takin' 5

I always feel accomplished when I get through a Monday. Today marks the beginning of the true count down to the end of the semester, and I don't think my 3rd years will be to the point that I'd hoped they'd be. There are some big-picture things that aren't coming together, and I hate to sound like Debbie Downer, but I don't know if they can or will with this group of kids. It's not that they aren't great and capable and intelligent, it's just the fact that there are some big holes in their comprehension of major concepts, and the 3 day a week schedule doesn't really allow us the time to make sure that they always learn to use things as well as I'd like them to. Truly, no matter how much I like the personalities of this group of kids, there's quite a bit to be desired with their work ethic. There are times that 1/2 a class will do their homework! I'm about to re-do my HW "routine"; I think I'm going to up the points I give for each assignment, and I'm going to make homework corrections an additional assignment. Maybe I have it all wrong tho; they're already not motivated to do the HW, so maybe points won't be much of a motivator for them. An additional component to the assignment is probably asking for trouble. They probably won't do this part either. I think I need to do some reading of inspirational teacher stories about how they motivate students. To quote Harry Wong, "school is not FUN", but I DO have to make it interesting and personally meaningful for them to have some buy in, but I'm not going to bust out candy and silly uncontextualized board races to get them into the material.

the "dune" I'm running up

So, being the Michigander that I am, I have spent many hours running up and down the dunes at Lake MI beaches during the short summers. Running down is awesome, like flying. You take huge steps as gravity pulls you down the dune, and your ears pop from changing altitude so fast. That part is such a nice reward for the struggle you make to go UP the dune; every step you take you also slide back a bit. It's extremely hard work. In fact, a lot of high schools that live by the shore have their sports teams train by running up and down them, and they're almost always formidable competitors.
This is how I feel about my third-year French classes. I see them only three times a week, and after having had French only 3 days a week last year as well, they have a horribly shaky base that I'm trying to build on. Plus, third-year tends to be a level of French that's just drudgery for students; many of them are only in class b/c most colleges require 3 years of world language for admission. In response to this, I love to try to make this level as useful and communicative as possible. I want to spend as much time as possible in class doing speaking activities, and I schedule a lot of formal speaking assessements during off-hours. However, what I've noticed a lot this semester (more than in the past, but not by much...) is that they are having a hard time simply understanding why they've learned what they've learned. That doesn't seem to make much sense, but I guess a clearer way to explain it would be that they remember having learned it, but they don't really know what it's for. I don't want to give them a lot more homework than they already have, but I think I may be able to re-do the way I do homework so that I can bring in as many old concepts and as much old vocab as possible: quality rather than quantity, one of my favorite epithets. I was part of the textbook selection committee, and in general I love how the series works - it's full of ancilaries, and it has a lot of little alterations I can make easily for multiple intelligences. The prob with the book I see is that each new level goes off the assumption that the previous level worked through the whole book. When we spoke to the textbook reps, they assured us that the "looping" the series does would make up for previous levels not finishing the book. Even with this, the 3 day a week thing just kills any hope for them doing well and having a functional understanding of the language. Yeah, the powers that be swear up and down that when former AHS students go to college, they've done just as well as other kids who've had the language every day for several years. My source for that info might be coming to a false conclusion, since any kid who's going to keep in touch with his/her former teacher probably had a good experience in that class. From what I've seen in my somewhat limited - but growing! - experience is that there's a handful of kids that "get it" despite the odds, but there's a frighteningly large number of kids who don't have a clue why they're there, and just by complete luck they've been able to squeak by with enough knowledge to go on to the next level. This could also be a reflection of us having to take students into the next level even if they earned under a C (Really, I don't think I've met one kid who's earned lower than a C who actually knows what's going on in class. But there they are. Hmmm. We're not really setting them up for success this way.)
As I just read over what I wrote, I realized that I'm not being super rational. My feelings right now are just tainted by one particular class that's pretty fresh in my mind. I like them a lot, but they're not very motivated. About half the class does their homework, and a lot of them say to me, when I'm checking homework, that they didn't do it b/c they didn't understand. Well, they still don't get hw credit, b/c they have several days to get a hold of me before it's due, and they know I check my email at home, and I EXPECT them to contact me with questions (My freshmen are so into this! I think it makes them feel more adulty. It's ironic that my juniors are less responsible in this way. Well, no, it's not ironic. It's just not a novelty for the frosh and not for the juniors.)
I think a good solution would be to split the second year book in half. This is the first year I've used the 3rd year book, and since we've just bought them, the likelihood of us being able to change is pretty slim. It'd be too expensive. Really, though, the holes that have grown from their being in their second year of 3 day a week French make the third year book pretty far over their heads. I don't foresee the variable sched changing ever, and I abhor the thought that some of my kids will leave my classes saying that they took 3 years of French and they can't say a thing. I think this is my new Holy Grail: trying to make this work so that I'm not constantly frustrated after each class.

I'm TAKING 5 - OMG!

