Breathe and Find your Balance

Teaching is a demanding profession.  The perception that teachers work only 6 hours a day and have plenty of time off is NOT REALITY.  Teachers pour our hearts, souls, and, sometimes, our whole lives into educating our future.  Teaching can quickly become all-time consuming.  We can find ourselves (over) committed to school committees, coaching, assisting at sporting events, running after-school clubs, chaperoning dances, tutoring, advocating for education reform, reaching out to parents, participating in professional development, and so on.

Beginning teachers, for numerous reasons, want to get involved at school, drenching themselves in the school culture and all that comes with it.  Be careful novice teacher.  There is a balance that we all must find between our personal and professional lives, and this balance is different for each of us.  My advice is to take time for yourself and family, relax a bit, and reflect what your balance is.  Achieving balance among all aspects of your life: family, friends, love, hobbies, etc., is a struggle, but worthwhile.  Having a centered life will sustain you for the long-term, avoiding being burned-out or having troubles at home.  Ultimately, this balance will lead you to be a more effective teacher based on the premise that our personal and professional lives are – at a basic level – interwoven and trouble in one area will eventually affect other parts of our life.

Remember in these hectic days of September and October to keep perspective and acknowledge that it’s okay to put yourself first.

Super Quick Teacher Tip – Give Instruction Before Assigning Groups

TIP – If placing students into groups either 1) give instructions BEFORE assigning students to groups, and/or 2) provide written instructions once students are placed in groups.  This will eliminate the need to raise your voice above the chatter,and repeat instructions a million times.  In the end, you maximize your precious instructional time.

Plethora of Resources for Future and Student Teachers

I wrote the following post on Edubloggers – a group for those people blogging about the K12 classroom including teachers, administrators, curriculum directors, professional developers, pre-service teachers, and college level educators who focus on k12 education.:

Please share with me websites or resources that would be helpful to future and preservice teachers. I am the site author of roadtoteaching.com – a free site that supports pre-service teachers.

Here are the responses:

1. http://www.abcte.org – non-profit that helps people get certified to teach through an online program – we have $150 off in January as a promotion for people who want to get certified
   http://www.charterteacher.com – help for future charter teachers
   http://www.newteacherhotline.com – podcast for new and aspiring teachers
2. New Teacher Center: http://www.newteachercenter.org – Since 1998, the New Teacher Center has served over 49,000 teachers and 5,000 mentors, touching millions of students across the country through comprehensive mentoring and professional development programs.
3. http://www.cashforcreations.com – Educational Visual Aids, where teachers get paid for their original ideas of educational visual aids. Teachers can find other visual aids that teachers have used that have worked for them in their classrooms.
4. I have a message board for pre-service and new teachers and answer questions about curriculum, organization, classroom management, working with parents, colleagues, administrators, etc. on scholastic.com. Advice is free. 🙂
   http://community.scholastic.com/scholastic/board?board.id=emergency
5. A few more ideas: for parental involvement, especially with the growing Latino student population, try Colorin Colorado at www.colorincolorado.org. On my LinkedIn profile page there is a list of sites specifically for improving parental involvement. Another idea is Teachers Pay Teachers at www.teacherspayteachers.com. It contains a lot of inexpensive resources that will benefit new teachers. I also suggest connecting with professional learning communities like edWeb at www.edweb.net. Good luck!

RESOURCES

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Recharge Yourself with your Belief / Philosophy Statement

I spent yesterday guiding my students through the process of developing their belief/philosophy statement on teaching.  I participated alongside my students.  To spend a significant block of time to reflect on my values and beliefs regarding education, teaching, and learning, was quite refreshing.  I haven’t seriously reviewed my belief statement since I was student teaching.  I was amazed and inspired by how much of my teaching practice was reflected in my belief statement.  It makes sense though.  As I write in my book:

An education philosophy statement is the bedrock of any master teacher; it encapsulates the principles and beliefs you bring to your teaching, creating the foundation to guide your teaching practices.

If you haven’t review your belief statement, then I encourage you to reflect and answer the following questions:

• What motivated you to go into teaching?
• What values and beliefs would an ideal teacher have?
• What are your beliefs about students, learning, behavior, respect, school systems, etc.?
• What changes would you like to see happen in our education system?
• What values do you want to model for the students inside and outside the classroom?
• Of your beliefs, which ones are non-negotiable?

