Are teachers becoming extinct?

“Teaching was so much easier in the old days.”

 “Kids are so different now.” 

“This generation just isn’t the same as we were.”   

parentinginformer.com

 

How many times have I heard these complaints from veteran teachers?  In the hallway between classes, after school, at conferences.

I am struggling to know if this is really true as I think about how to motivate next year’s crop of sophomores.

It is true that I am a little different as a teacher:  I’m not a worksheet teacher at heart,  even though my early days of teaching were planned mainly from the teacher’s edition with sprinkles of what I considered exciting embellishments of opportunity.   That helps somewhat. 

I believed in authenticity and choice early on.  That pragmatic philosophy came from managing a house with five kids as a first-year teacher.    I also came from hearty, progressive teacher stock:  My mother’s fifth graders used carpet spools to build giant log cabins during their pioneer unit and created a twenty- foot pterodactyl to hang from the ceiling.  My childhood was filled with hands-on learning.

Even so, in some ways I do see general differences emerging over my past 16 years of teaching.  I see students who are

•        More open with their lives- sometimes when I’d rather they not be.
• Less respectful towards adults in general.
• Less concerned about homework if social activities or jobs are in the picture.
• More willing to work in teams or groups.
• More investigative, especially when it comes to using technology.

http://www.ttuhub.net/thehub/wp-content/uploads/2014/04/iStock_000018170994_Medium.jpg

 

Now that most of our kids are out of the house, I’m curious about this generation I’ve helped create. 

And I’m wondering how I can use these new traits to my advantage in the classroom.  How will I need to shift my practices to keep my new audience of students engaged and achieving? 

As Haw says, “If we don’t change, we could become extinct.” Who Moved My Cheese?

Is the cheese is moving from your perspective?  How are you moving with it?  Or not?  Why?

A teacher's sacred rites of summer

Every teacher needs to be forced to clean his or her classroom every year, whether it is to move rooms or just as a masochistic rite that marks the beginning of summer. 

For those of us who don’t teach by the book, the cleaning and sorting process takes just a bit longer. 

Like most teachers, we must also recap the markers, gather the chalk and erasers and magnets, and take down and sort the posters- all twenty- something of them. We also stow our cute family photos, displayed with the intention of making us real people to our students.  And we also remove the wall calendar. 

But those are the only similarities.  Now we must debate whether to save the pictures as possible writing prompts for the future, because we know that though there are millions of images available online, sometimes holding a picture in one’s hands is the next best thing to being there. 

Only then the sacred rite of packing up begins.

The first challenge is finding boxes for all the items that may not be left on the desks, tables or shelves so the custodians can wax or shampoo the carpets.  Not all boxes are created equal, so we tend to look for paper boxes first, and hope that no one has been hoarding them for a move to Maine.  If we are lucky or ambitious, we secure banana boxes through a young relative or parent who has a part-time job.  These are the sturdiest of all and can manfully handle books that must be removed from the ten bookshelves that circle our room.  The dozen tiny Amazon boxes tossed in the garage, albeit made of strong corrugated cardboard, are saved as a last  resort.

Then the boxes must be loaded, preferably in a neat and orderly system because, of course, they will all be unloaded in the two weeks before school begins in late July when no one wants to sort random stuff left over from last school year.   In order to save the custodian staff some work, we begin making an effort to consolidate into as few boxes as possible. Games in one, or two… or three.  Playdoh, beanbags, marker boards, extra erasers and markers, flashcards, baggies, all go in one marked educational tools.   Except for the two items that are just a hair too big and keep the lid from fitting.  They go in another “misc” box, so labeled because we can never spell once school has ended. 

Now it’s really decision time. Over the year, the plastic closet has been crammed with new artifacts, pushing last year’s stuff to the back.   What can be pitched, given away, or placed neatly in the boxes already labeled?   Leftover handouts:  When will we teach that unit or class again?  Is there space in the filing cabinets?  Half-used spiral notebooks: Should we tear out all the pages to recycle them? What about saving empty file folders with both sides labeled?  

This process can take hours. 

As the empty boxes evaporate and we are getting discouraged, we decide to face our past head-on.  We contact the custodians for the combination to a teacher double-locker just outside our door. No worries;   we are teachers now, not students, and the combination works and there is no tardy bell ringing in our ears.    Aha!   The small baskets will fit- what can be crammed into them?

Now there are only the giant stuffed tiger, the bent curtain rod with faded blue sheets, and two decorative foils from the Cyrano de Bergerac unit. What the heck?  Leave them out and let the custodians have a little to grumble about.

Finally, everything on the desktop is swiped into the drawers to be sorted in late July and artfully replaced, as we start all over again.

Glass and houses

Here’s a loaded question: What do whiskey and cigarettes have in common in my life.  No, they’re not my coping mechanisms at the end of the school year. 

Let me add Kellogg’s cereal and Hershey chocolate.  Stumped? 

These are some of the factories my family toured while we vacationed back in the 60’s.  While they all might not have been age appropriate, they still gave me indelible images about production and a wider vision of how the world works.

