Hedgetoad Teaching

Friday morning, I found myself crowded in a room with several people in order to start planning out an RTI Manual. This manual is needed so that if anyone "decides to leave", someone else could step in to replace them... preparing for coming lay-offs? Ha! We fooled them! No one has a minute to actually work on the manual until this summer. While doing that the state department of Ed. representative go to be all impressed with what we're doing at the high school. Of course, if you look at all the research, doing anything at the high school level is impressive. Even more impressive would be something that was proven to work... which we haven't found yet. But I am supposed to expecting calls from other schools. God, help me, I'm going to sound like Tim Gun*... "make it work!"

There have been a few discussions on grading going around the ‘ole school building this month. A new idea (for us) being floated is changing our grading structure to ones that have been tried in other districts. First, changing our grading system to a 1 thru 5 scale for everything. It sounds like a bit more work on some things – grading, converting to 100% scale and then converting to 1 thru 5 scale… but I suppose it would a somewhat easy switch for English teachers. Second, no longer giving a grade lower than 50%, even if a student turned nothing in – not even a piece of paper with a name on it. I know there are many schools who have made this change and it always invokes controversy. The theory behind these changes is that it severely punishes students who don’t turn in assignments, as opposed to those who turn something in… bad or good. Some would argue that if a student can pass an exam, but not bother to do any homework, should the grade be based upon their learning or their...

“If you don’t do it this year, you’ll be one year older when you do” ~ Warren Miller When I was younger, my father took us to see the new Warren Miller film every fall, just before ski season started. They were the most awesome movies I’d ever seen. Back then, I don’t think anyone was shooting the type of real action, quasi-documentary of crazy people jumping off of snow covered cliffs for fun types of movies. In fact, they weren’t even shown in a movie theater. They were shown at the Opera House and we wore our best ski bum clothes. I swear, once, Mr. Miller was actually there. Even though I haven’t seen one of his films in 15 years, I can still instantly recognize his voice and immediately be transported to the days when I was sure that “ski bum” was the best career choice out there. One of key themes throughout all of his movies was the idea that life should be lived to it’s fullest right now. Just do it and do it now. Sure it may be crazy to jump off of a cliff covered with snow o...

Still trying to get everything done before the week of meetings start. Studiously avoiding the school building and taking another peak at my class roster. Yesterday students could pick up their schedules and make changes before the year starts. About a third of them do it, and the counselors start working on evening out sections. I'm sure that my 5th period class now has more than 7 students. Or I could not have a 5th period class any more. It's all up in the air now. But I won't take a peak until next week. Why ruin the surprise. I'm still worried about the AP classes. I ran into a student a week ago who told me "everyone wanted to drop the class, but were afraid to tell you"... Is this true? Am I an AP bully? Have I driven the entire program into the ground by demanding too much? The first thing I had to learn after moving here was that very few people expected any sort of rigor from students and that those who had that were usually looked down upon. If they...

Last year was a tough year for me. I had a lot going on in my personal life, working on Take One! and the new RtI stuff (which took me out of the classroom more than I liked). I also had a class with a horrible mix of students. All of these things combined in a way to that made me really not want to be teaching or spend any time outside of school thinking about/working school. We all know that teaching isn't a job that can be done during school hours. I wasn't being a good teacher... at least in my mind. This year, my goal is to change that. I've really reworked several things in my sophomore curriculum and added a lot of preparation work into the early months of the year. I'm not sure how well it will go over, as our class configurations changed. Our school no longer has separate "honors" and "regular" english courses for the sophomores. There will be a much greater mix of skill level in the room. My AP courses will continue on, but the summer assig...

My freshmen started reading The Hobbit on Monday. We got into the "hero's journey" today and for the first time I think the short lecture went well. At least they copied the notes down from the overhead and asked questions that were related to the topic while I was talking. (of course, I had one student ask rather rudely why I hadn't just copied the notes for them - so he could read another book while I was talking. I wonder why I hadn't thought of that?!?! Possibly because the point was to listen?) Afterwards, they all made a "travel journal" to summarize as they read. I made the mistake of saying they could "teabag" the books to make them look more authentic - who can remember all the vulgar slang language ? After the laughing subsided and one student told me what it meant, I changed to "antique." Of course, that meant a full explanation... not "antique" with flour, "antique" with a teabag. Damn slang! The Sophom...