Pun Intended

Pulling hair out...

Creative Teacher Fired

"Michael Baker, who made news last year when district officials told him he couldn’t teach history from the present backwards, has not been in classrooms since April 18.

His abrupt departure apparently came on the heels of a video he showed to a geography class called “Baghdad ER.” 

The documentary film chronicles life in the emergency room of a combat support hospital in Baghdad and includes graphic footage."

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Add another one to the list.  A teacher does something different, memorable, tries to bring some relevance into the classroom - and they are fired for it.

I will still never get over the buy-out that took place at my Alma Mater shortly after I graduated.

What REALLY kills me about the article, is that a bunch of people called this Vietnam veteran anti-American, a communist, and only showing an anti-military point of view.  Interesting.  Let's see what the department of defense thinks...

Defense Link review of "Baghdad ER"

"It is a poignant testament to the sacrifice of American troops and the dedication of military medical personnel."

- Defense Link News

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GEEZ!!!!

The teacher as mysterious "other" IE starring myself as Ms. Cruella De-EvilTeacher

I've always been very fascinated by literary studies that observe how one group of people treats another group as "the mysterious other," often approaching them through one of the following means: emphasizing cultural exoticism, enslaving them, eradicating them, or any of the above + or - villainizing them.  Today, in the world of educational "mysterious otherness" and summer school, I feel like the villain. 

Anytime I complain about the frustrations of unmotivated students, arguing with students, reprimanding students, flat out punishing students, and/or any other similar classroom agenda-struggles, the thing I am MOST frustrated with all boils back to being cast as a villain.  Or at least feeling like one.

"Otherness" between teachers and students bothers me.  One major reason for this is because I am still quite young.  If my mom were still around, I think she would still try and give me a curfew when I go home.  It was not that long ago that I was a teenager.  Really not THAT long ago, not long ago as in half of the clothes in my closet have been there since high school, (some from Jr. High), and they are still "in style."  Yes, I measure things by the metric units of fashion longevity.  Shut up.

For this, and other assorted reasons, I do not feel a huge sense of separation between myself and students.  We are all people, we all want to have a good day, we all have "rough lives" (as one student put it today) for one reason or other to deal with, (and no, I do not believe you should be granted classwork autonomy because you a.work a lot, b. have a kid, or c. anything else.  No one made it anywhere by asking for a free pass.  Sorry.). 

Thus, it makes sense to me that a classroom should function with everyone seeking a level of harmonious existence and involvement.  Hold on don't call me an idealist schmuck.  I'm not stupid, (at least not for that reason).  I'm aware this is not the case.  I can handle that.  Students want to chat, somedays they don't feel like working, yeah yeah beentheredonethat.  I got told to sit in the corner a lot in elementary school; all of my neighbors were my BFFs. 

So when I have to go to a student and address them privately about the problems with their disruptive and otherwise not-doing-the-work behavior, I see it as a (semi) friendly reminder of why they are there, (the answer being painfully obvious when the case is summer school), and it can be left at that if the behavior is corrected.  But when this doesn't work and I have to raise my voice, write referrals, take away privileges, etc., and I am met with resistance, attitude, or any other form of visible disgust, I begin to feel like the villainized "other."  I am no longer, (if I ever was), "human," I am an evil war mongering demon teacher with green skin and fangs that nobody wants to see or be near, which, even though it may be effective towards getting an assignment finished, is still not a good feeling.  I signed up for this?

It's the times when I'm mustering all of my internal stern-ness to tell a student to be quiet, and they are looking at me as though I'm hatching alien spawn out of my cranium, that I remember what I would rather be doing.  If I was either filthy rich or ridiculously brave, (either/or), I would move to Morocco, wake up at noon, eat soft, cracked-wheat tabbouleh spiced with saffron in an enamel tagine, and write about it.  Then if I got bored, I'd get my Ph.D, work at a university, teach a little, (no forced assignments there!), then go on sabbatical to the Greek islands.  And if I were a carnivore, I'd eat donor kebabs just like I did from the vendor on Lover's Lane in Izmir.  Then I'd write about that, too.  No one getting mad at me, except maybe my friends or my dad - hey it happens - and I would no longer be Ms. Villain, I'd simply be me. 

