There's nothing to do...

How do I deal with having nothing to do?

Now, that's not entirely true. I still have a house, two children, a husband, and a career. And believe me, that's enough.

But for the past three years, I was also working on a second Master's degree. And for the most part, that mostly just meant that for a few months each semester I had extra work to do, reading, papers, to write, etc. Then last semester happened.

I was taking my last class in my program, which no one felt the need to tell me that it would be the most demanding one to date, as well as completing my internship. And holding down my job, children, house, and husband.

From late August until the first week of December, I had to discipline myself each and every day. Always planning ahead in order to complete my own work, keep up with my AP classes, and maintain the house and my children. October is busy for us anyway because three of us in the house have October birthdays. The past four years I have hosted Thanksgiving at my house, so Thanksgiving break is traditionally devoted to major cleaning and cooking.

Generally, Friday nights were free. But then starting Saturday mornings, the marathon continued. I would either spend Saturday mornings cleaning or starting to work on my class, or work for the internship, or grading for my classes. Saturday evenings may or may not have been free. If a holiday were approaching, Saturday evening was devoted to decorating and/or shopping. Sunday was spent either at the public library or at Barnes and Noble (hint: I prefer the library because it is always quiet and there are PLENTY of electric outlets. And at the main Spartanburg branch, you can bring food and drinks if you stay in the front area!). Doing research, listening to lectures, posting to online threads, writing papers, completing internship work, planning for my classes and grading.

I experienced two major breakdowns (that I can remember). One occurred on a Wednesday evening. I had just turned in a paper that Monday, but one was due again in 1.5 weeks, so I was trying to get a bit of a head start on it. I was so tired that I was seriously having trouble seeing the words in my textbook. I was trying to make sense of the labyrinth of the directions my professor gave for the paper. Then I always had to interpret these directions in my head: okay, what does she actually want to see in order to make an A? It was all bullshit anyway, these paper assignments, and when I know that, it's doubly hard to concentrate sometimes. I honestly can't remember why, but me and Brian were also arguing (probably because I wasn't a very fun person to be around during this time period) and I slammed my textbook on the kitchen floor and left the house. I could barely see because I was crying so hard, but I just felt like I might explode if I didn't leave the house. I drove up 290 before coming back with a coffee from McDonald's. Then I went to bed.

It's just a feeling of absolutely no control over anything because you are literally always doing something for someone else, and it continues for four months straight. And of course the entire time I felt like an awful mother because I was constantly having to take time away from them to do all of this work. I knew the entire time that it would be over early in December, but still. You never get this time back, even if it's only a few months.

Add in, as anyone who's read this blog already knows, that the other class I was teaching, my senior English class, was seriously the worst class I've ever taught, and the fact that I asked for help in getting resources to help teach them in order to save me time and my requests were rejected, and I just felt incredibly lonely. I felt like no one cared at all that I was going through one of the hardest times of my life. There are some exceptions to that statement, and those people already know who they are. If I were not a religious person, and did not pray regularly for perseverance, I do not know how I would have made it through.

And now, this weekend, all I have to do is clean up the house a bit and grade some papers. That's all. I have to re-develop a life again. I can think about my children first and everything else next. I was in such a good mood yesterday while I was teaching because, this semester, my senior English class is very nice, and some of my AP students even asked me, "Are you having a good day?" I was certainly able to prove to myself, through this program, that I can do anything I set my mind to, but it kinda did come with a price.

Now I feel like I've been repaid.

The Way We Weren't

Today was my last first day of school as a classroom teacher, and it's bittersweet.

I'm very excited to be doing something new next year, but then I know there will be many aspects of being a classroom teacher that I will miss. No matter how bad of a semester I may have had, I still managed to get sort of excited for the first day of the next semester, thinking about new things I could try, etc. I really love some of the units I teach because I have learned a lot about myself as a person through teaching high school for 8 years. I have really helped a lot of AP Language students grow as mature thinkers and writers.

