Another year comes to an end

So here we are at the end of yet another year. I think it's a sign that I'm getting older that the years seem to go by a lot faster now. Who made that rule? I'm definitely not a fan.

In the past year, I have changed my job and my home, and both were wonderful, positive changes. I am about 4 classes away from my Masters degree in English Education, which is pretty darn cool. Yes, I'm going to make my students call me Master Farrell for a little while after I get that degree. ;) I have been taking a break from theater this fall, and I've loved it. The break helped me re-charge my batteries and remember who I am as a person, not just as a teacher. I hosted my second annual Home-Cooked Meal for Former Theater Students, and it was a riot. I'm so blessed to have worked with such tremendously talented, intelligent, and just GOOD kids.

I have been thinking about and could write about all the things from the past year that I wasn't so happy about. In fact, that's kind of my nature--to ignore the good stuff and obsess over the not-so-good stuff. But I'm not going to do that this year. What is done is done and it's not worth any more energy or worry. It's water under the bridge.

Instead, now, on the eve of 2009, is the time to look forward with hope, optimism, and love toward what the next 365 days will bring. I am hoping that 2009 will involve love, happiness, good health, wonderful friends, a credit card with a balance of 0, and a pair of size 10 pants. :)

In the words of Ralph Waldo Emerson, "Finish each day and be done with it. You have done what you could. Some blunders and absurdities no doubt crept in; forget them as soon as you can. Tomorrow is a new day; begin it well and serenely and with too high a spirit to be encumbered with your old nonsense."

May you begin 2009 with a spirit too high to be encumbered by your old nonsense! Happy New Year!

Big Changes...

Well, it's been awhile and a lot has changed. As I type, I'm sitting in a computer lab at Chaska High School, learning about the technology we'll be using this coming school year.

Big Change #1: I got a wonderful new job! I will be teaching Language Arts and Theater at Pioneer Ridge Freshmen Center in Chaska. I've met my new colleagues and they are wonderful. Also, my room is so big and pretty and has windows to the outside! :)

Big Change #2: I moved! I'm now living in Minneapolis, off of Loring Park, with a girlfriend from college. The apartment is very nice and I'm enjoying accomodating to city life after three years of suburban life. I'm starting to get the hang of the bus system, and I've discovered the quickest way to get to Chaska.

Other than that, life is just zipping along. I took two grad classes this summer, so I'm now halfway through my Masters program, which is super exciting. I've gone to several weddings of family and friends and I've made it up to the cabin several times.

Also, I have two book recommendations to share:

The Absolutely True Diary of a Part-time Indian by Sherman Alexie: Hilarious and moving story about a young Indian boy who leaves his reservation each day to attend the local White high school.

A Long Way Gone: Memoirs of a Boy Soldier by Ishmael Beah: Incredible story about a young boy who loses his family during the civil war in Sierra Leone and is recruited into the government army at age 13. Absolutely mesmerizing and heartbreaking and full of hope.

My love/hate relationship with technology...

I'm currently having my students create blogs and contribute to a class wiki as part of our reading The Secret Life of Bees. I think the general idea of the whole thing is going to turn out really, really well, but it is frustrating as heck trying to get there. The set-up process and learning curve are so enormous that it makes me want to yank out my hair. I just have to get over this first hill to the point where they get what they're doing and all will be better.

Something that I've discovered that's interesting about my students is how unwilling they are to problem-solve on their own. It seems as though, if they don't get it the first time, they get completely deflated, give up, and call me over to help them. Where's the eagerness to get in and muck around with stuff until you figure it out? Where's the willingness to make mistakes so you can learn from them? I hope this will teach them that it's okay to do that, especially when you're learning how to do something new.

