Time to Nap.

I was so close to losing it with a student today. I felt the anger rise up to my face and I got all red and hot. Why? While his classmates were giving speeches, he had his phone out. He saw me see him with his phone. He put his phone away and denied he even has a phone when I told him I needed to bag and tag it. What scared me was how angry I became simply because a student was being defiant. This was the first time I had to deal with a directly defiant student and I just felt so flustered. My goal was not to win. My goal in dealing with defiant students in the future is not to fight until I win. It seemed pointless, but I still felt like I needed to make a point.

To top it off, though, this is a student who has been doing very little work in the classroom. It's scary to think how easy it would be to give up and let him fail with no intervention. I'm ready to take a nap though - I had a great day and this one situation just wore me out. It's nice to know this is a dilemma veteran teachers face too. I think they just know how to not let it follow them home better.

My First Week

So how'd it go with my first week full-time? Great! I'm still adjusting to this whole waking up and not working evenings thing. I still don't know what to do when my alarm goes off early in the morning. The teaching part has been going well though. I still have a bit of the "WHAT AM I DOING?" air to my teaching, but it's slowly beginning to disappear with every time I get up in front of the classroom. I am beginning to become more attune to the environment of the classroom: task management, behavior management, individual instruction time with each student, differentiating instruction to tailor to students' needs. It's a process, but I am ecstatic that I am beginning to get a sense of myself as a teacher.

BEGINNING is the key though. I still have a long way to go, but I can't consider myself great after one week.

Vocabulary

I am always a bit torn when it comes to direct vocabulary instruction. For the most part, it seems so pointless and dull. Here: look up this word and use it in a sentence. Now it's committed to your memory forever. These words they have to look up seem to be esoteric and antiquated. Is it necessary to learn words that have been basically purged from our spoken and modern written language? So many paradoxes rise for me when I think about it - especially since I am a word-lover who gets a thrill over finding a word I have not even heard before.

I have to say, though, that the question about vocabulary instruction is answered when a student has difficulty answering a question in an assignment due to not knowing a word. That's it. Debate over. Yes, it's needed. The way to do it, though, is a good question. I can't tell if the worksheets currently used in class have made as much progress as possible as several students were unable to recall vocabulary words from previous worksheets.

I think the way to do it is to invite discovery from students, instead of assigning discovery to them. This is much easier for me to say than to actually make into a real lesson; however, I think most people have a natural curiosity to know unknown words (unless too many are presented in a row or the reading is too complicated, but that is just considered frustration). I think there's a way to tap into this, but it will just be something I will consider for the moment.

Digital Literacy and Assessment

Something that I think about sometimes is the way to assess use of digital literacy. We stress its use and hey, I like it a lot too, but how do you assess something that can go in so many ways? I suppose this is always the issue with open-ended assessment, but if a student makes a really, really terrible video with awful audio quality and abysmal video quality, should we give them the same grade as another group with a cleaner presentation if they hit all the requirements? I suppose it really depends upon what you are grading. If it's a film production course, grade on product quality. If it's not, don't. However, students should be aware that if their product is so incomprehensible, that I can't pick out what I'm supposed to be grading, that I can't give them the same grade, even if they really did include the requirements.

Another issue that comes up is in-class research for projects. Since there is such a digital divide in schools, most teachers will need to have in-class computer time for students to do research and work on products. How do you bolster efficiency there? When I went to Park Center yesterday, the students were researching poets, but they were doing it somewhat aimlessly. Some were on Facebook. Some were on YouTube, but I don't believe blocking these websites will help. I don't know if every second of every classroom needs to be spent working, but wasted class time hurts my teacher soul a bit.

LINK: http://www.chompchomp.com - I've been struggling with how to make grammar instruction slightly interesting, because there's not much you can do other than direct instruction and practices. Here's at least a humorous approach to grammar exercises.

NEW LITERACIES!

It feels pretty funny to read about new litearcies in an academic context, because the researchers are describing my teenage life: I was always playing around with Photoshop, reading fanfiction (yikes! embarrassing!) and joining forums for things I liked to discuss with other people the things I liked. It was never something I thought about on a metacognitive level - it was just something I did to naturally entertain myself and dive into my interests.

I like new literacies because I am comfortable with them. It seems to be a natural way to teach, because it is the natural way I explore new ideas. If I am curious about a time period, I will watch videos about and from that time period (you know, barring the medieval era). If I am interested in a book, I go to Amazon to read what other people think about a book or watch interpretations of scenes on YouTube. I like to interpret the way music videos change the text of music and how comments on videos or newspaper articles shape the meanings of texts.

