kro f gni llor

I quit

2006-10-02T10:51:00.000-05:00

Last monday, I resigned from my position as English teacher at South Delta High School in Rolling Fork, MS. Briefly, I was threatened and physically assaulted by a student on August 30th. The assistant principal, Mr. Haynes, and principal, Mr. Spurgeon Banyard, took the student's side, and accused me of lying about the incident. After this incident, my assistant principal took actions that can only be described as actively working against my attempts at classroom management. On several instances, the assistant principal undermined my authority in front of students and parents, mostly for incidents that I was trying to keep within the classroom and for which I had not solicited his help. Nevertheless, I was undaunted and I continued everyday to attempt to find new ways to control my classes in the face of administrative opposition. On Monday, September 25, I was again physically assaulted by two students. After this incident, the principal and I were discussing the attack when he became very agitated and threatening towards me. In the aftermath, I was unable to garner even a half-assed promise from either the principal or superintendent that the situation would change or that I would be supported by them in the future. Unable to feel safe in my own classroom or in the same building as my volatile principal, I had no option but to leave the job into which I had put so much effort, money, and time.

I am very disappointed by my experience here in the Delta. Mostly, I am disappointed that I have to leave the students whom I was just starting to understand and gain their trust. I am disappointed that my students will probably not have a good English teacher this year. I have nothing but the upmost respect for the other teachers in the program who work so hard at this job day in and day out. I will miss my roommates so much, and thank them for the love that they have shown me in the brief time that I have known them. I wish everyone the best of luck.

Unfortunately, it didn't seem as if MTC was willing to help me out once I had made the best decision and left the job at South Delta High School. After a single conversation with Ben right after the events of Monday and Tuesday had transpired, I heard nothing from anyone in the program. I was informed on Saturday evening by another program participant that my photo had been taken off the MTC website.

I am leaving my home in Anguilla, MS today because my next month's rent is due and I have no job. I have a court hearing with my principal today at 4 pm and then I'm leaving to go home.

documenting

2006-09-06T18:05:00.000-05:00

I woke up this morning at 4:30, about 4 hours after I went to bed. I was having a panic attack and then I started crying. Mostly it revolved around my 7th period disaster class. In the past week, I have had a student push and threaten me (albeit in a mild and vague way), a student scream at me, a student walk out of class without permission, and a student yell "you're stupid" as he walked out the door. As with anything it's probably mostly my fault. But none of these situations were dealt with by the administration appropriately. So now the students know what's up. Particularly since I usually give up on my consequences about halfway through the period. What consequences?

Anyhoo... I got up and started to write down all the incidents revolving around the class, all the times that the administration dropped the ball and failed to react appropriately to student misbehavior, even when it was they who told me to do certain things, they failed to support me in the aftermath. I was told to send students to the office for the slightest offense. I was later reprimanded (mildly) for not controlling my classroom and sending too many students to the office. I was even told "to find creative solutions" (sounds familiar?) and to "try to understand the students better."

Whatever. I felt a huge load lifted off my shoulders as I wrote down what had happened. At least I know, in a somewhat coherent fashion, what is going on in that class. all the crappy events stopped floating around in my head, plaguing me. It was down on paper (of the electronic sort). it set me free. the tears were gone.

Today I went to class and we got through the lesson, for like the first time ever. I had students who refused to do work after I put their names on the board with increasing numbers of checks after their names. I plowed through. I had students raising their hands to try to confront me about their name and checks on the board. I blithely continued. Some of the students relented, started taking notes, and participating in an orderly fashion. One little angel kept his hand in the air the entire class. until the bell rang. We finished the lesson. (only 3 days behind the other classes!)...

The bell didn't ring. 3:02...3:03...3:04...3:05...

Then the students started insinuating that I had crabs.

In fact, I do have a case of pubic lice. How did they know?

First day of school and Wong

2006-08-15T01:11:00.000-05:00

Well, I finally had my first day of school. I think us kro f gni llor people were the last ones to start. Not that it helped matters much.

My school is totally disorganized.

