I’m going to try to bring back my weekly reflections, though after second semester of grad school starts back up, who knows.  Still, I think reflection is a powerful part of being a good teacher, and writing, in my mind, is better than just thinking about it, too.

First, my own teaching.  I started Shakespeare plays in three classes.  My ninth grade class is reading Romeo and Juliet (coincidentally, so is my ninth grade daughter).  This play never gets old for me, and this is my ninth year teaching it.  At this point, I have to admit I do very little tweaking with my unit plans and basically just pull from my memory.  As always, the Folger Shakespeare Library has been and continues to be an excellent resource.

One of my eleventh grade British Literature and Composition classes began The Taming of the Shrew, and I really wish Folger had more stuff for this play.  As it is, I found an excellent unit written by Sydney King of the Oakland Unified School District.  This district has a great site with lots of resources for teachers, and I am glad they appear to have so proactively encouraged their teachers to share.  I discussed this unit in a previous post.  So far, we have finished Act I, and the students are having some trouble with the humor.  I explain, and they look at me like “That’s not funny.”  I am hoping that as we move through the play, they will find it more humorous and enjoy it more.  To be sure, the beginning, with all the strange Italian names and people in disguise, must be somewhat confusing.  I asked them to make a character map and will make copies for the whole class of the best one (plus reward that student).

I began A Midsummer Night’s Dream in my other British Literature and Composition class.  This class does not like to participate.  At all.  Ever.  And if you’re reading this, guys, you know it’s true.  It’s frustrating to call on students to read when my other classes argue over who gets to read, and that’s all I will say about that.  We are doing some engaging work that I perhaps fool myself into thinking that even this class is enjoying a little bit.  I even bravely posted a YouTube video of my group from last summer’s Folger Mini-Teaching Institute acting out scene 1.2 (Bottom and the mechanicals planning Pyramus and Thisbe).  Crickets.

A ranty digression: Even with a new requirement that students must leave one comment per week on the classroom blog, I cannot seem to get my students to use it.  Honestly, when I was in school, if my teacher had a blog for us, I have to say I would have been interested enough to keep up with it.  I just don’t understand the near total lack of interest.  Of course, I know I’m an English teacher and therefore more inherently interested in English than my students, but the fact remains that this is something different that only one other teacher at our school does (that I know of).  It’s a helpful tool.  It’s frustrating to see how little students actually use it.  I just don’t think asking them to use it is asking much, so I increased it to a requirement, and here it is Saturday, and only one student has commented on the blog.  I really, really don’t understand it.

So back to MND.  I haven’t taught this play since my third year of teaching, I think.  I taught it my first year in a poor rural school and my third year in a suburban school.  I actually took my students to see it in Macon, and ran into my former students from the other school!  That was really interesting because they had been sophomores when I taught them, and their senior English teacher had brought them.  The junior class (which I had taught as freshmen) was also there, but I had taught them Romeo and Juliet.  I asked the sophomores if they remembered studying the play, and they did (I think one girl still had Titania’s “Set Your Heart at Rest” speech memorized).  My suburban students were clearly intrigued by these former students of mine, and it was good to see them again.  I remember that months later, after we had switched teachers (at this suburban school, we switched at semesters, and I might get some of the same students back, but most of the time, I got a brand new crop).  One of my students showed me next time I saw her that she still had a copy of the speech in her notebook several months after we had studied the play, and she was very proud of having learned it.  I am hoping that my current students will feel the same way at some point.  At any rate, Friday, we practiced and picked apart those 12 lines, so I hope the students got something out of it.  It’s harder to work with students who are not enthusiastic no matter what I do.