HOWEVER! I see two problems with new literacies that I'm sure can be solved in a think tank. First of all, there is a bit of a danger in publishing and interacting on the world wide web (and I know not everything has to be published on the Internet). I know I'm sounding a bit like Mom here, but students need to be taught the way to publish and be safe. My goodness, there's still some things I published as a nine-year-old online because I used my full name.

Second of all, there's the problem with the participation gap. Not everyone has access to the Internet at home, or even stable access at their schools. Some schools do not have enough computers for stable access for each student, much less access to audio or video equipment or editing software. It's good for students, but there are drawbacks we must consider.

LINK OF THE WEEK: http://savedelete.com/10-best-and-free-online-video-editing-software.html

Here are ten links to video editing software for different types of videos from mashups to short films. These videos are usually saved in the cloud so that students can work on them in both the class and at home. This also helps with the lack of access a school may have to video editing software and equipment, because this is editing software and students can create mashups from online videos. Maybe they'll even go viral!

Conferences and Choice

Ahh, middle school. When I was in 8th grade, my English teacher assigned us a research project: pick a president. Any president. Research his life. I chose Richard Nixon because I had no idea what that whole scandal thing was about.

For some reason I cannot figure out to this day, my teacher denied my proposal. He was, as far as I could tell, a president of the United States. Why did it get knocked down? Was he too controversial? I have no clue; I settled for Jimmy Carter instead, which other than the history of peanut farming, was not very interesting. I had a prescribed way to organize this paper (early life, presidency, post-presidency) and do the research (notecards). I understand students need to learn how to write in certain genres, but is there a better way to do this?

Doing the reading this week brought me to this idea. Why can't we put more support into our students' choices for writing topics? I think we can scaffold this idea and then bring their ideas together through peer and teacher conferencing. Not only does this allow the student to own his or her writing more, but it gives students answers if their topic is "too controversial" or not well situated for the paper prompt. This also gives the students the opportunity to write about controversial issues in an objective and appropriate way. If you just tell them no, they will have that looming over their heads. Give students respect.

Finally, I wanted to post a question to my fellow English teachers. The issue about grading still doesn't sit well with me. Yes, the Dornan text talked about it, but it basically said "Grades shouldn't matter." That's nice, but that's not really the reality of our future teaching jobs, unless we are teaching a night class on creative writing. What are your opinions about grading? I have such difficulty applying an arbitrary grade to a piece of fluid work, but, in the end, I have to.

LINK OF THE WEEK: ProCon.org - If your students are writing a speech, argumentative paper, learning about multiple perspectives, or are just very opinionated students, here's a great website that has a variety of pro and con arguments for many controversial topics. This resource is also useful for creating a database of controversial topics to explore. The Teacher's Corner has ideas for lesson plans, lists for resources on critical thinking and examples of how other schools are using the website.

Feeling a Little Inadequate Here.

Yikes, okay, I picked up a lot of good teaching tidbits this week, but I'm feeling inadequate in my grammar knowledge right now. Appositives? Parallel structues? Participial phrases? Okay, I get the idea on most of these (except appositives. Please, someone explain those to me) but it's no wonder that traditional grammar education is met with groans, moans and little results (that was not parallel structure, BY THE WAY). I guess this brings up the question, though, is how important is it for students to be cognizant of the grammar they are using? For example, I might be using appositives, but does not knowing if I'm using this grammar matter? Can I still be a good writer if I can't articulate what I'm doing?

The other part of this week's reading that stuck with me is the idea of the writer's toolbox. I can see myself teaching the tools used in the article and adding more. I do want to add, though, that the toolbox method can work for a lot more than just writing. For example, I have a great interest in teaching film production. Film production is a little like a visual form of writing, but these tools can easily transfer to the pre-production (and even production and post-production) processes. When reading, everyone uses tools to look more deeply into texts. When speaking, people use tools to convey their messages better. Acting, too, I'm sure has this. Maybe even baseball. Everything can have a tool chest, especially in Language Arts.

Website: The Secondary Language Arts Educator's Toolbox Do you think the toolbox article was too based in middle school? Do you hate middle school? Do your students hate to draw little symbols? Read this article (and click next at the bottom, because the good stuff isn't on the first page!) and learn how to mature up your toolbox if that's your thing.