A Thankful List, From a Lady and a Huntsman

 Family and friends top the list, per usual. But here’s the rest of my “thankful” list:

-DEVOLSON IS OVER!!! Fill the goblets! Bring out the pheasant! Strike the lyre and play a merry tune on the lute! The Dark, Evil Vortex of Late September, October and November is but a dark and distant memory! (Can you tell I miss Game of Thrones?) 

-My student teacher. I can’t talk about her too long or I’ll start crying. But she’s an angel. Here is what 90% of our conversations look like:

Me: I’m a terrible human. I’m a mess. I’M THE WORST!

Her: No you’re not! Here, do you want a cookie?

Me: Yes. (with crumbs flying out of my mouth) Do you know where I put the vocab quizzes?

Her: Oh, I graded them and recorded the grades in your binder for you when you weren’t looking. And then I filed them in their student folders. 

Me: Are you sure you want to marry your fiancé and not me?

Her: Yes.

She’ll come around one day.

-Carbs. Have you made it to my Pinterest board for DEVOLSON food? I think I’m going to rename it “Highway to Diabetes,” or maybe “Elastic Pants Are My Soul Mate, #blessed.” I made these ham and cheese sliders for our faculty Thanksgiving potluck and my principal loved it so much he started crying, right there in the teacher’s lounge in front of everyone.

Just kidding. But everyone loved them..

Speaking of carbs, a few years ago I started making leftover Thanksgiving grilled cheese sandwiches that I would highly recommend. Layer one piece of buttered sourdough bread (or something sturdy), Havarti cheese, leftover turkey, another piece of cheese, stuffing (spread thin-like), cranberry sauce, your other piece of bread. Grill on low so the cheese has plenty of time to melt and your butter crisps up like it was born to do. It’ll change you.

-Moving up with last year's students. My students came to me last year fresh out of 6^th grade, super behind where they needed to be, and definitely unfamiliar with working hard. Yesterday as I was grading their analysis essays on Anne Frank, I realized how far they have come. I found myself writing things like, “Wow—great point. I never thought of it that way,” and “Nice justification here” and “Holy cow! This is college-level thinking!” Ramon, one of my nuggets whose very first essay for me in 7^th grade probably contained a total of four correctly-spelled words, turned in an essay that probably contained a total of four misspelled words. I know sharing this probably sounds conceited and/or braggy, but I don’t really care, because they’ve worked really, really hard, and I’ve worked really, really hard, and in teaching, especially at a Title I school, you just really have to savor and remember moments like I had yesterday during grading. 

-Frozen meals. Between this year’s DEVOLSON and being in grad school full time, it’s a wonder I’ve even remembered to eat things. Frozen meals have been a total lifesaver this semester. My favorites: anything Amy’s brand, the meatloaf and mashed potato Lean Cuisines, and, if you’re feeling particularly naughty, Beecher’s in Seattle makes this frozen macaroni and cheese that may just make your face fall off from dairy splendor.

-This pencil sharpener. Some of you held my hand this summer as I made the important decision on which pencil sharpener to get (thank you), and I don’t regret this one at all. Christopher, also known as X-Acto Teacher Pro, is a fine gentleman and we love him very much.

-Workshop teaching method. Oh, man. This has changed my life. It requires very careful and specific procedures being in place, but is so totally worth it. “Here are your assignments for the next three days. Work at your own pace. I’ll be checking in on you.” It’s. The. Best.

-Dogs. I want to adopt an adult dog over Christmas break and name him/her after a character from literature. What do you think? (Note: this is actually a cry for help. I need a reasonable, logical person to talk me out of it and tell me they are expensive and I don’t have enough time for one.)

-This poem. The past few months have been pretty brutal for me, not as a teacher, but as a lady and a human*. I came across this poem in my reading for grad school, and I think it has saved my life in a small but important way. If you’ve found yourself in a rut, or a valley, or a pit full of snakes, or whatever you want to call it, or even if things are great and beautiful and perfect for you (yay!), I hope this poem is something for you to hold onto.

(Something onto which you may hold? Grammar is so stupid sometimes.)

