Wednesday, Later

For as bad as yesterday ended, today has been a triumph. Such is the teaching life. Of course, I still have the showdown about our department's budget needs coming up in 20 minutes, but for now I won't fret about that.

I'll focus, instead, on what put the day in the win column (now there is a thought. Chalk all 185 - or however many there are - teaching days in terms of wins and losses. That would put one's year in perspective. I might try that next year). First, Brit Lit was great. But it always is. For whatever reason this is by far the most traditionally structured class I have ever taught. I've thought of that often too. It's the typical lecture, take notes, read, and respond class - like most of the ones I had in college. But I really don't teach like this. My composition classes are nothing like this. Neither is Science Fiction or American Lit. But I think part of it has to do with the fact that at least once a year (or however often I have Brit Lit), I like to at least look like I'm really teaching and know what I'm talking about.

Composition II was even better. This was mostly due to the fact that the biggest pain in the ass has been gone for the past two days. It's amazing how one kid's presence or absence can affect a class. When he is gone, like today, most everyone stayed on task. They turned in their homework assignments (they wrote essays based off the film "The Sandlot" in which they had to connect with a rite of passage or epiphany from the film). Those were a joy to read. Then I had them choose another rite of passage or epiphany (or both if they thought to combine the two) and write on that. I read essays ranging from dealing with the death of a grandmother from lung cancer to a student witnessing her father accidentally hit the family dog with the truck (there was one vivid scene in particular where the writer described how after days of looking for the dog, the father finally found it and carried into their shop - the body all stiff and frozen) to a student standing up for herself and taking a butter knife after her older brother to a catcher writing about the time he realized he could effectively 'call' the pitches during a game to a student writing about learning they are adopted. I knew this was a good class because by the end of the day I was what I call "running with the natives," which means sharing stories of my own rites of passages and epiphanies and learning right along with them.

College Composition was a wake up call for many of my writers in there. I returned their film analysis essays. I found that many had no idea how to analyze. They could summarize perfectly. But when it came to analyzing a scene for theme or film technique, many were clueless. So I actually spent some time during the previous block (Comp II) retyping a students' paragraph in which they were to analyze a scene for theme, but really they just summarized the scene. I made a copy of that paragraph. Then I made another copy in which I went in and added the analysis (in bold), so the students could see what I mean by analyzing instead of summarizing. So the students spent most of the day hunkered down trying to analyze in their next essay (a literary analysis of either "Young Goodman Brown" or "The Things They Carried"). One student said, "I thought this was pretty good. Then last night I had my dad read it and he said, 'This is horrible. I can't read this anymore.'" And she thought I was harsh! I have four students who get how to analyze. The rest are struggling to get there. Hopefully, today helped them.

Then I spent my prep in our biweekly 'common prep' meeting. This one was led by our local 'gurus,' and it was good. This session was based on teaching/building vocabulary. I was introduced to some really interesting strategies (the coolest one being a type of 'word card' in which students write the vocab word in the middle of the card. Then they use dictionaries to isolate the prefix, suffix, and root word. Then below the word they write the meaning. In the upper right hand corner of the card, they write the actual definition. In the upper right hand corner, they write the opposite definition or meaning. In the lower left hand corner, they write a sentence using the definition. Finally, in the lower right corner, students draw some kind of picture to help them remember the word and its meaning. I like that idea. I'm going to incorporate that next year.

Well, it's three bells. Time for the showdown. Today was a big win. But I have a feeling our department's budget (or at least certain factions of our department) are in for a loss. I shall blog on that tomorrow.