Graduation Time: The kids in the back row.

Yesterday, we had our Senior Honors Assembly.  340 of our graduates streamed into the gym clad in purple and black all in sync to the familiar beat of “Pomp and Circumstance.”

Although they don’t graduate until next week, this event always tugs at my heart strings because it is the first time we see them in their graduation gear and hear “the song.” At this ceremony, the kids are honored with academic pins, high GPA, perfect attendance, and CSF honors.  You have your usual suspects in the first two rows: kids that led clubs, filled AP classes, and are attending UC Berkeley, UCLA, and UC Davis in the fall.  

Then, you have have everyone else.

It always kind of surprises me when I don’t recognize some of the faces.  As a super involved teacher, I feel as if I am out and about often and immersed in campus culture. Yet, I don’t know many of these kids. Obviously, they are graduating so they did fulfill the requirements necessary, but who are they? What did they do?

This got me reminiscing back to my own high school experience: Kailua High, class of 87...Home of the Surfriders. I was a solid “B” student with the occasional “Cs” and “Ds” in math sprinkled in. “As” found their way onto my report cards in a few spots: I LOVED Theatre, English, and Journalism.  I even won scholarships for my work on the stage and my writing, including a full ride to Hawaii Pacific University as a Sterling Scholar in Theatre.

I was not a valedictorian, I took no AP classes, and I wasn’t in ASB. I didn’t attend football games and was not athletic (even with my 5’10” stature...bummer). I was good at a couple of things and that was it. This has led me to a career that fills my soul and allows me to feel like an "expert" at some level.

I talk to my students about this. It’s okay not to be good in everything; in fact, we don’t NEED you to be good in everything.  Society doesn’t need you to be good in everything.  We need you to be good in a few things and do them very, very well. I don’t really care if my cardiologist has read Hamlet (although that would be cool), but, I want them to be a science nerd. I don’t care of my accountant can dissect a frog, but I want numbers to be their first love. I don’t care if my favorite novelist can solve an algebraic equation...just keep dancing with words.

You get the point.

I love my high achieving kids and am actually in awe of many of them; their work ethic and time management skills alone will get them far in any field they pursue. How on earth can you get straight As over and over again in all subjects?

But, my sweet kiddos that didn’t “do it all” or are carrying a soft 3.3 GPA, find your one or two things you adore and immerse yourselves in them. Become an expert in them. Give that gift to yourself and the world.

And don’t you dare ever feel bad that you are not sitting in the first two rows.

 

New Principal?!?

Recently, our principal accepted a district office job and the hunt for a new leader is on: interviews commence this week. Our superintendent and school board asked staff (and students) what qualities they crave in a leader. Here are some that ended up on the list over and over again:

Visionary:  Someone who has the vision to select high impact concepts or strategies and develop them FULLY - not abandon when they detect any lack of “buy in” from staff.

Inspiring:  One that can inspire a campus culture of intellectual curiosity and professional development. THis leads to organic community building. If you can inspire your staff, you bring them together.

A Teacher-at-Heart:  Someone who was an AWESOME teacher, staying current in best practices, cutting edge pedagogy, and has a passion for both teaching and the energy of youth.

Interpersonal Communication Skills:  Funny, personable, knows his staff, friendly, attends outside events (drama, music, sports, dances, Writers’ Cafe etc.)

Confident:  Commands a room, students know who she/he is, strong sense of why they are and what they want to accomplish.

Tough: Makes some hard decisions that benefit the campus culture, the teachers, and, most importantly, our students.

Many, many more came up but these seemed to garner the most repetition.  I think it’s an incredibly difficult job that is probably best suited for a team of three human beings: the fun one, the business one, and the politician. It certainly is a post I would never want. I think it is impossible to make everyone happy (you never will) because you simply can’t be three places at once and see all the shows, all the games, and all the awards ceremonies.  

I do feel that my strongest principals (I have had four) are the ones that I truly feel have my back: they trust me, they support my ideas, and they take some risks with me.  Their door is always open and they don’t see staff as interruptions but rather as their community to serve.

I’ve asked to be on the interview panel for the new boss and hope to be granted a spot. The principal has the power to create a campus culture, for better or for worse, and once that is set into motion, it sticks for awhile.  As the old saying goes, “the only constant is change,” so let’s hope this is a good one.

The "Movie-Playin Teacher" - We all know the one.

I love movies. Film can be an invaluable educational tool...sparingly. “Are we watching a movie today?” “No.  Why do you ask?” I respond. “Because we watched movies in my last two classes today.”