-You turkeys. I love hearing from you—your crazy stories, your notes of encouragement and solidarity, your reassurance that I’m not as much of a freak as I think (and occasionally the one person who’s like, “Whoah, you are a freak,” and I’m thankful for you, too, because you make me laugh out loud). This year in particularly I’m just very thankful to know you and feel heard. So thank you, and go buy yourself a milkshake for being so awesome.

An overflowing cornucopia of love,

Teach

Besides family and friends, what are you thankful for? Tell me right now. Pretty please. Also share your recipes with me.

*later I reread this phrase and thought I'd said that I was a lady and a hunstman and it made me cackle.

Starting School Later: Hater or Advocator?

Guess what? National Geographic emailed and asked if I wanted to join their team as an explorer!

Just kidding about that last part. But they really did email and asked what my thoughts are on the possibility of legislation being passed for schools to start later in the day. Have you heard the buzz about this issue? Basically, school-age kids aren’t getting the amount of sleep they need, which creates a whole slew of problems for them. There’s been a ton of research that supports the benefits of secondary schools starting later in the day, like 8:30-9:00-ish, yet very few (less than 1%) of school districts have actually made the switch.

If you had asked me during my first year of teaching how I feel about school starting later in the day because students are sleepy, I think I would have laughed out loud scoffingly, like Gaston from Beauty and the Beast and said something like, “Well maybe if the students went to bed earlier they wouldn’t be so tired!”

(I was cranky about 97% of the time during my first year.)

But now, with a few years under my belt, my answer is a little different.

First, let me be clear: I am a morning person. Through and through. At sleepovers growing up, I was always the kid who woke up before everyone else and either went to town on my friend’s bookshelf or crept into the kitchen and chatted awkwardly with the hostess’s parents. So, of all the things that are difficult about the teaching life, I’ve never really minded the waking up early part. In fact, I get to school about two hours early because I am way more productive in the mornings than I am after school. If I ran the world and everyone were exactly like me, schools would start at 6:15 so we could be out by 2:15.

But, luckily for you/everyone, I don’t run the world* and not everyone is exactly like me. I teach at a Title I middle school, where many of my students are at or below poverty level. Teaching has changed my life for about a kajillion reasons, but one of them is the way I handle kids falling asleep in my class. I don’t punish them anymore. Instead, I listen. “Hey, I noticed you were pretty sleepy today,” I’ll ask them later, privately. “Everything okay?” Sometimes it’s just a one-time thing—they just couldn’t fall asleep, or lost track of time watching YouTube the night before. But more often than not, it’s due to one of the following reasons:

•  Some of my students don’t always have someone around to make sure they go to bed early. Sometimes it’s because the people who take care of them work night shifts or are elsewhere during the week. But even for the kids who do have someone making sure they go to bed at a certain time, kids having personal access to cell phones, TVs and video games makes it difficult for any parent to monitor how much sleep their child is getting.
• Many of my students live an environment where it’s difficult for them to get to sleep or stay asleep.  Some of them have family members who encourage them to stay awake or are too noisy, playing music or having guests over into the wee hours of the morning in small apartments where the rooms are close together and the walls are thin. Others may have noisy neighbors right next door, or live in a neighborhood where emergency sirens on their street are nearly a nightly thing. Also, I have way too many students who are responsible for the care of their younger siblings. I can’t tell you how many times I’ve had a student tell me that the dark circles under their eyes are because their little brother or sister had a stomach virus the night before. 
• Some of my students are having trouble sleeping because of stuff they have to deal with during the day. Bullying, domestic violence, unstable family situations, abuse, neglect, hunger, homelessness. This is just a short list.

 I know that every teacher’s free time is precious, whether they have a family or not. I know that having another hour taken away from our evenings would be felt very keenly by all of us. But what if we didn’t have to look at it that way? What if having better-rested kids would actually make our jobs easier? What if starting later would cut down on failure rates, absenteeism, and other things that are so widespread at schools like mine, and are actually part of the reason that we have so much work outside of school hours? So, while I’m not totally psyched at the idea of not being able to beat rush hour traffic anymore, I am also aware that there’s more to this issue than me. Even though starting early might work for me, it’s clearly not working for my students. And I don’t get up and go to work every day so that I can learn to write an expository essay or so that I can tell the difference between there, they’re, and their. If they’re not getting enough sleep and there’s a way for us to fix it, we owe it to them and their success to try. (See what I did there?)

