Overloaded

Ok, so my barrage of posts right before the first round was due seems to have left me a little bit dry.

In my time away I've been very overwhelmed with schoolwork. Apparently it's not recommended to take both 125A and 125B in the same semester. I did not know this before, and I completely understand it now. Though, it would be a lot easier to handle without a certain selection of any of my other classes right now.

It's got me thinking about high school, and how teachers semi-coordinate their assignment schedules in high school to avoid overloading students with too many big projects all due at once. While I appreciated the efforts while in school and having less homework to ignore at any one time, I'm now wondering if it does some harm as a manner of college prep.

For the students who actually did their homework and got used to a sort of even work load, how are they supposed to deal with midterms and essays all being due within two weeks? Especially for those who are working full time and dealing with other things that high schoolers often don't have to think about at all.

I do like the idea, but think that maybe it should be done in moderation, maybe only in the first half of the year. That way, student can get a taste of the insanity that they're going to be facing in only a few more years. Every high school is a college prep school now, right?

Taking my own Advice

It’s not until now, less then an hour before this first batch is due, while I’m finally putting them all together in a Word document that I noticed my suggestion to myself in the very first entry.

I’m starting to think that it’s kind of a good thing that I’m such a scattered student right now. This should allow me to be my own best teacher in managing to get a student back on track. I mean, if I write things down for myself and then don’t follow them, I really can’t expect anyone else to follow them either.

So the next round of these should be a bit different than this first one has been. I’m going to start trying to make time to do everything in a way that I can be proud of. While there have been times that I’ve wanted to focus more on being funny and having people come back because they enjoy reading this blog, the good writing should follow if I’m paying enough attention to what it is that I’m saying. Heck, I might even find a way to be funny while saying something worthwhile!

I hope that the lesson I learn from this isn’t so much how I work best, but to really teach myself that people need to find their own best practices and go with that. My biggest problem with high school was that my teachers always seemed to expect me to do things their way rather than my own, when I could have given them a much better product had I been allowed a little wiggle room. With a little luck, I’ll really be able to learn that for my own students.

Procrastination

Now that I’m less than two hours before the first batch of these journals are due, I’m glad that I had this blog to be keeping up with them. Sure, I’ve already written two today, and after I finish this third one I’ve got one last one to go, but that’s still a whole lot better than I know I would have done without the blog. This brings up a good point when dealing with students. While I would love to have been totally different than most students, I know that in the issue of procrastination, I am not. If we give students any amount of time to complete an assignment, they will wait until the last minute because they have things to do that are not only more interesting, but more important to them.

So how does one little teacher find a way to get students to give the sort of attention to their work that it deserves? Especially a teacher who doesn’t always do that for her own work!

I have no answer to that question. Maybe using blogs in the way that I’m doing is one way to help with it, maybe there will be some other huge breakthrough I have while actually in the classroom. Maybe I’ll simply get an awesome group of students who want to do their work and won’t trouble me at all!

Hey, I can dream, right?

Revision

I really hate when I get a paper back (from any assignment) only to read it and find a million things that aren’t the way I intended them to be. Sure, there will always be something that I miss or that I could correct, but to have totally just gotten it wrong because I refused to go over it is a little silly. Without fail, if I haven’t spent some time going through a paper after I’ve written it, it will not have the message or clarity that I want it to have. I’ve seen this going back though some of these entries. Some of them are rather unclear and unfocused, though that may be due to the nature of the style in which they are written.

Journals by nature, to me, are not always thought through and complete. Especially when they are half written during classes and then typed up later (and in theory wrapped up then as well). Now, I’m not admitting to and such debauchery going on for these entries, but something is causing them to be less than ideal.

Back to the point of this entry though! For all of those times that I’ve gotten a paper back on to wish I could revise it, there must be a way to really cement in my head how beneficial that revision is. My first taste of really knowing that came last semester in my advanced comp class, when I would go through turning in multiple drafts to my professor. I started thinking then about how I could incorporate such things into my own classroom.

The most creative idea I’ve come up with yet is having students bring their last paper in within the first week of class to be re-worked and revised. Hopefully seeing the difference in the quality of the pieces is enough to motivate them to find the time for an early draft and revision on the rest of their papers through the semester.

Portfolios

One thing that I like when it comes to assignments is being able to have my own input. I don’t just want something that they teacher assigns and have to do just what they are expecting. That really doesn’t sound very interesting at all for me to create, much less for the teacher to read if they’ve assigned this same task in previous semesters. That’s why I’ve chosen to do this assignment through a blog, though the description was a journal and I was very happy to get the support of my professor to continue it this way.