A rather long, drawn out example: On Wednesday, August 2, I came in 3 days before we were required to report for duty to start working on my classroom, a la Wong. "They" told me I was to be placed in the classroom of an old English teacher who had left. They told me to "clear out all the junk." So I started, file upon file cabinet stuffed full of ancient, unorganized worksheets, shelf upon shelf of outdated textbooks (my roommate anele objected to my "throwing away books," because it was just wrong. I told her if she wanted to come into my room and pack up all the useless, tattered books and send them to the poor, bookless people in Africa, to be my guest). So anyways, after over 10 hours of just throwing stuff away (I quickly gave up trying to organize it or salvage anything useful from it), I had begun to make some headway on the project.

I went away for the weekend.

I came back on Monday and during the weekend, in some stroke of genius, I guess the administration decided that they were going to move all our classrooms around and I was assigned a new room. The few teachers who raised objects to attempting this move at such a late date were accused of not wanting to fully commit to the new adminstration's vision for success. And the teacher who had allegedly retired suddenly reappeared, quite upset about the fact that I had thrown away "30 years of her life."

Seriously I was about to quit and pack up back to temperate Boston. Beyond this they kept us in the crappiest professional development ever for the rest of the week (basically an incoherent rehashing of what we learned in Ann's class, sans her winning personality), except for thursday when we were allegedly supposed to be "allowed to work in our classrooms all day." In fact, the day was punctuated by a FOUR HOUR FACULTY MEETING that was originally supposed to last "less than 10 minutes".

Also, the air conditioner in our home in alliugna was broken for two entire days, and I spent a sweaty, sleepless night "waiting for the repairman to get a part from Greenville."

Zabe reminded me to be flexible. Sure, I thought, but "being flexible" doesn't preclude one from "being totally pissed off."

But then came Wong to the rescue. Note page 94 of the essential "First Days of School" published by none other than Harry K. Wong Publications. Buring among other gems of wisdom, Wong notes "Spend your time on classroom management of student procedures rather than making your classroom look like a showcase. A few bare but clean bulletin boards, shelves, and flowerpots won't disturb anyone."

Plus, one of my favorite and best teachers in high school didn't put a damn thing up on his walls.

So how did today go? It went fine. It wasn't spectacular by any means but I think I set a very firm tone and the students got the impression that we were in class to learn and do work and not waste time.

We'll see, it's dangerous to be too optimistic, it might lead to complacency. I need to develop blinding efficiency and organization. I mean it is 2 am right now and I have to be at school in 5 hours. And I'm wasting my time blogging. So I wouldn't say that my head is totally (or even partially) above water.

My biggest challenge will be focusing on what I can improve and not on what I can't, like in that cheesy "Serenity Prayer" that they use in AA meetings.

the end of the summer

2006-07-23T20:24:00.000-05:00

So in Massachusetts summer ends in September. We used to go back to school after labor day, and you might even be able to wear a sweater on the first day of school, but maybe not since the autumnal equinox is on the 22 or 23 of september every year.

In Mississippi, the summer seems to end in the last week of July. Some teachers have to report to their districts tomorrow. I don't have to be there until August 3, but that used to seem like a date that was right in the middle of the summer.

This whole summer has been, in my mind, is entirely separate from what's ahead. I really have no idea what it's going to be like, even though I have heard so many stories. I've learned a few marketable skills. I wrote an awesome classroom management plan. I am totally freaking out about being a teacher.

I'm going home for a week to Boston which should be nice. I will see my family and eat some nice food and watch a lot of tv. And then I will move into my little home in alliugna.

I drove to my alliugna house today and almost everyone in the neighborhood happened to come outside just at that moment to stare at me. One woman yelled 'welcome to the neighborhood!' I felt shy and waved back and then awkwardly pretended to be looking for something in my car. The house is still empty, save for a few piles of possessions that my roommates and I have deposited there before we go on our little trips home to our families. I don't have a bed for my room.

I drove around the area for a little bit and then drove back to Oxford. Almost everyone's gone and the summer is over.

MTC Vets

2006-07-18T16:46:00.000-05:00

Today we had an MTC vet day. There were MTC veterans there to talk to us all day long. The morning was uneven. There were some new, interesting ideas being thrown out there but mainly I heard a lot of the same old same old. Whatever, I signed up for this.

