Editor Betrayal

Our yearbooks have arrived, but it’s a secret that they are even in the building because our party isn’t for another week and a half. Of course, I had to go look at the book, and my principal couldn’t stand the excitement either. I haven’t even told my staff because they can’t keep secrets that well, and the next thing you know I’ll have all their friends harassing me to look at the book, too.

My yearbook students, who are basically past wanting to do anything, are begrudgingly making posters to put up all over the school advertising the release party. The truth is we’ve only sold half our books, and we will be able to sell most of the rest in the next week. Students either buy them at the beginning of the year when they are less expensive, or they wait until the last minute and pay a premium price. It’s frustrating, but our rep says it’s that way all over the city.

Today I implored my staff members to use word of mouth to advertise by asking every single student they meet if they have purchased a book and tell everyone how cool the book is going to be.

I was so close to passing on the compliments the principal gave and maybe even showing them the book when my editor piped up, “That’s not truth in advertising.”

“Are you serious? You don’t think our book is good?”

“No.”

I was instantly angry at her betrayal. Nice way to support the staff and our efforts, little miss snotty editor! I did not agree with the theme the class chose this year, but I told them--and especially the editor--that if they could work it out, we could do it. These were her ideas! What didn't she like? I’d be the first to admit right here if I thought the book wasn’t good. It is good—better than last year—with a lot of special little details that I’ve not seen in other middle school yearbooks. I overreacted in anger and told her to leave if she felt that way. She didn’t leave, and now I will be irritated with her the rest of the year because she was being such a brat.

(I’ve been disappointed with her and the other editor all year long. They aren’t the hard-working, creative students they were last year. My relationships with my editors have always been this way. It’s like a marriage. You think you know a person, but then you make a commitment to each other… I could do a whole series on yearbook editor nightmares I’ve lived.)

If the rest of the staff could not see my anger, they are blind and deaf. I tried to regain some positive stature:

“For those of you who take pride in the work we’ve done this year, please tell all your friends to buy a yearbook.”

Then I recruited help to do some last minute party planning from the enthusiastic staff members who will probably turn on me next year when I give them leadership positions.

Scenes from My Teacher Life

Probably not coming to a theater near you. Probably not even on the Lifetime channel, either.
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A Quick Question the Day Rough Drafts Are Due

Student: Miss, is it okay that my title is my thesis statement?
Teacher: No.
Student: But I ask a question and then the rest of the essay answers it. It’s what my paper is about.
Teacher: That’s nice, but the title and the thesis are different things. It’s like saying your name and the period are the same. Did you actually state your thesis in your first paragraph?
Student: Well, no. It’s my title.
Teacher: That’s nice, but you have to also state it in your essay. The title is something separate.
Blah, blah, blah. Back and forth. Student does not get it. Wants me to say what she has done wrong is okay.
Teacher: Just turn it in.
Student: So, it’s okay.
Teacher: No. It’s not.
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How Many Days of School?

Teacher: Be sure to turn in your reflection logs.
Sounds of students sucking in air. Obviously many have forgotten.
Random Student: Oh yeah. I need to do that.
Teacher: I’m sure it’s not a problem since you’ve doing it all along anyway.
Much eye-rolling from the students.
The teacher participates in transparent self-talk. The class is used to seeing such theatrics when the teacher is exasperated and is quite unmoved as the teacher has a conversation with herself.
Teacher: Note to self: the reflection logs are not working well despite the fact that this is the third check and we have gone over examples in class. Should we throw them out? Hmmmm. No. Try something different.
Random student: Does that mean we don’t have to do them anymore?
Teacher: NO! It is a very powerful tool—oh never mind!
Random Student: Does that mean we don’t have to do it?
Teacher: Oh, no. You still have to do it. I’m just not going to explain to you again why the reflection journals have great educational ramifi—seriously just never mind. They're due today.
Silent, blank stares from the students.

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Kids Are So Strange

There are students waiting outside the teacher's classroom, and as she walks from the parking lot she sees one student standing on the edge of the sidewalk, obviously waiting for the teacher with her arms outstretched.

Teacher: Uh, what are you doing?
Her friends giggle. She just stands there grinning with her arms outstretched.
Teacher: Are you going to hug me or help me carry some things.
Student: I want a hug.
Teacher: Okaaaaaaaaaaay. Did you want that reciprocated because my hands are full…
And then the student puts her arms around the teacher and gives her an awkward hug.
Student: Ha! I hugged a teacher!

