A Little Help from your Friends

A friend of mine went to South Carolina to teach, and she is not having a fantastic time. She asked for advice from other teachers.

Anyone whom I have spoken with about my experiences this year knows that it has been a little rough. ....

I have spent the last week taking a class ... called "Teaching Children of Poverty." I figured I was faced with 4 options:

1. run crying back home
2. look for a different job in S.C. ...
3. go back to where I was this year and try again. ...
4. search out some kind of information and develop some kind of plan so that next year I will not be in such excruciating mental pain. ...

I have done a lot of thinking this year about why this experience was so hard...

So here are my questions, and maybe some of you can help.

What does a new teacher need to be successful?
What should she do when she doesn't get it?
What challenges have you overcome and how?

It is so sad that teachers and students have to live like this.  While I am only another new teacher stumbling through the experience, here were my thoughts on the first question.

Ug... I really wish I knew what to tell you. Some things off the top of my head are


1. Flexibility: DON'T try to win every battle. Pick the battles that are necessary for your students to feel safe and to learn. You may not accomplish everything you plan, and that is ok. I have many children of poverty who act out because they really do need a lot of time to think about it. I have some students I will wait 30 seconds for, but that is what they need to feel (and be) successful.


If it takes two days to get through a worksheet, fine, but that is one worksheet they can feel proud of instead of two half-done worksheets that leave them feeling insecure and lost.


If you have students who lash out every time you make them read, maybe they can't read... and maybe they are very embarrassed by it. Find another way.


Make sure you are appealing to various intelligences, keep them drawing, acting, moving around, etc.


2. Compassion: find what is likable about the individual students. Remember, someone, somewhere loves that child, and if that is not the case, those kids need you even more. These kids might be coming home to empty houses, no electricity on occasion, neglect, or even abuse.


3. A little pocket money: Set up a behavior/reward system, and scour the dollar stores for fantastic deals. Something as small as a juicy or a mechanical pencil can be a very big deal to students who live in poverty. And it helps them see that you care about them and you want to reward them.


4.  Find at least one teacher or administrator who shares the same pedagogical values as you and who values you as an educator. Sometimes you just need that one person on the outside who can tell you that you ARE doing a good job.


Anyway, I am nowhere NEAR perfect, and I have had a lot to overcome as well. These are just some of the tactics that helped me through on my darkest of days.
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Photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/bixentro/1980291692/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

Wikipedia is... Not the Devil?

While drinking my morning coffee and checking on my blog subscriptions, I scrolled over a title called "Embracing Wikipedia" by Larry ferlazzo, which had a link to an Article by the same name by Matthew Shapiro in Education Week.

My natural inclination was to quickly delete any such harrasy, thus preventing the words from making my eyes bleed and accidentally landing me in one of the outer rings of Doom, the one reserved for people with poor researching skills. But then I realized the importance of opening your eyes to opinions you disagree with, and even opinions you hate. The world moves far too quickly to hold grudges on ideas, and no one wants to be the teacher who still uses the same binder of worksheets she acquired in 1970.

I recommend reading the post and coming up with your own ideas on the opinions stated. I for one found it to be very interesting and worth considering in the classroom. He mentioned the scrutiny entries go through to be used, the panels and discussions, and the citations at the bottom. The latter piece is what helped me see his side a bit more, but I suppose that is because at my core, I still don't trust a website that once said Caesar fought off his enemies with an ipod, or that had information one week that gave a list of animals vegetarians can eat (what???) and the next week said that vegetarians did not eat animals etc. etc. etc. for several months.

The author seems to feel that he can trust the Wikipedia information as well has he trusts the Encyclopedia. I don't think I will be able to jump on that boat just yet, but maybe Wikipedia, much like "The Force" is a power that can be used for both good and evil. Maybe I have only seen the evil.

I think if I were to use it in my class, it would only be after we learned how to decipher between credible websites and websites that might be trying to lead them astray, much like how students have to fully understand how to write complete sentences before they can figure out how to thoughtfully write using sentence fragments.

Anyway, this was my response to the article that I left on his post, but I wanted to think and ramble on the topic of Wikipedia further on here.

Very interesting article. It brings up some very valid points, and I for one abhor Wikipedia. Sure, I like it to answer some quick questions here and there, but I do not see it as a valid source for research.

My worry is that Wikipedia takes us farther and farther away from recognizing “credible” sources. Eventually we get to (and have gotten to) a point in which we believe any random “fact” or “statistic” people say to us. Our next-door neighbor, who may not be an expert in anything is suddenly a source for a statistic on how 80% of schools waste all their tax money on teacher vacations.

