My end of the school year reflection.

A lot of my education major friends from college are still hunting for that elusive permanent teaching job. When we talk, I recognize how fortunate I am and I do my best to remain positive as we speak, despite a job market outlook that is drearier than ever. 

“All you can do is keep applying,” I say, and those words are meaningless, perhaps insulting coming from someone who has a permanent position, but I don’t know what else to say. I am one of the lucky ones. Who am I to comment at all?

When we began our majors in the education field, we were told many things that happened to be true at the time: the baby boomers are about to retire! Demand for teachers surpasses the supply! This is a hot field to get in. Little did we know that when those baby boomers were to retire that their positions would be cut right along with them - large in part due to a lack of funding brought on by the Republican war on public education.

Like I said, I was one of the lucky ones - but not at first.

When I graduated from college three years ago, I had never felt so optimistic, so free, so excited by the endless opportunities presented to the young, energetic, slightly crazy 22 year old that I was. Without hesitation, I began applying all over the United States (and even in quite a few other countries). I figured if it were May, I would easily have a job lined up by June, which meant plenty of time to prepare myself for the big move and have fun in the meantime.

Then June came. Then June went.

I was still optimistic. Oh, people don’t even hire until July, I told myself. Then July came. I kept applying. I drove to Chicago without telling a soul at a last minute’s notice for a series of interviews (something I couldn’t remotely afford - thank you Mastercard), only to lose out after it came down only to me and a nice fellow who had been teaching in the Dallas area for three years. I broadened my search to states outside my preference area. I began to email principals directly after applying, attaching my resume and glowing letters of recommendation. I spent money getting certified in the states in which I was applying in order to demonstrate how serious I was about each job.

I applied for over 300 jobs that summer. I still have all the automated response emails in my Gmail, as some sort of relic reminding me of what it was like to sit at a computer from 10 AM to 10 PM entering the same information over and over and over. Some of those initial prospects came with interviews in which I felt confident afterwards. Most I never even received an email saying the position had been filled.

By August, I had ran out of money despite serving tables full-time.

Soon, I applied to sub in a more upscale school district about 10 miles outside of Erie.

That year passed and I learned a lot. I learned that subbing was a great experience in classroom management, quickly adapting to situations, and learning techniques to remember students names quickly. I also learned that with subbing came a culture of irresponsibility among myself and the other subs in the district, as we frequently closed the bar after a long day in Miss B’s or Mr. K’s or Ms. G’s  (spending money that I didn’t have because I was a sub and this angered the younger, more arrogant me). We’d show up for work the next day looking fresh without anyone every suspecting our previous night’s ventures. Work was steady. There was rarely a day that I wasn’t in the school. Despite being a sub, I became a fixture in the school. I knew the kids and the kids all knew me. Despite switching up classes every day (until the last six weeks of the year, where I filled in for a teacher who went out for medical reasons), I really started feeling like a teacher. It was quite an interesting year - and despite the immaturity of my nights, the substitute teaching truly had a lot of value, both in learning the trade and growing up.

The next spring came and the application process started again. I hated the idea of going through it all again, but I started early. I applied for another 300+ jobs beginning the process in April… and then June came and June went once again. I remember going out to the bar with a group of friends, getting drunk, that stupid kind of drunk fueled by stress and bitterness, and for the first time angrily saying to them, “What the hell more do I need?” And my one friend replied without hesitation: “Experience.” The rub, of course, being that no one wanted to give me any.

I was still angry. I didn’t understand how my resume could be any better - stellar grades, great references, head coaching a state-winning Special Olympics basketball team - what the hell else did I need? Just experience, that bastard experience. The word echoed in my head, a demon hanging over my shoulder at all times. 

July came and went. I had accepted the fact that I would be substitute teaching and waiting tables for another year. I considered going back to school full-time. At least my loans would be deferred then. I considered teaching English in South Korea as a friend of mine was, despite this being financially implausible due to my debt. I considered packing up all my shit and splitting town to move in with my cousin in L.A. to do who-knows-what.

Then the call came. Then the second call came.

It was August, I was serving tables and nearly broke, and I finally had two job offers. The journey had been rough. There was a lot of anger over feeling so completely lacking in control over the situation, despite feeling that I had so much to offer as a teacher, that I had so many great ideas if someone would just give me a chance - but then, in some surreal way, it worked out. I even had options. I was in control again.

So, if you’re about to begin the painful process of looking for a teaching job, know that it will not be fun. Know that it might not happen this year. Or even next. But like I tell my friends, all you can do is just keep applying. Eventually, it will work out and you will look back on those stressful, angry years certainly not with longing, but with a strange sense of nostalgia and satisfaction.