I'm so on a roll - 2 days in a row! This has been a really long, but good, week. I feel like I had such an "extreme teaching" week. A friend/colleague from Heritage and I have put together a French 3 PLC, and we worked together for the first time on Tues. It was so nice to work with someone who shares my teaching philosophy. It's not that I don't want to be challenged by people who think differently than I do, but my last French PLC meetings haven't exactly been fruitful or positive. This teacher and I shared a lot of ideas and really mapped out what we want our students to be able to do by the end of the year. Plus, we shared a ton of ideas and materials. Then, after yesterday's 21st C meeting, I almost feel like I'm in grad school again. My brain has that sort of super saturated feeling. I don't know if that makes any sense. I guess my head just feels extremely FULL right now to the point that it's kind of cobwebby. I'm so glad that it's Friday so I can have the weekend to think things out and plan things (All these ideas and thoughts are backing up, and it's overwhelming!)
Plus, I had such a strange class today. I LOVE my first-year French classes! They have such positive attitudes - even if some of them have work ethics that leave something to be desired... Today I took a girl's i-pod, and I'd caught her listening to it before. She was so angry at me about it! She swore up and down that she wasn't going to listen to it, and that she was hurt that I would "think she'd lie to me about it." Oh my goodness....it's not like she hadn't set a bad precedent! She even went as far as to write me a letter telling me that her trust in ME was now shaken!!!!! Don't get me wrong - I was NOOOOOOO angel in high school! I did things that I WILL NOT mention on-line for the world to see, but I never had the audacity to address a teacher like that! I may have been bad in some ways, but I made sure I never crossed the line of disrespect with a teacher. This is one of those situations that I don't know if I need to let drop or if I should confront her about it. My first instinct was to let it pass, but she's been on my radar a lot lately. I think she's pretty good at manipulating people, and I don't trust her one bit. I guess I'll decide the next time I see her.
Then, RIGHT after I read the letter she left me, a student that came in for the next class said that she heard I was an amazing teacher and that she wishes she'd taken French. It was such a nice thing to hear! I know I'm super friendly, and I have a reputation for that (also for being super caffeinated.....), but I don't hear very often if kids really think they're learning from me. Well, I guess lately I'm hearing that more. A lot of parents told me that at conferences. It's stupid how much I need external affirmation, but this is that time of the fall when most teachers start to feel like they're horrible teachers b/c we AND the kids are so burnt out. I think that was a shot in the arm that will help me feel better about spending an inordinate time this weekend grading my huge stack of papers!!! Oh, but that kind of dedication's the mark of a great teacher, right? Har har.

my quandary

Ohhhh, time to vent. I have this unresolved issue. I am FULLY committed to constructivism. I in NO way doubt the value of teaching this way. I feel like in my 6 years of teaching I've seen so much worth in making my students come to their own conclusions and make inferences. One thing about studying a world language is that most of us teachers were taught in such an outmoded way. In my French classes in high school, my teachers presented us information like new grammar as an abstract concept. They would show, for example, a "grid" that organized the verbs into 1st, 2nd, 3rd person, singular and plural. That was the intro to the concept - what?!?! It just makes sense to teach a second language in a realistic context. Here's an example of what I mean: when I teach something new, I like to present it to my classes in a way that really demonstrates the meaning of the concept - like in the form of a short reading or a conversation with them in French. From these "texts", I guide them to make inferences about meanings of what's unfamiliar to them and try to identify patterns that are distinct to that grammar point. I make sure that I give them time to develop some ideas, and then we talk about it all together to make sure that we're all on the same page. I DO find that there's value to the verb grid thing, but only after they've learned what it's for - it's simply a visual organizer; conjugating the verb is not the be-all-end-all. I'm sort of going off on a tangent, but all of this preamble comes from a tense conversation I had with a colleague that boiled down to the idea that "if your philosophy is so great, why am I not seeing some HUGE difference in their understanding and abilities?"
Well, it's a good question, and I have NO idea why not. What am I not doing right? I sure as heck am not going to abandon constructivism. Actually, I lied - I do have an idea why it's maybe not making as much a "difference" as I'd like it to, or maybe that the "difference" isn't really showing. Maybe it's that my students aren't consistently exposed to constructivist teaching. It seems like there are so many of us in between C1 and 2 that lack of exposure is probably not the real reason. (Glass half full?) One thing that I find is that my students have pretty poor memories. That sounds like I'm putting the blame on them, and I don't mean to. I recycle info as much as I can (I think). I worry that my teaching may lack in the "rigor" department, even though I HATE that word with a passion. That's a struggle for me - to make sure that I'm challenging my students consistently, but I also hate the idea that MORE is more. If we demand that they move constantly from one concept to the next and hardly move past the "knowledge" rung of Bloom's taxonomy, we're doing them a disservice; they won't develop more sophisticated thinking skills than information recall. However, there are so many demands for kids to know MORE rather than for them to know BETTER.
This is a slight tangent, but I'm reading Zen and the Art of Motorcycle Maintenance, and it's so coincidental that a lot of things the author (Robert Pirsig) mentions are similar to our discussions in 21st Century; there are even similarities to The World is Flat when Pirsig talks about technology and the changes that had come about even by 1974 when he published it. This is the kind of book that I've striped with highlighter ink for a lot of reasons. One bit that struck me especially was when the author visits the university in Bozeman, MT, where he taught for a while. He was basically extremely depressed while he was teaching there, and he had a lot of criticism for the way school is "done". He wrote, "Imitation is a real evil that has to be broken before real rhetoric teaching can begin. This imitation seems to be an external compulsion. Little children don't have it. It seems to come later on, possibly as a result of school itself," and, "You're supposed to imitate the teacher in such a way as to convince the teacher you were not imitating...That gets you As. Originality on the other hand could get you anything - from A to F. The whole grading system cautioned against it."
I don't want to create little mimes like these. I hope I'm not. I worry also that I overestimate how constructivist I am - I don't want to be over-confident. I think this year I'm really going to be analytical of my own methods and make sure that the things I choose to spend our class time on are truly in line with what I believe.
I'm most certainly going to change my grading system to make it skills-based. My only trouble is that when I did it last year, it really had some quirks that I wasn't patient enough to try to iron out. Rather, I just went back to old school "homework, quizzes, tests and effort." Ew. My students deserve better feedback than that.