Interestingly, one of my students proposed a longer school year for a change she would like to see happen.  Then I asked the class if they would like a longer school year.  Eyes began to shift.  I reassured the students their responses would not leave this room.  Nearly 75% of the students raised their hands in favor or a longer school year.  Hmmmm…

If you are in the process of writing a belief / philosophy statement then read my post on Topics for Philosophy Statements, especially if you are have trouble writing one.

Commentary: My year-end wish

I hate it when teachers talk about the Real World, as if patches of TP stuck to bathroom walls with no other adhesive than shit were not real, as if the occupation of teaching and the pursuit of a learned mind could not stand without the crutch of commerce and threat of paycheck deduction, as if the chorus needed one more monotone voice: You’ll need this for 5th grade because your 8th grade teachers won’t put up with high school work will be different from post-secondary degrees land a good job.

I’m for relevant curricula laden with text-to-world connections, cultural literacy and resume lessons; I’m also for planting seeds in the mulch of escapsim, for preparing students for communities not just as They Are but also as they Can Be. Most of my students feel the weight of a limited future already without the pending revenge implied by my version of the World, a place none other than adulthood’s true horror.

There are 100 days left until the first day of school in the fall, and even though my students have a large countdown in the cafeteria, I tear pages from a smaller countdown in my room. It’s near the end of the year. These kids may not yet be eager to coordinate their Velcro binders with their First Day ‘fits, but they are nostalgic about school and optimistic about life, especially the seniors.

I hope someday their heretofore hypothetical bosses allow them to be childlike. I hope my kids look back in their yearbooks and read, taped to the back inside cover, about a strangely familiar kind of spirit:

You wake up one morning fascinated by everything.
You eat OtterPops in the summer because that’s how you know it is summer.
You make a kite out of twigs, dental floss, and some brown paper napkins.
You find something crawling under rocks at the end of the driveway.
You look for hayseeds in needle cushions.
You curl up in a ball in the grass.
You master the monkey bars.
You invent a game where players must flap their arms like wings.
You let your shadow show your hands how to make puppets.
You re-read your favorite books.
You jump on hotel beds.
You are loyal to any group you belong to.
You float through your sorrows with water wings.
You and your best friend pinky-swear to be nicer with thumb wars.
You study World History because you are intensely interested in the world.
You understand why religious figures go to mountains to make big decisions.
You listen to waves clapping on the waterfront of the Puget Sound, on the rocky shell-lined shores of Alki, stand by a string of foam left behind by the tide, and you say to the sky, Thank you, thank you.

Commentary: Take the bathroom pass

A few of the awkward, sometimes heavy, substantially germy bathroom passes teachers use to deter students from leaving: toilet seats, stuffed animals, life preservers, junkyard rims and steel anvils. Maybe an unwieldy and extravagant pizza box from a dormitory way back. Fit this enormous piece of inflexible cardboard through the door and you can go to the bathroom. Take this chain link puzzle and bring it back with fingerprints.

It’s part of the humiliation of urinating in public schools. It’s the entertainment, the real reason. Admit it, you’re bored, tired, want to get up and stretch, walk around the halls and text. Go.

I know my class may sometimes be the bad one – levels of engagement so low students doodle Shawshank tunnels on desks and chant the old-timey spiritual WHAT TIME IS IT WHEN DO WE GET OUT OF HERE WHEN DO WE GET OUT? – but the secret: You get out when you want. The building is open. I’m not your parole officer. Some of your peers went. A few weeks ago they hopped the 101 to the mall to catch the sale on poppin’ strawberry lip gloss. They took the plunger as the pass. And never came back.

Lost Causes

Chris, one of this year’s Lost Causes (Lost Boys?), turned in a final. It’s a gorgeous compilation of writing supplemented with imagery from magazines. The first piece of writing begins, “Due to my lack of creativity the following will be an ebony and ivory gallery.” It’s black and white.

