The Week Before Break

One of the benefits of teaching at a private school is that we sometimes get more time off for holiday breaks.  This is the last week of instruction before our 2 week Spring Break which everyone needs and deserves.  But, there are a few things that need to be considered when we do not see our students for two weeks. 

Here are some of them:

 

 

1.   They will think every day this week is the day before break.  Monday will feel like Friday.  Tuesday will feel like Friday.  Wednesday will feel like Friday.  Thursday will feel like Friday.  And Friday will feel like, well, better than Friday. 

 

2.   Students will be in state of incredulous wonder in every class where a teacher is still instructing and working through the curriculum. 

3.   Teachers will want to get any important tests, projects, etc. done before the break to avoid any gaps in learning the material. 

4.   If you add #2 and #3 together, you get teachers vigorously trying to finalize parts of their curriculum and students who either joining them in the fight or looking like cartoon figures with two question marks instead of eyes. 

5.   There will be countdowns.  Teachers will be doing the counting down more than students. 

6.   Teachers will need to decide what to assign for homework over this long break.  There are two schools of thought on this.  The first is to let break be break and let students spend time with their families without the stress of homework.  The second is to assign something that they can actually get done because they might have some time on their hands.  I do assign homework (reading or an essay) but it is not due the day they get back.  It is usually due 2-3 days after, so students can choose whether they would like a homework free break or to get it done when they have some extra time to do it. 

7.   Not only will the classrooms feel different this week, so will the hallways, the
    cafeteria, and the library.

The week before break is a certainly a special week in the school year.  In order to get to our long break, we will embrace what will be a long and crazy week.   And this year, when we get back to school after break, we will have about 2 months before summer break.  So, there will be more even more counting down.    

 

One of my favorite activities to do with my Sophomores is called Vocabulary Challenge.  The have to choose from 50-75 vocabulary words and create a story that makes sense and shows that know the meaning of the word and can use it appropriately. 


So for instance: 

     This will not receive credit:  The girl show a great deal of apathy.

     This will: By constantly rolling her eyes and sighing loudly, the girl   
     clearly expressed apathy at her mom’s lecture. 

We do this challenge once a marking and students can earn Extra Credit for using more words (and we all know how much they love Extra Credit).  I tell the students to feel free to use sports, cartoon characters, movie figures, etc. to make their story interesting.  Because of media and it being an election year, several students have even tackled satirizing politicians for their stories!

The creativity and the humor in some of these stories is the best part of it for me when I am grading them.  However, they are also upping their vocabulary game manipulating such words as charlatan, pernicious, pusillanimous, adulation, sycophant, grandiloquent, harangue, galvanize, juggernaut, just to name a few, into their stories.  (You can now also see how they can have fun in the political spectrum with these words!)  I have to place a 1 page maximum on the story or some of them would write 2-3 pages. 

Vocabulary instruction and assessment is predominantly memorization, even when we know that our goal is building.  And, we know the students making flashcards and quizlets…we tell them to!  This activity takes the assessment a step beyond memorization and it is one of the activities my students anticipate and really enjoy doing.  After I read them all, I compile a list of all of their story topics and then read 2-3 really creative or funny ones to the class. 

Here is a list of some of the story topics that they have fun writing:

o   the 1985 Celtics vs. the current Golden State Warriors

o   a noxious gas actually coming from a culinary school improperly disposing of eggs

o   a farmer trying to win the annual pumpkin competition

o   a charlatan trying to pull off a hoax on a genial couple

o   a restaurant date ending in an altercation

o   a boy who loves the WWE, but his mom thinks it is a fallacy

o   a myriad of people trying to get the new iphone

o   a letter to 007 about planting a bomb in a clandestine location

o   a yachting trip the faces a formidable storm

As you can see, they are very creative with their topics!

 

When Teaching English Becomes Math, Part 2

I knew everyone would want some news on how I was faring underneath this pile of Junior Research papers, ha ha ha!  So, here is the latest report: 

I am down to the final 17 papers to grade!  I would like to have them finished and back to students in one week, Monday, March 7^th.  So, if I read 3 a day, I can do it!  The thing is, something (or many things) will happen that will cause me not to be able to do 3 per day and I will have to redo this very complicated (for an English teacher) Math equation several times before all is said and done.

That being said, I would like to comment on the papers I have read so far.  I am so proud of my students.  Writing a Research Paper is tough!  It is extremely labor intensive and requires the components of many parts to come together in a final product.  Also, many people often forget that writing is a skill – just like shooting a basketball, ice-skating, or cooking.  Just like running, trying to lose weight, or making hand-crafted birdhouses.  Sure, there are a few people that are naturally good at it.  But, all the rest of us, have to keep at it.  We have to keep writing, keep revising, keep reading about writing, keep editing, keep brainstorming, keep going to the Purdue OWL website when we have questions about MLA formatting, keep on keeping on!  And as with most skills, the more you keep practicing, the better you get.  No, you may never be Steph Curry, Bobby Flay, or whoever is the world-renowned maker of handcrafted birdhouses, but you will get better.  I promise, you will get better. 

 
 

The papers I have read so far are very good!  I am looking forward to reading the rest. 

