School Calendar = not good for students

Dear Dr. Alonso:

As you work to reform the Baltimore City Public Schools, perhaps you can reform the calendar?

We're only given 180 school days a year. To force school-going until Christmas Eve, or other days like Thanksgiving Eve, really seems to undermine what you're trying to do. Attendance is horrible these days, and very little, if any, learning is going on. My school decided to hold its annual holiday assembly on today, Wednesday, primarily because attendance on Thursday was expected to be so poor. I'm sure the problem is throughout the district.

In addition, with our new contract that will attract the best and brightest from around the country, not affording teachers more of an opportunity to visit their far-away families is also problematic. This is not to mention the families of students in our district, who would appreciate their young kids home a little bit sooner than they are. Indeed, many simply keep them home.

All in all, I'd much rather go a bit later in the school year than be a babysitter to the half of students who will show up tomorrow. Seriously, this is not good for the kids.

Sincerely,
EpiphanyinBaltimore

What? The Cyclops raped the men's heads? on the floor?

By the way, just so you know, if you create a cool Translation activity comparing and analyzing the same section of The Odyssey, one translated by Robert Fitzgerald and one translated by Robert Fagles - expect "Robert Faggies" to be called across the room. And not on purpose to be funny, but actually thought the "l" was an "i".

Also, be prepared that if the Cyclops is "rapping" the men's heads on the floor, that kids will think that Polyphemus is raping the men's heads.

"Marking"

The Detroit State Poems: Marking (from http://www.library.utoronto.ca/canpoetry/wayman/poem4.htm)

Tom Wayman
From: Did I Miss Anything? Selected Poems 1973-1993. Madeira Park, B.C. : Harbour Pub., c1993.

I begin each essay with a calm mind--
a fresh start.
But as I consider what they have written
I get angry: the most cursory of rereadings
would have caught this sentence fragment,
and here is a misused semicolon
after we spent more than an hour on that in class
and where I talked to this student individually
for another thirty minutes about this persistent mistake.
And instead of the simple structure of the expository paper
which we have also gone over and over
and which can be so helpful a model, a technique, a guide,
here again is a jumbled series of random observations:
trite, contradictory, obviously hurried
and spelled wrong.

My red pencil becomes enraged.
It stalks through the words,
precise, bitter, vindictive,
acting as if it is pleased to discover error
and pounce on it, hacking and destroying and rearranging,
furiously rooting out sloppiness and weakness
as though upholding some stern moral precept
against another, softer age.

But the hand gripping the pencil
begins to tremble with remorse.
It feels it has led the students on
to try to expresss themselves
and then betrayed them:
attacking what they have exposed
of their ideas and emotions.
What use is righteousness, the hand wishes to ask the pencil,
without charity?

I read the name at the top
and think of the young person whose effort this is.
Now all I see on the paper
is a face, crestfallen when I hand back what they attempted.
Eyes look up at me
apprehensively, as at a judge.
We both know my weighing of their skill
will be taken to be an assessment of themselves.

It is as though I have been asked to mark
not essays but their faces,
not sentences but who they are.
I raise my pencil, but my hand still shakes.
I want to show them what in normal English usage
is considered incorrect.
But I can not assign a grade to their eyes.

Trying to teach The Odyssey

Right now, I'm attempting to teach The Odyssey to the most reluctant readers I've ever taught.

I came in at the beginning of the unit with a great plan. They would read short sections of The Odyssey at home and we would come in and do great and fun textual analysis activities and creative projects! A board game based on his adventures! A retelling of The Odyssey on the streets of Baltimore! I wanted students to see The Odyssey as a metaphor for the journey of life.

Instead, I'm finding that just helping them decipher a line like, "Poseidon set the world atremble" takes a few minutes. And after enough students are telling me, "I don't get it...", I'm finding I'm throwing my unit plan and reading plan to the side and doing things like recripocal reading and "read a sentence/summarize a sentence" activities in class.

The lesson from all this?

1) Don't give out a reading schedule if you're not sure how the kids will respond to, or "get", the book. I'll remember that next month with The Catcher in the Rye.

2) More reading strategies. More Cris Trovini stuff.

3) Stop rushing so much!