I have a facebook, and several times a week friends and family members are posting made up statistics about various causes because we no longer recognize what is credible or how to find the information for ourselves.

That said, this article gave me some definite food for thought. I wish it would have addressed that our research sources are not quite as limited as Wikipedia or a dusty-ole book. :) I feel it is important to teach students how to spot credible websites, and perhaps that can be done through Wikipedia as well by using all the links provided. Thanks for the eye-opening article!


photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/misterwilson/84860632/
http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

Candy Burgers for the win!

One day my students and I were in Art class. Their assignment was to make a burger out of construction paper. One student, Selena, asked if she could make her construction-paper burger to look like it was made out of candy. Ms. Mack, being the creative art teacher she is said, "Of course!"

Thus it began.

The students spent the rest of Art class imagining and discussing how cool it would be if such a thing existed.

Later that evening, I realized that I had to come up with a big reward for them for the end of NWEA testing. It only took me seconds to realize that I wanted to give them the candy burger of their dreams, to show that that they could turn their imagination into reality. I brainstormed all day, asked other teachers for advice on ingredients and scoured the isles of Giant Eagle. I also received the help of the other Language Arts teacher who went home that night to make "cheese" out of orange melting chocolates.

The candy-burger buffet ended up being one of the most fun rewards of the year, and it all started with one student's imagination. So let that be a lesson: While it is a lot of fun to sit around dreaming about what could be, the fun in much greater, and the rewards are much bigger when you decide to stand up and make it happen.





All photos by Ms. Kin and used with permission.

We Hate Ms. Kin

Yesterday I was trying to see how searchable my new webpages were, so I typed MsKin into the search engine. The first page I saw was a "We Hate Ms. Kin" page on Facebook.

Especially with my kids, you prepare yourself and prepare yourself to take anything they throw at you... you constantly reinforce to yourself to not take things personally. I have had many wonderful moments in teaching, and yet, I have also been called names, been told I look fat, had a desk thrown at me, and been told by students that I am a terrible teacher. and yet at that moment,

my heart sank.

I was able to muster my courage and click on the link. I mean, why should I take a Facebook club seriously? Like ripping off a Band-aid, I entered the page and I studied the small, blurry, phone picture of... another Ms. Kin. I felt relieved, but not happy.

I wondered about this woman's story, how hard she tried, whether she loved her class as much as I grew to love mine, or if she drove to work each day, apathetic and counting the days to retirement. I wondered if she knew, if she saw the same ominous link I saw, and if she clicked on it.

I have to believe that no one gets in to this career planning on being a bad teacher or a hated teacher (and yes, I am very aware that the level of one category is not necessarily proportional to the level of the other category). But I also believe that about the human condition, no one starts out planning on being bad or hated. Of course, I am also known to be very naive. I am also ok with that because I would rather think the best about others and be proven wrong then to think the worst about others.

So yes, somewhere, written on notebooks long thrown in the garbage is a scribbled "I hate Ms. Kin" that is written about me... some long past Facebook statuses, I am sure, say the same, and the memories exist of the first half of my first year when my students would say all these things to my face.  Luckily, we were strong and we worked past all the arguing and formed bonds.  So, this website, today, was not for me.

I hope the other Ms. Kins out there are keeping their heads up, working through the bad days, seeing their students for all they can be, and working every day to be the teacher they started out hoping to be when teaching was just a dream.

A Little Humor About NCLB

I stole this from a blog called Diane's Discoveries. I loved it and could not help it. :)

Link: EduBlog Insights � Blog Archive � If no child gets ahead, then no child will be left behind.

Did you see NCLB–The Football Version? Author Unknown

l. All teams must make the state playoffs, and all will win the championship. If a team does not win the championship, they will be on probation until they are the champions, and coaches will be held accountable.

2. All kids will be expected to have the same football skills at the same time and in the same conditions. No exceptions will be made for interest in football, a desire to perform athletically, or genetic abilities or disabilities. ALL KIDS WILL PLAY FOOTBALL AT A PROFICIENT LEVEL

3. Talented players will be asked to work out on their own without instruction. This is because the coaches will be using all their instructional time with the athletes who aren’t interested in football, have limited athletic ability, or whose parents don’t like football.

4. Games will be played year round, but statistics will only be kept in the 4th, 8th, and 11th games.

5. This will create a New Age of sports where every school is expected to have the same level of talent and all teams will reach the same minimal goals.

If no child gets ahead, then no child will be left behind.

photo http://www.flickr.com/photos/joeshlabotnik/2227617888/

http://creativecommons.org/licenses/by/2.0/deed.en

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