Hmmmmm...so for four hours straight this boy has sat sedentary watching movies and, naturally, now has no energy to do anything else. When this happens too often, this is not responsible teaching. I’m not talking about the occasional film, full of power and insight that you can’t capture without dramatizing it, or the day you are under the weather but drag yourself into school as to not abandon your students with the risky sub.

I’m talking about habitual movie players: we all know the type. You hear the kids talk about them all. the. time. It starts with, “They are so cool cuz they play movies-we watched “The Little Mermaid” today.” But then...something changes. “They don’t like to talk to us.  They are lazy.  I’m bored in that class.” The students start to get it. They get that this teacher is checked out and is far more comfortable hiding in the dark. The powerful medium of film has become the escape route from connection.

Ironically, in AP Literature we are closing out the year with a first ever Literary Film Appreciation Unit; we are watching three films in four and a half weeks: “The Secret Life of Bees,” “Othello, and “The Handmaid’s Tale.” The kids research the novel and film, share these notes via a mini-seminar on these elements, and then watch the first half of the movie. Next class, we continue the film as they take notes on both elements of film and the literary concepts we have worked on all year.  After the film, we discuss the “So what?” and conclude with a quickwrite. This has been a very cool way to end the year by “reading” three more novels, cinematically. These scholars have worked incredibly hard all year, begging for movies at times. (They did get to see “Frankenstein” in February and some scenes from “Hamlet,” but that was it.) This has been a fulfilling unit to close on and a good example of how film can ignite a class rather than drain it.

It’s funny that in a screen-obsessed world, kids actually get tired of looking at one. They crave positive attention and human interaction. They need to feel as if they are doing something, creating something, engaging with something. These are the activities that make us feel alive: teachers included. You all know the lift we get when a student says something and we know a concept has clicked; we know we have sparked something that will burn for awhile...that doesn’t happen after movie #10.  

I like to think of our students at the customers, and we are here to serve them. They need to get their “money’s worth” each and everyday. On the days I am tired, I slurp up a 3rd cup of coffee and think of my own childrens’ teachers, working tirelessly every day to elevate my kids. I would be so bummed out if they sat and watched movies three times a week all year long.

Like anything good in life: wine, pizza, Twix bars...we must use moderation. Make the movies quality and the exception rather than the rule.  Make them meaningful and break them down in a way where the kids are talking, thinking, writing, and digesting the major concepts. Make the intent genuine, use sparingly, and you won’t wear the title of the “movie-playin’ teacher”!

Timer: With or Without You?

Oh, the Ipad timer.  How do I love thee?  In the land of 2 hour blocks (my current schedule), time becomes as existential as a Camus novel.  Minutes fall away, drag on, or get lost in sometimes a mushy second-hand controlled mess.

Enter the Ipad timer...or any timer for that matter...the cute egg shaped one from the kitchen supply store works, too. There is something magical about having a finite amount of time to do something in. Whether it is a 2 minute yoga stretch or a 7 1/2 minute quick write, the productivity of a teenager rises exponentially when a time limit is placed upon them.  Check out the difference:

SCENARIO #1 (NO TIMER):

Discussion ensues about said topic (enter curriculum here).

Teacher: I would now like you to do a quickwrite that expresses the three most important aspects of today's discussion. Let me know when you are finished.

Kid A gets up to get a tissue, stops by cute guy's desk, chats, goes back to own desk, takes tangerine gooey lip gloss out, applies, opens binder, sees note from friend, smiles, puts it away, finally finds paper, takes it out, pulls pencil out of case, it's somewhat dull, she sharpens it, this requires her to walk by cute guy's desk AGAIN...

Teacher: (6 minutes have passed) how are we doing?

Kid A:  Really?!? I haven't even started it yet!  OMG!

SCENARIO #2 (TIMER PROJECTED ON WALL):

Same assignment…

Teacher:  You have 7 1/2 minutes starting NOW! Go!

Presses start on timer...

Kid A gets up to get a tissue, peeks at timer (inner thoughts: oh crap 1 minute has passed).  Walks by cute guy's desk, he actually stops her talking and points at the timer and shrugs his shoulders (in a super cute way).

"Whatever!"  she thinks.

Kid A slumps back to her desk, skips lip gloss and goes straight to binder, unclicks, pulls paper out and actually GETS STARTED 3 MINUTES IN.  Woo hoo!