A student teacher in my building told me about www.teacherspayteachers.com today and after checking it out, it seems like an interesting concept and a more active community than most lesson sharing sites I’ve been on.

Most of the lessons, projects, handouts, and other resources on there seem to be offered up for free, which, of course, is the best part about it. On the other hand, it offers the ability for every teacher to offer up their own “store” to post their own original teaching materials for free or a fee (most seem to fall in the $1-3 range).

I am an outspoken critic of most American-made textbooks, particularly in my subject of history (I do not use one at all in my course). I do not like the way in which they choose to interpret American history, I do not agree with the way that most are developed, and I do not like the way that the profits are distributed.

So, instead of wasting district money on 100 awful textbooks for a course at $150 each, I will gladly drop a buck or two here for materials created by other ACTUAL educators, knowing that my money will go directly to them, and that I will not have to worry about the wear and tear of aging since the files will be electronic (which also means I can edit them to my liking and to fit my curriculum). This could also be an awesome resource for student teachers needing ideas or inspiration.

If any teachers out there create a store with their stuff, be sure to send me a link. I’ll probably dabble and upload some of my bigger, more ambitious assignments over the next few days.

Here is my reading checklist for the rest of the spring (inspired by Caitlin) which gives me until June 20:

• Independence Day by Richard Ford
• The Wind Through the Keyhole by Stephen King
• The Man Within by Graham Greene
• The Invention of Air by Steven Johnson
• Black Reconstruction in America by W.E.B. DuBois
• History of the Battle of Lake Erie by W.W. Dobbins
• The Samurai by Shusaku Endo

My leisure reading has slowed to a crawl these past two months, as most of my time reading has been spent perusing educational journals and books (or grading research papers and essays). Lately, by the time my brain has winded down for the night after a hot shower, I will get into bed, where I generally read for an hour or two a night before sleep, and I’m only able to make it 10 or 15 minutes before I can no longer resist the weight of my eyelids.

Fortunately, I will have more time once my grad courses end in two weeks… and then I will be free to read whatever I please until early-July. As much as I enjoy grad school, I need a break from educational theories, curriculum mapping, and critiques of No Child Left Behind. I am thankful that my summer course is a seminar on modern Germany (WWI to present).

For my leisure reading, I alternate between fiction and nonfiction and my interests, as anyone who has followed me for a while knows, are all over the place. I invite any recommendations to add to these.

This is my third cold of the year and this sucker has me nearly out of commission. I’m groggy. The coughing is getting tiresome. The chapped nostrils are far from enjoyable. It all makes me a little cranky. If I wait up at 5:30 AM and am still feeling this crummy, I’ll be taking a sick day.

Knowing the possibility of this, I told my students today that I may Skype them over the projector during their class, so they better behave for the sub or they’ll feel the wrath of Mr. James while he is curled up from the couch with a box of tissues watching reruns of No Reservations while eating a pot of cheap macaroni and cheese. And that wouldn’t be a pretty sight.

As for colds, when I get one, I fight them off pretty quick - and it’s a rare year when I have more than one. Actually, I can’t think of a single year in my life when I have had more than one cold.

My grandfather was a dairy farmer and my father is a sewer plant operator, so I’ve always made the claim that all the time I’ve spent around cow manure and human waste has given me an almost superhuman immune system. Which, really, is true. I rarely get sick. This year has been the exception and it’s probably a combination of a lack of sleep, not exercising like I should be, and being around all those sick kiddies who think running their hand under the sink of cold water for two seconds is the proper way to wash their hands. 

So it goes.

“That classroom can be your battleground or your playground,” Frank McCourt said is his memoir Teacher Man. That sentence has stuck since I first read it, embedded deep into my mind (and, in fact, I have the words hanging on my classroom wall), the thought reemerging almost daily when I feel my blood pressure begin to rise, when my hands begin to sweat with frustration over whatever it is that the students are resisting or complaining about on that given day. Make this our playground, I remind myself. Don’t fight them.

“Why don’t you want to read this?” I remember asking the students against my better judgment. What are you doing? I then asked myself, immediately regretting that I had taken the bait that was the collective groan of the class. You’re the teacher. Don’t ask them. Don’t enable this defiance. Just do it.

“I’m sick of reading,” one student finally chimed in.

“How could you possibly be sick of it? You don’t even know what we are reading yet,” I responded - and they didn’t know. This was the Roaring Twenties that I was teaching the class. Gangsters! Gambling! Moonshining! Violence, guns, prostitution, and lawbreaking! It was everything that would quench their thirst for chaos. If I couldn’t get these fifteen year old kids interested in this, then what hope could there possibly be for me?

