Deserved Punishment

In March of 2008, the most horrific murder in Memphis history occurred in the neighborhood my dad and I drove through when I was a child (I wrote about how that neighborhood changed my life here).  I remember so distinctly hearing about it on the Nashville news and breaking down in tears at the thought that someone actually shot and stabbed four adults while five children and babies watched.  And that when that person ran out of bullets, they turned to stabbing every one of those children with kitchen knives to eliminate tiny witnesses.  The story still makes me want to simultaneously scream and cry.

I later watched the investigation unfold on my favorite reality crime show, The First 48.  Today marked the end of the thirteen day trial for Jessie Dotson, who was named as the assailant by his 9-year-old nephew who survived despite a steak knife being lodged in the back of his head when the police arrived at the scene.

A jury took just an hour and a half to convict Dotson on all nine indictments.  The sentencing stage comes tomorrow, and I’m following the events with baited breath.  The options are (1) death penalty or (2) life without parole.

Pardon me while I get political for a moment:  I have never believed in the death penalty.  For anyone.  For any reason.

Something about having to live with the knowledge of what you’ve done provides more suffering than a potential “out” of having someone else take your life.  Then there’s the part about “an eye for an eye makes the whole world blind.”  There’s also the constant possibility that a person was wrongly convicted, which isn’t discovered until new technologies are developed to prove that.  Last, but most importantly, is my belief in the inherent good of people.  Though I’ve never met this man, I know that somewhere inside of him is a grain of goodness.

Did this man do something unimaginably horrific?  Yes.  Do I believe the state of Tennessee needs to take his life for it?  Absolutely not.

If you’re interested, here’s the link to my hometown newspaper’s coverage of the Lester Street trial.

Changing it up!

Today’s post is up at You Make It Happen.

Check it out!

Anticipation

Today begins the most agonizing portion of my year:  Vanderbilt football season.  The game is tonight, and I’m a bit under the weather, but you had better believe I’ll be out there rooting for the Commodores.  We play Northwestern.  They should be really bad at football, seeing that they’re the same kind of school as us and all.  But they’re not.  Actually, they’re quite good.  Here’s hoping we can start off strong (like that year we went 4-0 to start the season or that one where we beat South Carolina in our first game)!

For a healthy amount of skepticism, I introduce to you the words of blogger KingJamesIV of Anchor of Gold.  He sums up the feelings of Vanderbilt fans everywhere:

The Classic Vanderbilt Football Season [my activity in brackets]: Start strong [Get hopes up]. Sustain injuries [Curse wildly with no regard for decorum]. Rest hopes on seldom-used/freshman replacement [Not recognize said player's number. Look up name in program]. Pray [Pray]. Take lumps like men [Turn to basketball season]. This is the circle of life that I have known for close to three decades. Sometimes the injuries occur before the strong start. Like this season.

Really, that’s all you need to know.

I’m off to don my black and gold…

Tags: season predictions, skepticism, vanderbilt football

Reversal

The door swung open and my assistant principal paraded into the room, holding his right hand in the air as if being sworn in to testify.  He kept holding it in the air until I finally caught on that it was a high-five he was looking for.  I obliged.  I also asked what we were celebrating there in the middle of my 3rd period class (not like I was doing any teaching or anything).  He informed me that we were not, in fact, going to be losing a teacher this year.

Be it the embarrassingly low test scores or the persuasive abilities of my principal, the bottom line remains:  we all got freaked out over nothing.  Let the year continue!

Tags: relief, teacher mobility, teaching

The winds of change

The announcement came around 3:45 that there would be an Emergency Faculty Meeting immediately following the dismissal bell.  Everyone knew that it was the last day for official pupil counts and that our numbers had been unexpectedly low.  However, I just didn’t think it would happen.

It did.  My school (the one with shockingly abysmal test scores) is losing a teacher.  It’s only the third week of school, but to me, it may as well be week 20.  We have settled into a rhythmic routine and things are running as smoothly as can be expected.  While I understand the need to be “fiscally responsible” and “allocate our human capital equitably”, what I don’t understand is the need to shake things up in a school that needs no sort of shaking.

The worst part of all this is that the teacher leaving us could be the one whom I have gotten to be quite good friends with over the past week.  The announcement was made yesterday, yet we heard nothing further about it today.

I’m off to hope that nothing else changes.  Change is no bueno for this creature of habit.

Tags: school, teacher effectiveness, teacher mobility, teaching

Value Added Scores

Walking past the grocery store checkout on Sunday, I saw a headline in our local paper that sparked me to pick the paper up.  The article, entitled “Teacher scores get more exposure“, outlines some ways teachers’ “value added” scores could be used in the future.