I think that teaching others is perhaps one of the hardest things we try to do as humans because ultimately we cannot control other people. We can study all of the psychology we want; most people are aberrations anyway, so we just stick with what seems to work. We have to be able to transfer knowledge to each other, though; otherwise, how else would mankind have survived for this long? Nowadays we seem to think that we can only learn from each other using technology, which I think is seriously flawed logic.

It is highly possible that I have learned more from my students over the past 8 years than they learned from me. I am still a highly introverted person, introspective, and quiet. Unless you really know me. Some people who read this blog might know my other side that is loud, sarcastic, and perhaps slightly annoying. :) It's been sort of tough meshing these different sides of myself as a teacher because, frankly, I sometimes have a hard time taking myself so seriously that I think a classroom full of 18 year-olds should. I more or less have just tried to develop units and lessons over the years that were more interesting and thought-provoking for the students rather than sticking with stuff that promoted the image of me pontificating from my podium.

Overall, this method has worked very well for me. My students often tell me they learned a lot in my class, and about topics that they didn't really know much about before. My seniors research ethical issues in science when we read Frankenstein and they pick a banned or challenged book to read, research, and write an argument about in terms of the usefulness of book censorship and intellectual freedom. My AP students...they do too much for me to want to write here. :)

But I have to once again come back to last semester's English 4 class. The one I still can't believe happened. Driving home today, I was trying to think of a way to describe them. And I can't. It wasn't a class only of bad kids who always hated me and each other. It wasn't a class of students who just wanted to get it over with already in order to graduate. And it wasn't a class of students who were studious and interested in learning (hah!). They were all of those things combined. Every single day. I can't even decide if we ended on a positive or a negative note, which is very fitting (although the fact that one girl gave the class the finger as she walked to the door to go to the restroom leads me to believe that's ending on a negative note). Nothing was steady or predictable. Very hard to try to characterize.

And I have no idea if I learned anything from that experience except to just get through each day and try to help someone learn something (well, actually my goal was not to completely lose my cool every day). One student thanked me for having them use LiveBinders.com to complete an online writing portfolio. But before that she smarted off to me after I dressed her down for attempting to copy someone else's work. I don't know about anyone else, but I don't do well with ambiguity in dealing with people. I like to know definitively where I stand. Do you like me, or not? Now, the students liking me is not something I care about as a teacher. This is what I want to be clear, as a teacher: are you going to come into class with war paint on, or are you going to try to work with me? If that's not clear to me, I have a hard time.

So this is The Way We Weren't: we weren't clearly in love or in hate. We weren't in love with learning or with failing. We weren't anything that can be clearly communicated because their identity as a class shifted every week to something else that I had to adapt to.

I guess you had to be there.

Panacea for all!

It seems like calls for education reform are a dime a dozen and are proposed every other day, but reading this one made me think (Commission Recommends Core Reforms in New York).

We hear calls for more rigorous testing in teacher education and certification programs, longer school days, more prekindergarten classes (depending on which color state you live in), more technical and career course offerings. No homework because it's stressful, useless, and diminishes a desire to learn. Flip the classroom and use more technology. Use iPads because students are used to using them.

No one ever mentions the student themselves! How do we reform them?

All of the ideas mentioned above imply that the United States no longer leads the world in educational achievement (read, test scores) because we're not using the most effective teaching methods and our teachers aren't smart enough. Wow.

To use an analogy, if a patient goes to see a doctor and then does not follow the doctor's medical advice, thus becoming even more sick, does that mean the doctor is not smart enough, needs more training, and better equipment?

Let's not wear the rose-colored glasses, either. It's not like we woke up one day about a decade ago and all students sucked. There have always been bad students, students with poor attitudes, even dangerous students. And let's also remember that it used to be true for the US only to educate a small portion of the population. But when we live in a democracy and we believe everyone is entitled to the rights guaranteed  by the Constitution, we're going to face the problems of dealing with, well, everyone, not just the entitled few.

Of course there is always room for teacher improvement because our classes of students are never the same. I have never used the exact same teaching methods or materials each year in my AP Language classes because the students differ each year even though the course itself remains the same. Technology changes and becomes easier to use each school year, and we do need to be able to devote ample time to learn how we could efficiently implement them in our classes to help facilitate student learning. For example, my AP Language students created a class wiki to share their research papers and were able to read each other's work and comment on it. But I think we should also be careful to realize that not using these technologies doesn't mean students can't learn. If that were true, how did anyone throughout history learning anything before the last ten years?

