Although I want to improve as a teacher (and I will!), it’s also important to acknowledge some of my accomplishments this semester.
Here are a few of them:
1. I have rediscovered my joy and passion for teaching. I’ve always known, despite years of struggle, that teaching is at my center. It’s what I do. This semester, teaching has begun to be fun again.
2. I have regained my confidence. It’s important to remember that I’m good at this job. There is much to improve, of course, but it’s also clear that what I do helps students.
3. All my students passed. I gave out no failing grades. This has never happened before. I’m proud of the support I provided, and I’m happy that my students saw me as a coach. It wasn’t easy, but I made significant progress in providing academic intervention.
4. My class website, iseroma.com, has become an interactive learning space. Students take pride in posting their work. They write comments to each other. The dialogue continues outside of the classroom.
5. I have written regularly on this blog. Writing has helped me reflect and make changes more quickly than talking (which sometimes becomes venting). My favorite part, though, has been seeing comments to my posts. My teaching improves because of your insight.
6. I have taught a meaningful and rigorous AP English course. I’m making several improvements next semester (stay tuned!), but I’m happy to say that I’m proud of the work I’ve done so far.
Next semester, I hope to focus on reading, my #1 passion — in my class, in my Advisory, in my school. Let me know your ideas!
I do a lot of complaining about my students. They’re not working hard enough. They don’t have study skills. They’re not proofreading closely. They’re not doing enough homework.
In other words, it’s their fault, not mine.
Whenever I start blaming my students, it’s time to do some reflection and figure out next steps — about what I need to do.
Fall Semester Reflection Topic #2: Homework
My experience with homework this semester has been as follows:
My students have trouble breaking up large assignments into parts,
I’m successful with writing homework but not with reading homework.
Although my perception is that my students aren’t doing enough homework, I haven’t investigated their homework habits. That’s what I’m going to do tomorrow when I give out the first semester course evaluation. On this assessment, I’m going to ask my students how much time each major piece of homework takes them to complete.
I think expecting six hours of homework per week is fair in an AP class.
From the data I collect, I’m hoping to create a more streamlined daily homework schedule for my students to follow. My recommended homework schedule will include all major parts of the class — reading, writing, and test prep — along with a suggested amount of time for each activity.
Some may argue: How is this going to prepare them for college next year, when nobody will tell them how to complete their assignments?
I get that argument, and I know that what might be best is coaching students — whether individually or as a class — to develop their own homework schedules.
But we don’t have time to teach time management skills and then to figure out whether they work (except for maybe on their Theme Study). I want my time to be focused on teaching close reading and helping to improve their writing.
With this daily homework schedule, my hope is to send the following message to my students: that the key to success over time is through consistent practice and work habits (rather than through spurts of effort followed by days of rest).
One question, however, remains: What’s the best way to make sure my students stay on track?
It’s Finals Week, so that means that instead of helping my students with their exams and projects, I’m thinking about ways to improve my teaching next semester.
Topic #1: Reading.
I must say, I’m a tad obsessed with reading. It sort of makes me crazy, actually. My general feeling about reading is that everybody says it’s important but nobody does it anymore.
In To Read or Not to Read (2007), the National Endowment for the Arts concluded that 15- to 24-year-olds read an average of 7 minutes a day.
When I wrote my AP English syllabus in August, I decided that my students and I would study 12 books this year. That’s a lot, but I did the math: If students read 20 pages a day, six days a week, we could get there.
It just hasn’t happened. I mean, we’ve studied six novels so far. But it’s pretty clear that all my students haven’t really read them closely (if at all). Here’s why:
1. My students don’t yet read consistently on their own. They might read on Monday but then skip Tuesday. We need to build daily habits.
2. If the book is difficult, my students read really slowly. I can’t fault them for this. If I want them to study the books and annotate them, I must meet them where they are.
3. When you’re overloaded with work, reading always comes last. If I’m a student and have three hours of homework, most likely I’m going to put reading off until the end (when I’m most tired).
