Last Inservice Day

Today is our final inservice day. If I have to sit through another God awful power point presentation by an administrator or education 'expert,' I'm going to lose it. What is ironic about the glutton of power point presentations is that on the first day of inservice, the teachers were put through an interesting exercise on the importance of getting our information into the long term memory of our students. The exercise moved the teachers around, got us thinking and brainstorming, got us actually playing the roles of information in a brain and modeling how it goes from short term memory to long term memory. While some teachers hemmed and hawed, I actually enjoyed it. One point that the teachers who presented this information stressed was that we need to use a variety of techniques to teach students. We can't just lecture for 60 minutes and expect them to digest all the information. Nor can we just show videos for an entire period. Somehow the administrators and education 'experts' missed the point. For in the past two days we have sat through roughly three hours of power point presentations. So much for actively engaging us.

I told a few of my colleagues that I have started a blog. They quickly jotted down the name so they'll check it out later. I told them that I was just going to honestly put my feelings about teaching on it. So I hope no one gets offended. I am blessed, though, to have a very talented and supportive English department here. But we all have our inter office politics that sometimes make keeping the peace difficult. Today was an example of that. Our department head found out on our first day back that her class sizes (she teaches ninth grade communications) have bulged to nearly 38 kids per class. (I am blessed with no more than 20 in a class - though I had 37 in a Brit Lit class spring quarter). She was obviously frustrated by this, especially since she really had no warning about this. The freshman class is 30-40 students larger than the other classes. Plus three years ago, an English teacher retired, and due to budget cuts, we never rehired. So this year most of us are putting up with larger class sizes and offering no elective classes (such as creative writing, science fiction, film study, and so on).

Now what made this a sticky situation was that one of the English teachers here is married to one of our counselors, who is in charge of registration and organizing schedules, so sparks flew a little in our department meeting. But nothing was meant as a personal attack. From my point of view, I think we should have been clearer to the counselor when we set up our schedule. Here at our school, the teachers have a great deal of input into devising their schedules. We basically can choose which classes we wish to teach. So we are blessed there. When we were putting the schedule together, we noted the larger freshman class. However, we don't have enough teachers to teach six sections (which meant about 20-25 kids per class). So we left it up to the counselor to decide what to do - hoping, or so I believe - that he would contact us about a solution. But he didn't. He just packed the students into five classes instead of six - thus 38 kids in a class. In hindsight, we should have told him that if it came down to having just five classes, he should have cut out another course - like tech writing - and put in another freshman communications class. Or he could have taken one of our Comp I classes (which all sophomores have to take and which usually range in size from 10-18 kids) that had 10 or 12 kids in it and put those kids in the other Comp I classes and then put the freshman communications class in that slot. If that sounds complicated, it is. Which is why there was the conflict. But we are dealing with it as best we can.

Last night Dad called and said that my uncle was just placed in a nursing home. His daughter and ex-wife found him wandering around his apartment building. He has severe Alzheimer's. In my thesis, I wrote about him showing some signs at my mom's funeral three years ago. When some of my other relatives read it, they were doubtful, for my uncle was a very bright man. Unfortunately, I was right. Here's an irony - my uncle and I share the same birthday, August 25. So while I was celebrating mine with my fiancé and the kids, he likely didn't even know it was his birthday.

Tomorrow is free - no more inservices. But I'll be in. My room is a disaster and I haven't even began to get ready for my classes. I think I'll see if my fiancé's daughter wants to accompany me tomorrow. She is a budding artist and would love to help me decorate my room.

Day One

I teach high school English in north western Minnesota. As my description states above, this blog will offer the reader a look into my life as a teacher. I consider my home and class lives inseparable. Even though this is my eighth year in the classroom, I still am unable to separate the two, much to the chagrin of my fiancé. But that was part of the deal when I went into teaching.

I also hope to show the many highs, lows, successes, and frustrations of the teaching life. For the past year now I have been addicted to several blogs - most by teachers, and I hope to offer any readers the same things I've found in other blogs.

We are currently on our second day of inservice. I hate it. I have found that many people in the general public think we just show up on the first day of school and leave on the last day and that's it. Well, that is a load of crap. Now I'm not one to complain about being a teacher. We have enough of those around here. I love my job. I love my salary. I love my kids. I love my room. I love my work. Again, I am not one of the teachers who rants and raves about being too many papers to correct and not enough money to do it. I know how fortunate I am. But inservice days drive me nuts.

First, they usually entail listening to some hired gun 'expert' educator our administrators overpay to come in to get us revved up. This isn't always bad. But more often than not, as has been my experience, this 'expert' is usually someone who has only observed a real classroom. Yet somehow they managed to write seven books on how to manage a classroom or motivate students. It's kind of like being in college again where I had a few professors, usually in the ed department, who have very little experience (if any) in the classroom. But since I'm in the role of student during these inservice days, I give the 'experts' my attention. But usually I get very little from them. Plus, I could get more accomplished in my own classroom focusing on my own classes.

I do prefer these 'experts' and their presentations to the higher ups in our district, such superintendents and principals, getting up and blathering on at length. During my second year here, we had a superintendent who spoke for over an hour reminding us that it was our role to motivate our students to achieve. I have never been more insulted in my life. It's not like I forgot that I was supposed to motivate students to achieve over the summer. Sometimes, like it or not, superintendents are as out of touch with classroom reality as the so called 'experts.'

The rest of the inservice days are usually spent in department meetings, cleaning out my room, getting my computer up and running, get the classes entered on my computer, making sure my supplies all arrived and so on. What drives me nuts about all of this is that it has so little to do with what I enjoy most about teaching: the students.

New teachers are often amazed at all that goes in to just being ready to teach on that first Tuesday in September. But right now I wish it was all over and I had some kids in here writing. So I guess I'll stop procrastinating and get back to my inservice day.