I'd love advice on how to deal with the villain-role-complex.  Just get over it?  Don't think about it past the last toll of the bell?  Stand my ground and keep popping out alien spawn?  Well, I do stand my ground, I just feel awful.  What a day. 

Struggles of Various Sorts

Today has been a day of many struggles.  Mostly with myself.  So before I begin what will inevitably sound like complaining, (although it's intended to be "reflection" rather than "ranting"), lets talk about the weekend.

Because of the death of a friend's little sister, many old friends from high school flew into town for the memorial service.  Thus the weekend took on a flavor of immeasurable bitterness mixed with the subtle and familiar sweetness of seeing old friends.  The bitterness behind the motive for our gathering is so difficult to taste on one's palette that there is a sense of guilt for even wanting to take joy in seeing people who I have missed.  It also confuses me that even though I never met the sister, I still feel as though her status of permanently absent is palpable even to me.  I can't decide if this is because I still have open and ragged memories of how it feels to lose a family member, or because she was so obviously an asset to humanity and now gone... or a combination of both.  What's more disturbing is that when I went to look for her obituary, I found ANOTHER obit for a 19 year old killed in a driving accident, then my cousin in high school has joined an "RIP so and so" Facebook group for a kid, and my students were talking about a funeral for someone they know/knew.  WHAT IS GOING ON HERE??  Then I saw an Allstate commercial that shows car loads of happy kids/teenagers driving down some desert road with the statement that every year X-number of kids go out for a drive and never come back.  Being able to put a face on one of those kids in the commercial almost made me cry... I had to remind myself this was TV.  Why so many casualties?  Have I simply never noticed them before?  Has it always been like this?  What really gets me is how this sister of my friend would have lived if she'd been wearing a seat belt.  I can't get over it.  Anyway.  I was going to use this as a ramp to talk about how great it was to see all of my friends, but now the mood is ruined.

Other struggles... feeling sick in the morning when you have to go to work!  I don't want to call in because I am truly critical to the operation of those classes, no one can say that my presence as the teacher is not important.  And besides that, I would hate to call in on a minor "I feel sick" day, never knowing if a major (and long lasting one) may decide to strike in the future.  It's tough being critical! 

Then there is another struggle with me.  I decided it would be funny to write a parody of the Gilligan's Island theme, using material from the play Twelfth Night.  Then I tried to learn how to play it on guitar.  A few new chords later, I could sort of do it.  Then I thought it would be fun to bring it in and perform it for the class.  This was a great idea until about two minutes before I had to leave and decide whether or not I actually wanted to take my guitar and commit to it.  I did.  Then I got to class.  I decided to wait and see how time fared.  We ended our important to-do's with fifteen minutes spare.  OK, fine, I made it this far, I'll go through with it.  Suddenly I am embarrassed by students looking at me, (a very bad thing in the teaching profession).  But then I figure, if I REALLY cared about being in a position that insured I always looked good and was never subjected to some good old ego deflating humiliation, I wouldn't have chosen teaching.  So I sang, sometimes hitting the notes, sometimes not, clumsily strummed, and made it through my rendition of "Orsino's Island," and here I am to tell about it.  Maybe I can lose ALL sense of ego and do it repeatedly next year!  We'll see.

More struggles today, again with myself, include my desire to be liked.  But if you ask me to my face, I will deny it vehemently and possibly issue threats.  I am well aware that to be a successful enforcer of rules, deadlines, etc. that one has to accept that many students will not appreciate your consistency, stamina, structure... and thus won't like you.  I can handle not being liked.  But it does not make my day brighter, even if I refuse to let it be a dimmer.  I especially hate it when my desire to be consistent and fair elevates into a power struggle that I blindly enter and don't notice until two irritating minutes later when I realize what has happened.  A counselor told me that when two people enter a power struggle, both lose, so never do it.  I take this to heart, but then don't see it coming when I forget that I don't need to explain myself more than once on the naive assumption that the kid didn't understand me the first time.  They understood, they are merely arguing. 

