Put me in, Coach.

As September 1 was approaching, many different things were  running through my mind. Curriculum. Classroom management. Teaching strategies. Authentic assessment. How was it all going to fit together? What was it all going to look like? How on earth was I going to do it all?

But behind, or maybe I should say on top, of all the “teacher” and “education” stuff was a monkey on my back that had nothing to do with teaching and everything to do with who I am. It reared its ugly head strongly on the second day of inservice, a week before students arrived. I was overwhelmed with meetings and paperwork, still adjusting to the 40-minute commute, and not quite sure which of the three different schedules I was actually supposed to follow. As a result, I was 15 minutes late for a school-wide meeting.

Long pause. Long exhale… even now, as I write this. I hate to be late. Even more telling, I hate to be late because I hate to disappoint. All would have been okay in mind (I was giving myself a break… I am new after all!) if my principal hadn’t stopped in my room later that day and said “About this morning…” It was all I could do to fight back the tears. Grow up, Katie!

And that’s when the monkey went wild. I rarely question my ability or my intelligence. I can almost always fake my confidence when it’s required. But always always always I struggle with the fear of disappointing _________ . The name in the blank changes on any given day. What if I disappoint my principal? What if I’m not everything she expects me to be? What if I disappoint my mentor? What if I disappoint my students? What if I disappoint my parents? My friends? The homeless man on the corner? Seriously… it’s a disease.

Luckily (or unfortunately?), this is something I’ve struggled with all my life. And often, it has served me well. I’ve followed rules and obeyed laws to avoid disappointing people closest to me. I’ve pushed myself to do well in school and get good grades and start new journeys. And I’ve learned to live with it. I’ve learned to overcome it, to an extent… at least I’ve learned to temper it. To not let it get in the way of what it is I have to do.

But I once again find myself in the position of starting over. I’ve gone from doing something for 8 years and becoming a professional and being very good at my job to the rookie starting a new career… literally, starting at the very bottom. I want to be good. I’m used to be good. To being the best. And the hardest part for me right now is knowing that I’m not. Knowing that I have such a very long way to go. And knowing that it is very possible that I may disappoint one or two along the way.

On the bright side, my first few days have been amazing. And if history has taught me anything, it’s that I won’t be a rookie for long.

Two days under my belt…

Heading up to the first few days of school there were a lot of nights spent lying awake with monologues in my head of everything I wanted to say to my students. Sometimes I’d turn on the light and jot down a couple notes; other times I’d simply repeat lines over and over in my head until I could force myself to begin the mantra of “sleep. sleep. sleep.” My emotions were as varied as the winds in the Sahara… every hour a new feeling prevailed. Sometimes forced confidence. Sometimes terrific fear. Sometimes quiet calm. Sometimes “breath deep” and “just do it.” Day to day a new slogan would pop in my head, and it got to the point where I really wanted to write my own theme song like Jess does in the previews for a new fall show “New Girl.” Something like, “who’s that new teacher, reaching kids and raising test scores? It’s Katie! It’s Katie!”

Ridiculous, yes. Healthy? I also think yes. My journey to this point was challenging, but in my heart I know I’m ready. And by the end of day two, I was shaking with adrenaline and giddy and feeling like maybe I can do this after all.

I know not every day will be like the first two days. That’s why I thought it important to document them. I’ll need something to look back on after I’ve had a day that makes me question if I’m on the right path… there will be many days like that. Of this I’m sure.

But days 1 and 2? They were good days.

I can do this.

Attempting to revive…

I had great ambitions for this blog back when I began student teaching. Alas, between student teaching, working for the magazine, and working at the brewery or on a freelance project, I had no time and no desire to write when I did have time. However, I still think this could be a good place. A good place to vent on my bad days. A good place to get advice. A good place to share stories and all of those first-year teacher experiences.

Which brings me to the main point: I got a job! I’m the new 8th grade English teacher at a beautiful district in southern Wisconsin. This place felt right from the moment I got there for my interview. That feeling turned into a job interview, and I’m hoping that feeling continues throughout the year and helps me stick around for years to come!

On our agenda this year: Reading The Outsiders, lots of short stories, The Diary of Anne Frank (drama version), and Call of the Wild; Writing persuasive essays, timed essays (in prep for high school), research paper, descriptive / narrative essay, and literary analysis; Language focus on verbs, sentence combining, and vocabulary. So much to cover and so little time!!

Speaking of time… I really think America should start following the European schedule: school year round, but longer breaks after every quarter. We no longer need kids to have the summer off to help in the fields. Granted, there are plenty of farm kids in Wisconsin, but very few, I believe, that are needed to get the farm work done in the summer. I don’t know. Maybe I’m wrong. But I really like the European system, and I wish it’s something our country started to consider.

So. Enough for one day. Now for some quality time with my coffee and the New York Times crossword puzzle. I’m going to try to post at least weekly, and I hope for some great feedback and advice along the way.

