Prompt: What is the best thing you do in your classroom/school/district/job?

It's hard to brag. 

I also have dozens of assignments and structures in my own classroom that I'm proud of, as well as lots of things I've screwed up (that you could charitably call "learning experiences"). I like the student-centered infrastructure, which is not dissimilar to the one Karl writes about here. I like the work on Hour of Code and presentation skills and patterning and website building - all skills that my students need to be successful in their future lives. And the Pretty Much All Online Class I ran? Didn't work out too well.

But my two favorite assignments are these:

At the beginning of many English classes, I have my students read Jamaica Kincaid's short story "Girl." If you haven't read it, it's basically a list of things the narrator's mother lectured her about when she was a little girl. They progress from basic ("Wash the white clothes on Monday and put them on the stone heap") to much more devastatingly serious ("this is how to make a good medicine to throw away a child before it even becomes a child"). I have students write their own version of this piece, from the voice of their own parent. Believe me, it's a great way to get inside students' heads - to see what kinds of things they are being taught at home, what type of relationship they have with authority figures, what they are interested in, what they wish they could do, but can't.

These classes tend to culminate with a reading of Tim O'Brien's The Things They Carried. In the middle of that book, there's a short story called "How to Tell A True War Story" that says, in part, "true war stories make the stomach believe." The whole story (and whole novel) toys with the reader's perception of truth and fiction, and how your understanding of your own past can change with age and perspective. And that stories can be true without being factually accurate. Anyway, I ask students to write the story of their own transformation. They can tell it straight, as it happened, or they can choose to completely fictionalize it. 

These stories frame the class in a beautiful way. Though the classes are ostensibly about analysis of theme or argument, these two assignments make analysis personal. And that's really my best thing- taking distant texts and making them personal, using them as a vehicle to build relationships among the students in the class, helping students see each other as people and not obstacles to be conquered on the way to becoming a Junior Marshal. 

It doesn't always work, but when it does? That's the best of things. 

Unfortunately, Weebly ate my first draft of this blog. Here's the guts of it:

I struggle a lot with the idea of a late work policy. In a purely philosophical sense, I don't believe in charging penalties for late work--because if a student does it, and the purpose is to learn, then there shouldn't be a penalty for when the info is learned. 

However, we teach in the real world, and grading 2500 assignments at the end of a grading period just isn't feasible. And we all know that assignments turned in at the end of a marking period tend to be facile and completely, well, lame. This is because the work is done out of context: if you're writing, for example, about a text you read 3 months ago, then you're not going to remember all that much about it. Your analysis is going to be cursory at best and, more likely, just flaccid and dull and a waste of space. Also, as teachers, we know that we tend to grade assignments cursorily in the end-of-semester crunch as well, so not much actual learning happens. 

What I'm toying with now is the idea of chunking the semester into 2 or 3-week blocks, letting students turn in whatever assignments they want, whenever they want within that time frame, but not afterwards. Obviously, major projects and presentations have to be done on time, but the rest will allow for students to move a little bit at their own pace, but not get super far behind. Hopefully, it will serve to make my ends-of-semesters easier as well. 

This is a thought-exercise in progress, and would love to hear what your additions + suggestions are.

As I have noted at least a million times on this blog, I teach three different preps (AP English Lang, Desktop Publishing, and garden-variety American Lit), and have 100 students on our 4x4 block schedule. So yeah. That equals a lot of grading. 

And since I don't think letter grades tell students anything useful about their essays, that means I'm giving a LOT of feedback. Like, A LOT A LOT. My fingers can't type that fast, not fast enough to give meaningful feedback on 200-ish assignments every week.  So Kaizena helps me. 

In case you don't know Kaizena, it's an app for Google Drive that allows you to leave voice comments on Google Docs. By using Kaizena to respond to student essays, I can much more realistically give feedback to that cavalcade of students. It allows me (and allows them) to feel like we're having sort of a writing conference, which I know is ideal for every student on every major writing assignment, and is also completely unrealistic. I love the fact that students can go back and replay my commentary on assignments, which in some ways improves upon a "real" writing conference: this way, little side trails and details don't get lost in the ether. My students will tell you I talk and think in tangents, some of which actually turn out to be interesting/useful. 

And Kaizena cuts off your voice comment at three minutes, which is perfect. It forces me to be concise, and let's be honest: three minutes is about the limit for anyone listening to a recording of me rambling about an essay. 

So yeah. Kaizena is just a couple dudes. They are awesome. They aren't paying me to write this, nor are they shipping me to conferences or anything. They just make a really cool little program, and it has a place in any class--particularly ones that are writing-intensive. 

Every winter, I plant seeds.

This isn't anything special, nor is it any different from millennia of humans. 

I do this for a few reasons. I like seeing plants grow. I like keeping heirloom varieties of vegetables alive in the world. It keeps me grounded, in a very literal sense-- there's something satisfying and humbling about coming to school the next day with a little bit of dirt under my fingernails. 

My ancestors came to the United States in 1640, settling in central Virginia. Over the last four hundred years, they have gradually migrated all the way from central Virginia to central North Carolina. While most of them had other avocations, almost all of them have gardened. My roots run deep here, both in this red clay country and in the sense that it's both appropriate and desirable to see green shoots breaking soil.

The other reason I plant seeds is because the practice gives my life balance. I have the growing station pictured above sitting in my kitchen, and every time I walk in the room, the earthy smells remind me that there are other things beyond cinderblock classroom walls, things that are connected to places deep in the past. When the first true leaves pop out of the tomato plants, and that distinctive tomato plant smell remains on my fingers long after I’ve scooped and divided and transplanted, it reminds me that although the winter is dark and cold and longer than I'd like, the summer is coming, and coming soon. 

Finding those reminders - that summer is coming - is the dead-of-winter task for me as a teacher, too.  It’s easy to forget that my time with students is short and precious...especially when they refuse to do work, or throw something at a classmate, or ask the same question for the tenth time that I’ve just answered each of the previous nine times.

Trying to rush plants along is a fool’s errand. No matter how much fussing I’ve done over them, how much water, how intensely I shine my grow-lamps, the seeds are pretty much going to sprout when they feel like it. 

I have to remember: teaching is a long-game.  Like planting seeds, it’s sometimes hard to predict what will happen months later. My job, with seeds and with students, is to provide the most optimal conditions, and then get out of the way--with a little extra dirt under my fingernails. 

Full. 

That's the word that immediately occurs to me as I think about my classes this past semester, and as I think about the ones to come in the Spring. My reflex meant that response in a tongue-in-cheek way, as in, "Wow, there certainly are a lot of kids in these classes!" And to be sure, there are quite a few--over 200 in six classes, three different preps.

But the more I thought about it, the more I realized I want my students' experiences in our time together to be marked by a different kind of fullness, one beyond just "lots of physical bodies stuffed in one small space." 

I want their experience in B109 to be full of laughter. I want their time to be full of creation. I want their chunks of life in here to be full of part hard work and part giggles, part passion and the building up of patience, and frustrations resolved by "oh holy crap, now I see!" moments.

I want full classes, brimming with not just people, but ideas and surprises. I want them to tumble out the door still debating, and I want them to fill the Internet with their words. And I want to step back and let the fullness of what they've created change their worlds for good, forever.