However, this afternoon's session with Sarah, an MTC veteran was pretty awesome.

Well I guess I should preface this by saying that yesterday (and for about a week previously) I was feeling pretty despondent about the next two years. I said to my amazing roommate that I wasn't really sure that I wanted to be teaching at all, and that I didn't know why I was here. Maybe it was the result of last week's "TEAM" ridiculousness, the scariness of moving to kro f gni llor, but I really wasn't feeling that good about anything. I knew that I was in denial about starting school, as I hadn't even given one thought to preparing my class for the fall, what my rules or procedures might be, or even what kind of classroom I wanted to have. I just wasn't thinking about it all, and just focusing negatively on the present at LaFAYette high school and reacting negatively to the fact that Ben divided up our groups on Monday into boys and girls, and the girls' group learned a watered down version of the "holds" of dubious merit that the boys did.

But listening to Sarah yesterday was great. The first thing I was surprised by was her English 10 syllabus. It closely resembled what my 10th grade English syllabus back in the late 90s in Massachusetts looked like. I didn't hear her say that "these kids just can't relate to the literature in the books" or "I like English, but teaching English in the delta isn't going to be about really teaching English, it's about getting the kids to be responsible and to work" or "It's impossible to get them to do homework, so it's not even worth trying." I think, subconsciously, the sentiments expressed in the above loosely paraphrased quotes from people in the program have been weighing on me. I understand the pitfalls of being overly idealistic; however Sarah's presentation didn't come across like that at all. She mentioned several times that she had very high expectations for her students. However, the main thrust of what I perceived to be her teaching philosophy was "this is what an English class looks like. This is what English classes look like everywhere. In tenth grade English classes, students should be reading entire novels and plays, and it's no different in the delta."

I don't really consider myself an idealistic person at all anymore. What Ben said to me on the first day of MTC really rang true for me, that we should go into a situation with zero expectations, so we can neither be proven wrong nor disappointed. But at the same time I want to have high expectations for myself, that I can be the kind of English teacher that I actually want to be, and not a "special" English teacher who doesn't actually teach an English class but teaches a special Delta-style English class that is attempting to create good test takers who understand and abide by rules and consequences.

In Ms. Cook's intro class to the course we will be taking in the fall she said that the top 10% of our students will be excellent, these are the types of kids that, drum roll, will actually go to college. (at my high school 98% of students went to college) The bottom percentiles will go to jail, deal drugs and become absentee fathers and unwed teenage mothers and a whole host of other stereotypes. And the middle percentiles, these are the ones we need to work on enabling to become productive citizens who can hold down a menial job and not cause too many problems.

I mean that's not what she said exactly, but it seemed like we are aiming for the very lowest end of mediocrity for the majority of our students. This may be true and the grim reality that we are facing, but it doesn't seem like I want to be here if that's all we're even trying for.

I mean, I know that by teaching English II, a state-tested subject, that I need to basically, horrors of all horrors, teach to the test. But that seems like a cop-out and a way to be lazy. I can easily be lazy, and this summer I've felt an increasing urge to be lazy, which I think has contributed to my despondency. I want to be a real English teacher. And I think what Sarah impressed on me yesterday was that "teaching to the test" and being a real English teacher, like the ones I know most of us MTC members had in high school, are not mutually exclusive.

I knew this. but it was immensely helpful to hear. I've decided that my English class will be reading real books this year. (Someone said to me, "but most of these kids can't even read". I think that most of them can read. They don't look at a page of writing and say "what are those funny looking symbols on the page?" They may have severely limited vocabularies, etc. may be reading at a very low grade level, but that means they can read, right?)

A final question: can someone tell me what TEAM stands for? I've been wondering for a while.

all about me, part II

2006-07-16T19:24:00.000-05:00

well the outfit was much cuter this time. I really like my brown linen dress. My mother always buys these clothes from like Eddie Bauer or something and when they're not cool enough for her, she offers them to me. So anyways, it was slightly less painful this time to watch the video because I wasn't trying not to look the entire time.