Thanks for reading!

Student teaching has begun…

And I finally have all of these things to talk about! Tomorrow is my first day “in charge” of my classes, and I’m so excited. I’ve had a few days to get to know my students, and I’ve already learned quite a few names. I’m READY for tomorrow!

But, with everything I’ve experienced this week, as I sit here at home catching up on things online, there’s only one thing in my head… one student whose story I have yet to know in detail but whose story I heard enough about today to want to take her in my arms and make all her hurt go away.

She’s in 7th grade. She’s black. Her mother is in jail. Her dad is an addict. She lives with her grandmother. She was sold for sex when she was younger. She’s been raped many times.

Unfortunately, or thankfully?, you would never know it. She wanders the hall like a normal 7th grader. She jokes around with her friends. She laughs and teases and fits in. She’s not the best student, but she does alright. She’s not the most angelic, well-behaved student, but she does alright. She does alright.

Hearing her story today, the immensity of this job took my breath away. Teachers are asked to teach, to guide, to mentor… but teachers are also asked to care, to listen, to be there. To BE there.

This girl’s family has never been there for her. They took away her ability to attach. They took away her ability to trust.

I don’t know how to fix that. How to help her. How to not be one more adult in the long line of those who have disappointed her.

I’ve always thought that it would be so hard to be a vet because you can’t save them all. I never thought that the same reason would make it even harder to be a teacher.

Building a library…

One of the most exciting things about becoming an English teacher is creating my library. Books have always been one of my favorite things; they’re the reason I ended up with an English degree. My goal was to move to New York after college and work my way to the top of a publishing company. I always thought being an acquisitions editor would be the ultimate job. And then I met a boy… but alas, everything works out as it should in the end, no?

So here I am, soon to begin my final 3 classes before student teaching next spring, and every day I find another book to add to my “to buy” list. A couple weeks ago I spent an afternoon on Thriftbooks (one of my absolute favorite sites!) and bought $500 worth of books for $30. Doesn’t get any better than that, folks! Finding the time to read them all is another thing, but getting them into my library is the first step.

Today, instead of simply adding to my list, I found a book that I had to buy immediately. It’s cowritten by Alan Sitomer and Michael Cirelli, and it’s called Hip-Hop Petry and the Classics for the Classroom. I’ve always loved poetry, but in just about every English teaching class I’ve had there’s been a discussion about how difficult it is to teach. High school kids too often think negatively of poetry, and the forced teaching of classics only worsens their negative opinions. Of course, as a new teacher, I’m all “I’m going to make it fun!” And the professionals who have been teaching all their life look at me and think, “Yeah, right. I remember when I could change the world…”

From what I can tell, Sitomer and Cirelli have created something really good with this book… at least something that teachers can work with, and hopefully, something students can, too. This is one addition to my library that I can’t wait to read!

What books do you consider “must-haves” for an English teacher’s library?

Confidence required…

I’ve always been quite confident in my ability as an editor. I discovered early on that I learn fairly quickly while on the job. Once I learn something, usually minimal review is necessary before I am able to perform that job accurately on a regular basis. And once I feel I know something, I seldom second guess myself. However, I have been humbled time and time again upon discovering that I’ve been doing something incorrectly for years… so while I am confident that I do my job well, I am also equally confident that I have so much more to learn.

And this is how I have approached my teaching education. I am confident in my grasp of the English language. I am confident in my ability to read and interpret a given text. I am confident in my ability to challenge others and encourage critical thinking. I am confident that, someday, I will be a great teacher. However, I am so aware of how very little I know and of all I have yet to learn. Which is why I was nervous about viewing the scores of the Praxis II test I took a few weeks ago. I was confident going into the test, but relatively less so coming out of it. I was pretty sure I had passed, but equally sure that I had not done as well as I had hoped. Lo and behold, I was wrong! I looked up my results today, and I did so much better than I thought I did! I needed a 160 to pass, and I got a 189… 2 points higher than the high end of the average performance range. After literally patting myself on the back and jumping for joy and high-fiving my computer screen, I took a deep breath and thought, I can do this. My confidence was renewed.

After reflecting a bit (teachers are encouraged to reflect as often as possible!), I realized that this roller coaster ride is something I am going to have to get used to. I know that when I’m student teaching next spring there will be moments where I will feel so confident going into the classroom only to have the rug pulled out from under me mere moments later. I also know that some days I may feel clueless and incompetent and realize later that I just had the best class discussion ever. I know that it will get easier. That some days will be harder than others. That I will never, ever know it all. Yet, all this is what makes it so exciting. Today, I came to work knowing exactly what I had to do and how I was going to do it. Tomorrow will be the same. And Friday will be the same. And every day next week will be exactly the same. Once I enter my very own classroom, no day will repeat itself ever again.

Bring on the roller coaster!

