Met a new teacher today...

I met a new teacher today at my wife's school.  The circus of introductions, building tour, and heaping helpings of first day advice is overwhelming enough but I was reminded of the state of your classroom upon your arrival.

It occurred to me that you get one of two stereotypical spaces to call your "new" classroom...neither of which are ideal.

1.  Looted and Pillaged

Oh yeah, you know the room.  The former teacher told everyone in the department to come take what they want before they retire and have a farewell chat OR it's the space that fell serious victim to the beg, borrow, and steal mantra of teachers.  Probably more the "steal" part of the mantra.  On the up side, there's a blank slate for the new teacher.  There's not much to weed through to determine what level of usefulness there is in a careers worth of materials and resources.  The drawback is that as a new teacher, anything and everything can be helpful.  Very, very, very helpful.

2.  Oh, you're the new teacher in that room.

Oh yeah, you know this room even better.  The pack rat.  The frugal conservationist.  Or most likely...it was the hoarder teacher who felt like there was a potential purpose for anything and everything.  It was the teacher who had a unique "organization" system, to which only they held the secret decoder ring (and the answer was most certainly not Ovaltine).  Probably not much useful here for a new teacher who's been schooled in new methods, strategies, and technologies to say the least.  Also, probably too scary for coworkers and custodial staff to attempt to sort through.  There are certainly resources of value in this space, but the sheer volume simply makes the "gold dig," out of the question.

The circus of introductions, building tour, and heaping helpings of first day advice is overwhelming enough, but then you usually end up in one of these two spaces.  

Pick your poison.

Inspiring words from a frustrated student

My goal for this post is to write about something that inspires me.  To illustrate my inspiration, I want to share two videos.  The first video speaks for itself.  I do not condone the behavior of the student but I genuinely believe that he has a valid point.  His message carries merit but his delivery was poorly timed and disrespectful.  Meet Jeff Bliss... (posted by YouTube user rahmathek15)

First and foremost, I don’t want that to ever happen in my class or yours.  If it does, you, me, we probably need a long hard look in the mirror.  The old saying “from the mouths of babes...” is all too often true.  If you “teach” by handing out packets, you’re not a teacher, you’re an overpaid babysitter.  This much of his rant cannot be swept aside as an outburst of teenage angst.  His point is powerful.  Be a teacher.  Be inspiring.  Interact with your students.  Make your students think critically.  Be a teacher.  Make them want to come back to your class every day.  Be a teacher.  Don’t be an overpaid babysitter.

The second video is one of those gems that YouTube members generate periodically that go viral.  It didn’t go as viral as I and my colleagues think it should, but perhaps we’re easily amused.  The Jeff Bliss rant has been “songified” (yes, I just made that up) and it is sonic gold.  (posted by YouTube user Bill Ghedi)

The take away here is the hook of the songified rant:  Touch His Freakin’ Heart.  It has become the battle cry, the calling card, the inside joke, the motivation for my social studies department.  We ask one another, “Did you touch some freakin’ hearts today?”  We talk about certain students in terms of “that’s a kid who needs his freakin’ heart touched.”  It’s comical, yes, but it’s also a serious point that we try to employ every day.  Stuart Smalley had his daily affirmation and now we have ours:  You gotta come in here, you gotta make ‘em excited, you gotta touch some freakin’ hearts.

When August rolls back around, don’t let a day go by that you don't try your best to touch some freakin’ hearts.  

adventures in first day attendance

One of my personal top ten tips for teachers is:

Learn every student's name, how to say it and spell it, ASAP.  Learn the names of students in your school who are not in your class.  It will get you miles ahead with your students.

I work in a school in which many students have unique names with unique spellings and unique pronunciations.  Frequently, the names do not follow traditional grammar rules.  I have learned to unlearn, relearn, and be open to learning how to spell and pronounce my students' names.  I have also learned that knowing how to properly spell and pronounce names is a simple thing that makes students feel important, liked, and remembered once they have left the classroom.

In my experience, I have had to learn how to spell Brittany, Brittney, Brittani, Brittni all in the same class.  I have had a student with two apostrophes in her name and multiple students with an accent mark at the end.  The tricky part is reading the unique names on the first day of school.  To prevent mispronouncing names I read over my photo rosters a number of times before the first day, check with other teachers who may know how to pronounce certain names, and even check with the attendance secretary in order to avoid student embarrassment as well as my own.

I have had students become angry at my initial, incorrect, pronunciation.  Some students have simply responded to my pronunciation, never suggested it was wrong, and I have learned months later that I'd been saying it wrong the whole time.  I have also had a student whose name still remains a mystery to me.  She corrected my pronunciation on day one, I repeated what she said, she corrected me again, I repeated, she corrected me again, and I repeated again.  She gave up and said "close enough."  I really thought I was saying it exactly the way she was...

My adventures in linguistics have been just that, adventures.  As adventures go, sometimes they are successful and sometimes they end in a manner of defeat.   I have experienced both, but I always admit to my students that I am doing my best to learn every student's name and commit to being the first teacher my students have to learn all of the names on the roster.  Knowing your students' names makes classroom management easier, makes grading easier, and makes building rapport infinitely easier.  Learning names will get you miles ahead with your students.

 All my students want to know if it's "that ball from that one movie."  No, it's not Wilson from Castaway.  Wilson was a volleyball, this is clearly a soccer ball wearing an obnoxious North Tech hat from the early 90s.  The hat is obnoxious, my soccer ball friend is charming.  Together, they are a perfect conversation piece.

The next questions I have about this blog is:  Is someone supposed to learn something from it or can it be purely for entertainment?

I suppose that including my reaction to each stated adventure or misadventure and what action I took can serve as some sort of management anecdote for other teachers or for people in general looking for ways to handle hilarious, disastrous, ticking time bomb, and horribly uncomfortable situations.

The hilarious, disastrous, ticking time bomb, and horribly uncomfortable situations are usually the ones that make an imprint on my memory.  

This is my first blog post for Mr. Sadler's blog about stuff.  The title is vague due to my vague notion as to what I will blog about and who, in the vast expanse of the inter webs, will stumble upon it.  In a very meta-blogging sense, I'm just not sure that I have it in me to successfully blog.  I can obviously physically make it happen in terms of design but I'm not sure I am extroverted enough or have the ego to assume that people will read or want to read my musings.  Nor do I think I have enough desire or time in my life that I will want to devote to continuing to add more musings.

With respect to the aspects of teaching, over which I feel like I have a decent mastery after 7 years, I expect that someone else has already blogged about them long ago.  I know I have beneficial experiences to share, but surely they're being shared by an already established blogger who will land at the top, pages before me, on the list of Google's search results.



So my next thought is to do what my dad has told me since my first year of teaching...that I should be writing down all of the significant things that happen during the adventures and misadventures of the teenage learners in my classroom.  Every time we talk he asks me what has happened that was funny or profound and I always have a story for him.  He enjoys them.  I enjoy them.  I enjoy telling them to him.  I think that in 20 years I will enjoy reading them.  I offer them to my friend Dave who is a screenwriter and he works many of them into a script that takes place in a high school.


Perhaps the exercise of the first blog post has actually led me to define what the "stuff" will be for future posts.  

Huh.  

Maybe this could work after all.