Work Day Blues

Today is one of those few days left in the school year that is given over to the teacher as a professional work day. That is, a day to work without students and without administraative demands. Inservices and professional development have essentially been commandeered by administrative direction with the not-so-subtle implication that teachers are not professionally wise or responsible enough to direct their own professional development.

Today I need to:
1. Catch up on all my grading (a considerable amount) and enter 1st quarter progress grades by 3 pm (no exceptions as the e-mail directive states!)
2. I just received 124 completed AP Document Based Essay questions to grade from students yesterday. I doubt I will have any time to complete, or probably even begin, those. So, there goes the weekend.
3. This is my 3rd classroom move in four years and I still need to unpack and organize 4 boxes of materials.
4. I need to clean and reorganize the room. (Janitors usually only empty trash and pick up the obvious--they, too, are overstretched and understaffed.)
5. Update class web pages.
6. Complete online test preparation for one class.
7. Fill out attendance confirmation forms for last week for the October count.
8. Call several parents.
9. Several students come to the room to chat and for some help.
10. Former student calls and invites to lunch.
11. Plan for next week.
12. Make copies of a chapter of textbook that still hasn't arrived.
13. Look for textbook for new class that has been out of print and backordered since Aug.
14. Review upcoming assessments required for Middle Years Program.
15. Fill out form for class descriptions required for next year.
16. Fill out request for conferenced attendance and pay (chosen by lottery throughout the district.)
17. Prepare for meeting next week on teacher evaluation.
19. Restock classroom supplies from department.
20. Update gradebook and check quarterly attendance.
21. Answer student e-mails.
22. Return book to media center and check for another for class.
23. Check and read district/building e-mail and respond as appropriate.

I think about half of that actually was accomplished. The others rise on the priority list and calendar for next week. I still don't have a resolution to the missing text for one class. I'm going to have to be creative on that one. I can leave around 4 pm, taking a box of grading and work home. The question I always have for myself after a work day is: How much of that is really helping me to provide the best educational experience that I can?

The answer is why I call it, Work Day Blues.

Gemütlichkeit and سلطنة عُمان

Jurgen is an exchange student from Germany. At about 6'5" he towers over most of the other students in the hallway. He smiles almost constantly, like the cat that just swallowed the mouse, and talks incessantly. The stereotype of German students, foreign students in general, is that they are hardworking, serious, nose to the grindstone, and far better than American students. Jurgen is a jokester and takes humor well; he dishes it also. When his work rarely was finished in class, my only observation was that I must have gotten the most lazy student in all of Germany.

This didn't phase Jurgen at all. "I am. All my teachers in Germany say the same. I'm very proud of that fact." So now, I have the proudest, laziest student in all of Germany who talks incessantly. He has quickly made friends, constantly asks for exceptions to the rules, for himself, of course, and sees it almost as a duty to see how many dates he can go on. The rules at his hosts' home are a bit restrictive for him. And, of course, he views the restriction on students his age from having alcohol as outright ridiculous.

In the same host home is Muti, an exchange student from Oman. He couldn't be more different from Jurgen. He is small in stature and rather disappears in the hallways. He is reserved and almost overly polite. Everything is communicated in a very quiet, paced voice, followed by "Yes, sir." and "Thank you, sir." He is a diligent student, although sometimes he doesn't complete work because of difficulty understanding the reading or the directions, but is too reticent to ask. Jurgen and others try to include Muti in activities and getting out of the house; Jurgen says that Muti spends most of his time communicating with friends in Oman from the computer chat. Jurgen is also overt about discussions of politics and religion, while Muti tends to keep opinions to himself.

There isn't so much a clash of civilizations in that US History class, as a crash course on culture. Jurgen and Muti add significantly to the learning experiences and perspectives in the room. They are also learning about American culture, for good or ill. These two have definite views on immigration and on the view of the United States from other parts of the world. Every day, in some way, we shatter stereotypes in that room. But we also build up prejudices in some ways, because for the majority of students, Jurgen and Muti have now become representatives of their culture and countries in ways that no individual should have to bear. Suddenly, Germans are "like" Jurgen, and Omanis, and Arabs, are "like" Muti. And, alternatively, their experiences are becoming what America is, and what Americans are like.

The demographics of that room: 22 girls, 13 boys, 4 Hispanic, 1 Omani, 1 German, 10 Black, 14 Caucasian, 1 Indonesian, 2 Asian (both Khmi), 1 disabled, 4 "multiethnic". Assimilationists are uncomfortable with the ambiguity of opinion, religion, shattered stereotypes and new prejudices, language, and culture in that US History class, and see it as one of the central goals of public education to melt that pot into the mainstream.

A brief description of New Netherland, (now New York) completed on August 3, 1646.

"On the island of Manhate, and in its environs, there may well be four or five hundred men of different sects and nations: the Director General told me that there were men of eighteen different languages . . ."
--Isaac Jogues, 1607-1646

Semiotics of the Sentence

"Indentured servants became indentured servants because they either sold themsleves or were kidnapped into slavery. Those who sold themselves into slavery were often looking for the opportunie of dinding wealth and being well off in money."

This tangled spaggetti sentence and its several misspellings are an example of the challenge of teaching good writing. Effective writing. Writing that makes sense. (And, yes, I tend to write with sentence fragments, but that for later.) For full disclosure, I am not an English/Language Arts teacher. But for history and history essays, writing effectively is a tool that is necessary. How you do that has become a battleground of educational theory and philosophy.

Semiotics is the study of signs and meanings. The following is one of the "signs" that symbolizes the controversy and battle in educational circles over the teaching of language and writing.


