make an even better librarian. That's where your head's at."

And it's true. Jackie was getting all excited this week because she got the kids who don't usually speak in class to speak, and I was getting excited about library day on Thursday and Friday. I got excited when I recommended a book to one of my kids (one of my books, from my personal library, that I loaned him) and he came back the next day after only reading in class and said "Can I take this home and borrow it? It's REALLY GOOD."  Now I get updates every day from him on how much he's enjoying The Hunger Games . (What really makes me happy is I think the fact that I was happy about this made Jackie want to start reading Hunger Games, and SHE ended up not being able to put it down either. SCORE.)

The library is where my head's at. I'm not thinking about how to make my language arts class better -- I'm thinking about how to make library time better. (Is there a list of authors who write about similar subjects? Can I put together a list of great new books? How would I put together a book display? What could I do to make this space more inviting? When can I get around to sending Rick Riordan a fan letter for writing the books that at least fifteen percent of my kids are reading?)

Of course I have to invest time in my teaching, and I will, but I think the course ahead is pretty clear -- One weekend, I'm going to have to sit down with some Grad School applications and find some more scholarship money floating around someplace.

Airship Ahoy! Student Teaching Dead Ahead!

Good news! The best of news, in fact.

I have received my student teaching placements for next semester! 

There are two of them, one in an area middle school and the other in a high school, and I am assured by people in the know that they are wonderful teachers who really know their business.

I was so overcome with joy at this prospect my productivity for the day imploded, and I ended up leaving my homework until my shift at work last night. Three hours of heavy productivity. It was great.

But after that I went home feeling a great deal like a failure. Here I am, a quarter of the way through senior year, practically swimming in homework and midterms, and all I want to do right now is work on a Halloween costume. Talk about trival.

Not just any Halloween costume, mind you. A steampunk airship officer, to be precise. I spent the better part of Wednesday Googling Do-It-Yourself steampunk accessories, including the obligatory round-rimmed goggles and making a shopping list for the local craft store, thrift shop, and bargain outlet. I realized I want to work on this, instead of writing the 5 mini-essays I have due next week, because I’m bored. A little burnt-out, too. I’m sick and tired of learning about how to teach kids, and it doesn’t help that in two of my classes we’re talking about exactly the same thing. I need a week, I think, to not do any schoolwork at all, and a week is a luxury I don’t have.

Steampunk is an interesting aesthetic. It tries to combine the power, creativity, and mechanical prowess that the Industrial era embodies while at the same time embracing the whimsy, romance and beauty of the Victorian age. Simultaneous creative periods, but very different ideas in terms of what form and function are. It’s like Gaskell’s North and South in a big way, the culture of the city meeting the machinery of the town. (Speaking of which, I got a massively awesome mashup idea involving Mr. Thornton and a bunch of robots that I think I might use for my final project in Contemporary Lit.)

Anyway, as I’m googling around I can’t help but be fascinated by what some of these people have built. These contraptions are beautiful – mahogany keyboards with repurposed typewriter keys, working blunderbuss guns that fire ping-pong balls. (That was another reason I was ashamed of myself – I’m not half that creative or talented to be in this genre) I realized that cosplay of any kind says something very interesting about our society in general. We have such creative, artisanal talent as human beings, and in our industrialized, buy-it-out-of-the-box world, that energy that in earlier periods would have been put to the purpose of making useful objects  is rerouted into making objects that could have been useful, but instead are used for this specialized kind of play. Steampunk’s fascinating to me because it tries to embody this past-present binary, the beauty of past design but also the desire to be futuristic and imaginative as well. (Also awesome - dieselpunk, the 'punk that started after WWI and the Age of Steam left off. Think Art Deco, Soviet Realism, film noir and really futuristic looking cars. Epic.)

I’ve realized, in between trying to finish the midterm exam due tonight and the final project due tomorrow, that this is an excellent conundrum for several reasons. First, I have to practice a good deal of self control in sticking to my time management options. Second, I’m realizing teachers cannot live on homework and grading alone. And third, if I’m getting burnt out thinking about the same thing all day and it’s only October, how must my students feel when they’re learning about five or six different subjects and they have to write a bunch of papers?

All of this is pointing me towards a conclusion we’ve discussed, both in Pedagogy and in Young Adult Lit-- students need to have a way to engage with the literature they’re reading beyond just writing about it. Involve an art project once in a while, something that uses a different part of the brain. This is why art and music and the humanities in schools is so very important! Kids need a creative break!

I know this teacher does, too.

Plagiarism (And Other Things In My Life I'm Not So Sure About)

Every time I wrote a paper for middle or high school, my teacher would remind me not to plagiarize. It's a staple for essay writing instruction -- Tell us where you got everything and don't copy anyone else's work word for word. If you don't, we'll come after you with a red pen and a vengeance.

Simple.