Aren't There Some Dumb Questions?

Research papers are due for peer evaluation tomorrow. Papers were assigned weeks ago. This isn't the first paper we've written this year. The following question from one of my students made me want to poke my eyes out with dull kid scissors:

How do you write a research paper?

I probed him about a few things, but he claimed he didn't know how to do any of it. I could understand if he needed help with parenthetical documentation, or if I had to go over citation tips again, but he wanted all of it?

Did he expect me to give him the simple answer or redo the unit we did last quarter? Oh! He remembered the unit, but he did not do the paper. Between the two of us, we're a disaster. I have obviously not gotten the concept through to him, and he has chosen not to attempt anything that would allow me to give him feedback. It's nice that he's finally reaching out for help, right? This has been going on for weeks, and it took up a good chunk of last quarter and TODAY he decides to play along with the rest of us.

And for goodness sake, is this the first year ever that he has had to write a research paper? Did he just fall off the turnip truck?

What Did We Expect?

Our foreign language teachers planned a big team event today, which involved all of our students sitting in a room watching travel videos that they made for the entire day. (Yes, students on my team all take a foreign language.) It was a really good idea for them to share--and evaluate--their videos with each other, but it was a long day.

We fed them snacks regularly. We packed them into a room just the right size to accommodate 150 teenagers. We contained 150 teenagers to one room for an entire day. We let them out of the room for lunch, where they feasted on pizza and other food they brought in, which included quite a bit of junk food.

Did I say student-made videos? Yea, really cool. But if you look at the number of students we have in this group who are not motivated students, you know there were going to be plenty of poor quality videos. Some of them were so boring. Ack! And since it's so cool to make all your letters swim or spin on the screen, I got dizzy just watching a few of them.

And you know every time I saw a spelling error I wanted to jump up and say, "Whose video is this? Are you KIDDING me?" And don't even get me started on my pet peeve with exclamation marks!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

So, let's review:

Friday
May
7 hours
150 teenagers
small room
24 videos
half of the videos painfully dull
crazy editing and style issues (probably only to me)
uncomfortable chairs
lots of junk food

Okay, okay. I have to be positive. The kids had a great time, and even the crappiest movie is better than I can do because I haven't bothered to learn i-movie yet. Kudos to our foreign language teachers for pulling this together!

But...right now....

I wonder if that bottle of wine my brother made me is ready to drink yet?

Involving My Students in Writing Assessments

Basic graphic organizer that I use with my students to help them see the whole picture.



One of the components of the independent project that my students are working on is related to either art or community service. When I've done this project before, I have considered throwing out this part because it's not really language arts related like the rest of the project. Originally, it was only a fine arts component, but I added community service as an alternative option for those who are painfully artistically challenged.

Although the art component feels like it should be discarded from the project, it often inspires students to reach beyond the expected, and it seems encourage them to add pizazz to the entire project. For example, one of my students chose LOVE as a theme. For the creative writing component she will be writing several poems. She has chosen to combine the art component with it and make an illustrated book of poetry. I doubt she would have illustrated that book of poetry had it not been for the art component.

I almost threw out the art component this year because I've been trying so hard to build stronger rubrics, and I could not figure out how to write a rubric to this component that is wide open. And I mean WIDE open:

Fine Art or Community Service Component
For fine art:
Create, perform, present, or share with the class:
Music
Art
Video
Theater
Photography
Dance
…or other alternative means of expression

OR

For community service:
Plan and implement a community service project related to your theme.
Document your process using journals, copies of letters, and pictures.

Most years I've basically given students full points on the art part if it was halfway decent. There were always students who thought taking 10 minutes to glue some pictures on a poster board should be considered art. But what had I really said they could or couldn't do? Sometimes collages make wonderful pieces of art. It was so subjective. I was ready to hit delete on this section, when it occurred to me that my students could write their own rubrics for this section.

How will I know if you perform well in this area? Well, why don't you tell me?