Sentence diagramming was introduced in 1877 as a "reform" to better teach grammar by providing a visual structure. It just happens that graphic organizers are all the rage for teaching the generation of ideas, brainstorming, and organizing as an alternative, I suppose, to that nasty old thing, the formal outline. I happen to agree that we should use all the tools at our disposal and not have a rigid outlining formula. Yet, what is a sentence diagram but a graphic organizer? Why are graphic organizers popular and sentence diagramming next to heresy? Why would schools, departments, or districts ban, dogmatically, the teaching of grammar and vocabulary?

Diagramming not only teaches the structure of language within a sentence, but also the recognition of the parts of speech and the function of words in language. As a side effect, it also happens to teach analysis and synthesis--higher order thinking skills. Nevertheless, the sentence diagram has taken on the meaning for many of the dry, boring English classes that students hate. It also doesn't necessarily teach better writing.

Instead, we have the focus on context and reading, reading, reading to get better at writing. I again don't disagree that context is important. But analysis out of context is often just as important to understanding. The bigger battle really is that edu-crats, both at the public school level and in research universities, are under pressure to invent the new--bigger, better, more "research" based, and that takes the teacher out of the professional cycle. Professional judgment is no longer trusted. Responding to student needs has become defined as implementing a particular program.

Diagramming has never really died. But why must we, should we, wait until pendulum swings back into the realm of common sense? Why do we deny to ourselves the very tools that are, at times, the most effective and appropriate instruments that we have to excel?

"Economic opportunities in America were very unusual. Social class, poverty, and slavery are some of the factors that affected the colonists opportunities to succeed."

Ah. Now, that's better.

Freud, Jung, & Us

Each day, if you take the time to peel back the layers of behavior and revelation and dreams, is a carnival of psychodrama playing out a concentrated performance of teenage angst in a pressure cooker stage called school. There are few social institutions that wind up such a complex network of daily conversation and human interaction with the main purpose of mental activity. Most institutions focus human energy and attention en masse. A football game, for example, is a concentrated event of tens of thousands of people, but all arranged to view and respond to a single game and a single clock. Corporations have a product focus and a complete language with which to think about work and interaction.

Schools are a chaos of social activity, conversation, hundreds of purposeful lessons, and thousands of unintended lessons. Social activity ebbs and flows througout the day, and predictability is often difficult to come by. Human events, needs, behavior, conflict, attraction, role modeling, abuse, hurt, pride--everything is there, every day. Rob comes to the door of the next classroom, looking a bit medicated and dour. He looks for an opening to vent, to reach out, perhaps just to talk.

Two teachers are listening as Rob relates that his friend, a bit older and out of school, was killed in a robbery attempt, or so they think, this week. The friend was coming home early in the a.m. from a late shift at work and was attacked by three men. Shot five times while fleeing from them.

There is little question that this is now a highly sensitive and therapeutic situation. The conversation that follows, the concern shown or rejection perceived, the words, demeanor, questions, all have the potential for deep emotional impact. For healing, or for hurting. For friendship or alienation. For better or worse.

From all that buzz of activity within and around that building today, this in-between-bells discourse is most likely the most heavy with seriousness. I certainly am not, nor are most of us, qualified to delve deeply into feelings and the impact this is having on Rob. But you, I, we are there. No escape. We can't provide analysis or psychotherapy, but we are healers and hurters, all of us. There is no right path, no way to really help that is clear cut. There are many wrong paths, and many ways to lose the opportunity to help. The burden is great. It isn't an expected part of the teaching job; it certainly isn't in any teaching job description. There is no question that it certainly has its impact on me as well. I would have to be numb for it not to. To not think about the repurcussions and the humanity of the situation.

What comes to mind is "he ain't heavy; he's my brother" and "lean on me." I hope that is sufficient to be helpful and not hurtful. Perhaps Freud just all boils down to this. I hope Freud just all boils down to this.

What matters, therefore, is not the meaning of life in general, but rather the specific meaning of a person's life at a given moment.
--Viktor Frankl, Man's Search for Meaning

TXTMSG4U

There is a nu language out there, TMWFI. %-( Our compressed communications world has sparked the invention of nu grammar, puntu8un, & spelling & EVN art. If U IM or TXTMSG much U need 2B able 2 understand & CR8 solutions 2 fast-paced communications, & I mean TSTB. OK? W/B soon.

If UR a nOOb 2 this world, U need 2 get on board PDQ. SUM of these compressed words, frazes, & CR8V spellings even end ^ N assignments & essays. Just, sort of slip N A3. 404 if this is AISB, but RL is that it is here. NRN

Students now often sit N the back of the classroom, cell phone N hand under the desk, & spend time TXTMSGING friends. We have had 2 deal w/ some TXTMSG threats 2 other students as well. PROLLY if the TOS, then I won't B TXTING much. OTOH ICBW. But DEGT. SIGTR, POS. SIT. Take on TPTB & T+! (((H)))

TRANSLATION: There is a new language out there, take my word for it. %-( (Confused smiley face.) Our compressed communications world has sparked the invention of new grammar, puntuation, spelling, and even art. If you instant message or text message much, you need to be able to understand and create solutions to fast-paced communications, and I mean the sooner the better. OK? Write back soon.

If you are a newbie to this world, you need to get on board pretty darn quick. Some of these compressed words, phrases, and creative spellings even end up in assignments and essays. Just, sort of slip in anytime, anywhere, anyplace. I don't know if this is as it should be, but real life is that it is here. No response necessary.

Students now often sit in the back of the classroom, cell phone in hand under the desk, and spend time text messaging friends. We have had to deal with some text message threats to other students as well. Probably, if the teacher is over the shoulder, then I won't be text messaging much. On the other hand, it could be worse. But don't even go there. Sorry, I've got to run. (Parent is over my shoulder). Stay in touch. Take on the powers that be and think positive! (Hugs!)