“The only reason we even bother to read any of this is because there’s going to be a stupid test on it,” the same student added without a hint of condescension. “It’s all we ever do in school. Every single block. Read. Test. Read. Test. Read. Test.”

I considered what he was saying and stood quietly in front of the class of twenty-nine freshmen, unsure of what to say. All eyes were on me, waiting to see my reaction. Yet, I had engaged this conversation and another preaching session on the value of reading wasn’t going to cut it… and I couldn’t simply end it. I had to find a way to put a positive spin on it. In my mind, I pulled up a task list of options, looking desperately for a solution that wasn’t in any of the educational theory books that I had read in college. Where do I take this conversation from here?

“Well, I’m still pretty new at this teaching thing, you know,” I said. “So fill me in here. What don’t you like about reading?”

“Tests, man,” the student told me and his classmates nodded along, as if I were now in on some ancient secret that they all knew.

“Tests.”

“Tests. It’s not the reading for most of us. At least I don’t think. I’m just so sick of filling out stupid tests. First block, second block, PSSAs. Can’t we just read something for once and enjoy it without having to fill out all those stupid questions afterwards?”

I again considered this. “Point taken,” I replied. “But in the meantime, let’s get reading.”

The class groaned again and we began to read.

I learned a lot during that brief conversation. I hadn’t quite been sure how the handle it at the time, but I did realize one important lesson: I need to let the students talk. I need to let the students explain to me their frustrations and why they are groaning instead of simply telling them to knock it off. I learned that if the classroom is a battleground, the tests are the landmines that the students want so desperately to avoid. They want the classroom to be a playground just as I do.

I remember going home that night and laying on my couch and thinking the conversation over. Tests, man. Who could blame them? 

The next reading assignment that we read as a class was an excerpt from an F. Scott Fitzgerald story. When we finished reading it, I told them that I didn’t have anything to go with it, but I wanted to know what they had thought. There was silence for a moment. Then the student who had spoken up in protest of testing chimed in.

“It was pretty good, I guess,” he said. 

That was the only response volunteered by the students, but as the class ended, I still felt pretty good about the whole situation. It may not have solved anything. Most would probably never remember the story. And I just may not have had the most effective solution to the problem right then and there. I realized in that moment though that if I just learned to listen sometimes, the students had some pretty good ideas.

The above link leads to my other blog where I discuss some of my thoughts on life as a teacher.

If you’re one of the numerous teachers who asked for the Facebook template for your class and I didn’t send it on to you, then I apologize. It’s been a constant stream of requests since I first posted it a few months ago. I figure that an easier way to provide this would be to have a link with a downloadable file instead of sending it out individually to each person who requested it.

You can download my template right here. I’ve tweaked it quite a bit since I first posted it a couple of months ago, but enjoy Version 2.0 while you can, because by next year, I’m sure I’ll have to completely revamp it as the Timeline becomes to new Facebook norm. Until then, just adapt my template for your classroom’s purposes and let the students have some fun with it.

Many public schools have had difficultly keeping up with the frantic evolution of technology. Whether the blame lies on reluctant teachers or administrators, insufficient funds, or outdated curriculum, the reality is that many of the traditional views on education are becoming insufficient or irrelevant to the 21st century learner. Educators now have the ability to take back control of their schools and lead by example with innovative practices. It’s time for teachers to ditch the expensive textbooks and put into practice all of those crazy teaching ideas swimming around it our heads - those ideas to crazy to ever work - and revamp programs so that they not only include a heavy focus on technological literacy, but help shift schools to purposely designed curricula that implement materials and skills across every discipline. Education needs to be purposeful, relevant, seamless, and collaborative in order to graduate a globally competent student.

Every student should have a unique role in crafting a product that is a piece of a larger picture. With free Google services and safe educational social networks providing products designed specifically for collaboration, the shift could be relatively inexpensive for school districts. As a simplified example, a district could design 9^th grade curriculum where students studying the American Jazz Age of the 1920s could be placed in a group - whether the members were in the same class, or a different period, or even with students in a 9^th grade at a neighboring school within the district (and hell, maybe eventually even using a “partner school” across the globe). The free Google services could provide an easy and effective way for students in a group to communicate with one another outside of a classroom.