I also have a new Writing Seminar class.  I didn’t used to like teaching Writing Seminar at my school, but after I had done it for a couple of years, it became one of my favorite classes to teach — I lean more now towards running the class like a writing workshop.  My students are currently engaged in the big deal tenth grade research paper, which I teach old-school style with note cards.  At some point down the road, I would like to engage Google Notebooks or Zotero, but at this point I am not able to do that, and that’s all I’ll say about that.  At any rate, it’s something I am very comfortable teaching, and it’s a very important skill.  We have engaged in a unit on understanding plagiarism this week (taken from a recent issue of English Journal, and NCTE’s Web site is taking an absurd amount of time to load, so I’ll have to share the bibliographic details later, as that issue is on my desk at school right now).

I think it has been a good week for the first week back after a vacation.  We had the National Honor Society induction Thursday night.  I have been the NHS adviser at school for a while now, but frankly, it was too much for me this year with department chair and graduate school, and I am not sure I should be doing it anymore.  At any rate, our community service activities and club meetings will be the focus for the rest of the year, and that suits me.  The selection and induction process is more time consuming.

This was a fairly big year for me.  I went back to school and now have one semester of graduate school under my belt, and I also took on chairmanship of my department, which has brought challenges both expected and unexpected.  I also had the opportunity to go to the NCTE convention for the first time in ten years, and I presented at the GISA convention.

Every year, I make the same resolution, and I keep it for about the same length of time most people keep theirs: to cook more meals.  It’s hard to find the time.  I am not very good at the planning part.  I do well for a while, but then I leave off planning for a while, and resort to picking up junk on the way home.  Plus, I have been getting home later this year with more work to do, and it has caused problems for me as far as cooking meals.  Any tips?  I downloaded a meal spinner app from iTunes for my iPhone.  Maybe it will help; maybe not.  What I need to do is come up with some kind of way to plan meals.  Anyone know of a good program or tip for doing that?

Another thing I want to do is try to grade things faster.  I tend to get backlogged, and then I have to spend a day just plowing through grading.  I would like to get things back to students faster, but I admit that’s really hard for me to do with writing.  I spend a lot of time on it.  I am at least glad that I finished grading before the holidays because it is very hard for me to grade at home — my children see to that.  So, for that matter, does my husband.  Instead, I was able to relax and enjoy the holidays as time off.  Too many of my colleagues are grading papers if Twitter and Facebook are any indication.

I want to spend more time reading.  I am hoping that now that I have an iPhone, I can work through some books using Stanza.  I read 23 books this year, not counting re-reads (I re-read Harry Potter and the Deathly Hallows and Twilight).  That’s not too bad, but if I set aside a little bit more time, I could probably double it.  It’s not a race or anything, but I would like to read more than I do.

I think I did fairly well with my British Literature classes in light of a very short October (filled with days off for Jewish holidays).  I cannot assign homework over Jewish holidays, nor can I assign major assignments to be due the day after a Jewish holiday, and while I understand and respect the reasons for these requests, it does make it hard to move through any material that month.  Next year, they will mostly be on the weekends, so it should be better.  In spite of that, my students still read excerpts from Beowulf and The Canterbury Tales and all of Macbeth.  Next semester I start with A Midsummer Night’s DreamThe Taming of the Shrew in one class and in another.  I do not feel as good about the number of books I was able to teach in my Hero with a Thousand Faces elective, which was seriously curtailed by the holidays.  Still, the students did learn a lot about Joseph Campbell, and I think I accomplished my mail goal of helping them see the movies they watch and the books they read in a different light.  My ninth grade class is going fine — I taught phrases, punctuation (commas, quotation marks, italics/underlining, semicolons, colons, and apostrophes), and two novels — The Bean Trees and The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night-Time.  All in all, I think I was able to move through a good amount of material in a quality way that helped my students learn it.  I seem to be getting better at that rhythm the longer I teach at my school.  I am hoping some changes we are discussing will help me even more next year.