Exactly like my recent field trip to Kokomo Opalescent Glass   http://www.kog.com/  and the Seiberling Mansion http://howardcountymuseum.org/tour.php  in Kokomo did for fifteen girls.

In this age where the focus on STEAM has replaced STEM, which replaced math and science, which replaced all curriculum, teachers and parents giving students the chance to experience a variety of careers and opportunities still results in widening their opportunities.

Up to Kokomo



Last Monday, my colleague Beth Roop and I drove the white mini buses up State Road 9 and then headed west for about an hour to the stained glass factory.  The girls shrunk back a bit when we entered the hundred-something-year-old building with its dusty floor and cobwebbed ceilings.  They clearly were out of their element. 

Their attention shifted immediately with the intense heat and blinding glow from the 2600 degree furnace that melted the sand and ingredients.  They whispered to each other about the danger of carrying huge ladles filled with molten glass from the furnace to the rolling machine, but they edged closer to get a good look.  Even they were shocked at the $65,000 monthly gas bill reported by our tour guide.  They smiled as they watched the artisan blowing into the long tube to shape the blobs of hot glass into flat round plates of glass used as centerpieces for stained glass windows.  And by the time we saw the artisans making glass beads and laying out pieces of glass for windows, all of us were imagining the designs we would create if we were the ones behind the work tables. 

Career Connections

During our tour, each of the girls learned about surprisingly different careers: They could be a chemist who created recipes for various types of glass; an engineer who designed the machinery that created the glass; a social media expert who marketed goods across the world; an artist who designed stained glass windows for churches or famous singers like Elton John; even a retail store manager, selling delicate works of art, instead of burgers and fries or clothing.

Howard County Historical Society
After our lunch and tour of the Neo-Jacobean Seiberling Mansion in downtown Kokomo, the girls came away with new career possibilities in historical preservation and museum curatorship, interior design and folklore, all career topics that are now more to them than just majors listed on a college website.

 Lasting Impressions

And more than careers, the girls learned about production and manufacturing.  They learned that goods don’t just appear: There is a process that people create using math and science and language and trial and error.   They learned that the past can give us guidance for the future, if we take time to learn it.

Above all, these girls took with them a wider window on their world, a chance to see how many people take their passions in life and turn them into pleasure for others…while also earning a living. 

What an education!

Testing fun... and rigor

It’s testing time again. 

My Indiana Writing Project colleagues and I have been holding workshops for teachers who are giving ISTEP, Indiana’s current version of high stakes testing.  My area of expertise is the English 10 End-of Course assessment or ECA because I taught sophomores for 16 years and through several incarnations of the graduation exam.  I'm proud to say we had some great success together.

Not much has changed in terms of how to prepare students over the years, even though the stakes and the content has evolved:  It really begins on the first day of class, when teachers build students’ confidence and create high expectations for their learning.

But in the short haul, in these days before the test, sometimes even the best teachers are tempted to cram one more fact or approach in hopes that students will score just a little higher.  It can get out of hand and burn out kids before they even see the test, despite teachers’ good intentions.

To maintain everyone’s equilibrium in the noxious atmosphere of education these days, I encourage you to balance fun and rigor.  Play a game for a few minutes during class.  Construct a healthy competition between teams of students as you review.  Encourage students to write questions for each other using satire from The Onion or some nonsense poetry.  Get students up moving as they bowl for literary terms or answer conventions questions.

And start planning now to set the tone for testing day.  Last year at my school, we created a PowerPoint presentation for students to view as they enjoyed their protein breakfast funded by local businesses.  The content was the generic test-taking tips that we hoped all students would remember to use when they opened the test booklet or turned on the computer.  But to up the engagement, we created some buzz beforehand. 
 

We elaborately staged photos of the student-testers themselves a week or so before the test and were sure that no one saw it before test day.  One student had climbed on a desk to point to the clock for the reminder about budgeting time in his photo shoot.  Another looked as if he were shivering on the slide with a reminder about wearing layers.  By featuring the students themselves, we were assured an attention factor of almost 100% on test morning.

So, insert a little fun in your test prep.  You'll see the payoff in more engaged students.

Find some of my fun and rigorous test prep materials at
http://www.teacherspayteachers.com/Store/Second-Classroom-On-The-Left/Order:Most-Recently-Posted

What Is success?

For the past seven or eight years,   I have taken my students to the local university library.  They enter, awed at the four stories of books available to them as they begin their academic writing careers.  By the time their instruction session has finished, and they have become intimate with databases, the electronic card catalog, academic journals and Boolean searches, some I have found weeping in the stacks on Third Floor, East, hopelessly confused about how to locate a particular title; others I have seen stumble down the steps looking dazed, their eyes unfocused and their voices not quite coherent.

Even so, most tell me later, sometimes years later, that this field trip is one of the best they have taken.   They have been challenged to find what academics have written about their research topics and have used it to create their own arguments.  They have conquered the various types of scholarly media that a university offers and supports.  And they have seen firsthand the rigor and expectation of the post-secondary education world – as well as the hundreds of college-age hotties they failed to impress, properly putting them back into their place in the pecking order of academia.

