5 Things About Teaching and Other Tips for Surviving the Nuclear Apocalypse

1. Dress & You Or Why You Shouldn’t Wear That Rage Against the Machine Shirt

First impressions are the most important. In teaching, you will be making impressions every single day. A good impression begins with a good appearance. You may be comfortable in acid-wash jeans and tribal face paint, but others may not be comfortable in seeing you wearing such. When selecting your outfit for the day, keep in mind that your student teacher is going to judge you based on appearance first. Look the part, don’t just think the part. Keep comfort in mind. You may like your stiletto strap on heels, but if you have to go barefoot half way through the day to survive them, consider some sensible flats instead. Set a good example before you complain about your student teacher arriving in those neon pink Bermuda shorts.

2. Hygiene Or Why Your Student Teacher Shrinks Back in Horror When You Smile

Appearance isn’t the only facet of a first impression. If anyone can smell you before they see you, this is definitely the wrong impression to be making. This applies to both bad and “pleasant” odors. If you find that your daily scenting ritual requires a dip bath in perfume or cologne, then too much is being applied. If you find that students can gauge the amount of time that has gone by in the day by the size of your armpit sweat like the rings of a tree, then one might consider applying more deodorant or touching up during the day. Keep some extra handy for emergencies. Brush your teeth. Just…brush your teeth.  It should not appear as if you replaced your teeth with kettle corn when you smile. Your student teacher will silently thank you for this in the long run.

3. Student Names Or “Hey You, With the Goody Batman Backpack”

You already know all of your students’ names. It shows you care. A student teacher isn’t going to know these right away, and a student isn’t going to feel like a student teacher cares about him when he is constantly referred to as “that kid with the Justin Bieber hair” in formal address. Don’t wait, set about to committing their names to your ST’s memory early. Use them often. Make that connection as soon as you can to show the students that you both care about them as individuals and not just statistics to be counted absent, late, or present. You will find the students care more about you both in return as well. Use seating chart strategies or getting to know one another games to help if necessary.

4. Encouragement Or Why Your Student Teacher is Wearing Dark Eyeliner and Listening to Linkin Park

The student teacher is a fragile creature. It’s made of weak, squishy stuff crammed into a human-shaped bag. What I’m trying to say here is that it’s very easy to hurt their feelings. There are going to be rough spots. You should expect this. Don’t demand perfecting, guide toward it. Your ST is learning, as you may be learning as well. It is your job to help them learn the tools they need to succeed, not criticize their every move. Provide the encouragement necessary to help them through. Let them know when they are doing something right, and help them correct their mistakes. You will both be the better for it in the end. Nobody wants a sad mopey student teacher lurking about in the classroom all hour.

5. Cooperation Or What The “C” Stands For

Cooperate with your student teacher. Don’t stand in the way of their ideas, learn to work with them. Allow them into your own planning process and begin to build that professional relationship that will be necessary to success. Include them in ideas and plan ahead for some cooperative lessons before you hurl them out into the unknown by themselves. Model some individual lessons then maybe allow them to replicate or modify the same lesson for another class. Show them the ropes before you have them competing in prize fights. Never forgot that your student teacher is not there to take over your class with no aide. Be prepared to step in and assist when necessary even when they have assumed full classroom duties. It’s not always the best idea to see if someone sinks or swims when one is holding the life preserver. Also, watch out for sharks. Keep in mind that your student teacher will not be able to succeed without your help.

Dear, 17 Me

Have you ever wondered where you will be in nine years? Of course you have, but you have no idea. Where you are headed is not what you wanted, and one day you are going to need to come to grips with that. Let me give you some advice that will serve you well in the future (present? past?).

Watch your English teacher more closely. You cannot always idolize people based solely on the effect they had on you. There are skeletons in closets, and you should see this before it's even more devastating than it would be now. Change your coat. Just try and convince mom and dad to buy you a new one. It’s old and it looks awful. People will judge you for it, even if it is comfortable. Step left when James turns around. Your back will thank you for that one further along the road. Enjoy your fully functioning knee while it lasts. Go out and do things you can only do now, or you will be living to regret it later. Just save your money on Valentine’s Day and try and stay within your league. It’s better to find someone who understands you and likes you for the way you are than to try and impress someone who is vastly different from yourself.