Arguing bothers me.  I usually brood about it while driving home.  When I got in trouble in high school, I knew that I deserved it.  All those lunch detentions for being tardy?  Yeah.  Extra work for talking in class? Yeah.  Being called on when I was OBVIOUSLY mentally elsewhere?  Yeah.  I think being able to accept those punishments without complaint was one of my strong points.  So when I see the need now to dole one out, I don't understand the obligatory bickering that ensues.  I forget that I don't need to bicker.  I'm the teacher, I win!  If something was unfair I wouldn't do it.  So when a kid decides that they don't like me because they think I'm hard when I think I fall over myself trying to provide extra materials, extra explanations, extra resources, etc., or because they think I'm mean when I'm trying to hold them to standards that make the class run smoothly and uninterrupted, and they want to argue with me or roll their eyes at me, yes it BUGS me!  But I will not lose sleep over it.  And I will work with my desire to "be liked" until it is no longer a hindrance against which I struggle, so much as a mere tool to make me a harder worker and as fair as possible.

So there's a day of struggle.  Oh yeah, and one more:

I struggle to understand THIS. 

Dear Billy Corigan, EXPLAIN NOW.  thanks.

   

P.S. if that is, in fact, a nuclear explosion in the back ground, I might understand, but the evidence is still unverified, so I'm going to need further explanation. 

Foreign Language "haters"

If there is one point that I would like to stress to my Spanish I students who are struggling and like to say, "I hate Spanish" within reasonable earshot of me, (IE to my face), it would be this: DUH, SPANISH IS HARD!  Learning a new word for everything as well as a new set of rules for organizing those words is NOT easy, and no one said it was.  Thus, could we please eliminate the griping and whining, ask ourselves what new endeavors in life we have ever expected to be easy, and then move on? 

I know learning Spanish is hard, I may have done worse in Spanish in high school than I did in math, (ask my dad how many teary, yell filled nights we spent over pages of fractions!).  In college I said "sayonara Spanish," enrolled in Japanese, dropped Japanese after one semester, and counted down the credits until I could get my foreign language requirement shelved and behind me.  The odd thing that occurred, though, was that I experienced a minor epiphany prior to completing my fourth (maybe it was second and only felt like my fourth) and final semester of college Spanish. 

The epiphany went something like this: first, I didn't believe, after all of the elapsed time I had spent struggling in Spanish classes, that I had learned a darned thing.  (A teachers worst nightmare: "I don't learn anything in here!"  Who's fault is that!?)  I couldn't formulate sentences, I could barely read it, and I always forgot how to conjugate the verb suffixes.  Then, I realized that my problem wasn't necessarily based in lack of knowledge, so much as in lack of fluency.  I had a sufficient (bastante) base of vocabulary, but couldn't string words together in my head fast enough.  To me it seemed as though it would be a waste to struggle so much in a subject, realize that I knew a little, (un poco), and then quit, ensuring that I would forget all of what I had learned, despite my belief, and make it all for naught.  So I signed up to study abroad, in Spain.

This is unique because my major was English Literature and creative writing.  I should have followed my contemporaries to London or Glasgow, or some other land of accented English, in order to study poetry and Shakespeare in more depth.  Bah. 

Off to Malaga, to spend a summer learning both Spanish and sign language all at the same time.  It was wonderful.  While I spent too much of my time being a hermit, (lets not talk about personal flaws such as fear, because it will only lead to a long discussion of paralyzation, Joyce, and Dubliners, and remember we are avoiding Ireland by going to Spain), I did manage to acquire the fluency that I did not receive in the university environment, where I never took the initiative to seek out Spanish speaking partners or any sort of outside practice.  When I came back to Arkansas I skipped Spanish 3 & 4 and went straight into Cultural Readings.  I got my first "A" in Spanish.  This is being said by the girl who would tear up over frustrations concerning the difference between "llevar" and "llorar."  Not only did I come back wanting to speak and read Spanish more, I also took French, and LIKED it, which I seriously need to pick up studying again.  (UT has an amazing web site for teaching and learning French, which can be found at Francais Interactif). 