For more information on this issue from people way smarter than I am who don’t compare themselves to Disney villains, check out Sleepless in America, a TV special on the National Geographic Channel premiering Sunday, November 30^th at 8 PM Eastern time. And here’s a short clip about the education part of it for you to take a gander.

What’s your take on all this? Holler at me.

Love,

Teach

*I mean, really, it would fall apart in about twelve seconds.

Things I Said Out Loud Today: DEVOLSON Edition

This past spring I wrote a post about the crazy stuff I found myself saying out loud. Then this week I realized that, due to the Dark, Evil Vortex of Late September, October, and November, I am running completely on empty, both patience-wise and motivation-wise, which has led to some pretty questionable content coming out of my mouth. It has also led to sentence you just read that contained far too many clauses.

Here are some things I said out loud today.

“I wish explosive diarrhea upon you.” After a student hid underneath a table and grabbed my ankle.

“Did someone take my gloves on accident? Joke’s on you; they smell like dead hamsters.” They were my running gloves. And by running I mean jogging. And by jogging I mean it looks like I’m casually cross-country skiing but with no poles.

“Can I see a head nod from everyone to indicate, ‘Yes, Ms. Teach, I understand that you did not intentionally show us that advertisement?'” I was showing a YouTube video that had to do with what I was teaching, and apparently the version I looked up yesterday was different from today’s, which had an incredibly age-inappropriate advertisement preceding it. Hooray.

“Please stop losing your minds.” A good minute and a half after said advertisement was shown.

“Oh, it’s your birthday? On the count of three, everyone creepily whisper ‘Happy birthday’ to Melinda.” Have you ever done this with your class before? It’s way quieter and way more hilarious than singing.

“Eliud, you’re not allowed to talk in time out.” Keep in mind I teach 8^th grade.

“You did your packet in hot pink pen? Who do you think you are, Kim Kardashian?” I don’t know why I chose this celebrity—I have no knowledge of her ever having written in hot pink pen. Also, I KEEP A PENCIL CUP ON MY TABLE. 

“Bye, don’t participate in any stupid or reckless behavior.” I say this to my classes as I dismiss them every Friday.

“I love throwing away other people’s trash! It’s my favorite!” I think I read somewhere that middle school teachers in particular should avoid using sarcasm with their students. Oops.

“Whoever organized the binders without being asked shall feast in Valhalla!” I’ve been thinking about Vikings a lot lately.

“Because the government.” In response to, “Miss, why do we have so many more kids in our class this year?"

“Oh, look! You’re tardy.” Then I laughed way harder than necessary.

“Well, could you see that singing ‘You got a fast car’ repeatedly was upsetting him?” Just another day of middle school conflict mediation.

"I can't." After school, out loud, alone in my classroom, upon considering and immediately rejecting the idea of changing my bulletin board.

Come on, Thanksgiving. Mama needs you.

Love,

Teach

10 Real Things I Wrote While Grading

Hi.

I haven't posted in a while because I've been grading fictional short stories for the last twelve hundred years. Why? Because I told my students there was no page limit for the assignment. I'll pause while you laugh at me and point and shout, "ROOKIE MISTAKE!" jeeringly.

(Pause.)

Thank you. I needed that.

Now that that's done, I actually did enjoy grading them. Their stories were awesome and they actually read their rubrics, which figuratively speaking made my heart explode with never-ending confetti. I also enjoyed grading them because I began to realize that some of my feedback would sound very, very strange if taken out of context. 

So I decided to publish it on the Internet.  

Here are 10 real things I wrote while grading:

I mean, don't we all?

Super stinky scarf, or superhuman senses? This is important.

If you've had the popcorn in Chicago you will understand that this is a valid question.

Or a governor-appointed granny?

(Note: It was in the linen closet.)

Can't believe I fell for the old bait-and-switch!