Teacher: how are we doing?

Kid A:  Really?!?  I just barely started (I had to be realistic, right?)

Anyway, for some reason the timer can get a little more work out of your struggling kids and LOTS of work out of your academically minded scholars.  It's clean, straightforward and a constant reminder that we have a task at hand.  It doesn’t mean you won’t give more time when you check in at the end, but it frames the time given in a very real, digitalized  way.  

After 13 years teaching high school English, I have found that the small addition of the timer to any level of class (from AP/Honors to remedial or Special Ed) has an immediate dramatic effect on production of work and control of chaos.

Some chaos is good, but it’s nice to give it a time limit.

Mean Girls: Have I failed them?

Nothing quite sobers you up than looking at a screen shot of a Twitter fight between some of your students...in this case, high school girls.

Wow. The sweet, respectful young scholars that sit before me are obviously not the owners of this Twitter account.  The vitriol spewed forth is nothing we have learned in class, yet if feels very well studied and superbly executed.  It was brutal.  I actually cannot repeat any of it in my my blog for fear of an indecency flag.

Expletives aside, it was just simply mean.  It was mean and ugly and gross. And it stayed with me all night. The four girls involved were all brought into the APs office and given the appropriate discipline, but although necessary, I don’t think it will stop the problem.

Ironically, these girls are all in my Speech Communications course, where our entire emphasis of the class is on...well...communicating. We also work extensively on conflict resolution. I guess we need a little more work in this department.  Maybe that is why I took it so hard. The reality of teaching is, you can work all year with a kid and really feel as if you are making progress and then, in true teenage fashion, they will make a really, really bad decision.

Here is where the public opinion of teachers really gets me. The label “bad teacher” is thrown around like salt at McDonalds...too much. What non-educators fail to realize is that our clientele is a bunch of kids and kids are unpredictable. They are at a time in their lives where they are navigating their way from childhood to adulthood and along with that, bad decisions become the norm. We try everyday to steer them in the right direction...go towards the light, children! But, sometimes the darkness prevails...in the form of cute boy, snapchat, or just plain vanity.

Today, we will circle up, play some soft music, check our phones into the back of the room, make eye contact, and attempt some verbal appreciations to open class. It could be a time of healing or a complete disaster, as my teacher buddies well know. Our world is an unpredictable one...but, we keep trying, we keep fighting, because these kids - challenges aside - are well worth it.

My Student's Parents Speak Spanish...and...

Last night I presented the Board Award in English to an incredible young scholar.  This boy has a 97% in AP Literature, has missed only one assignment out of 76 this semester, and is heading to UC Berkeley in the fall.  

HIs parents speak Spanish.

His mother and father, beaming with pride, each shook my hand, smiled and nodded their heads profusely.  My student says, “They only speak Spanish.”  

As a public school teacher in California, this is no shocker but this doesn’t make it any less incredible.

This top scholar of English, mastering the likes of Sylvia Plath, Samuel Taylor Coleridge, and Mary Shelley has been raised in a Spanish speaking home.  Not only did he have to learn English, he then rose through the ranks to reach the highest levels of English literature analysis.  This just touches me so deeply.

His parents, were beaming with pride:  you really felt the love even if they couldn’t verbally express it to me.  I started to think about this powerful learning tool:  love.

Love is what gave my student the boost to succeed in school.  His father works on a dairy and mother babysits a few days a week; this family did not have the money to send him to prep schools, or SAT tutorials, but they had love and that made all the difference.

What does that mean to us in the classroom?  How does the old saying go?  “Students need to know that you care before they care what you know.”  Love.  We need to love them. It’s our only chance.  It doesn’t mean that you forego expectations, deadlines, and consequences but it does mean the constant reminder that you are doing this all out of love. I care about you and that means I work hard and you work hard.  If I didn’t care, here is a movie and leave me alone.

If you ever poll your students about their favorite teachers, it’s usually a no-brainer. They love the ones that care.  They love the ones that know their name.  They love the ones that ask them how their day is going or follow up on the baseball game yesterday.  They love the ones that have an engaging lesson planned everyday. They love the ones that establish respectful order in their class. They love the ones that love them.  

I’m excited to watch my student rise through the ranks of academe. He will no doubt be an asset to UC Berkeley: his keen intellect paired with his flawless bilingualism is a slam dunk for success.  

But, I will miss him because...I love him.

Teachers have friends? Teachers NEED friends!