And now I will channel my inner-Dorothy and click my ruby slippers together, because if my Math is right, “3 per day, 3 per day, 3 per day…”   and I am done! 

When Teaching English Becomes Math

Right now, I am in the process of grading 43 rough drafts of Research Papers for my Juniors on the topic of societal fears and the hero or solutions that these fearful societies need to overcome the fears.  They are very interesting papers.  My students have put a tremendous amount of time into these papers.  I actually really enjoy reading them and providing helpful comments, suggestions, and feedback so that they can make revisions and turn in a more polished final draft. And, they are really quite interesting to read. But, the whole process becomes amazingly and ironically mathematical.  Here is how:

o   I have 43 to grade. 

o   I spend about 15-20 minutes on each paper.

o   That equals 3 papers per hour (and that is if I do not get distracted)

o   That equals approximately 15 hours to grade them.

o   Not to mention that I used a pretty specific rubric addressing 10 Research Paper Skills I would like my students to master.  I need a calculator to determine the grade.  And that is how teaching English become weirdly, insanely, and sometimes irritably mathematical.

 

And now for some funny memes and comics that may or may not make the grading of these papers easier…

 

 

Snow Days!

It is truly not possible to determine who loves Snow Days more—teachers or students?  So for the benefit of not causing any issues, let’s just say it is 50/50.  But, it isn’t.  It is really, truly, factually, scientifically, and abundantly proven that teachers love Snow Days even more than students. 

When I was first teaching and we had a Snow Day, I went to school the next day and told the veteran teachers how much grading I got done and how I had planned ahead and felt so productive and pretty awesome.  They all stared at me with a “What’chu talkin’ bout Willis?” look.  One teacher put her arm around me and said very sweetly, but also quite seriously, “Um, you are not supposed to do any school work on a Snow Day, dear.”  Then it was my turn for the “What’chu talkin’ bout Willis?” look.  She continued, “Snow Days are a gift from God to teachers and he doesn’t want you to work.  He wants you to take the day off and sleep, read, make a snowman, do ANY thing you want to do, EXCEPT any school work.”  All the other teachers nodded and it seemed like the phrases “gift from God” and “NO school work” and “read, sleep, make a snowman” were leaving their lips and forming these crazy dream-like bubbles that started swirling around my head so that they would never EVER be forgotten. 

And those were the days when one had to listen to the radio for school closing or watch the scroll at the bottom of the screen before declaring a Snow Day victory.   Nowadays, a nice phone call or text and BAM, turn the alarm off!  Back to sleep, and no school work today!

Oh, and every once and awhile those weather people do such a nice job preparing us for snow storms that some schools declare a snow day the night before and we don’t even have to wait for the call or text in the morning.  Those snow days are Gifts from God with a cherry on top. 

A JOLLY GOOD TIME TEACHING GRAMMAR!

 

On Friday, I had one of the best grammar lessons with my sophomore classes ever!  English teachers know what a victory this is.  But, I have to give my 13 year old credit for helping me with the lesson’s success.  I was telling him how I wanted to make Grammar – types of clauses and classifying sentences, specifically – more interesting and important to my students.  I was feeling that they were not really seeing the importance of learning Grammar (HUGE battle to overcome with some), that they were not really getting it as much as I was trying to help them “get it, “ and that they were not really having any kind of fun.  And we all know that Grammar needs to be fun, right?

“What can I do to make them like Grammar more?”   I asked my son.

“Give them candy,” was his response.  

So I told my son, that I was not going to just give them candy just to make Grammar fun.  I needed more than that.

Again, a very short response from him, “Make it a competition.”

He even helped me with choosing candy they would all like:  Jolly Ranchers. 

And guess what?  Those beautiful watermelon, grape, cherry, sour apple, and blue raspberry candies and a little competition worked.  No one could get a Jolly Rancher until they answered all sentences in the exercises correctly and as a class they had to agree with the individual student whose turn it was to give an answer or help him get to the correct answer. 

So basically, they had to “get it” in order to get a Jolly Rancher. 

Best $5 I ever spent in the name of Grammar.  I will continue to see to it that none of my students makes a Grammar error like the one on this magazine cover. 

 

 

 

Being Sick and Being a Teacher

This week I came down with a sore throat and had to take a sick day to recover.  This is usually not a problem, you just take a sick day, right?  But, it was the week after exams and also the week grades were due and because of some student absences right before exam week, I was bogged down with trying to get grades up to date and complete my gradebook.  

Basically, it was not a good time to take a day off.  For some teachers, there actually never is a good day to take off.  Here is a funny meme that encompasses this vey thought:

 And another: 

Okay, so maybe these are some very funny exaggerations.  But, there actually is a good amount of truth to these memes.    I wonder how many jobs this is true for… this concept of “I’d rather just gut through being at work and not feeling well rather than making sub plans and then hoping the sub plans are actually completed and then grading the work you had the students do in your absence.”  UGH.  I read that sentence and I would rather just go to work!

So just don’t ever get sick if you a teacher during the school year and you will be fine.  I mean, it’s not like you are around tons of people and countless germs all day!