National Boards

I'm dooooonnnnneeeee!

I want to plant the town red tonight. I just squeezed 13 months of work into a few of weeks. Actually I've worked on it in bursts last year but this past two weeks have been absolutely brutal. I'll be postmarking it on March 31st - the deadline.

People ask me, "If you do this again, would you wait this long?" And, actually, yes, that's me. This has been a year of deadlines, crazy stressful teaching-related deadlines, and I've made every one. All on the day of the deadline. But I've not passed one yet. What a year it's been, seriously. I need to write about it more. Probably my busiest year yet, and I'm only working one job.

Finsihing up National Boards

Blogging has been light lately, mostly because of National Board. I waited until the relative last minute for a couple of the entries; I'll be working on this all the way until the deadline on Wednesday. The most difficult part was/is Entry 1, which I really wish I had given myself more time for. Usually I can write about myself and my teaching with ease, but this is making me go a lot slower, more methodically, and the results are I'm only on page 5 of a 13-page entry. I'm not even positive I'm writing it correctly, but what I'm writing feels good. I've gone through such stages with this whole project; last year, I regretted doing it, but sent in my final entry at the last minute; I thought I was going to not do so well, but I got a perfect score. This year, I feel like I've gone through so much (the IB IV class, with its deadlines, has made me work harder than I have, probably ever), and really wish I hadn't taken on National Board. There were a few places I wished I could have jumped ship. But I didn't. Now, I'm 72 hours from having to send it off and am glad it's coming to an almost-close. I've enjoyed the reflection that it has compelled me to go through, but I still don't know if it was the best year to attempt this. We'll see.

Updates

I'm really, really busy, but am taking a brief break to blog. If you're interested in keeping up with me more, follow the twitter feed to the right. It's probably not a bad idea for me to, in my busy-ness, reflect a bit on what is going on in the classroom, baseball field, and National Board preparations.

Classroom:
The 9th graders are doing pretty well with the Literary Circles Unit. I tell them that this is an exciting time for them, because it's showing them that the teacher can be kind of removed from the "giver of information" role and more into the facilitating role. They struggle with it, and I struggle with it, too - holding back from giving information, or unsure about what is going on in the books because it's hard to keep eight books straight at once. I love the excitement and buzzing I'm hearing, though, and I love that they're using each other to dig away at the texts.

As for the seniors, attendance is often erratic and that's frustrating. I'm moving the East of Eden unit alongside poetry, practicing for both Exam 1 and Exam 2 of the IB Exams. I probably will not choose a 600-page novel again for the second semester of senior year. I love the book, still, but it might be too heavy for right now. The students are up and down on it. As for me, I'm so moved by it, but alternately frustrated by the too-perfect dialogue. It's like the characters are more symbols than they are people. But I still love it. And, it's sad for me to say this, but I see a lot of Tom Hamilton in myself, which makes it all the more moving for me.

Coaching
Today was Opening Day, and we were rained out. The weather has, once again, been brutal for Baltimore City Baseball. First, we were dealing with the melting snow, and now, more rain. Our field is in horrible condition and the city has not come yet to fix it. Still, the team is good - possibly very good. I just hope we can play some games soon.

National Board
I'm so busy I can barely see straight. I'm not looking forward to Spring Break; I'm looking forward to March 31st, the due date. Hope I get done!

Pondering discussions

In discussions, Class A follows the rules closely. They offer a comment, provide a quotation that supports it, and mention any literary devices that are present that help contribute to meaning. This gives the the total possible three points. I call on six people at once because there are so many hands raised ("We'll go from John to Michelle to Aneeka to...") and everyone doesn't get to talk. It is technically strong and ensures a wide use of literary terms.

It's also incredibly boring and not much of a conversation.

This is a competitive class with a lot of kids who really care about their grades. It does not translate to good discussions.

Class B, though, is a little bit less like this. Class B speaks more freely, digging at the topic and turning it around in their heads. They talk to each other more. I talk to them more. They sprinkle in the literary terms, but don't seem like they're wedging them in there for a grade. It's so much nicer as well as more insightful.

I did the discussion a little bit differently for Class B, after Class A's was a little like pulling teeth. I structured it more. I went down the planning sheet. Should have done that with the first class, I guess.

I'm wondering if it's more me than them, or a combination of the two. Class B felt great afterwards. Class A felt a little like there wasn't that much learning going on, just talking to get a grade.

Hmmm...

National Board Portfolio is due in 16 days

I can't quite believe how much is going on right now:

1) Our school is going through this big accreditation process and things this week have to be tip-top.

