Let it be written, let it be done

I walked outside today, felt the warmth of the sun on my face, looked up and said, "Thank you for this moment. It's nice to see you again. It's been a long time since I've felt your light."

Here in Southeastern Michigan we've had a couple warm days since Spring began, but on those days I've either been dealing with weather/pressure related headaches or I've been stuck inside doing school work.Today was the first warm day I could actually go out and enjoy.

I found out earlier this week that the proposal I wrote for the NCTE convention in November with Kevin English, Amy Watkins, Lindsay Grady, and Dave Stuart was accepted. Our session is called Doing More Isn't Doing Better: How to be an English Teacher and Have a Life. Truth be told, I had an inkling of an idea for this session a few years ago but I was really hoping someone else would come up with this idea and present about this topic because I wanted some answers. Turns out, if you want something done you've gotta do it yourself. So just like Kevin and I took a stance this year that Students CAN Write and learned as we went, so too will we learn as we go about How to be an English Teacher and Have a Life.

I'm starting today. By sitting in the sun, feeling its warmth, and not feeling guilty about all those writing assignments I need to grade and lessons I need to plan right now. I'm choosing to have a life and to be present in this moment rather than worrying about everything that is unfinished. There is ALWAYS something that is unfinished when you're a teacher. And so, my mantra for the 2015-2016 school year and the rest of this school year will be: doing more isn't doing better.

Let it be written, let it be done.

Advocating for students should not mean silencing teachers

I've only just recently become aware of the controversy surrounding former CNN news anchor Campbell Brown and her mission to end teacher tenure, but you can be sure I'm getting myself up to speed after her appearance on the Colbert Report. 

The Colbert Report
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Once again, teachers are receiving the brunt of the media's ire as the conversation revolves around teachers, yet we are not given a seat at the table. So educators must resort to writing tweets and blog posts (sometimes anonymously for fear of their jobs) because no one in the media is inviting us on shows like the Colbert Report to rebut the arguments of non-educators who think they know the best way to educate children. Who needs undergraduate and graduate degrees in education along with years of classroom experience when you have corporate backers with lots of money to tell us how to educate children, am I right?

So since I nor any other teachers for that matter have been invited to the debate that I'm supposedly trying to silence, I must write my rebuttals here on this blog.

Brown stated that 91% of teachers in New York were rated either effective or highly effective despite the fact that only 31% of students are reading, writing, and doing math at grade level. She then followed up those statistics with the question "How does that compute?"  I'll tell you how that computes: it's called "standardized tests are not an accurate reflection of a student's abilities and have very little to do with students and everything to do with politics and money." Education blogger Jersey Jazzman said it more accurately than my emotional diatribe, so I'm just going to quote him directly:

What Brown neglects to mention, of course, is that New York's test scores plummeted this past year when the state changed to Common Core-aligned tests.  Everyone who knows anything about testing knows that New York has been monkeying with the passing rates for years, as cut scores shift for reasons having nothing to do with actual changes in student achievement. 

In her Colbert interview, Brown called teacher tenure laws anachronistic, outdated, and antiquated. It seems to me that in 2014, if a teacher can get fired for teaching evolution as Colbert pointed out, or working for a school and writing a blog post about homophones can result in a dismissal, that tenure is needed now more than ever.

And let's not fail to see the irony in the fact that Brown founded a group called the Parents Transparency Project, yet she is choosing to ignore transparency about the people who are funding her efforts to end teacher tenure. Once again I will quote Jersey Jazzman:

And that is precisely the problem: the debate about tenure is now dominated by telegenic partisans who have no knowledge of education policy and won't reveal their funders -- all the while, the voices of teachers are excluded. 

I encourage you to read Jersey Jazzman's entire blog post because it is incredibly enlightening.

Meanwhile, let's not forget that in her crusade to end teacher tenure to rid the system of ineffective teachers, the people Brown and her "educational" crusaders are likely to end up hurting are passionate, caring teachers like these:

Turning off my teacher voice

Since I left my teaching job in June of last year, I found that I immediately missed the classroom. This year of rest and rejuvenation has made me realize that it is darn near impossible to turn off my teacher voice, the one that looks for a teachable moment in almost every situation.

For example, I recently finished reading It All Changed in an Instant: More Six-Word Memoirs by Writers Famous and Obscure, and all I could think about were the ways six-word memoirs could be used as a form of assessment in almost any subject-area. In English class you could ask students to write six-word memoirs for the protagonist and antagonist in the books they finish. In social studies students could write a six-word memoir for a famous historical figure like Napoleon, Abraham Lincoln, or Nelson Mandela. In science students could write the six-word memoir of an amoeba or an element on the periodic table. There are so many ways this could be used that I get excited just thinking about it.

Another example of not being able to turn off my teacher brain was watching the Super Bowl on Sunday night. All those creative, funny, heartwarming, and profound commercials constantly keep me on the lookout for teachable moments. This year the commercial that immediately sent me into teacher mode was the Bob Dylan Chrysler commercial. Despite the fact that I really enjoyed it, I am also a bit dubious that Chrysler has been resting on their laurels and rather than innovating by trying something new (something, one would argue, that got them in that whole Bankruptcy mess) are trying to recreate the magic of Eminem's Imported from Detroit commercial from 2012. So I think it would be interesting to have students compare Chrysler's Super Bowl ads from the past three years and examine, not just the ads in their entirety, but also isolate the writing (I am an English teacher after all) to see their effectiveness on a strictly text-based level. Where are the similarities and how are they different? Just writing about this makes me wish I were in my own classroom this year.






I gotta admit, all three of those ads do make me wanna buy a Chrysler so while I am critical of their motives, I can't deny the ads stir the soul.

So the moral of the story is, no matter how hard I try (oh who am I kidding, I'm not really trying) I can never turn off my teacher voice.