Other than class today, life is okay. It's getting harder to listen to people talk about school here next year when I know I won't be here. I don't feel at all invested in decisions that are being made because they won't affect me, and staying focused on my work is getting more and more difficult. People are frustrating me too. I don't want people's pity, so I'm trying to stay positive, but just because outwardly I'm smiling doesn't mean that inwardly I'm okay with having people talk carte blanche about next year like it doesn't affect me or bother me. I'm beginning to get a little worried... okay more than a little worried about finding a job for next year and there are some very big questions I need to answer to help me make the right decision, like do I still want to teach? Do I want to do something else? Am I willing to move? If so, where? Out-state Minnesota? Out-of-state? Overseas? Ah!!!!!!!!

I guess that's about it for right now. With any luck, the next post will be less stressed and moe positive. :)

First non-class related post!

I realized that I haven't posted anthing here in some time, so I felt I probably should do a little updating.

Life went wild in December and the wildness has been changing and shifting in and out of different areas of my life since then. I finished directing The Laramie Project at MGSH last month, which was an incredible experience. The students were so committed and wonderful to work with that I was a sad to see it end, but relieved to have my after school time back. :)

In February I was finally forced to acknowledge that I'm not Superwoman nor am I invincible. My years of perfectionism and people-pleasing finally caught up to me. I discovered that I suffer from anxiety (that's where those panic attacks were coming from!) and am on the road to dealing with it. I'm happy to repotr that I'm doing 10 million times better than I was in February, and I am finally learning to say "no" and not take on quite so much. :)

Bad news quickly follows on the heels of good, though. The school district in which I work--District 279: Osseo Area Schools--failed to pass all of our levy referendum questions this past fall, so we are cutting $16 million from our budget. Elementary schools are closing and people are being let go left and right. My school is faced with the task of cutting 13 positions from our building and is anticipating average class sizes around 40 next year due to our "reduction in force." Needless to say, I'm very concerned about my job, but this situation also brings up questions of whether or not I want to continue teaching if class sizes are going to be that large. I'm just trying to take it one day at a time and not get too stressed out. I'm hoping for the best but preparing for the worst.

Despite it all, life is going pretty well. My students are, for the most part, really wonderful. They have their days, some more often than others, but don't we all? We're currently gearing up for the MCA II Test in Reading, which is the test they have to pass to graduate. It's also the test the government uses to measure Adequate Yearly Progress (AYP) for the No Child Left Behind Act (NCLB), which I think is, though well-intentioned--a pile of (CRAP). :) My family is doing well and are excited to get up to the cabin this summer to do some painting and remodeling. I've already been to one Twins game this year and I'm ready for the warmer weather and the sun and more Joe Mauer. :)

That's enough for now. Until later...

Most Wonderful Time of the Year? Nay, Most Stessful is more like it.

So we're into the holiday season. I'm also currently finishing the last week of trimester I and gearing up to start trimester II. Needless to say, I'm stressed.

As I was trying to relax the other night, I picked up my most recent copy of Glamour magazine and stumbled upon an article about the negative effects consistently high levels of stress can have on a person's health. The article described a variety of factors that contribute to high levels of stress, and one thing that was mentioned was people's reliance on, nay addiction to, technology. Women interviewed for the article told how they got antsy when they were forced to be away from the pinging chimes of their email inboxes and the dinging rings of their cellphones.

This got me thinking about an earlier blog post I wrote about everything being "better, faster, stronger" and wondering if that was a good thing. I'm coming back to that again. Is "better, faster, stronger" really that, or is it crazy, too fast, and stretching us beyond a point we can handle?

I have been emailing back and forth with a parent about her child's performance in my class. At one point, she suggested that a solution to her child's failing grade in my class would be that I should email her her child's upcoming assignments for my class every Friday. Fortunately, when we sat down face-to-face to conference, the counselor very tactfully suggested that that was an unrealistic expectation and the parent agreed. Do we assume that because a person has technology at their fingertips--email, an online Gradebook, whatever--that all of that person's work should/will get done faster? Because that forgets the most important part of the equation: the human doing the work. I may have tech tools, but I am still a human who has to do much of the data input, and I, like everyone else, only have 24 hours in a day.

I guess all I'm asking for is room to breathe. A little bit of let-up and a scaling down of the expectations of perfection and instant feedback. I am only human.