Classroom Library and SSR

One of the goals of our 9th grade team this year is to create more of a reading culture in our school. Our students are definitely not readers, and they've become less and less readers in my time teaching. I'm not sure if this is nationwide or not, but it definitely seems that attention spans are shrinking and being able to commit to long and sustained study is just more and more of a challenge to students.

Our response this year is to incorporate Sustained Silent Reading into class every Monday. I've been pretty consistent with it, and I regret whenever I have vacillated or not given them much. I have created a classroom library with weekly trips to The Book Thing of Baltimore and students can find something to read, or they can bring something they want to read from home.

I can't say they are looking forward to Mondays yet, but they like picking out books and there are definitely kids who get lost in their reading. That's their assignment every Monday, and they're graded by it -- are they "lost" in their book, whatever it is they choose? I figure that reading is thinking and that even if the kid is reading R.L. Stine, they are still reading and thinking (actually, those books have a vocabulary that is just above most of my students' level, so it's a fine read for them) and developing both the stamina and thought processes associated with the rigor we expect from our students.

As I was through The Book Thing, I find myself pulling any book that I think any of my students might be interested in. When I was a 9th grader, I devoured John Grisham novels, and am hoping a kid who might want to be a lawyer (re: half of my kids) pick one of his up. I get sports books, young adult books, biographies, and whatever else I think they might want to pick up.

Today's impressive take of free books included the following:

Three Julia Alvarez novels

The Island of the Blue Dolphins (James O'Dell)

Two copies of The Kite Runner

Several John Grisham novels

Shiloh

The World According to Garp

Two Wally Lamb book

several classroom dictionaries

A YA book about Hitler's rise and fall

A courtside look at March Madness from a reporter with a lot of close access

Cold Sassy Tree


I got four boxes full, so that is only what I remember. This is my new Saturday or Sunday ritual, and my classroom shelves (from shelves lifted from random closets in my school) are getting full. Now I have to set up a system of checking them out or giving them away.

Returning to house concerts

I'm having a house concert tomorrow night.

If I were writing a memoir about my life, the house concert would hopefully function as a symbol. You see, when I moved to Baltimore nearly ten years ago, this was one of my things. I lived in a pretty active house on Walther Avenue, with an assortment of roommates that came and went. I had tons of good friends that I hung out with all the time. I was in great shape; I was dating regularly; work and social life and exercise were co-existing in a symbiotic pattern. And, I did house concerts.

Every month, I did them, at least during the school year. Twenty or so people would come over, and we'd drink and laugh and watch great musicians as they stopped off on their tour through the mid-Atlantic to play a small space in Baltimore. I became friends with the musicians, some of whom I knew way back in my music booking days at Michigan State.

In the ensuing years, however, it just became harder. I don't know why; it's not one thing in particular. The eye surgeries hurt my mojo a little. So did being phenomenally broke and working two jobs. So did moving out of the Walther Avenue house, a little bit too late, a little bit too long after the revolving door of cool roommates stopped.

It's probably no secret that my life right now is a paradox. Professionally, I've never been better. I'm a National Board-certified teacher; I just got a big raise; I feel I've taken a bit of a leadership role on in my school. I feel like I'm doing a good job in my classes. Not good enough, but good. (Teaching is still a job that never quite feels fulfilled; there's always something to do, always something you can be doing better.)

But my personal life? It's the opposite. I get home in the pitch dark and find myself, almost nightly, sinking into a cocoon of exhaustion, lesson planning, websurfing, and TV-watching until too late (teachers should not watch The Daily Show; we simply just shouldn't be up that late. It's not healthy.) I love my job but crave the weekends, if only to catch up on sleep, but by Sunday night, I'm waiting tables and stressed out. I'm waiting tables again, not really for the money, but for the social aspect, to get away from thinking about school all the time and meet some new people. At the same time, I crave talking about school, because (a) I can talk about it easily; and (b) hanging out with teenagers all day makes you crave adult companionship to share these stories with. I'm out of shape (4 times to the gym this week notwithstanding... we'll see how I keep it up) and feel stuck in a rut. To top it off, I'm kind of sick of Baltimore.

So, yes, the house concerts, starting that up again? Maybe it's a symbol of my return and my escape from the rut. Let's hope so.

You should come: Holden's Lair House Concerts