Life is too short to burn bridges over petty grievances. Don’t kick them out of your house, no matter how much you feel like they deserve it. Spend even more time with grandma than you will the next year. She may seem immortal to you now, but fate is fickle. Call aunt Rhonda, check up on her. No one else will. If she knows people care, maybe she will seek the help she needs right away. Don’t give up because the system was designed for people like you. Don’t let it stand in your way like it has for me. Work your way around it and get on with your life quickly.

Tell her you love her when you find her. You don’t need to be macho.

Don’t write that paper for him. It’s going to blow up in your face. Speaking of grades, keep in mind that those guys who harass you now will never graduate while you will and are still miring in misery to this day. Hard work and smarts will pay off in the end, you don’t need to get payback now. Back up all of your materials for your stories. You never know what might happen to data if you are not meticulous. Take up the offer to get that story published; no matter how bad you think it is, it doesn’t matter. Get it published and get your foot in the door.

Stop daydreaming about being a cartoonist, you can’t draw sequentially. It will never work out. Explore your thoughts about education and psychology now. It will serve you much better than needing to start over from scratch. Speaking of which, don’t try to major in art. The stress and lack of sleep is definitely not going to be worth it. Turn down the job at Wal-Mart. Wait for something that isn’t akin to slave labor.

Have fun, and keep looking forward.

With Apologies

If you are wondering why this post is only going up now instead of way earlier, I lost both my internet and my car for most of this week, needing to rely on hospitality to get to and from the school. I've been unable to get to an internet connection until mine finally went back up today. My apologies to my group mates for any annoyances this may have caused.

Speaking of my car, that is what I wish to talk about in this post, because it made me think of something very interesting. It's a situation I've never read about in any of our texts before. I should begin with where the problem started and work my way from there.

It was lunch time early this past week. As I have taken my custom to do, I was driving back from picking up something to eat down the road. Approaching the intersection of 21st and Hillside, my car began to make a terrible squealing sound. I groaned, knowing that I'd have to have it looked at when I got home. It didn't make it that far. As I pulled into the turn lane and up to the light, the car simply stopped running. It just sat there, unable to start, and not even willing to turn the engine over. Of course, this being lunch hour traffic, I had a great deal of people lined up behind me who wanted me to move, but I could not. This was not the worst of the situation. The worst was that I did not have my cell phone on me, and thus I lacked any way of calling for assistance. The people who were whipping around me angrily now were not interested in providing any.

Luckily, I broke down very near the police station and I was able to just walk over and get help. Here's my problem as it related to education though. I was delayed with my car for the next hour and a half, well past the allotted time for lunch. I'm in the middle of having full control of all of my CT's classrooms. The only reason I was able to make it back to the building without missing any classes is because my plan period immediately follows lunch.

My question is as follows: What if I had broken down without a cell phone (this means I had no way of contacting the school and letting them know what was happening) and I had been forced to miss a class I was supposed to teach? What would the school policy be to do then?

This is a situation that was entirely out of my control. If I were a full time teacher, who would watch my students? No one would know I wasn’t returning to my classroom unless a student went and reported my sudden disappearance to another teacher or the office. I would assume in that case they would have to send someone to at least watch the class. I do recall a few times in my high school career that a teacher no-showed a classroom which was then watched by the principal of vice principal. It essentially became a study hall as they didn’t utilize any sub materials for the class. That is either because there weren’t any (since the teacher was expecting to be there), or because they chose not to; I do not know which.

This situation really got me thinking about this issue, which is something we’ve never really talked about before. We talk about being prepared for sudden sick days, but the possibility of unexpected, sudden disappearances from the classroom seems like a good topic to discuss at some point. There must be some standard of procedure for these things I would imagine.