It’s pretty easy for me to figure out what’s going wrong about reading, but it’s really hard to figure out how to make things better. But I do have some ideas. I’d like to hear yours, too. Here are mine for next semester:
1. Read four books (more) closely, rather than six superficially. My fear is that I’m lowering the standard and that my students will follow suit and read even less. But I was looking at The Scarlet Letter today (which we’re reading in January), and no normal person can actually understand that in two weeks. After all, “physiognomy” and “ignominious” are run-of-the-mill words in the novel.
2. Require reading and evidence of reading every night. This semester, I broke up the reading into chunks — sort of like college — and told students to make their own schedules. Wrong! If my students don’t yet read every night, I must force it on them. But the question is how. I’m not interested in reading quizzes or thought journals. Annotations work for students who do them, not for ones who don’t (or who fake them). In addition, I don’t want to have to check their reading every day (including weekends). I’ll have to think more about this.
3. Spend more time in class reading and talking about reading. This semester, I focused on writing, especially on Mondays, when we did AP test practice essays. If I’m going to make progress with reading, I’m going to have to devote much more class time to it. I just don’t know exactly how.
4. Build the social aspect of reading. This semester, I tried online video chats to promote reading, especially on weekends. But the technology just didn’t work well enough. So my latest idea is to do more in-class group activities with the books and to do regular one-on-one conferences with my students on their reading.
Please let me know what you think — and if you have ideas.
This morning, I read a scathing article in The New York Times that investigated K12, the nation’s largest for-profit online education provider. It’s a long and excellent article.
In K12 schools, kids as young as 6 years old mostly stay at home and do their lessons at a computer, while teachers manage up to 300 students at a time.
This isn’t academic intervention or enrichment. It’s a child’s entire education.
I’m a big believer of tech in schools, but K12 goes way too far. It’s eliminating the two most crucial elements to a student’s education: the teacher and the other students.
Full disclosure: I currently attend an online master’s degree program. (But that’s different, I swear!)
Although online learning can provide targeted and individualized intervention, it should never be a replacement for the interaction that occurs between students and their teacher in a classroom.
Imagine if your memories from childhood amounted to the hours you spent in front of a computer.
The saddest thing here is that it seems like K12, in its recruiting efforts, may be targeting students of color and others who have traditionally not been successful in public schools. This is unfortunate not just for K12 but also for our public school system. After all, families who transfer their children to K12 must feel strongly about the low quality of education they’re receiving from their current public school.
Instead of replacing a child’s education with an online solution, I wish companies like K12 would partner with schools to provide targeted intervention. I have no problem if our school had more computers and if my students worked independently, as part of the curriculum, to build their skills. Of course, there’s probably not enough money in that model, which is exactly what for-profit companies like K12 are after.
I just finished my 15-page research paper for my library science class. It frightened me. After all, I hadn’t written anything that long since college. So I made sure to begin writing six days before the due date.
Yes, how very adult of me.
My planning helped: I stayed mostly on schedule and finished the paper yesterday with time today to tinker with citations and references and those annoying things.
This means that I also had time to help my students with their three-page essay, due tonight at 11 p.m., which I assigned last Monday and which 95 percent of my students likely began today.
You might think my students suffer from procrastination. I don’t think that’s it. Rather, I think my students think all assignments take one day and deserve one draft, no matter their length, no matter their difficulty.
I have to figure out ways to infiltrate that thinking and get my students to plan ahead.
One way is to build in more checkpoints. For example, I could establish more due dates along the way so that students understand that a large assignment should be broken up into smaller parts. This strategy, however, does the thinking for the students, and does nothing to prepare them for college.
Another thing I could do is suggest a timeline or have my students come up with their own. Earlier in the year, we did this in class to create a reading schedule for one of the novels. Some of my students struggled with making a plan, but they appreciated the activity.
Nevertheless, in order for a schedule to work, you have to stick to it, and my students sometimes think they can do more than what’s possible in a day. So what’s crucial is to get my students to be honest with themselves about how long it takes them to complete a task.
The problem with doing that, of course, is that it might overwhelm me. I might find out that even if my students spend 60+ minutes on my class every night, they still won’t complete the work.
(I think I’ve stumbled on what might be the truth: Many of my students are working 7+ hours a week on my class — and yet that’s not enough, and we have to figure out ways to find more time and to work more efficiently.)
Although I want to improve as a teacher (and I will!), it’s also important to acknowledge some of my accomplishments this semester.