Moral of the story?  I don't really know.  But it is difficult to learn a foreign language, but at the same time, it is also worth it, and there is no way in hades that it will get done if you don't every study!

Next episode:  how is a teacher to answer when a student asks if I, I mean he or she, believes that the world has multiple languages because of the ladder of Babel?  So many things wrong with that question, where to begin...

Anti-"thank a teacher" tirades

While standing at the photo copier this morning, I had a few minutes to kill as it spent thirty "warming up."  Above the machine a document was posted, outlining all of the tedious tasks that a teacher deals with during the day, including, but not limited to: keeping grade report records, attendance records, picking assignments, grading assignments, behavior management, drama counseling, parent appeasement, administration appeasement, excessive professional development hours, uncompensated continuing education, etc, etc.  At the bottom it said, "thank a teacher." 

This kind of document does not make me want to be thanked.  It makes me think of all these components, blank out for a moment, and then after rousing again, I ask myself, "WHY AM I INSANE??"  None of these things seem overwhelming when I see them as a cohesive, manageable whole.  But when dissected into all of the tedious, annoying tasks, I do not feel as though I should be appreciated, I feel as though I should be committed. 

Today is sort of an example.  When I was a student, (all of last year and every year prior), I never realized what all went into creating the lessons and activities that I participated in, and I was an elementary school teacher's kid!  Yet I still did not rise above oblivion in regards to everything that goes in to producing and orchestrating a typical school day.  Now that I am the one creating and conducting these events, my appreciation has obviously grown exponentially.  Usually, I think it is fun to choose and prepare fun activities, even if they are time consuming.

One successful example was for my Lord of the Flies unit, which was done like the show Survivor, where each class started with some silly "physical challenge," (team game), and the winners got a head start on their "mental challenge," (essentially an open book, timed, group quiz).  One of these games involved passing lifesavers across coffee straws from one cup to another.  This seemed simple, as I used to receive life savers in my Christmas stocking, and they always came wrapped together like a roll of pennies.  After making a special trip to the grocery store the night before the game, I found that this is not the case anymore.  Lifesavers no longer come like pennys, but instead come wrapped in individual bags, all housed within a larger bag.  WHY!?!? 

Two hours, and a million plastic wrappers later... I had unwrapped all of the stupid lifesavers so that each team could have a ziploc baggie full in order to play the game.  Please take into account that 1/3rd of each large bag had to be thrown away because of breakage, and I had to take into account that none of the game pieces would be reusable, but instead be quickly consumed without thought as to the painstaking process of UNWRAPPING each and everyone of them.  Oh well.  It was fun and a great success.  Well worth it.

Today's example of teacher tedium... not so much.  I decided I wanted to play Spanish vocabulary bingo.  I spent two days figuring out how I would create this game from scratch, and finally decided that I would have to make a blank game board in a word document, type all of my vocabulary words separately, cut them out, and then tape them to the board, photocopy it, untape them,  mix them up, retape them, and photocopy again.  I would repeat this process for every kid in the class, so that no one had a matching bingo board.  Did I mention that when I went to photocopy my first board, that the copier broke?  It wouldn't spit out my copies, so each time I copied a board, I had to physically pull apart the machine to pry out the wrinkled papers, then unlatch and relatch every part of the machine so that it would stop displaying "paper misfeed," and I could begin the process over.  I made it to class with one minute to spare, a handful of "Baile Bingo" game boards, a box of fruit loops for playing chips, and high expectations.

Does the game work if no one has studied?  Um, no.  Does it work if half the boys eats all their game pieces in the first five minutes even though I tell them not to?  Um, no.  Do I leave frustrated, annoyed, and wondering why I didn't major in business?  For a brief moment, yes. 

But then it passes, and I'm glad I made a spare copy of each board so that I now have master copies and never have to re-do the process again.... until I want to play the game in literature and have to create a whole new word list.  Let's not rush ahead, though. 

Oh teacher tedium... how shall I fight thee, and not go insane.  I know one way - don't read those annoying lists of all the worst parts about your job!!  I think about the two kids who did well on my Spanish test, regroup, plan another review, and breathe.  Yay, weekend...