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“Do they have schools that do this all the time?”

“Do what?” I asked my summer school student for clarification.

“Have just one long class instead of a bunch of different ones.”

As I thought about his question, possible answers and complicating factors raced through my head: teachers’ contracts, graduation requirements, the length of the day, space and facilities. I didn’t share these considerations. Instead I just said, “Probably,” and was sure to ask, “Why?”

He explained that he liked having more time in class, he liked that he didn’t feel rushed, and because of the smaller class size he felt he was able to focus more. I had only met the student two days before, but we had already spent over 10 hours together due to our intensive summer school schedule. As it turned out, we liked summer school for the same reason: longer, smaller classes.

But one of his reasons didn’t sit right with me: He said he didn’t feel rushed. I certainly felt rushed. We had just under 40 hours in two weeks to prepare for the Living Environment Regents exam. I had to condense and prioritize a curriculum I loved. I had to figure out exactly what my students knew and didn’t know, and how they liked to learn. My job was definitely a rush job. (more…)

Prom has been an important topic of conversation for some students since our first graduating class entered our school three and a half years ago. It’s been on the minds of many more of these students, now seniors, since fall. Daily discussions of the event began as soon as we returned from spring break in April.

Last Tuesday, was “A Night to Remember” — our school’s first senior prom, a thoroughly planned and coordinated affair. I was in attendance, and found myself unexpectedly moved at the sight of our soon-to-be-graduates decked out in color-coordinated suits and dresses.

They’d watched it on “Glee” and seen it in the movies — now they were there. If a school’s first report card marks the transition from being a new, small school to just a small school (no longer new) for teachers and administrators, prom was that rite of passage for students. A student later shared with my principal, “I actually felt like I was in a movie.”

I was frustrated in the weeks leading up to prom. There were too many conversations about what to wear and whom to go with, and not enough college considerations for my liking. The problems that needed to solved around prom and other senior activities like senior trip seemed miniscule in comparison to other issues that needed to be addressed — graduation requirements, financial aid applications, college selections.

I have different priorities than my students. I should. I’m the adult; they’re adolescents. (more…)

Monday’s lesson in 12th-grade economics was on the federal deficit. My co-teacher reviewed with the students how and what the government currently spends money on, how and when the government raises money. “What happens,” she asked, “if you’re spending more than you make?”

Our students knew the answer from our personal finance unit from a few weeks ago: “You’re in debt!”

“So what should you do when you’re in debt?” she continued.

“Stop spending,” one student offered.

Another suggested, “Get more money!”

Conversations like this one remind me of why I’m excited and challenged by teaching: The economy is both much simpler and much more complicated than can easily fit in a 70-minute class. My co-teacher and I walk the fine line daily between simplicity for the ease of learning and complexity for the sake of accuracy. (more…)

Chatting with my colleagues in the lunch room yesterday, we speculated about the likelihood of having a snow day today. One teacher put it at 45 percent, or “just under a coin toss.” Others thought “no way,” or “absolutely.” Snow day closure decisions are a mixture of weather and local politics, so it was anyone’s guess.

Snow days are a mixed blessing. For students and teachers, there’s the timeless thrill of discovering that a work day is suddenly a day off. But eventually the snow is cleared and we have to deal with the reality of missing a day of instruction. At this time of year — so close to the Regents exam — each day feels even more precious and snow days disruptive.

But, as it turns out, non-snow days are also disruptive. I taught about 30 students today total, if you add up all the students in the three classes that I teach. Such low attendance challenges teachers and schools. How do we honor the students who do attend while knowing that if we move on today, we’ll be playing catch-up tomorrow. (more…)

I recently had a conversation with a colleague in which we tried to pinpoint the most difficult aspect of our jobs. One challenge I have as a special education teacher is that I teach four different lessons every day and I don’t get a chance to refine the English lesson from the morning class for the afternoon one.

My colleague’s challenge is not executing lessons, but the planning that goes into each of them. Planning is perhaps the most time-consuming component of teaching, and also the most important. While I’ve become more efficient with my planning — able to identify student learning outcomes more quickly and design engaging instruction — I still have a lot to learn. It also still takes me a lot of time. Here’s how I typically plan:

Point A: I have nothing. Nothing to put in students’ hands, nothing to plan a lesson. (more…)

Last week’s teacher workday, held on Election Day, marked a first for my school: We participated in a campus-wide professional development program. The day underscored how difficult – and how important – teaching and learning about about teaching and learning can be.

My school is one of three schools now occupying a single building. Our students wear different uniforms, our hallways are painted different colors, and because of staggered start and dismissal times, I rarely run into my colleagues who work in the rooms above and below me. And yet our schools also have a great deal in common: We serve similar populations of students and are experiencing the unique growing pains of being new schools. It follows then that we have a great deal to learn from one another.

