Wordless

The start of a new quarter brings a new reading class for me. At our school, sixth grade reading is delivered in the content area one discipline at a time, and on my team that means I teach four rounds of memoir every year. For the most part, I really like it: enough time passes in between lessons that I don't feel as if I'm teaching the same thing over and over, but I also have the opportunity to revise and tweak within months rather than years. Plus, as I've written before, every class can be different because individual students react differently to the same material, and in language arts, that's not a problem.

Take today, for example. My students were creating reading strategies posters. They had to read the descriptions of visualize, analyze, evaluate, connect, self-monitor, recall, infer, or question and illustrate the concept without using words. Then they do a gallery walk to "read" the other posters.

Over the last fourteen quarters, I've seen a lot of ways to communicate these ideas, some more effective than others. This morning I took a look at the product two boys were collaborating on. It was a two panel illustration. "He's reading a book," I said pointing to the first side. My students nodded happily. "But I can't tell what he's doing over there," I gestured to the right side of the page.

"He's folding shirts!" one of the boys told me.

I furrowed my brow a moment and studied the poster, waiting for enlightenment. "Is the book about folding shirts?" I asked slowly.

"Yes!" they were excited to confirm my guess.

"Then it's 'Recall', right?" I checked.

"Yeah!" They nodded. "He has a beard in the second picture to show that time has passed!"

What's Up Doc?

You know you have a grave set of documentary shorts when the most uplifting of the five is the one about Ebola.

The Benefit of Experience

I've often said that the two careers I chose, cooking and teaching, don't always get the respect they deserve, because everyone eats and everyone went to school, so everyone thinks they can do either job. I'll also repeat the story a colleague once told me about her ex-husband who couldn't imagine why she was tired at the end of the school day. "All you do is sit at your desk and say, 'You may begin.' What's so hard about that?" he asked her.

I guess it's one thing when people outside the profession think the job is easy, but recently a couple of teachers in our school seem to discount the value of experience in the field. They are career switchers who have implied in conversation that their private sector time has prepared them just as completely to teach as someone else's time actually spent in the classroom.

Maybe, but here's at least one observation they might find valuable:

Middle school kids are like magpies; they often can't resist shiny objects. Ergo, don't use push pins on bulletin boards in the hallway; they will be stolen.

Conflict

"What are the two main types of conflict?" I asked in every class today.

Oh, it should have been review, but when I posed the question I got a lot of blank stares. Still, there are many brave souls who are willing to make an educated guess, and I commend them.

"Serious and mild?" surmised one student.

"Verbal and physical?" hypothesised another.

"Bullies and friends?" conjectured someone else.

At last I saw the hand of a new-ish student, recently moved to our district from Hawaii. "Internal and external," he proclaimed confidently.

"Great!" I praised him. 'And do you happen to know the three types of external conflict?"

"Hitting, punching, and kicking?" he guessed.

No worries, friends, because by the end of the lesson the vast majority of students knew that conflict generally comes in four flavors: character vs self (which is internal), character vs character, character vs. society, and character vs environment or nature (all three of which are external).

However, at the end of the day, I was sequestered in a meeting in a classroom at the front of the building. When the final bell rang, I was distracted by the parade of students I saw through the window. There was a lot of energy as they joyously exited the building for the weekend, but as I watched I was appalled to see Mr. Hawaii run up to another student, smack her upside the head, and run off.

I wrote it up, but when I told my friend Mary the whole story starting with his knowledge and subsequent misinformation of conflict she shook her head at me.

"Foreshadowing!" she laughed. "Seriously? You didn't see that coming?"

While it Lasts

One day over our snowcation last week, Heidi and I went to a mall that is a little farther than we usually venture outside of town. There was still a lot of snow on the ground, and we took advantage of the fact that we needed to make a return to walk around the mall and get some extra steps in. "Let's explore every corner of Tysons!" I said, because even though it was opened in 1968, it has been renovated and expanded several times in the last 47 years.

Back when I was a kid, Tysons Corner was considered the newest and coolest place to shop. My glamorous cousin, Sandy, was a buyer for Woodward and Lothrop, and she she was based out of their flagship store that anchored the mall. When we were in town visiting, one afternoon was always set aside to meet Sandy somewhere fun for lunch. She would glide in elegantly and then sit right down and dig in to pizza or burgers with us.

I'd forgotten those days until we turned down a little dogleg into a section of the mall I haven't been to in a loooooong time. As we swooped past Saks and made a U-turn to return to the main shopping area, I skidded to a stop and gasped. "That pizza place!" I pointed. "We met Sandy there for lunch!" I stood and stared for a moment, thinking back to a Tysons Corner that no longer exists. Where was the Farrell's Old-Fashioned Ice Cream Parlor? Woodys? Hechts? Woolworths? The Hot Shoppe?

"I can't believe that place is still open!" I said with a lingering look over my shoulder as we continued on our way.

Less than a week later, I read the following bulletin on my foodie news feed:

Luciano Italian Pizza Has Closed in Tysons Corner. After 42+ years serving our friends and family at this location we had reached the end of our leasing agreement. We cherish the many fond memories we have been a part of over the years.

On Me

The first Wednesday of the month in our school district is reserved for countywide content area meetings, and so over the years I have attended roughly 175 middle school language arts gatherings. In an honest attempt to make the time valuable for the teachers who are required to attend, the department has tried many formats, but personally, I have forgotten most of the meetings.

I think that may be inevitable, but not necessarily negative, perhaps, in the way that although I don't really remember my own sixth grade year I continue to confidently teach legions of sixth graders. I'm pretty sure that whether they recall the specifics or not, our time together is well-spent because what I try to instill in them before they leave me is a desire to learn, the belief that they can, and a skill set they may use to do so.

Do our countywide meetings do the same for us? Not always, but today mine did. I attended a presentation by a Teacher Consultant from our local chapter of the National Writing Project. He led us through a session where we wrote poetry, outlined an opinion essay, and learned how to guide our students to collaborate to create standards-based rubrics that they can use to assess their own writing. It was awesome!

Ten years ago, I attended the Writing Project five-week summer institute, and it revitalized and refocused my teaching practice dramatically. My take away today? I need another such re-energizing experience.

Oh, and here's the zero draft of my poem, written in the style of Kwame Alexander in Crossover:

With my knees in the dirt

         WEEDING and SEEDing

                     mulching and feeding

                                       

Bees BUZZ and worms w        e

                                         i     l

                                          g g

                                           

Shoots !   green and grOW

            T

            U

            O

            R

            P

            S

SUN shines on long V      I      N     E      S

Fertilizing flowers to fruit

O! How my garden grows

Please, Sir, I Want Some More

It is part of our daily routine in homeroom to stamp reading logs in order to ensure that students are filling them out daily even though they are due weekly. So, at the end of November I bought a blue ink pad to go with my snowflake stamp.  "We're going to use this every day until we have a snow day," I declared.

"What if we never have one?" somebody asked.

"Then I'll be stamping blue snowflakes in June!" I answered.

This morning on our first day back after the eleven day blizzard break,  I held up the box with all the stamps in it. "What'll it be?" I asked. "Those snowflakes were pretty effective! Want some more?"

Ten students looked at me silently. I couldn't tell if they were tired or snow-shocked. "I'll tell you what," I said. "Why don't you choose? When I come around you can pick a snowflake or a yellow jacket, our school mascot."

It was snowflakes all around, friends.