I don't know that I've improved much since mid-June when I was teaching at Holly Springs. In general, the "TEAM" environment seemed to me entirely artificial, particularly in an English class. But maybe i'll blog about that next. I seemed rushed and nervous, particularly during the first 5 minutes of the class. After that, I kind of got into a groove and seemed more confident about the lesson and what I wanted to students to learn, but I've noticed that in almost every class I've taught the first 5 minutes or so are punctuated with a lot of filler words, namely um, uh, and "right." I think that the confidence issue is a slight issue with me. I know that I'm well prepared for every lesson and have tried to think out all the possible pitfalls beforehand, but it's something about the nature of the English lessons that I teach that lend themselves to a lot of ambiguity for the students. Meaning, that the concepts in English that I want to teach are ambiguous, that interpretation of meaning in any text is fluid and subjective. I tried to express this point to one of my "TEAM" teachers, when she criticized me for not giving the students "a right answer" to take away with them. She didn't buy it, saying that students want to know the right answer. I know that that sounds pretty pretentious and b.s., but it's a concern for me.

In other words, I think I lack confidence because the concepts that I want my students to learn lack the precision of meaning that characterizes a concept in math or science.

During my lesson we were talking about setting in a short story that took place in India. I asked the students to identify parts of the story that contributed to our understanding of setting in the story. We talked about things that I hadn't planned to, and didn't get to things that I wanted to. Which was good, but I'm always unsure whether I should try to keep the conversation in the direction I want it to go, or let it evolve organically. Ultimately, I need to be able to make those decisions and adapt during every lesson, but I still feel insecure at times, which I think leads to the bumbling and giggling that seems to prevail during my openings.

Anyhoo,
videotaping oneself is deeply embarrassing.

hooly springs

2006-07-01T20:13:00.000-05:00

Last weekend I went to Potts Camp. I drove through Holly Springs National Forest to get there and arrived just about when people were going to Church. At Holly Springs summer school we had 2 students in our class who went to school at Potts Camp Attendance Center and I wanted to see what their school was like. I told one of those students that I had gone to Potts Camp, and he said "Did you blink and miss it when you drove through?" At the entrance to the town, there was a sign that said "Welcome to Potts Camp, MS. Population 494." The student body comes from around the area, though, because the according to this website (mississippi.schooltree.org) the school enrolls 490 students in grades 4-12. So it couldn't be that there are only 4 adults in the town on Potts Camp.

Anyways, Potts Camp Attendance Center was a little grim. The building was much older than Holly Springs High School and looked kind of organic in its architectural layout. Meaning that the original school building had obviously gotten too small at some point so there were all kinds of mismatched ells and annexes making up the school. It reminded me a bit of the outside of the building of where I'll be teaching this fall (even though we couldn't see the inside). Probably first built in the 1940s, window air conditioning units, etc.

The racial breakdown of students at Potts Camp Attendance center is about 60% white and 40% black. At H. W. Byers Attendance Center, also located in Holly Springs but which serves Marshall County and not Holly Springs proper, the breakdown is about 35% white and 63% black. on the other hand, Holly Springs High School is 97% black. Where I'll be in the fall is 99% black. The high school I attended, Milton High School in Milton, MA, is 76% white and 19% black. Anyways, I find this all fascinating. So according to this schooltree.org website, which may or may not be reliable, Holly Springs High School enrolls about 19 students who are white. I wonder what it's like to be them. The rest of the school age students who are white in Holly Springs must obviously attend Marshall Academy which is 98% white. We had a student at summer school who went to Marshall Academy. I also wonder what it feels like to go to a segregation academy.

My friend from college who is from Tupelo says that some families that are white will move for the sole reason of moving to a school district where there are few black students. I imagine that some families move out of Holly Springs so that their children can go to either Potts Camp or H.W. Byers.

Anyways, I'm sorry that summer school is over--it was memorable--but I am also relieved. I've been so stressed out that I just realized that I forgot about my best friend's birthday. I guess that's a preview of what's to come.

self-evaluation, or all about me.