2) Week 3 of baseball season. With the weather, we've only been able to be on our field twice. Right now, it's pretty much a lake. I've scheduled two scrimmages for the end of the week with county teams that surely have better facilities and drainage. First official game is Monday. We're not ready and this will be a busy week. In the rain.

3) National Board portfolio is due on March 31st. I have several complete days of work (non-stop writing and revision) to complete everything, as I'm very far behind. Luckily, I just finally got some help transferring a mini-cassette to a DVD, something I had been stuck on for a while (so much of this is about technology knowledge...). I will probably have to take a personal day and/or a sick day(s) to complete everything. It is a whole lot of work but I have a renewed determination to get this thing done well - just heard only 23 teachers in the city have National Board Certification and I'd like to be #24, or at least one of the new batch. (That number seems a little low, but I'm not sure where to check.)

4) Staying on top of two challenging, teaching-for-the-first-time units with both grade levels.

I've had some good St. Patrick's Day Lesson using this song

"Looking for a Job" - Todd Snider

I saw Todd Snider on Monday night at The Ram's Head Tavern in Annapolis. It was crazy, going to a concert on a weeknight during the second week of coaching, but well worth it - a guys' night out with friends. Seeing Todd Snider live is one of the great joys that live music provides; I recommend it for everyone. I love so many of his songs, but learned a new one. This line -- "What what you say to someone with nothing. It's almost like having it all" -- really grabbed me. Great song.

Perfect song for a productive but lonely rainy Sunday

Second guessing

I'm not sure if East of Eden was a great choice for Seniors with about six weeks left of real high school. Heavy and long.

Or maybe that's me saying that. I'm in the throws of trying to get National Boards done (due March 31st), plus running a Lit Circles unit with the 9th graders (it's going great, but 8 books is hard to stay on top of) and, of course, coaching, which keeps me at school until late every day. This month is a rough one.

Nostalgic for Rocky Run

I just want to say that I can't believe that nothing has opened in the former Rocky Run location in Charles Village. Rocky Run was always busy, and it was big - cut a little fat from the operating budget, fix that horrible smell that never got fixed when it changed its name to Bert's, and you could have a cash cow. The Charles Village Pub is always crowded, too much so, and the peanuts and trivia at Rocky Run. There's a sign in the window for a pasta and pizza place, and I'm hoping it's a cool hangout bar as well.

There's also been a sign in the window of the previous Xando's location for a while, that a new Pizza Tavern was coming. I forget the name, but I've googled it, and the only information I found was old. I haven't seen any progress there recently.

So, I'm feeling nostalgic for Rocky Run (where I had several of my best Baltimore memories), and think something should hurry up and establish themselves. I know it's a recession, but still - a college campus area that has one bar? No good pizza places? Come on... these vacant storefronts are just depressing.

The Bible in the English classroom

I had an interesting moment this week about using The Bible in my classroom. We are currently reading Steinbeck's East of Eden. If you haven't read this book before (and you should - it truly is one of the great American novels), Steinbeck draws very heavily from biblical stories. He even names two different sets of brothers Charles and Adam, then Caleb and Aron, underscoring (with same first initials) the allusion to Cain and Abel. Later, he draws on a lot of Eden-esque descriptions as well as including characters that seem aligned with Eve and even Satan.

So far, we have read Section I, which focuses heavily on Adam and Charles. Steinbeck is setting up all of his biblical allusions, and it's really quite strikingly similar when you look at Genesis 4. Abel and Cain both give their father gifts, but the father only like's Adam's gifts. Charles gets jealous, and tries to kill Adam. Charles later hurts his forehead pushing a boulder and gets a large scar on his face (mark of Cain). Cyrus, their father, is a god-like figure in many ways.

If kids don't know the story of Cain and Abel, they just can't understand what Steinbeck is trying to do. So I did an activity that had us read together the first two paragraphs of Genesis 4, which tells the story of Cain and Abel, and discuss the several comparisons (most of which I outlined above) between Charles and Adam versus Cain and Abel. It was a quick 15-minute activity.

A few minutes into the activity, one of my students said she felt uncomfortable discussing The Bible and asked to leave. I did not let her, and told her we were reading the passage as a tool for analysis of East of Eden. She did not complain anymore, but that night she put a message on FaceBook about the Bible not belonging in public schools.

I admire her passion and definitely agree that The Bible should not be used to preach to students in schools. Indeed, I am a fierce advocate of the First Amendment. But deliberate religious illiteracy is not what the First Amendment is about. Just as if we read a Muslim novel that drew heavily from the Koran, we would read any appropriate passages from The Koran to deepen our understanding, or a World History class might read from religious texts for comparative purposes, if I did not provide my students with that miniature lesson, then I would not be doing my job. I would be forcing my students to read the novel with a curtain over their heads.