As a future writing teacher, it's important for me to remember this, and remember to teach it to my students. But what I've been having difficulty with lately is the idea that in order to teach someone about plagiarism, I have to plagiarize someone else's idea on how to teach.

Let me explain. In classes like my English Pedagogy we're given books written by prizewinning, veteran teachers that are full of strategies and observations on what works in the classroom and what doesn't. Our professor is filling us with tools from her own experience to help us when we get out into classrooms of our own. And this, to me, sounds an awful lot like plagiarizing, or copying off of someone else's paper on an exam. Aren't I supposed to just know all of this by myself? Aren't I supposed to be coming up with these mind-bogglingly good theories of pedagogy all on my own?

When we speak of sharing lesson plans or ideas on how to teach, isn't it technically intellectual plagiarism when I think Emily's lesson on how to wrap up a unit on critical theory lenses was so awesome I'd like to do exactly the same thing in my classroom because I thought it worked well? Are my roommate and I going to plagiarize each other when we discuss at the end of each school day and try to come up with a plan of attack for tomorrow using these textbooks and their ideas?

My good friend Ben recently linked me to the blog Teaching FTW, the one year labor of love of one Ross Trudeau, a teacher in a Boston charter school.  Trudeau describes a very prescriptive approach to his teacher training at said charter school, something that runs counter to most educator preparation programs in America today. I'll let Mr. Trudeau explain himself on this one:

"Program founder MG once likened traditional teacher prep to putting a pilot in a cockpit after teaching him about aerodynamics and meteorology... but not telling him what any of the buttons do. 'What? You crashed the plane into the mountain? It's cool! You get a whole new plane next September, and you probably learned SO much from that first plane crash! Go get 'em, tiger!'" -- Teaching FTW Feb 4 2010.

"This feels like the best way to learn how to teach. TELL me the moves. WATCH me practice them. CRITIQUE me on how good my presence is, or what my face looks like disciplining students, if my line of questioning is appropriate, yadda. It's like the total opposite of learning adolescent psychology and debating at length the place that ebonics has in a classroom. It's a common-friggin'-sense way to go about learning how to teach. " --Teaching FTW Jan 21, 2010

And while I am reading this blog, I am thinking several things. One: Ben was a genius to link me to this. Two: This is really funny. A little unreadable at times, but funny. Three: I wish my blog had 76 followers. Four: The prescriptive program sounds really awesome, but isn't that intellectual plagiarism too? Shouldn't you have to build your own classroom from scratch first and yes, crash a few planes? (I hate the idea of crashing a plane as much as anyone else, believe me, the idea that the parents of America will trust me with their children's futures is terrifying no matter how many people tell me I'll make a good teacher.)

I suppose at the bottom of this well of self doubt is the way I was taught to look at information and who it belongs to. I'm the girl who wouldn't ask a question in class unless I already knew the answer -- My idea about how knowledge should be handled is strange, to say the least. In my little world, this information on how a classroom works and how students work belongs to someone else. They did the research. They spent the time compiling it. If I were to use it in a paper, I would have to cite where it came from and I would have to paraphrase it. And yet here are all these people telling me that no, I should just use these ideas, lock, stock, and barrel, and maybe mix in a few of my own.

I think something's rotten in the state of educational training here, and I'm not sure if it's my training as a teacher, my own education prior to that, or something else entirely.

The Next Reason I Should Become a Librarian

Has it really been ten days since my last post? Sheesh. What kind of a sad excuse for a blogger am I?

As is the case with most huge gaps between posts, real life was giving me the short end of the stick when it came to having too much to do and not enough time to do it with. These last two weeks in addition to having to prep for my usual four classes, I had to carve out three hours everyday for teacher observation and find time to print and correct forty copies of my Book Arts project. Well, actually, forty copies of one side of my book arts project -- I have to go in next week and print the OTHER side of the sheet now. So that's where all my time's been going. No time for writing, no time for reviewing, and a smidge of time for reading before I went to bed at night. But them's the breaks, right? And I'll graduate in four years, which is fine and dandy because I don't want any more debt.

Teaching observation these past two weeks has been interesting, to say the least. For three hours every day I get to hang out and observe some seventh and eighth graders at a local junior high. I had conditioned myself to fear these two weeks, thinking those crazy preteens and their raging hormones and their ridiculous mood swings would get the most of me.

Truth be told, I'm having a lot of fun.

Seventh graders are fun because sometimes they still remember how to be kids. Give them an art project and they're happy. Ask them to read and eventually everyone will read. They love to tell you things about thier lives they don't think you already know (I got a lecture on how Facebook works after I had already said I have a Facebook) and they enjoy laughing. Some of them have learned already to hate school, but some of them -- some of them! -- are still out to learn. Last week we worked on poetic language, in the form of metaphors and similies, and I was pleased as punch to hear a few students describe school not as prison (although it was mentioned about four times) but as a party, a jungle, and a picnic. (Alliteration was one of the lessons I wasn't there for.)