2006-06-28T20:58:00.000-05:00

I taped myself for my self-evaluation over 2 weeks ago, but I didn't watch the tape until this last weekend. The first thing that I noticed about myself, besides the terrible outfit that I was wearing and my obnoxious voice, was that I seemed pretty nervous. I was always kind of aware of this, but before and at the beginning of every lesson I get all freaked out. This usually subsides after a few minutes of teaching, but it usually means that my "set," or opening spiel, is a total mess. I tell myself not to be nervous, because my classes usually turn out okay, but then during the set the kids are all eyeing me up and down and I start rambling. about who knows what. the kids don't know, I don't know. I don't finish my sentences and then randomly go off into a tangent and never complete a thought.

It's actually not that bad. But I should approach my sets with more confidence because it sets the tone for the rest of the class.

Well, the day that I taped myself was a while ago, on june 13, and it was before phase II of Amy's discipline philosophy came into play. Phase I was "laugh nervously while the students try to f*** with me and erratically dole out consequences." Phase II is and will be "embrace the bada$$." Anyways, I can see in the tape of me that I've changed a lot since then. I had my students today write an evaluation of me as a teacher and a few of them said I was too strict, but maybe if I had them for a year they would get to know me better and appreciate the structure and consistency.

I had a problem in the class with a female student who chose to not follow our procedure of "the teacher dismisses the class, not the bell." I kept the students after the bell, but what exacerbated the problem was that I overreacted to her sighs and eye-rollings. I'm not sure how I'm supposed to react to that. If a students sighs and rolls her eyes, it's disrespectful but it can be very subtly so, so I'm not sure if I'm supposed to just let the student vent her frustration and roll away, or confront the attitude. Not that there is anything that you're "supposed to" do, but what is the most productive for everyone? Later that same student walked away from me when I was talking to her and left class without permission both of which were unacceptable, but I'm pretty sure I escalated the situation by overreacting at the beginning. But now, 2 weeks later, I feel much more in control of the class and myself and I have a pretty good idea of how i'm going to start out the year this fall, i.e. very strict.

But I do have a tendency to smile a lot. Which is strange because I'm not a very cheerful person in general. But I think there is a lot to smile about in class.

Also, I'm really bad with time, I never know what time it is in class and I always run out of time in the middle of something and never complete my closure. I really need to work on this.

administration

2006-06-24T20:47:00.000-05:00

One of the things that I keep hearing at MTC is to "be flexible." This advice generally seems to apply to the administration of our schools. In class, we've been told horror stories about 6 days of homeroom at the beginning of the year and never getting one's scheduled planning period. During the role-playing session about diffusing confrontations, we were told basically not to mess with the administration at all, to do what we were told and not try to talk back or to change them. Just to accept whatever irrationality we are dealt. This all sounds like good advice to me.

My parents are teachers in Boston. My mom has been teaching for over 30 years. She has told me stories about getting into several big conflicts with some administrators at various times throughout her career. The big difference in Boston is that Boston teachers have a powerful union and so when she got into a conflict with an administrator, she would have the support of the union behind her. So if the contract said that she as a teacher was not required to cover classes during her planning period, then she could legitimately file a grievance with the union against the administrator in question. That's a petty example, though. I think that the problems my mother had were on the more serious level though, for example, administrators giving her bad evaluations without just cause, etc. She complains that the younger teachers don't appreciate the union and what it has done for teachers in Boston. The younger teachers don't understand that the union is there to support them in the face of an insane and irrational administrator. The heyday of the teachers' unions in America was really in the 1970s, when my mother started teaching. My mother and my father both are and have been union representatives for their schools. On a side note, the Boston Teachers’ Union (BTU) once gave me a 1000$ scholarship for being the child of union members. Also the BTU runs around chanting BTUnity! BTUnity! While raising their fists in the air. They also go around calling people “scabs”. It’s pretty hilarious.