When only the last paragraph of a paper is messy, you may as well make a note to your teacher that says, "Rushed to finish writing this on the bus, xoxo"

This would be a strange thing to shout in a movie theater.

Or anywhere.

This story was AWESOME and I am still thinking about it.

And finally, the comment that gave me the idea for this post:

I already can't wait to grade next year's short stories.

#thingsIneverthoughtIwouldsay

Love,

Teach

12 Times It's Been Worse

The saddest toddler in the world.

I am in my fifth year of teaching middle school English at a Title I school, and, for the most part, the skies are sunny. I have classroom management in the bag. Lesson planning is almost second nature. I can write a test in 30 minutes that is better and harder than the one that the state gives. It's the 7th week of school and I haven't had to refill my pencil cup yet. Things are pretty boss.

That being said, I still have days that make me want to sit under my desk and weep and never come out (it's usually during DEVOLSON).

When those days happen, I usually resort to thumbing through my Happy Binder where I keep old letters/drawings from students, putting "Chocolate" by The 1975 on Pandora, or getting a s'mores cupcake from a local bakery on my way home from work and eating it in about 2.43 bites.

But when that doesn't work, I think about the 12 Times It's Been Worse.

12 Times It's Been Worse

1) The time I was talking to my appraiser and a huge, flaky booger floated out of my nose like an autumn leaf and landed on my shoulder. I was wearing a dark turtleneck. He definitely noticed and stared at it for the rest of our conversation.

2) The time I had a student vomit in the doorway right before my students were dismissed for a pep rally. I had to spot thirty middle schoolers as they long-jumped over a pile of barf.

3) The time I bought a new shirt, wore it to school on Monday, dripped pizza sauce on it at lunch, then applied a Tide To-Go pen to it. Except it wasn't a Tide To-Go pen. It was White Out. And it never came out.

4)  The time my former principal made me write her essays for her to get into an Ivy League principal's institute and I did it because I was too afraid to tell her no. (She got in.)

5) The time during my first year when I took two students in the hall to talk about respect and they laughed at me, so I cried RIGHT IN FRONT OF THEM. (They kept laughing.)

6) The time I thought I had just had a breakthrough with a student just before he flipped over his desk and stormed out of the room.

7) The time I was teaching and hundreds of termites started flying out of a hole in the wall.

8) The times (plural) I had a substitute show up who was clearly hung over.

9) The time my students duct-taped each other to chairs when my substitute didn't show up.

10) The time a hot, boiled roach floated to the top of my cup of coffee from my school Keurig. (I noticed this before taking a sip, ergo, God exists and He loves me.)

11) The time my phone went off during an observation from my supervisor while I was student teaching. It was my mom calling. And I'd set her ringtone to "99 Problems." Because there was/is something wrong with my head.

12) 95% of my first year. And 75% of my second.

But you know something? As bad as my bad days have been, I've still never had a kid poop on my desk. That happened to someone I know in Washington D.C.

He teaches high school.

Bye now.

Love,

Teach

Blackout Poetry for the Win!

Okay, so I hardly ever post lesson plans/resources. There is a cornucopia of reasons for why I don't, including:

1) Writing about lesson plans/resources is not fun for me. Maybe this makes me a bad teacher? Oops.
2) I often come up with my lesson plans the week (and sometimes even the morning) that I'm doing them.  Again, maybe this makes me a bad teacher. But because of the disparities in ability level of the population that I teach and the fact that I have close to forty 8th graders in my classes, it's hard for me to plan ahead when I don't know until I teach something whether or not they will be able to master it one day or whether it'll take a week.
3) My lesson plans are very rarely phenomenal. 
4) There's just way too many other things I'd write about, like students long-jumping over piles of barf or the bizarre things I catch myself saying out loud on a daily basis.

But once in a blue moon, there's something we do in class that makes me want to bust through the doors of the teachers' lounge, saloon-style, and shout at the top of my lungs, "ALL OF YOU MUST DO THIS!!!"

Thursday was one of those days.