This is the spirit that infused last week’s professional development: learning from each other and making connections with teachers from other schools in the building. Each school hosted and facilitated a 90-minute workshop. The workshops varied in content and facilitation-style, echoing the different cultures of our schools. For example, a few of the students from my school hosted a presentation about our student-led conferences, and then another school offered a seminar on integrating literacy into all subjects through deliberate curriculum planning. In the afternoon I watched as colleagues, some I’ve worked with for years and some I had just met that morning, did jumping jacks and labeled body parts with Post-it notes as part of a workshop on engaging kinesthetic learners. (more…)

I admire the efficiencies of some of my colleagues. There’s a teacher down the hall who can get students in and out of groups of two, three, or four in near silence all under 20 seconds. Another coworker wishes students into uniform just by looking at them. I admire their ability to do things that don’t come as naturally to me that I often spend a lot of time planning or executing in the classroom.

Recently I was admiring a colleague’s ability to grade tests. I watched as she zipped through narrow slips of paper that contained student’s multiple choice responses, quickly counting up the correct answers and making note of the raw score. Then she flipped to the students’ short-answer responses and noted the raw score before grading their short responses.

She explained that over the years she’s tried to increase the speed with which she’s able to grade while decreasing the amount of paper she uses. It requires organization and planning to be that efficient with time and materials. “Multiple-choice scoring goes faster,” she told me. “The long part is the short responses.”

I flipped through some of the short-response booklets and looked at some of the student answers. “They’re doing much better this year,” she told me. “Same test, students are scoring much higher.” “Why?” I asked.

“I just wrote ‘answer in complete sentences’ after each question,” she replied. (more…)

“Don’t smile until Christmas.” I wish I could say this wasn’t the most common snippet of advice about classroom management offered in my graduate coursework. Instead, I’m baffled by having entered a field where the conventional wisdom is to act like you don’t want to be there for the first few months.

The first few days and weeks of school are essential for establishing an orderly and productive space for students. They provide the groundwork for a successful school year. As a teacher, I’ve struggled each year with my role as classroom manager. My first year in the classroom, I wanted to assert myself as an authority. I was, after all, the teacher. I demanded silence and told students when they could and couldn’t go to the bathroom. I found myself in power struggles with no easy victor.  It was clear to me when students were exhibiting behaviors that distracted themselves and others from learning, but I didn’t know how to communicate what I knew. As I observe new teachers interacting with students, I recall that feeling of knowing what I want to accomplish, but not knowing the steps to get there.

This year in my classrooms I still demand silence and tell students when they can and can’t go to the bathroom, but I don’t find myself in as many power struggles. I’ve learned to assert authority is a different way. Early in my career, I drew my authority from my role as teacher. Over the past few years I’ve learned to find authority from a clear sense of purpose and direction. We need to do this now so that you’ll learn this so that you will be able to do this then, I recite to my students over and over again. For me, clear intentions and deliberate instruction are the best classroom management. Still, I only partially know how to make this level of planning happen.

As I imagine routines and structures for my classrooms I work, I have a new goal in mind. (more…)

Near the end of last year I switched over from pens to pencils. The shift was born of convenience: Walking down the hallway, I could always find a pencil on the floor. Some students didn’t care for my lost-boy pencils, saying they were old (well loved, I assured them), wrote funny (lead is different then ink, I explained), and boring (I couldn’t beat a lavender gel pen). But over time I came appreciate the flexibility and subtle security of writing something I could erase.

Cleaning out my room at the end of the year I safely stored my ragtag collection of pencils. I assured myself that this fall my students would fall in love with pencils and the potential for self-improvement that they embody just as I did.

So it was with great excitement that I read this summer about Sharpie’s new Liquid Pencil. The Liquid Pencil promises to combine a pencil’s capacity for erasure with the flow of an ink pen. This new shiny innovation would change everything, I thought. Eager to get my hands on one, I scoured back to school sales at my local Brooklyn office supply stores.

This is how many teachers spend their summers. Not fixating on writing utensils (which I’ll admit in the grand scheme of the teaching profession plays but a small role) but rather reflecting on the past and planning for the future. (more…)

My first year of teaching I used to get “the Sundays.”

The Sundays would strike early Sunday afternoon right around the time I knew that having another cup of coffee would affect my sleep, rendering me a grouch at school the next day. These afternoons were spent stuck in a mixture of anxiety and guilt: anxiety that I wasn’t prepared enough for the week as I could be, and guilt that I didn’t use my weekend more fully to get work done so that I was more prepared.  Ironically, one symptom of the Sundays is that you have a hard time falling asleep, because you keep thinking about the week ahead (as well as how you could have had that last cup of coffee anyway).

I’m now in my third year and so my Sundays are a lot milder (although I still limit the coffee intake). I’m a more efficient planner, and I have a better sense of what’s worth stressing over and what isn’t.

If you’re a teacher (and even if you’re not), you’ve probably experienced the Sundays. (more…)