A thought and an exclamation...

The exclamation first:

I HATE WINDOWS MOVIE MAKER!

There. I said it. I'm done.

Thought: I just read a blog post on the National Council of Teachers of English (NCTE) website about teachers using social networking sites to connect with their colleagues and students. As a young teacher who has been worried about having a Facebook profile, that was a little reassuring. After reading the blog, I also went and joined the NCTE group on Facebook. :) More to the point, though, I'm using Facebook to keep in touch with students who have graduated. However, I don't accept students as "friends" until after they've graduated. Facebook, for me, is a personal space, separate from school. It is a representation of my life as NOT a teacher, as a free-wheeling, social person. It's not like I post pictures of myself naked in a group orgy-animal sacrifice-drug haven environment. Heck, I don't even do any of those things, much less would I be brazen enough to post pictures in a public forum of all that. My point is, I feel like the moment I begin allowing current students as friends is the moment that I begin censoring myself to a degree that I'm not comfortable with outside the classroom. I need to be me.

As I think about this, it raises interesting ideas about what exactly, in a personal sense, we expect from teachers. The possibility of everyone's lives and personal traits being available for public critique online throws into sharp relief our assumptions about how teachers are supposed to behave--inside AND OUTSIDE of the classroom.

Is it safe to say that there's a mostly unspoken assumption that teachers are supposed to be morally superior or morally correct all of the time? Where does this come from? Can this change? Would our entire concept and construction of "teacher" be required to change in order to accept the fact that teachers aren't always pillars of morality in the community?

I don't know, but I'd love to know what you think. :) And I still hate Movie Maker.

Till next time...

What's mine is yours and what's yours is... everyone's.

I really enjoyed that article! Jenkins brought up a lot of the ideas and problems that we have been discussing in class and explained in ways that I hadn't thought about.

I guess what stuck out to me most as something that could/should have an impact on my instruction is the skill of transmedia navigation, being able to follow and create stories and information across an array of modalities. To begin with, this sounds so much like my students. I especially identified with his description of the kids who struggle to understand why Spiderman doesn't appear the same in the comics, cartoons, films, and figurines. It goes to the idea, in a way, of judgment and being able to examine the perspectives and influences of the authors/creators of the varied images of Spidey. Using popular culture to help students begin the process of analyzing for perspective and purpose seems like it could be very powerful and could be a great scaffolding activity to get them into talking about identifying and analyzing images in advertising or news for perspective, bias, and purpose.

The bigger thing for me though, as an English teacher, was the concept of creating stories across modalities. Jenkins quotes Kress as "[advocating] moving beyond teaching written composition to teaching design literacy as the basic expressive competency of the modern era" (Jenkins 47). As someone who is currently staring down a stack of 150 sophomore narrative essays that need grading, the idea of the students creating a story that's a combination of film, sound, and other mediums sounds very appealing. :) It certainly would appeal to the students' strengths and interests, and it seems very constructivist in nature. The students would really have to understand what they were trying to communicate in order to get the message across accurately and meaningfully through a variety of media. There is a concern though about what kinds of materials and images the students appropriate for their creations. And I'm not just talking about copyrights and plagiarism. What happens when a student uses an image or video or soundbite that enforces negative, harmful stereotypes or assumptions? How do we engage with them about it? How do we read that use of that image/video/soundbite in the first place?

Another idea that appealed to me was the idea of collective intelligence. I especially noted the quote about how schools teach kids to work as autonomous problem-solvers, not as a community of collaborators. Again, looking at this from the practical side, having students work collaboratively in groups to complete projects and tasks could cut my grading load in half. :) It would require a huge shift away from the idea that students have to produce individually to be successful. And there would certainly be concerns that some students will simply try to sail through on the coat tails of their more productive team mates. We've all been there and felt that and it's frustrating as all get out. Is there some way to measure individual involvement to guarantee that all group members are participating or does that go against the very principle of collaboration and collective intelligence in the first place?

I think that's about it for now. Until next week...