Sadly, this field trip has dwindled from including all my sophomores to only a few AP Language students.  The number of students being exposed to this academic world has decreased from two buses filled with eager students of all backgrounds and capabilities to only the few high ability students who have hung in there for the second semester of a challenging course.  It has become difficult to take students out of their classes with high stakes tests for field trips. Other teachers complain.  After all, their students' tests results impact their performance reviews.  I get that.

But if all students truly must be college and career ready, they all should be given the chance to see what  college expects of them.  Shouldn’t the students who claim in their writer’s notebooks that they want to be doctors and lawyers, nurses and physical therapists, teachers and computer designers, video game designers and vets see what will be expected of them if they choose to pursue these paths?  Isn’t that a large part of making them college and career ready? 

What a shame that "success" is more frequently becoming created from sitting in a classroom, memorizing facts and working practice sets to pass a standardized test, instead of experiencing the challenges of conquering higher level inquiry.

Would you rather…?

Would you rather swim in a pool filled with frogs or bathe in whipped cream every day?

No question. I’d take the whipped cream, even though I’d smell like a carton of  warm sour milk by the end of the week.  I hate frogs.

Yesterday at the Indiana Writing Project’s workshops “ISTEP: The Write Strategies,” my colleagues Kathy Flatter and Lindsey Thompson shared several fun ways to make the writing to a prompt genre more engaging.  One of them was the “Would You Rather…” game.     You may remember the concept:  Two equally difficult scenarios are juxtaposed for players to consider... and defend.  In the board game version, you might have to predict the response of another player or the consensus of the group after discussion to earn a point.

But there are also websites devoted to these ethical and silly conundrums.

Here is an example from nicka who submitted a proposition to the sometimes inappropriate for school website http://www.rrrather.com/ :  Would you rather… go way back in time and meet your ancestors OR go way into the future and meet your great grandchildren? Interestingly, the website actually breaks down the total 289,452 votes by gender and country, which could be a great tool for prediction exercises and higher order thinking…. but that’s an idea for another day.

I agree with Kathy and Lindsey that using these questions IS a super way to engage kids in creating argument.  Some of the choices can be really wacky and appealing, especially for kids who are learning to create and support written argument.  But I am in the throes of trying to help ninth graders respond to multi-part prompts about Shakespearean text, and these questions seem too simplistic at this point in my unit.

So, I’ve decided to write a few of my own, two-part challenges.  “Would You Rather… Double Dips” I will call them, or  WYRDD’s.

Here’s one that I am going to use in an online discussion next week: Would you rather… Pick a fight with someone you hated and be terribly wounded, OR defend the honor of someone and be beaten in public?

Here’s another:  Would you rather… Marry your true love and never see your family again, OR marry someone rich and retain your family’s love and support?

Okay, so maybe these prompts aren’t as engaging as the whipped cream  or time travel ones, but they do meet my academic needs.  They connect to the themes of Romeo and Juliet, and they provoke a moral or ethical responses, a sure hit with teenagers.

But they are also more than that: Students will need to discuss BOTH elements of their choice, not just one and justify themselves. That’s the part that will help them with the multi-layered prompts they will see on their state tests, the part they are currently struggling with in classroom writing.

So this week we’ll do a couple of WYRDD’s together and then students will create their own WYRDD’s from their independent reading books and post them for their peers. By Friday, I 'm hoping they'll be ready to take on a double- dip essay prompt about Romeo and Juliet, without any overt help from the whipped cream or frogs. 

Snow days, anyone?

My calendar is so messed up!  We’ll never get through this unit on the Civil War!  How am I going to get my kids ready to pass ISTEP? 

Over the past few weeks of snow days and weather delays, teachers have been moaning about how to cover their curriculum.   Facebook posts, text messages, and the few hallway conversations we have had revolve mostly around whether we will be in school tomorrow, how to cover material in a 30-minute class period…. and what tasty recipes someone found while at home surfing Pinterest.

Even administrators are wringing their hands, mostly because we are missing days that prepare students for the state tests looming ever near.

A few schools in Indiana have been permitted to make up their missed days through a pilot e-learning program, where students work at home if school has been cancelled.  I’m trying to head in that direction, although my school is not on the pilot program list.  My classes that use My Big Campus and Google Sites are allowing students with Internet access to keep working, if they are so inclined.  In class, they use the school laptops; at home they use their own devices. 

And e-learning certainly has advantages. 

Students have access to supporting videos and resource material that can be individually viewed as many times as needed for scaffolding, or ignored if they aren’t needed.  Groups can work together remotely in discussions that also support learning; students can work when they are able and interested- even at 2 AM.  Teachers can provide feedback from home, and make adjustments or new assignments as needed.

In many ways, the winter weather has given us a chance to jump into the flipped classroom concept informally.   We can see what works, and what doesn’t, and why.

With the kind of engagement that e-learning offers, I’m thinking that filling those extra days in June won’t be such a challenge.