365

March brings the Slice of Life Story Challenge sponsored by the Two Writing Teachers blog and website. It was in response to this challenge last year that I began posting to my blog every day, and tomorrow begins my second year of doing so.

This time around I asked my writing group members to try the March challenge, too, and I can't wait to read what they write and see what they think of the experience. Anyone else out there who is interested in participating, the premise is simple: write about an event in your day and post it to your blog. (No blog? Start one! It's easy.) Then link your post to the TWT website every day in March.

They have drawings for nice prizes at the end, but the coolest thing about the challenge is that you get a built-in audience. Slicers try to read and reply to a few of the other writers every day. Last year, I was surprised at how powerful the experience of receiving responses to my writing from people I didn't know was, and it was amazing how quickly a community of writers grew.

Now it's a Party

Yeah, something got broken.

Filed under the category of man-what-a-bummer:

Purchased new car on Tuesday, knocked passenger side mirror to pieces on Saturday. Blame it on the parking garage, but don't I feel like an idiot?  I've been thinking all week that new cars are nice, but a certain sense of ownership and familiarity is definitely missing. Unfortunately, this little mishap hasn't helped with that; now I just feel like I'm driving somebody else's broken car. Maybe I'll go wipe muddy foot prints on the floor mats or something.

What's in a Name?

The recent snow days out of school gave my students some fresh memoir material. There are many tales of igloos, snow forts, and shoveling misadventures. As they've been working toward a final draft, we've done some mini-lessons on the qualities of an effective memoir. First, they worked in small groups to brainstorm improvements for a rough draft that was in obvious need of expansion. Then we turned that list around. So, if the title of the first piece was boring, then we agreed that a memoir needs a great title. Since the lead didn't grab them, they understood that for a successful piece, the lead should be strong, and so on. I'll use this same checklist for both their self-evaluation and my own assessment of their final drafts.

We're getting close to finishing, and a student who wants the best grade for the minimum effort approached me today waving her two page memoir. She's a talented writer who always takes pains to let me know she hates the assignment, whatever it might be. "Is this good enough for an A?" she asked me.

"Do you think it's good?" I replied.

"I don't know. I can never tell about my own writing," she told me.

"That's a shame," I said, "since you're the only one you can always count on to read what you've written. Let's work on that. How about this title? The Igloo? Does it grab you?"

"Not really," she said, "but why does it have to? JK Rowling's books have boring titles. They're always Harry Potter and the something." She thought a moment. 'Like Deathly Hallows. That's boring. But the books are the best."

"Deathly Hallows is not boring," I argued. "Far from it. Both death and hallow are very engaging ideas." She shrugged. "Go brainstorm three more titles for your piece," I directed her. "Then come back."

A few minutes later, she returned with these titles: The Great Igloo, The Snowy Night, and The First Night of Snow. I rolled my eyes and told her to keep working. Meanwhile, the author of another igloo story had been listening intently to our exchange. He handed me his piece with some concern and asked for ideas. I mentioned that the verb "dug" and his comparison to a foxhole stood out for me. A few minutes later he had these: Frozen Foxhole and I Know What You Dug Last Winter.

Now that's the spirit!

Not Just a Job

It's always a flag when you're happy if a student happens to be absent, but what a relief to be able to teach your class without the distractions that certain kids regularly create. Such a situation illustrates the struggle that teachers face to balance the good of the group against the good of the individual.

As contrary as it might sound, I generally appreciate the disruptive student because she will not allow me to ignore her, and by so doing to fail her. She is usually not the only student who is unengaged by my class or lesson, and she does me the courtesy of letting me know. Even so, in the midst of working through all the issues involved, it's hard not to get frustrated and a be little resentful at times-- after all, not many of us became teachers in order to deal with contrary children. But many of us did become teachers to make a difference by reaching kids, and it's silly to think it should be easy.