Whatever, there are no unions in Mississippi. So that's where you have to be flexible. I still think there might be a breaking point (which I think is the reason that some people leave the program after 1 year), and I can only hope that my situation isn't unbearable and that I have the strength to be as flexible as possible and focus on my classroom and my teaching and not any other craziness. My mother tells the younger teachers who get into a conflict with an administrator to always be respectful, because the principal is their boss, but then to file a grievance with union. I don’t have that option, so I just have to be respectful. Anyways, I think that on of the things that I’ve absorbed from the program so far is that its important to have the administration on your side so they will back you up on discipline. Even if there were a union, bringing up a grievance against a principal wouldn’t necessarily do all that much, and might make your current situation worse, especially vis-à-vis (essential teacher supply) classroom management, before it gets any better. Anyways, I love my mother so I decided to write this somewhat obnoxious post in her honor.

concept attainment

2006-06-24T11:05:00.000-05:00

Last week, I tried one of the inductive strategies we learned in class, concept attainment. My English II/III class at Holly Springs was doing a grammar unit, and I was responsible for covering comma usage. There are at least 10 different ways that commas are used in sentences and as I was thinking of how I would present the lesson, I thought that I would try the concept attainment strategy. The concept attainment strategy is when the teacher presents a set of objects as belonging or not belonging to a set and the students make a hypothesis about the rule for grouping.

I decided to focus on three of the different ways that commas are used in sentences: to mark a non-essential modifier, to separate items in a list or series of 3 or more, and for interrupting phrases and clauses.

I gave 5 different examples of each type of comma usage on a worksheet. I then told the students that I would be dividing the students in to groups. I gave them an example of what I wanted them to do: I showed them some sentences that had a city and a state in them, like Denver, Colorado; Oxford, Mississippi; Boston, Massachusetts. I then asked them to identify the comma rule in these sentences. This one was fairly easy, and the students were able to tell me to put a comma between a city and a state in a sentence.

The students then were divided up into groups of 3 and I told them that they were to develop a comma rule for each set of sentences. I'm not sure this worked too well, because it was difficult for the students to put into words what they saw. A few students told me "I know what the rule is, but I can't explain it." It worked fairly well for the last rule, "to separate items in a list or series of 3 or more" (i.e. The children like to run, skip, and play). But the other rules were a bit too difficult for them. I think grammar is so abstract and illogical anyways that inductive strategies are probably not best suited for learning grammar.

Regardless, I think that the exercise got them thinking a bit, and made my job a bit easier later when we went over the commas rules together in detail. Also, what i find interesting is that I was never really formally taught grammar in school, so my knowledge of commas and their appropriate use comes solely from inductive learning strategies. In other words, the reason I know how to use commas correctly (mostly) is that I developed my own rules from seeing examples in my own independent reading. The first time I formally learned these concepts was last week before I taught it to the students; I spent the night before furiously looking through my father's 1965 edition of An Index to English, my new best friend.

cold calling

2006-06-18T20:17:00.000-05:00

I employed the cold-calling technique on Friday, except I completely forgot to announce to my students that I was doing it. (I'm not sure if it's necessary to do so--it might have been better because the students might have tried harder and paid more attention). In general, in class I use a mixture of calling on kids who are raising their hands and picking on kids randomly, but I tend to lean towards the side of calling on students who are raising their hands because I want to reward them for being so helpful and willing to participate. When I was in school it drove me crazy when the teacher didn't call on me and called on someone else who wasn't even raising her hand. I mean, I knew the answer after all, why was s/he wasting time on those other fools.
--However--
When I used the cold-calling technique on Friday, I realized that when you call on a student who is not used to participating, it forces you, the teacher, to guide the student through the question, to ask more basic, easier questions in order for the student to reach the bigger question. The student then gets the gratification of having successfully answered the question, as opposed to feeling bad because s/he never raises his/her hand. The reason students are not raising their hands is that they either a. don't care or b. don't feel like they know enough to answer the question. Either way, the cold-calling technique helps them learn. And for the students who know all the answers, they get called on too, so they can feel validated for being so on the ball.

In other news, me and my future co-workers and some other person, nairb, went down to kro f gni llor on Saturday. We met our super intendent, who invited us to her awesome house with 3 indentical living rooms so filled with fake fruit and candles and angels and pictures and pillows and curtains that anele got real nervous and swallowed an entire pickle whole. She's also renting us a house in a nearby "town" which is AWESOME. I can't even describe the places yet, not having brought my camera either, so there will be more to come.