The material covered throughout each student’s school day could then relate to this overall collaborative project in some way. Some bigger picture, connecting it all, giving students a chance to learn something beyond the superficial. In a Computer Science course, a student could spend mornings designing a free Google website as a hub for the collaborative project while learning the basics of HTML and Flash. The student could then head to their Art class to design a project in the style of Art Deco or to music class to work on a composition from the Harlem Renaissance. Afterwards, they could go to history class where the student would begin in-depth research on a group-designated topic to create an interactive virtual timeline that includes embedded videos, photographs, and clickable Google Maps for the site. During lunch, the student might access the school’s social network to Skype chat about the website with a group member from the neighboring school, then afterwards head to English class to critique the short stories of F. Scott Fitzgerald, before heading to a Home Economics to cook a popular dish of 1920s Chicago, while concluding the day in a statistical mathematics course where figures of Prohibition-related figures and finances and the impending Stock Market will be calculated, examined, and analyzed.

This, of course, is an off-the-cuff idea of how this could be implemented - and the suggestion is unquestionably ambitious. Daunting even. To orchestrate such an effort in a single district would require the cooperation of school board members, administrators, curriculum developers, parents in the community, and, most importantly, all involved teachers. Yet, the idea, if implemented successfully, could lessen the scrutiny placed on public schools as being detrimental to the 21^st century learner. Educators have the ability to revolutionize education throughout the world and, in turn, better prepare young people to become more than critical thinkers, but critical doers in a globalized society.

You’d have to ask my students. Probably “weird,” “nerdy,” and “laid back” would be adjectives that come up often - and I’d agree. Every teacher wants to be Tom Berenger in The Substitute, but hey, it’s just not my personality. As is the push in modern education, I try to conduct my classroom as more of a laboratory than a lecture hall (although I do love to tell stories), where I am more of an overseer (the popular educational term: “facilitator”) than a traditional instructor. It’s a very hands on class: lots of projects - the creation of a Facebook profile for famous progressive leaders of the early 1900s, filming a silent film in the spirit of Charlie Chaplin or Buster Keaton during my Jazz Age unit, collaborative Google websites, podcasts, blogging, classroom social networking, etc. - as well as plenty of independent research and writing exercises (no surprises there, I’m sure). My goals: learn, learn how to learn, and have a good time.

As for being afraid if students stumble across my blog - well, no. If I were afraid of that, I simply would not have one. I am in the public eye and there are certainly responsibilities that come with that, but there is nothing that I publish on here that I consider inappropriate or that I wouldn’t defend were I to be confronted about it. Still, I take measures to ensure that this blog is not “out there” for easy access if students or parents are Googling me. My last name and exact location are not advertised on here anywhere, I have not shared this blog with any personal friends (it truly serves for my own purposes: archiving these particular young years of my life - a more interactive journal), and I even occasionally monitor the activity of where people who visit my blog are located to make sure there isn’t a sudden influx of people from my school’s area. Even if there ever is though, it wouldn’t much worry me.

By the time students have reached high school – particularly their crucial sophomore and junior years – they are generally familiar with the routines of active learning and assessment and they have become accustomed to and integrated into the school’s culture and community. As these students continue to near the crossroad in their life that is high school graduation, it is important that schools actively involve families in the education of their children.

Educational studies have demonstrated time and time again that students whose families are actively involved in their education are more likely to graduate high school and more likely to pursue and succeed in post-secondary studies. Many schools are well aware of the imbalance in parental involvement among elementary, middle, and high schools. Research numbers consistency solidify this claim: the older the students, the less involved the parents.

Yet, as critical as parental involvement is during a student’s elementary and middle school years, this involvement is just a crucial for the high school student. In most schools, high school grades are the only scores reflected in a student’s GPA – a critical factor in the post-secondary education search, particularly in its ability to open up doors for monetary assistance through grants and scholarships. In high school, a student is forming lifelong learning, studying, and research skills and habits as well as dealing with a continual evolution of their social skills – and all, not some, but all research shows that parental involvement means improvement in all of these categories.

Schools must make a point to involve parents, as well as attract parents who are resistant or have other priorities, to take an active role in their child’s education leading up to their high school graduation. Schools must extend their influence outside of the classroom and into the homes. Effective and consistent communication between teachers and parents, providing resources for families to have learning activities at home (and giving them the motivation to actually do it), making parents and students both accountable for illegal student absences, and building a community where volunteer opportunities in the school are seemingly endless are all key in developing a school as a positive and productive resource for a community, rather than simply a place where parents send their teenagers for the day - a hazing ritual on the way to adulthood. Developing ways to involve otherwise resistant parents while serve to foster a positive environment, give teachers and administration more influence needed to be successful in any community, and increase parental accountability in relation to their child’s success.