So that’s it.  My reflection for this year.

photo credit: maria flying

Nobody’s complained about the absence of my weekly reflections, but I suppose I feel the need to explain anyway. Our last day of school was today. This week was finals week. I have been crazy busy because not only am I finishing up the year, but I’m also moving classrooms and wearing a new hat, which has taken up some time this week. My department chair is leaving us, and I was offered and accepted the position of English Department Chair. I have never been an administrator of any sort, and I always said I didn’t want to be, but I do want to do this job, and I want to do it well. As department chair, I will take on duties such as managing department issues (professional development, book orders and inventory, ensuring department tasks are done), facilitating meetings between my department members and parents (if necessary), serving as a liaison between administration and my department, planning and conducting department meetings, and probably a lot more stuff I don’t even realize I’ve taken on.

OK, I admit I am excited and honored. I didn’t think I would be in this position a few years ago. Initially, I wasn’t sure I wanted to do it because I wasn’t sure I could do it. Over the last few weeks, however, I have decided that as long as I approach this new position as I always tried to approach my job and I do the best job I can do, it will be fine. I actually am pretty good at the paperwork and bookkeeping elements of teaching. What will be new for me is being in a position of some authority.

I am looking forward to this new challenge. My school has offered me a great deal of freedom and support to grow as a teacher. In the four years I have been there, I have written an English Journal article, made a presentation at a statewide conference, offered professional development to my colleagues in the faculty, connected with educators all over the country and the world through blogs and wikis (with the support of my administration when many schools discourage blogging), and genuinely felt embraced and valued for my contributions in way I have never felt anywhere else. And it has only made me want to do more. I have done more in the four years I have been at my school because I have been able, through their support, to do more.

So… onward and upward to even more great things!

We’re truly in the home stretch now.  My own students have two more weeks of regular classes.  My children have just one more week.

Once again, poetry has been squished in at the end of the year.  I suppose this happens because poetry is generally short, and teachers can expose students to poetry (and do a pretty fair job) in a short period of time.  Still, if I teach 9th grade again next year, literature in general, and poetry in particular, is something I want to focus on improving.  In our curriculum, which emphasizes a grammar survey and composition, literature tends to get the short shrift, but with careful planning, it doesn’t have to.  I have to say I did a much better job this year than I have in the past with integrating more literature; however, room for improvement exists, and I will make it a focus next year if I teach the same course(s).

I had the opportunity to teach my colleague’s British literature class, which was a real treat for me.  Because I think the lesson is potentially useful, I will post it soon.  I taught Robert Browning’s dramatic monologue “Porphyria’s Lover.”

In true “what works with one class doesn’t work with all of them” fashion, I am trying an SAT introduction unit with my own tenth grade class that worked beautifully in a colleague’s tenth grade class when I took it over for a couple of weeks.  My perception is that my own class resents the instruction.  That could be because of the time of year, and perhaps they would resent whatever I cooked up for the final few weeks, but it puzzles and bothers me that something that was so well-received and appreciated by one class is borderline rejected by the other.  I suppose I need to think about this unit over the weekend.

I try to write these reflections on the weekend, but perhaps I can be forgiven for skipping Mother’s Day weekend.  This time of year is so busy for teachers, isn’t it?  Even as things are wrapping up, which should make me feel lighter, I seem to have more to do than ever.

I have already reflected a little bit on last week in a previous post.

One thing that’s been on my mind this week is that it is taking quite a while for Amazon to ship my copy of Write Beside Them.  I would like to have it by June, so I am starting to wonder if I shouldn’t cancel my order and order directly from Heinemann.  I was so excited to save money by ordering from Amazon, but it’s taking unusually long, and I feel I should apologize to folks who ordered the book through my referral.

As I write this, I find I am not feeling particularly reflective at all because I can barely remember what I taught last week.  I think I will chalk it up to the time of year.  I do know that utilizing backward design has made all the difference in my teaching this year.  At this time of year when students have one eye on the calendar (and so do their teachers) and the other out the window, I am pleased to say we’re still learning and thinking and writing and reading.

Each year gets better, but I’ll save that reflection for the end.