Subspecies

I spent today working with a substitute teacher in my placement. I knew in advance I would be having a substitute so it wasn’t as if anything came as a shock to me. What I found amusing though is the complete shift in a student’s attitude toward class as soon as they learn that the regular teacher is not going to be present for the day’s lesson. Depending on the student it can mean a lot of things. Many take it as an opportunity to be as defiant as possible with the assumption that since the sub and teacher are not the same person, they will not be reprimanded but lightly by the sub and nothing will come of it later. Others seem to think that all sub-assigned work is not “real” work or does not need to be turned in on time. These two modes of thinking in particular are too often supported by the teachers themselves who do not put repercussions in place for student behavior during sub days. It has always been my experience that students are at least always a little more unruly when there is a substitute.

The particular behaviors that I spotted today were more along the lines of “this isn’t real work” as many students were very lax in completing the assignments left for them to do. One pair actually told me directly that they will just turn it in tomorrow instead despite it being due at the end of class. I wasn’t able to work directly with the substitute in all of the classes as I had to work separately with several students on a make-up test in half of the classes today, but reports of the student behavior seem to indicate that the trend of not completing their work continued throughout this period as well.

This isn’t to say this is the worst sub behavior I have ever seen (it is not by far), but it begs the question if there is anything to be done that can stop the downward spiral of students being unruly to substitutes. I’ve noticed that when the sub is there for several days in classes, things tend to get worse and worse as time goes on. I’ve been told that repeated procedural work should keep the students in line of their own accord even without direct teacher intervention (I’ve yet to actually see any empirical evidence to support this, but that is beside the point), however, it seems despite a sturdy set of procedures, students would often rather see how far away from the standard norms they can get. There weren’t any major issues, but in all honesty, there shouldn’t be -any- issues at all.

Somebody to do it for you

Recently in my placement, we went over the issue of plagiarism with our students. We made it rather clear that both my CT and I do not tolerate it on any level. Since it won't be tolerated on the college level and we are working with seniors, I feel this is a pretty reasonable expectation to have. Why teach them bad habits if we can avoid it? Now, it is required that we deal with cases of plagiarism in certain ways. The very worst that is allowed is a zero on the assignment. Make up work is optional. We made it clear we won’t be offering make up work for any cases of plagiarized material. This is for couple of reasons.

One, it isn’t acceptable academic behavior at all. It used to be that students could be expelled for incidents like these, so the blow has been lessened significantly over the years. However, it is still grounds for expulsion in college and can put a mark on your transcript that may prevent other colleges from accepting enrollment applications. Second, it is somewhat personally insulting to the teacher to think that plagiarized work is going to go completely unnoticed. It takes a certain low amount of expectations from a student of their instructor to assume that the teacher can’t tell the difference between their own work and something clearly cribbed from another source or friend/family member.

Having told our students this, imagine my surprise this week when I run into the following scenario. I am passing out a new assignment that will be completed over a week’s times. A few students groan as they tend to do, but one in particular makes quite a scene. I ask her what is the matter and she relates that she feels the work load has been far too heavy and they have too many things to do. I remind he that they actually have no other assignments to do currently, seeing as how all of them were due already. It is here that she reveals she had not completed the project they had spent the last week on (it was due today). I asked her why, and he response was as follows: “Because I couldn’t get anyone to do it for me.”

Now, I was a little taken aback by that. Keep in mind that we just very recently went over the plagiarism issue with these students, and here I am being confronted with a bold statement that a student would not bother to complete her work unless she had somebody complete it for her (the obvious flaw there being that then -she- didn’t complete it, did she?). I wasn’t quite sure how to respond to that. She was quite serious about it. Who would tell a teacher that? How could you expect to turn in any work then and have it not be looked at with more scrutiny to make sure it is yours from then on out? A better question is why show up to class at all if you refuse to do the work to pass?

I eventually told her that I didn’t feel trying to get others to do your work is a good way of going about trying to get anything done. She should try completing the assignment on her own. I was met with a series of grumbles and grunts and a flat refusal to utilize any of the day’s class time to work on the assignment she had just been given. This is bearing in mind that her complaint was about not having time to work on the assignments while being given time to work on it. I’m currently at a loss as to how I should proceed with this situation. If she continues to refuse to complete work I fear she will most likely fail the course (which is a shame for a senior to do when so close to graduation).