This is also why I like the idea of a semester long portfolio for over all grades. These would be items that have been worked on all semester, and maybe revised once more before final submission, chosen by the student to represent his or her work as they see it.

I did my own first portfolio submission just last semester. It wasn’t quite as free as it could be, seeing as how we had 4 assignments during the semester and those were the pieces that would end up in the portfolio, but the individual assignments were a little looser with their expectations.

What I’m thinking of to assign my own students would be a little bit more free form than anything I’ve heard of yet. Rather than limiting them to the pieces they’ve written in my class, I’ll open them up to anything that they have written for any class in the last year. Meaning something that they wrote in their previous English courses, or any other class they’ve taken. The challenge though would be that they must revise anything that wasn’t written in the current semester.

I think that this would be a great way to allow students to see that writing across the curriculum does have something to do with each other and hopefully allow teachers to tie them together in a way that will also allow students to tie different aspects of the different styles of writing to come together. Once they see that, hopefully they will be able to put together on their own some sort of puzzle with different attributes of different styles of writing that will work best for the individual.

Crazy

One of the biggest reasons that I want to teach, is the fact that they current public school system took a toll on me. While I wasn’t a perfect student, I was still a pretty good student before heading into middle and high school. I’m not exactly sure what happened in the switch from multiple subject to single subject learning, but something made enough of a difference that I went from being in good standing, to failing more than one class at a time.

I can remember a few specific instances standing in front of a teacher in high school and them telling me that I while I was currently failing their course, I would do wonderfully in college. Those comments always made me smile, but confused me at the same time. Why is it that if there is some sort of system already in place that will work for some students, we can’t make that work for high school? In most instances that I was failing a class, the teachers were stumped because I was also acing the tests, but they knew that I wasn’t cheating. I still don’t fully understand how a teacher can know that a student knows the material and refuse to find a way to pass them.

I’m sure that this is the sort of thing that I will fully understand when I’m the teacher. That also scares me a little. Like I might end up working with and for the system that was so bad for me in the beginning. The whole reason that I want to teach is to be able to change this system for the students who slip through the cracks like I did, so a part of me doesn’t want to understand why the system can’t be changed. Instead, I just want to find that change and make it work for my students.

The only ways that I can think of doing that right now would involve a whole lot more effort on my part, and because of that I feel like it probably won’t happen for the first few years that I’m teaching. I’m not stupid enough to think that I have better ideas than experienced teachers right off the bat, so I’ll have to settle into my own rhythms before trying anything crazy.

I’ve got some good experience with crazy, and it works best added in just a pinch at a time until it’s not even noticeable.

I dyed part of my hair green tonight. I’d kind of been getting the itch to have unusual colors in my hair again, and since right now is one of the last times that I will be able to do that without having to think about what other people with think of me, why not? I started thinking about it though, and why should things like hair color, tattoos or piercings not be something that teachers can have?

I’m a big fan of different people contributing different perspectives to a well rounded curriculum, and having only people with no visible tattoos or piercings, and who use dyes that are within the spectrum of “natural” hair colors doesn’t seem to lend itself to as diverse a group of people as we could be having to teach our youth.

I understand the inclination to want someone you know you can trust to be teaching your children, and that for a long time the idea of someone trustworthy was someone just like you, but things are changing. People are starting to understand that their chosen aesthetic does not automatically put someone into a specific category. Someone who is covered in tattoos or has different colored hair is not automatically some sort freak who will only lead children into devil worship, drugs and alcohol.

Hopefully these ideas are changing rapidly enough that I might be able to get the tattoo that I’d like on my wrist and not have to constantly wear bracelets while at work. It’s a phonetic symbol for crying out loud, is that not completely appropriate for an English teacher?

This week I have become totally overwhelmed with working too much while in school. So much so that now that I’m sick, I don’t seem to be able to get over it. I think this is because I’ve been going so long without a break, that my body is forcing me to take some time off.

That’s why I’ve already decided that once I start teaching, I’m taking one day each weekend that I’m not working. I know it’s not entirely realistic, but it’s definitely better for all involved. I will stay much saner, which we all know will benefit the students greatly, as well as anyone who happens to know me at the time, or just comes into contact with me on any given day.

It should be interesting to figure out how that will work, since I love to procrastinate and not get things done. I guess the attempts that I’m making now at getting on top of my work will go toward that.

I think that some time to be oneself is important to being a good teacher. Absence is supposed to make the heart grow fonder, right? So not being in teacher mode every day of the week should help to some degree to keep me going in the whole not getting burned out thing, right?