As much as we love the kids...teachers need friends, adult friends.  I have taught on four different campuses and will tell you point blank, I would not have survived for 13 years without my colleagues turned friends.

No one understands you like a fellow teacher: they just “get it.”  And, if you don’t tap into this free therapy, life in the classroom becomes tough.  My classroom phone rang the other day and I answer to the melodic tones of our art teacher.  She wants to know if we were to (hypothetically) put a girl band together, which iconic 80s group could we emulate?  Bananarama in overalls, the punky-pop of the Go-gos, or the seductive stare of Susanna Hoffs in the the Bangles.  This was a very serious conversation.  Then, of course, we had to cast the group using our fabulous females in the English, Science, and Math departments.  It took about four minutes, the kids had no idea what I was talking about but did witness me cracking up and returning the receiver to the wall with a huge grin.  “I love my job; let’s get back to work!”

Spending time together is a luxury because it is the one thing teachers DO NOT HAVE.  Lunch is 45 minutes and usually eaten up by club meetings or make-up work.  After school, teachers are cleaning up today, prepping for tomorrow, or, if lucky, grading (that usually needs to happen at home).  However, dragging yourself away from these duties for 10-20 minutes can be so invigorating.

Yesterday, I had three soft cookies left in a plastic container - You know the ones.  Soft white flour, refined sugar, cake-like ooie gooies with a thick coat of processed pink frosting frozen in currents of sweetness...rainbow jimmies surfing the sugar wave.  I stood up, left my messy desk and walked across the hall ambushing my BFFs in the English department.  We sat for 20 glorious minutes, nibbling our naughty snack, and breaking down the day:  who would be our new principal next year, what kids surprised us that day (both good and bad), and how are we going to end the year with a bang when we are t.i.r.e.d.

Well, I didn’t get all of my piles sifted through, and I was little late getting home to my own kids, but the 20 minutes with my pals across the hall made me feel not so alone in this insane profession. Ironically, we are never alone...but you know what I mean.

So, in conclusion, create those girl bands, eat those cookies, and talk and laugh with your colleagues.  We need to fill up so we may give hard each and every day.

Take their phones away?

Two days last week, all of my students (and myself) have parked our cell phones...and it’s been SOOOOOOOO relaxing.

A cacophony of desperate pleas filled the room:  “That’s evil, Mrs. Jones,”  “that’s unconstitutional,” “I’m going to die,” and my personal favorite:  “I just started texting a boy I like!”

Yes, we were all in torture as we slid our phones into the individualized pockets of the closet shoe organizers I had bought at Walmart.  What Snapchats would we miss...forever evading our speedy screen shot trigger finger?  What tweets would...tweet on by? What cute boy or girl would be frozen for two hours awaiting the three light gray bubbles of the “text back”?  We were about to find out…

My school schedule is blocked into two hour classes, three times a day. It’s a long chunk of time to focus teen energy...sometimes made longer by cell phones. I know, I know, we love our phones and, as educators, many of us rely on them as an educational tool. The kids can research, play fun quiz games like “Kahoot it,” and even finish up an essay draft on a Google doc and share it with us for editing. The phones have infinite capabilities; HOWEVER, even with my honors kids in AP Literature, I can attest that most phone usage is tied up in social media...and I would have been the same way in the 80s. Unfortunately or fortunately, these devices just did not exist. My tool of distraction was the origami note made from lined paper with my best friends code name on the outside.  Getting the note in her hand was a whole other level of stealth.

So, we parked our phones for the entire two hours.  My potential commencement speakers enjoyed captive audiences in Speech class with beautifully written feedback forms from everyone in class. My AP Lit kids took a mock exam, writing three essays in two hours minus the vibration of their phone notifications.

Speaking of vibrations, the phone parking is next to my desk in the back of the room.  As I was evaluating speeches and proctoring exams yesterday, I marvelled at HOW MANY TIMES THESE PHONES WERE BUZZING.  I think a fair guesstimate would be hundreds!  Hundreds of times per hour, these kids are distracted and pulled from whatever we are trying to accomplish in class. Even your most mature kid with the best handle on their impulse control is going to struggle to pay attention and not be seduced by the buzzzzzzzzzzzz…

I don’t really know where I’m going with this.  Like most things in my life, I feel like moderation is the key to happiness.  So, some days we will be tweeting, taking pictures, and screen chatting in “Todays Meet” and other days we will have to awkwardly stare into each others’ eyes with unoccupied hands at our sides.  

CAN WE DO IT?