Scheduling Conflicts

I've always wondered what it would be like to run into major scheduling conflicts in the classroom. What are we supposed to do when we unexpectedly find ourselves very short on time that we actually need in the classroom? Recently, I've ran into several instances of this in my placement and I thought I would just share them here for whomever it may interest.

Our class has a set schedule for when the students should receive vocabulary and when they will be tested on it. The students operate under this assumption and it can be problematic if the regular routine is suddenly broken. Lo and behold, several weeks ago, the routine was very much interrupted. Students were expecting, and preparing for, their vocab quiz as well as a unit test on romanticism to follow. On this particular morning, we were informed by a faculty member that they would in fact be spending the class period on career aptitude tests on the computers in the library. Now, many students had already put in much hard work studying for these assessments, and suddenly that all seemed to go to waste. There was also another problem. It was Friday. The tests had to be rescheduled to Monday, but that left two free days for teenagers to be teenagers and freely forget all of that studying that may (or, let's face it, may not) have been put into preparing. It didn't go as well as it could have, and it seemed apparent that the change in schedule was likely to blame for the downgrade in student performance.

Now, on to another little anecdote. Recently, we have been working on a persuasive essay in class. A problem arose on the last major assignment that required us to take some severe actions against plagiarism, and the students were required to work on their rough drafts only in class, turning them in each day to make sure the work was really their own. The problem arose that many students were simply much slower in the writing process than others and more class time needed to be allotted for writing. These extensions had to continue more than once. This has lead to a point where some of the material that was meant to be covered earlier has now been pushed back. While it hasn't caused any problems yet, who is to say what might happen toward the end of the semester when parts need to be rushed through in order to make sure all of the required material is covered? It's an interesting scenario to me, as I've wondered before what might need to be eliminated from lessons when there just isn't enough time to cover everything that needs to be done.  My CT seems to be handling it pretty well, though I'm sure I'd be more than a little frustrated at this point.

KATE Conference

Let me get this out of the way right away and say that I had a really good time at the KATE conference. It was great to meet a lot of interesting teachers and people from all over the state. I had the pleasure of getting to sit with one of our keynote speakers and the president (well, I forget what the official title is for the position). They were very nice to me, and understanding of how awkward it was for me to be sitting at what basically amounted to the "VIP" table for the opening festivities.

Jay Asher’s presentation about his book Thirteen Reasons Why was definitely the highlight of the entire conference for me. Jay reminded me a lot of what I envision I would be like if I had decided to pursue writing as a career. He has a dry whit to him that just seems so familiar. I can definitely ay he spoke a lot to the real experiences of what it is to be an aspiring writer and still balance that with an average life. He certainly hadn’t let any of his success go to his head. I feel that after watching his presentation, and to a lesser extent Clare Vanderpool’s, it has inspired me to not just give up on creative writing avenues and to continue to pursue them while teaching. Both of them spoke of how hard it an be to get work accepted, which really reminded me of things Ben has told me about his own work. However, they both kept trying and eventually the avenues opened up for them, so it is never a lost cause. This is probably the most valuable information they both shared for anyone aspiring to write.

In the other presentation I attended at he conference, it was important for me to check out the presentation on preventing plagiarism in the classroom. This is important to me right now because it has been a huge issue recently in my placement. We have been forced to openly hinder students being able to work on certain assignments at home in order to prevent them from plagiarizing any of their work. What I learned was that it is important to try and design writing assignments in a way that helps prevent being able to find any way to plagiaries the content. Making the questions pertain directly to the student in a personal manner was one of the biggest listed reasons. However, it isn’t always possible to make every writing assignment relate in that manner. I still found the presentation to be really informative, I just wish it could have also included some helpful ways to both identify and respond to instance of plagiarism. It would be nice to have a plan set in place for how the situation should be dealt with and be good enough to discourage it ever being done again.

Overall, the conference was good and the presentations were informative. I would definitely attend again in the future and check out some different types of presentations. I was a little disappointed that some of the presentations I would have liked to see were showing at the same time as each other. Because of this, it might be nice if some presenters actually had room to give their particular presentations more than one time a day so that people could fit them into their schedule.