Balance…

I’ve been thinking lately about how my current habits and ways of living are going to translate into my life as a teacher. From a young age I’ve always had my hands in a lot of different baskets. I was a gymnast, a ballerina, a swimmer, an equestrian, a t-baller, a soccer player. I was a singer and an actor. A future problem solver and a member of student council and the speech team. I played piano and violin and french horn. While in college for my English degree I waited tables, worked for a loan company, and took care of animals at the humane society. In the 7 years since I earned that degree I’ve worked for a book publishing company, a magazine, two horse stables, a bar, and a brewery, and I’ve even managed to maintain my own freelance copy editing business.

Now, granted, I didn’t always have all of this going on at the same time, but I’ve always had at least a couple different things to attend to at any given moment. I like to be busy. I like to learn new things and discover new interests. And I’ve realized that I like to maintain a certain lifestyle, and that lifestyle requires me to work hard. I bought my own house when I was 26 years old because I was working hard (I had 4 jobs at that time!).

Because of the life I’ve led up until now, I’m not afraid of the work that will be required of me as a teacher. I realize that I will be working twice as hard as my salary, and while I don’t think it’s right, I get it. What I’m most excited about, however, is the fact that I will get to teach so many different things, and I will never experience the same moment twice. I can’t wait to develop relationships with my students, and I am so looking forward to those moments of discovery.

What I believe will be my biggest challenge is balancing my work as a teacher with the rest of my life. Currently, working is my life… which is probably why I’m 29 and single! I hope to be able to continue my freelance business for many more years, but I know that it will have to slow down while I’m beginning my teaching career. And I’d really like to meet someone and have a family… I’m very worried that I will become so engrossed in my job that everything else will fall to the sidelines.

Which leads me to the following questions: How do you balance your work life and home life? Teachers are often asked to get involved in many different things at school, which should be great for me, but at what point do you have to say, “No, this is too much”? And if you find yourself overloaded, how do you regain balance?

The “reading” question…

I’ve spent the last few years working for an engineering magazine. The material is very technical and way over my head, but I quickly became used to the language. While I may not always understand what the authors are talking about, I do know that gigahertz is abbreviated GHz and kilohertz is kHz, and I know that dBm is different than dBc and that the “dB1” in PdB1 should be subscript. I know how it’s all supposed to look because I’ve looked at it every workday for the last 5 years. I’ve studied it. I’ve copied it. I’ve cut and pasted it. The way it looks is familiar to me even if the meaning of it is not.

My approach to writing and the freelance work I do, copy editing book manuscripts, is much the same as my approach to editing the magazine. I have always been an avid reader. As a result of my love of reading, or thanks to, I have always had a relatively easy time writing. For me, editing was a natural transition from reading and writing. Once you see something done correctly over and over again, it becomes that much easier to spot something done incorrectly. I may not always be able to identify a “direct object” or a “restrictive clause” or a “dangling modifier” (though I am getting better!), but I can almost always tell you when a sentence is incorrect because I’ve seen it done correctly so many times.

Mr. MacKnight tells his students to copy good writing, “word for word, comma for comma. By hand. So that it’s perfect.” This may seem like an odd exercise, but I can say from experience, it works! It will get students questioning why a comma was inserted in one place but not in another, or how an apostrophe is used in possessives. If nothing else, it will get them used to seeing it done correctly, so they can recognize errors in their own writing.

But, how do you get students to go out and read in the first place? I’ve read countless articles about the “literacy” issue in America and the struggle to get kids to read. I’ve also spent some time working with a sophomore student with a kindergarten reading level, so I’ve seen it firsthand. It’s one of the reasons I always give books to my 6-year-old cousins and 2-year-old niece at Christmas or for birthdays. I still struggle to understand it sometimes because reading was never a challenge for me, but I know it’s something I’ll have to overcome in my classroom.

So, how do you get your students to read? This article in the NY Times says that any book is a good book for kids as long as they are reading. But is it really? What do you do for those students who don’t read because they can’t? How do you make it fun? And what about students like the sophomore I worked with? Students who seem to have been left behind by the system? How do you teach Shakespeare to a room full of students when 25%?, 30%? 40%? can’t comfortably read J.K. Rowling?

The beginning…

I am one school year away from earning my English Education degree, and the closer I get the more certain I am that I’m on the right road. With every book I read my thoughts inevitably turn to why and how I would teach it to my middle or high school students. I immediately devour and absorb every news article or blog I see about teachers or our education system. My mind itches to map out lesson and unit plans that I want to teach someday… even though I haven’t even started my student teaching. Every day at work I long for the day I’ll be back in school so I can continue my studies and learn everything I can about how to teach.

So… I’ve created this place to share thoughts, to gather ideas, and to make a record of this final year of my journey, which is really the very first year of the rest of my life. I welcome comments and suggestions from anyone who has something to teach me… and that’s everyone!