Still, this is new to me. In my other brief usages of The Bible in the classroom (with Morrison's Song of Solomon, with Gabriel in Fences), I've never had a protest like this. I get some joking comments about The Bible not belonging in schools from the younger kids, and I always explain that it's okay to use it as a springboard for understanding a biblical allusion better, and they get it. This hasn't become a "thing" in my classroom at this point, I don't think, but I've certainly never had a student ask to leave before. I hope I handled it okay. I did post a long, and, I hope, non-combative (I really like this student personally, and recognize a lot of myself in her railing-at-injustice stances), reply on Facebook.

Note, not that it really matters, but I'm not really even a Christian. I'm pretty much evangelically agnostic. And, in general, I am not a fan of The Bible, mostly because I think it's used as a tool of discrimination too often. But I know it, at least with a passing knowledge. I couldn't be much of a reader otherwise.

The challenging task of separating the Billys from the Cals.

Easily the most difficult part about coaching is making cuts. It's so difficult, in fact, that some years, I've barely made any. However, I had a huge group try out this year, and I had to cut 15 kids on Thursday night from the baseball team, a greater amount than ever before. Even that just got the numbers down from 42 to 27, and really I should cut a few more to get down to 22, which is how many jerseys I have.

I cut a lot of great kids, many with some baseball skills; this year, even the 9th graders can play a little bit (I'm keeping two of them and cut a few seniors, in fact). But I just can't keep them all. It's actually tearing me up pretty good right now, not made any easier the more I learn about them. [...] The only solution I can think of is to have a practice squad, but I need someone to work with them, and it's kind of a thankless job because there are no teams to play and we are really restricted in equipment and space.

So, it's been a rough week, but also a good week - I really do love getting back out there on the field with these kids. It's a good team this year, potentially a really good team, and I've coached the mainly-upperclassmen team for a number of consecutive years now. I know the kids well and really, not to sound cheesy, care about them. It's such an interesting mix, quite a bit more of an interesting mix than any of my classes, which are separated pretty markedly (the highest-ability 12th graders, and a particularly wiggly group of 9th graders) into two types. Not so the baseball team - kids range from 14 to 18, great students and students I have to be on every moment, well-behaved kids in class and kids whose teachers are constantly in touch with me about tardies and texting. Yet they all are already forming into a cohesive group. I do love this.

Yet every season, I am blown away by the time commitment of it - I'm literally at school for 12 hours every day, and often then get kids home, and arrive home myself well past dark and plan two lessons for the next day. This Wednesday, I was feeling that pull of supreme irritation that comes from not sleeping (remember my diagnosis of Chronic Sleep Disorder from earlier this year? I had pretty much fixed it, but not this week), which this week came from being over-worked and also from thinking about these cuts.

Today, I decided to google myself and went to the ratemyteachers reviews about myself. I only have 14 reviews, and all are mostly positive, except one really negative one about four years ago - and that one smarts still. But the latest one said something along the lines of, "Good teacher, really nice guy, really laid back, but needs to find more time for his students".

It was oddly shocking. I certainly have some weaknesses as a teacher (it takes me too long to return papers, I haven't figured out a good way to do drills this year with my 9th graders, I have the occasional dud unit like the recent Native Son one that was a snowday-fueled surface romp instead of getting into in-depth analysis like I would have wanted to - perhaps I was too much of a slave to my schedule), but devotion of time is not one of them.

Baseball Season starting

Baseball season has started, and in many ways, it's the most challenging yet exciting year yet.

It's challenging because the winter weather has been the worst it's ever been before a baseball season. I don't know when we'll be able to use the field. Seriously. It already doesn't hold water well, and it's still pretty much full of snow where it's not really, really muddy or full of entire lakes of water.

It's also challenging for the reasons it is exciting: this is seriously the deepest well of talent I've ever seen try out. Usually we have around 40 or so try out, but several of the younger kids are not baseball players. They've come out because they wanted to try it. Not this year - these are all baseball players, all the way down to the 9th graders.

It's going to be hard to make those cuts (I wish we had a JV team. The funding was cut by the city years ago, before I came into the system in 2001) this year. But we're going to have a helluva good team.

Oh yeah. Being overwhelmed isn't the start of it to describe me these days. National Board stuff is due March 31st, and I'm really behind. Not to mention two new units that I'm creating lesson plans day-by-day for. I'm getting home at around 8pm every night and then spend a couple of hours planning for the next day. It's tough right now. But after March, should be better.