It just seems comical to me that all new reform ideas side-step the actual problem: our raw materials, the students themselves. If they ultimately don't care, how is putting an iPad in front of them supposed to magically change anything? And does it really matter that I have two Master's degrees if one of my classes is full of teenage mothers and students who are in and out of jail?

I really think that no one wants to admit that dealing with teenagers at the high school level can just be tough. It's easier to change everything about the educational system except them. Our American culture is largely responsible for shaping them as people and citizens as well as their families, and if good manners and being smart aren't truly valued, then how can teachers be the only ones in our society who are given the burden of changing that? And if a teacher grades an assignment, and a student doesn't turn it in but the parent emails the teacher asking if the student can get some kind of credit anyway (which has happened to me twice this year in AP Language), we can't pretend that our culture really does value intelligence. That parent is just implicitly teaching the student that you should be given at least something for nothing.

And I can't compete with that type of lesson.

Cheap Meth? Cheap Guns?

Sort of borrowed the title here from Nicholas Kristof's recent column Cheap Meth! Cheap Guns! Click here. about China.

It's quite catchy.

The notable quote in Kristof's article comes when he observes, "Tens of thousands of censors delete references to human rights, but they ignore countless Chinese Web sites peddling drugs, guns or prostitutes."

How many times do we pause long enough to contemplate the ironies of our lives? The Chinese government is actually getting it right here, if you're into communism. Suppression of intellectual freedom has long been proven to be an expedient in the takeover of common sense and justice. Do I need to even mention Hitler?

Keeping people ignorant, perpetuating myths and stereotypes, spreading misinformation that is tempting and just on the edge of believable...surely these things couldn't occur in the year 2013, the age of technology and transparency because if you can catch something on tape, well, that makes it hard to rewrite history, no?

Yet we see the paradox of democracy and technology. The more we are able to discover and share any type of new information as well as archived information that was previously only available to a select, elite group, and the more we are able to create our own histories (Rodney King), the more we seem to rely on tired arguments that have been recycled with 2013 terminology and myths.

It should be easier than ever to be a genius or, at least more practically, semi-knowledgeable.

And there certainly are some people who feel that they are more intelligent mostly because of the Internet. WebMD diagnoses, access to thousands of newspapers, Google scholar, celebrities who Tweet.

And also the proliferation of millions of web sites that are blogs like this one, contributing one voice to cyberspace (that I'm not sure you can argue actually exists), and other web sites that are more malicious and malevolent. We can pay people to do our thinking for us.

Is there a difference between this and China? Sure, and it's one that Aldous Huxley already observed. The difference is that we are willingly allowing our freedoms to be usurped by technology while most of the Chinese don't have a choice. We want cheap guns but no massacres. We want the freedom to consume the substances of our choice but not have to pay for rehabilitation or other health consequences. We want freedom, but there is a burden involved in that as well: the burden of being wise and careful, unswayed by rhetoric, always pointing toward King's arc of justice.

I think censorship is a mixed bag in America. When we have children, people generally feel pretty protective, monitoring what their children view, play with, who watches them. But if we start to discuss censoring the making of violent movies, people cry a foul against the First Amendment. Same with trying to promote gun safety (notice the difference in connotation between that term and "gun control"). People don't want the government to be able to control what you can view, listen to, produce, or shoot. But history has proven that we need protection from ourselves, particularly in a capitalistic society. We've seen this from the likes of Upton Sinclair, Susan B. Anthony, and Bob Woodward. When left to our own devices, we can do some pretty regrettable things to our fellow mankind, particularly in the name of money. It's one of the ultimate ironies of the universe.

Now, unlike what some might argue, our government is not communist. It does not delete web sites which publish views contrary to its own (not that there is only one of those anyway). But do we sometimes do things backwards around here? Do we sometimes get it wrong, do the complete opposite of what we should do?

Do we ever end up sounding like the catch phrase of obvious incongruity as Kristof wrote above?