I’m happy but can’t help but think this accomplishment is as much mine as his. I helped Chris one-on-one more than anyone else. I stapled his handouts to the wall so his black hole backpack wouldn’t suck them in. I hand-delivered a manila envelope of rough drafts to his bus. (Not kidding. I stood at the bus turnaround waving the envelope I found on the floor, holding up the line as I boarded each bus, asking, “Is Chris Araya here?” The kids on 56 whooped and hollered, and I walked to the back and found Chris grinning and cowering under the seat and chewing on the chopstick I hid in his hair while he was sleeping that morning.)

I didn’t teach him anything about organization and obviously enabled him, but I couldn’t stand to watch him write a new first draft every day because he couldn’t find the draft he wrote yesterday, and I wanted him to produce something, something polished, just this once. And he did. It’s beautiful. The first piece in the portfolio is called “My Law is Absolute Moral Law.”

It starts: “Things I wanna change: Black will no longer be black but ebony. White will no longer be white but ivory. Every tree will grow a different type of fruit and/or flower. Every day you will have a new name of your choosing. (You can borrow someone else’s but there will be a name transaction fee.) Hamburgers will no longer be called hamburgers but burgers. Grass stays a healthy green no matter the circumstances. Cheese never spoils. All the words I make up must be real words.”

Where New Teachers Go

New teachers go out in the portables, the moveable classrooms celebrating their 23rd year in the parking lot, the N-campus shacks where the carpet dampens every time it rains. (Leaks above and below. The rain somehow seeps from the ground and the kids hang their backpacks on chairs to protect their textbooks.) I heard last year a teacher here went on sick leave because the mold behind the walls was so thick she couldn’t breathe right.

See, teachers (mostly new ones) and students (mostly frosh) in the not-so-portable portables aren’t burdened by distractions like clocks, bells, or fire alarms. When there’s a fire alarm we wait for a kid from another class to open the door and WE’RE HAVING A FIRE DRILL CAN NICK COME OUT and HOW COME WE DON’T HAVE A FIRE ALARM and my yelling over THIS IS AN OPPORTUNITY TO PRACTICE FLEXIBILITY AND PATIENCE and ADMINISTRATORS WANT TO GIVE US AS MUCH INSTRUCTIONAL TIME AS POSSIBLE.

This is where I landed. In the Stationeries N-Campus (N for “Nowhere”?). This morning I found a rat keeled over in the hallway, clutching its stomach. When I told my principal about it and said a less dead rat bee-lining for the bologna in an innocent student’s backpack would be the end of learning as we know it, she said, “I have great faith in your ability to turn it into a teachable moment.”

She’s right. If they don’t fumigate soon, I will send a note home to the parents of all my students: “So that everyone may learn and be healthy, I need you to update your child’s shots. Please call the main office and let the principal know your child’s immunization status.” I’ve been told I should be grateful to have my own room, thankful I’m not one of the teachers more portable than me, who lug grocery carts full of markers and poster supplies around campus.

I don’t listen. This is a teachable moment, and I won’t compare my happiness to the lowest common denominator.

Free Documentary (TEACH) Portrays First-Year Teachers’ Struggle

Award-winning director Davis Guggenheim ‘s documentary TEACH is now available online for free at www.teachnow.org.

“TEACH chronicles the determination and commitment of four young teachers as they fight the real fight: educating our children. 

Davis Guggenheim’s award-winning documentary reveals the human side of the story: showing what it takes to survive the first year teaching in America’s toughest schools. (35 min.)”

Calculate the Cost of Teacher Attrition at your School

In an earlier post,  I examined the “teacher shortage” issue.  One perspective that I presented was that  it was the high rate of teacher attrition causing the shortage.  Rather than retaining beginning teachers through mentorship and professional development, teachers are left struggling, eventually with 50% leaving the profession within the first 5 years.  To replenish these teachers leaving, we hire new ones, again providing the same level of dismal support as their predecessors.  Not only is the cost of this cycle detrimental to student achievement (with the loss of experience and knowledge from the outgoing teachers), but there is a significant monetary cost as well. 

 

Using the calculator below, you can calculate the cost of your school’s attrition.

http://www.nctaf.org/resources/teacher_cost_calculator/school_calc_sdp.asp?clear=yes

 

I am left with asking, when will school districts and state education agencies begin to make a real, sustained effort to retain our teachers?