I'm not going to be one bit humble here. I was insanely proud of myself for thinking of this brilliant idea. Student input is one aspect of assessment where I could use some improvement. There are very basic requirements, but the approaches still leave a lot of room for student choice in this project. Why not involve them in creating the criteria for certain parts of the project? This is all about students learning something they want to learn. The more they make choices, they more they will gain from the experience.

Okay, so with that back story, today was the day when students had to turn in the criteria they established for themselves. Even with that, I gave them options. Some turned in a checklist of things that will prove they have excelled this is component, while others turned in some impressive rubrics with descriptors on a 5 point scale. Seriously! Full-blown rubrics! I love those kids!

In the end, I'm still going to have students who turn in poor quality work, as I had several students not turn in anything. These are the same kids who will draw some stick figures on notebook paper and then argue that they've worked hard on it. However, the majority of the students have set the bar high for themselves. They're owning this project, and they're excited!

This is the stuff we teachers live for!

Biohazardous Book

This is exactly something that would happen in my classroom:

My students started reading Going Where I'm Coming From in my class today, and we have just enough copies for a class set. In fact, in my largest class, if everyone shows up, I have to lend out my teacher copy, which is all marked up with teacher goodness.

Of course, in the very first class today, one of my student had a nose bleed and dripped blood over a few of the pages.

We were all sufficiently grossed out. I wiped the pages down with Clorox wipes, and later in the day after the pages dried, the stain didn't obviously look like blood.

But we still know...

Under a Microscope

We had visitors touring our school today from the Magnet Schools of America Conference. Perhaps a little unnerving, yes, but in the end it turned out rather well.

A large number of my top students were tour guides, and therefore excused from their classes today. At one point today I was a momentarily stressed out when I did a status of the class, as I was out of my classroom yesterday while I attended the conference myself, and found that the majority of the students felt like they didn't really understand the project.

In many ways I was not surprised, as I have gone through this project before, and it is not uncommon for students to take several days to understand the requirements and to formulate their project proposals. I was absolutely prepared to work one-on-one with students to get them on track today, but I was anticipating that number to be no more than five students in each class--not the fifteen in the class where we were expecting visitors!

In the big picture, I really don't have a problem with observers in my classroom seeing this whole process, but today we were suppose to be showing our use of technology. My students were suppose to be demonstrating their skills in researching, yet only a small portion of the class was at that point. The students who would have been on top of the game, as I said before, were excused from class to be tour guides.

Of course it worked out in the end. I gave a little background and invited the guests to talk with the students about their projects or any other information. I observed many students interacting confidently with our guests, which I was pleased about because if you're in 8th grade and you have a room full of teachers wanting to know what you're doing, you know that has to be a little weird.

There was one gentleman who went straight over to one of my flakiest kids (plus one that would not be comfortable talking to adults) and started quizzing him about the website he was looking at. Did he think it was a valid source? How did he know? I could tell with a glance that it perhaps wasn't the strongest source he could find. We've been through evaluating sources this year, and I reminded students to closely analyze their sources when I was explaining this component of the project. I think the man was also giving the student a refresher on the unit about research that we already covered about types of sources and ways to find them. Now, this is the kid who would not have been paying attention when we did that unit, but I'm sure vague memories started to come back to him and wished he would have paid better attention!

After about ten minutes I stopped by to check on the student, and the gentleman started to lecture me about how there were better web resources available. I smiled at him and said, "Oh yes! We've covered that concept this year. I'm sure Benito will get there." Then the man moved on to quiz a few more of my more inarticulate students. The man must have had some sort of radar! And the truth is, many of the students in my classroom at that time were not even magnet students; technically they were students who were enrolled in accelerated classes, yet not in the program. They are the students who are barely making it in accelerated classes, but if they were in the regular classes, they wouldn't be challenged enough.

After the group left, I checked in again with Benito, teasing him about how the gentleman had put him through the wringer.

"Miss! What was with that?"

"I don't know," I laughed. "He just wanted to help you, I suppose. You should have been able to discuss your topic and choices with him."

"I know. Miss, it was the first web site I looked at!"

I wonder, was he just about to click out of the page? Was he trying to decide if the page was worth his time, and he was hung up by having to articulate what he was processing in his head? Or, was he seriously considering the poor source he was looking about?

I suppose I'll never know. I do know that the gentleman, although he did rub me the wrong way, too, did a beautiful job in reinforcing one the the broken-record messages I've been sending all year.