We had some leftover time on Thursday, and earlier in the week I had discovered some class library books that had been ruined in my move across campus this summer. Some had been torn in half, others had a huge chunk of the middle missing. Obviously, I couldn't throw them away (that's breaking one of the 10 Commandments of Reading), so I decided to tear out all the pages and assign my students some blackout poetry.

The idea comes from this website, Newspaper Blackout, recommended to me by a Love, Teach reader. Basically this guy takes a permanent marker and redacts newspaper articles to create poetry.  So we did, too! I showed my students from examples, talked them through how to not get Sharpie on their desks/heads/faces/tongues, and let them loose with the pages I'd torn out.

IT WAS THE COOLEST. Take a gander.

Doesn't this remind you of that famous line in Vonnegut's God Bless You, Mr. Rosewater? No? Just me? Oh, well. Still cool.

"She took a deep breath and felt all the love whisper to her." Excuse me while I cry ALL THE TEARS

"Less than pleased is all you are."

This is just a handful of the amazing stuff my kids made. It is really cool to see what they turn out, and you'll find yourself in really neat conversations with students about their work. Do it this week, ELA teachers! You'll be surprazed (that's my portmanteau for "surprised" and "amazed." You're welcome.)

Love,

Teach

14 Reasons Why I Will Die Alone

Most of the time, I love being a single gal teaching in a big city.

But sometimes, like this week, I take a look at my life and realize that I will probably die alone and that my body will be eaten by coyotes.

Because it's Tuesday and everyone knows that Tuesdays are for whining, I give you:

14 Reasons Why I Will Die Alone

1) I don't go out anymore because I'm tired all the time. If I do happen to be persuaded to venture out beyond the confines of my apartment, car, and classroom, I'm usually:

• With a pack of other teachers 
• Wearing my faculty shirt that has a giant paw print on it
• Sporting stray pen marks and dry erase marker ruboff on my arms because I erase my white board with my forearms now, like a Neanderthal
• Yawning at 8:00 and telling anyone who will listen how I'd rather be in my pajamas

Line up, fellas.

2) I for sure won't meet anyone at school. The male teachers at my school are either:

• Married
• Have caught me whispering to my clothing
• Have said the following words to me, "Did you forget your comb today? Haha. Relax, I'm just kidding. I actually think your hair looks nice like that."
• Also crazy and our offspring would be genetically forced into a disturbing brand of weird
• Maybe too normal, which says a lot about how weird I've become

3) I basically have been controlling my own life for the past several years now, and I'm not sure I could handle not being in control anymore. Isn't that an attractive quality?

4) I bought these plastic mystical ponies at Target tonight.

What? Why? I have no answers to these questions.

5) See my fingernails in the above picture.

6) Because I live in a large city, I've learned to walk with a sense of purpose so that strange men don't approach me to say gross things. However, I am now so good at this that NOBODY approaches me.

7) These are my recently used emojis:

8) I have limited interaction with the male species due to my schedule, so when I am around a guy that is even marginally attractive or nice to me, my body betrays me and I can't stop giggling, sweating, or saying super weird things like facts about dolphins that I learned from a podcast P.S. it's this one and it's amazing.

9) Looking cute is time-consuming, expensive, and I give up. My student teacher has offered to help me, so that's hopeful. I told her I may have time next March.

10) I am too afraid to have kids anymore. I used to want to crank out so many kids it would require some kind of commune to raise them all, but teaching has made me realize that kids, while lovely, are mostly just fragile and dangerous creatures. They're basically walking Ziploc bags full of organs that sass you sometimes. Also, I blame my lack of interest on my pregnant coworkers and their absolutely horrifying daily updates on what pregnancy does to your body. Thanks for nothing, pregnant coworkers!

11) My standards are warped because of my literature man crushes, which may be the dorkiest thing ever typed in human history.

12) I'm looking into taking a quilting class at the suggestion of my pen pal.

13) I just believe that the above sentence should probably count twice in my list of reasons I will die alone.

14) Someone has been lingering outside my window listening to the radio on speakerphone for the past several minutes. So I may actually die alone tonight.

I know that I won't really die alone-- I'm just being dramatic. I'll die surrounded by my books, my lifelong companions.

 Love,

Teach