Oh, and I drove through a town called "Keel" today, a few miles down the road from Ole Miss.

my first week

2006-06-08T20:51:00.000-05:00

I will have only taught once this week, and that was today. I was really nervous the entire week and I spent probably 10 hours total stressing out about my lesson plan and rewriting it. I remember liking teaching before, but I felt like this was going to be much different, I guess because we've received so many warnings and instructions and there were so many things to get right (or wrong) in the lesson plan rubric. And I was positive that I was going to be really boring. I was not looking forward to today, and I was resenting having to write such an involved lesson plan, even though I knew, logically, that it would be eminently helpful.

Anyways, I was talking to my mother last night, and telling her about how stressed out, tired, and nervous I was and she said that all I could do was try my best. but still I was not looking forward to today, even though teaching was the reason I was here in Mississippi.

So, today was my best day so far at MTC because I had such a good time teaching and I realized that when you have students, you want to write better lesson plans each time, because you want each day to be productive in the classroom. You want to be positive because you want your students to be positive and feel good about themselves. and that it's not a burden to write a lesson plan, it can be exciting because hopefully, if done well, it can engage the students.

Most of the advice I've heard from second-years, and some friends I have in TFA is to remember to make some time for yourself because it's easy to spend all of your waking time and most of your should-be-sleeping time on schoolwork. So I'm going to try to keep that in mind and get eight hours of sleep. Which probably won't happen because I'm a night owl. hoo hoo.

Column A, Column B, I like Fried

2006-06-06T23:25:00.000-05:00

This is from a wierd Al song, "Rice Rice Baby"
Anyways, I like fried. and not only in Chinese food. I'm really into the fried here. I really enjoyed the fried chicken at Annie's. Am looking forward to it on Friday, too.

Montessori

2006-06-06T23:19:00.000-05:00

I’m writing in response to Jess W.’s focus paper entitled “The Latest Fad in Alternative Education: Montessori Methodology.” I was motivated to respond to this particular paper for several reasons, the main reason being that I attended a Montessori school for two years when I was 4 and 5. Jess W.’s paper was interesting because I have never looked at the Montessori Methodology in an academic way before. She provides a balanced look at both criticisms and praise of Montessori. My impression of Montessori is mostly positive. However, when my brother was 3, he was kicked out of the Montessori school in my hometown for, among other things, failing to sweep the crumbs off the table properly. (He swept them onto the floor and then laughed).

I loved my experience at Montessori. I loved the fact that we could choose what we wanted to do at any particular moment. If I wanted to pour blue colored water into different shaped containers, I could. If I wanted to move individual grains of rice from one bowl to another with a pair of tweezers, I could. I remember the teacher getting mad only once, when I made another student’s head bleed during a fight we were having over who got to read a particular book in the reading corner.

In general, however, the classroom seemed to work really well and I remember learning all kinds of things. Seldin and Epstein call it “a carefully prepared environment designed to facilitate the development of the children’s independence and sense of personal empowerment.” I obviously wasn’t aware of this philosophy when I attended the Montessori school, however I appreciate that this was what was going on in my classroom. I, in a mostly uninformed way, am very attracted to this philosophy. However, my classroom this fall will not be like a Montessori classroom. MTC seems to emphasize careful organization and preparedness as essential to a successful learning experience for students. Unlike in a Montessori classroom, I probably won’t have students wandering around my classroom, making snacks and visiting the sandbox table.

Among my greatest concerns about coming into education was the fact that I think that traditional public education stifles creativity and independence at the expense of creating hard-working “good citizens” that uphold the status quo in our society. I’m concerned about teaching to the test and the massive amount of hours American youth are strapped to a desk. When I was in high school, I often thought that all school was good for was teaching students to withstand massive amounts of boredom and to follow arbitrary rules. On the other hand, I understand that a good education is a conduit out of poverty. Hopefully, my class will be infinitely fascinating and I will succeed at maintaining order through procedures and not through yelling, threats, and arbitrary displays of authority.

magical

2006-05-31T12:31:00.000-05:00

I know that kudzu is the "plant that ate the south", see here, but I think that it's kind of awesome. Anyways, I took this picture near Sardis Lake.

2006-05-31T12:10:00.000-05:00

This is my first post. Today we watched a movie about MTC from 2003. An overwhelming sensation of dread came over me. I wish I could go back to thinking that it was just going to be really hard. Not the most difficult thing in the world, as it's being presented.