On Friday I had planned to expose the reluctant reader I've picked out for a case study I have to conduct to ten books I thought she might enjoy. The week before I'd given her a reading interest survey and asked her about what she already enjoys reading (Twilight) her favorite movies (Twilight, John Tucker Must Die) and her hobbies (none)

Using this smidgen of information (and what I'd already observed about her) I found ten books I thought she might enjoy -- Books with strong, spunky female leads, books about vampires (all vetted by me to be better than Twilight, which, by the way, only has a forth grade reading level and a ninth to twelfth grade interest -- yikes!) and books with a healthy dose of comedy in them.  At the end of class on Friday I tried to speak to her about why these books are awesome, using the 'book talk' format. It's a bit like pitching a new product to a consumer base, a commercial for the book, if you will. Well, my reader didn't listen to me, but five other people in the class did, so you know what? I call that a success. Some of them wrote titles down, some of them agreed that the books I had brought were good. I had gone home on Monday feeling like a failure. On Friday I felt like a hero. The Great Momapedia, savior of reading everywhere.

The mental conversation I had afterwards is one I've had with myself a few times this year -- I might not be good at this teaching stuff, but I am really good at being a librarian. I give a version of book talks every friday night when someone comes in without a movie and I find five or six to pitch to them. I love that part of my job.

And let's face it, I love to talk about books.

One Big Fishbowl

When teachers need some kind of observable assessment process to see if their students are learning (or have learned) something, we are told we can facilitate the type of discussion known as The Fishbowl, a technique where a small group sits in the midst of a larger group and are told to hold thier own discussion sans teacher guidance or outside class imput. The first two minutes of such a technique are agony for the students who haven't done their homework, as everyone is now watching them fail, which in my mind makes this a very strong motivator.

I've come to realize that my subscription to the "New Stories" thread in the Percy Jackson fandom on ff.net is exactly like me being on the outside of the fishbowl circle looking in.

This story is the third or fourth that I've come across there and it's fascinating to read. I say it's interesting because it's not a story at all, which means that as a violation of site rules that link will probably be broken soon. Rather, it's an open letter to members of the community who are behaving in an anti-community building way (flamers, writers of less than quality fanfic.)

After I discussed the question posed in my last post with a friend of mine, also an education student interested in young adult literature-- (I'm wondering if this narrow-mindness with the Canon is due to the relative youth of the fandom itself or the relative youth of the fans themselves) -- we decided that the PJO participants' adherance to Canon comes from a lack of confidence in thier own creative abilities due to their relative newness to the process of writing fanfiction and participating in the fanfiction community. Harry Potter, being a fandom that recieved a lot of traffic both from younger readers as well as older ones who had grown up with the series (like myself,) produces a different milieu of fanfiction because of the wide spectrum of ages and the length of time the participents have had to grow into the fandom and the writing process.

When in the case of PJO you have such a concentrated body (over 4000 fics) of young, inexperienced writers, it makes sense that from that group there will emerge several slightly more experienced writers who serve as flamers, reviewers who never have anything nice to say but always refrain from saying nothing. I think this happens when a fandom experiences a large growth spurt -- the 'old growth' writers in fandoms like LOTR (which got new life after the movies came out) become resentful of both the movies and the writers inspired by them who don't love the same fandom for the same reasons and so turn to flaming.

The most common response to flamers by young authors like this is to post passionate pleas asking them to stop or refrain from commenting in the first place. It's an ineffective tactic at best -- flamers pick the worst of the worst fanfics, usually the writers who are just starting out, and bully thier  tenuous hold on their new craft into a complete lack of confidence. Asking them to stop won't do anything. (I got lucky in my beginning years as a writer -- I was adopted by a wonderful group of older writers who gave me confidence when I did get hurtful reviews, and...well, I never got many very hurtful reviews.)

This writer, however, takes a remarkably adept approach. In the first part of her essay (that's what we'll call it; diatribe's too strong a word) she speaks to people who flame, but in the second part, she addresses the authors themselves, saying this is a two way street and if they are getting flamed, they have only themselves to blame. I don't know of any beginning writers who have taken that approach before, and I must commend this young person on being so open to the idea that the problem of flames is two sided -- I created something you didn't like, but you didn't give me the help I wanted to make it better. She (or he) offers little in the way of specific improvement strategies, which in this fandom can usually start with "Find someone to teach you how to punctuate your sentences, and learn what a run-on sentence is and how not to write one." Nevertheless, a good effort.

Her/His style is very elementary, jumping from viewpoint to viewpoint with a lot of hopeless-to-follow mess in between coherant points (a style I believe might come from watching cartoons; it bears some resemblence) but her/his intent is admirable. A little beta polishing and a better place to post this would do wonders.

At the very least, it's teaching this writer-teacher once more that observing what your students produce outside of class may be the very best way to direct your instruction inside of class.

Grammar, here we come.