Law and Order

I teach in a state where each morning we have a minute of silence mandated by law following the equally mandatory Pledge of Allegiance. Over the years, I've found most students to be pretty compliant to both requirements. Ours is a very international community, but even kids who are foreign citizens stand respectfully, and some of them even recite the pledge. If ever there's a problem, it's with that minute of silence-- sixty seconds of stillness can be quite a challenge for certain eleven-year-olds.

A couple of weeks ago, I was shushing one of the usual culprits, when he piped up to ask why we even have such a thing. (Mind you, he's been exposed to this routine since kindergarten. Did the question really only occur to him now?) "It's a state law," I told him when the minute had ended. "So, technically? Every time I ask you to be quiet during it, you're in violation of the law."

"What? Are they going to arrest me?" he asked. A couple of the other kids snickered.

I shrugged. "You could probably get a fine or something. I'm not really sure. Should we ask the resource officer?" I looked around the room at eleven suddenly wide-eyed children, and laughed. "I'm just telling you that the minute of silence wasn't my idea. By law, we're supposed to be quiet."

We moved on to whatever we were doing next, and I forgot about the whole thing until today. A student in another class came to my desk looking like his business was very urgent. "Is it true that you threatened to call the police on your homeroom if they wouldn't be quiet?"

Now that's how rumors get started.

Professional Courtesy

A couple of kids poked their heads in my door right after school. "Can we make some copies?" one of them asked. Kids don't ordinarily need to copy things at our school, so I asked them what was up. It turned out that another teacher, not on my team, had given out packets of information about a big field trip. One of the students had hers, but the other did not; they wanted to know if I would make a copy for her. I wondered if they had asked their teacher for another packet, and they told me that any student who lost the information would be penalized with a lunch detention before receiving the replacement. The single copy that they had in their possession had already been paid for in precious lunch time, and that student was hoping to spare her friend a similar fate.

I understand that the teacher who imposes it is trying to instill a sense of responsibility and consequences in the students, but I think that such a penalty for losing paperwork is dumb and overly-punitive. Even so, I hesitated when asked to make the copies. The students wheedled and begged and swore that they would never tell the other teacher. (Had they visions of me, stealthily entering the office, checking to see that the coast is clear, and surreptitiously feeding the papers into the machine, all the while looking over my shoulder for fear of my draconian co-worker?) In the end, I held my ground, though, unwilling to unilaterally undermine the professional judgment of a colleague.

I think they understood, but I'm still not sure I did the right thing.

Desks in Rows

A colleague stopped by my room to ask a question today. "Whoa!" she said, "What's going on in here?" She was reacting to the way the furniture in my classroom was arranged. Our school was built in the early 70's, and I know I have some of the original furniture in my room: heavy chairs made out of chromed steel with some sort of ceramic seats and backs (all in the harvest palette of the time, too-- gold, brown, rust, and red) and trapezoid-shaped tables that I push into hexagons most of the time.

My room is big but not huge, and I want a central space where the kids can sit on the floor in a circle, but I also want a place where they can meet in small groups, so we push the furniture around to accommodate those things. When we have class meetings, I arrange the tables in a big parallelogram with an open space in the center, and thirty of us sit around the perimeter. If I have a meeting, I move them into a conference table shape. It hardly takes a minute, and rearranging the room is stimulating and engaging for the students.

Tomorrow, the counselor is coming in to do academic planning and 7th grade scheduling. She wants to use the projector and needs the kids to be able to see the screen and copy what's there. When we were planning the activity last week, it occurred to me that this would be an opportunity for me to arrange my room in a configuration it's seldom seen: rows facing forward.

When the kids left today for PE and electives, I moved the furniture to prepare for tomorrow. Later I sat at my desk, off to the side, and visualized all the tables turned 90 degrees to face me, students silently working, heads down, as I presided over the class ensconced behind the big desk. It was a scene from my childhood, and there was something comforting and nostalgic about the vision, but it made me giggle, too, because it was sooooo not us.