In Tennessee (and maybe other states), there is a quite complicated statistical equation that attempts to calculate the amount of academic growth made by students in a year.  Ideally, a child will show one year’s growth during that time span.  This method is considered to be more fair to teachers and students because it doesn’t penalize teachers when children enter their classrooms as “low-performers”.  If the teachers can help the children achieve one year’s growth, they have done their jobs (or so goes the thinking with this model).  For more on this model, how it works, and examination of its effectiveness, go here.

All of that to say, the Tennessean article irked me.  Really, it was just the introduction (and the only part that most people will read).  Here’s the part I’m referring to:

Each fall, thousands of Tennessee teachers receive a confidential report showing how much last year’s students learned from them.

Until now, there wasn’t much reason for them to read it. It carried little or no impact on their job security or salary. Parents couldn’t see the report, so there was no chance of a flurry of calls asking for a new teacher.

But at least some of that’s about to change.

Starting next year, annual teacher evaluations will be partly based on student learning gains. Tenure will be at stake for new teachers, and in some cities, school districts are developing ways to link pay to that measure.

The idea that teachers don’t want to examine their scores to learn about their effectiveness is preposterous and slightly offensive to me.  Do all teachers await their scores with great anticipation and eagerness?  No.  Do some?  Absolutely.

Newsflash to the media:  WE ACTUALLY CARE.

Yes, these scores will be used in our teacher evaluations in coming years.  Maybe that will make some teachers more aware of them and more likely to utilize their scores to improve their effectiveness.  However, in my work with my district’s new teacher effectiveness initiative, my eyes were opened to the many flaws of these scores as hard and fast measures of effectiveness.

There are a lot of issues going on here, and they will need to be discussed and solved by people way smarter than me.  The thing I can’t really tolerate, though, is the idea that every teacher needs to be forced into caring about their effectiveness.  For me and many teachers I know, we wouldn’t be doing this if we didn’t want to be good at it.

Tags: standardized tests, teacher effectiveness, teacher evaluations, value added

The Drive

As the young child of a high school band director, you get toted around a lot of places.  From bus trips to random high schools to “twirling” a flag in the town’s Christmas parade, I had done it all. The summertime adventures of my father and I are, after all, how I learned the layout of a football field.  I knew that it was one hundred yards long and that eight marching steps equals five yards well before I knew the difference between an offense and defense.  Those adventures are also where he introduced me to the wonders of the orange Push-Pops (Flinstones, anyone?).

Though it was thrilling to wear that royal blue sequined vest and hear my name called on the loudspeaker during the parade, nothing surpassed the trips to the music store.  There were ice cold sodas awaiting me in the mini-fridge of the music room, which I would gleefully consume while crawling around the table as my dad listened to, examined, and chose which pieces he would teach that year.

One particular trip to that store stands out in my mind.  I sat in the back seat, belted in tightly as my dad drove through especially sweltering, muggy summer day.  The trip to the music store took us down a few backroads of Memphis and through neighborhoods I would not normally visit.

As we drove, I watched the children playing in the street.  Some adolescent, shirtless boys played pickup basketball, shooting the ball into the net-less rims of the neighborhood courts.  Young girls ran across the street unaccompanied and shoeless.  Elderly men sat in the blistering sun drinking from paper sacks.

“Daddy, why are all those people outside like that?  Don’t they know it’s hot?” I questioned.

Although I can’t remember what my father responded, I have a distinct memory of this event as my first realization that there were people living lives very different than the one I knew.  Anywhere I had ever been, there were nets on the basketball rims, shoes on the feet of young children, and grandpas usually were indoors watching reruns of “Hee Haw” and “Lawrence Welk”.

By that time, I had long ago determined that I wanted to be a teacher.  However, this event solidified my desire to teach underprivileged and underserved children.  I’m not sure why, but anytime anyone asks me why I teach where I do, my mind flashes back to that time sitting in the backseat of my dad’s silver Mazda on that sweltering summer day.

Note: This is part of the Slice of Life Story Challenge hosted by Two Writing Teachers.  Head on over there to find other teachers writing to improve their craft, as well as great ideas about teaching writing.

Tags: band director, childhood memories, inspiration, motivation, school, teaching

Slow

As my homeroom students re-entered my room for our 6th period social studies class, T, a student, walked by and flashed me a copy of the demerit she just received from my teammate.  It explained that T was caught cheating on her math test.  I allowed her to put her things down before calling her back into the hallway to discuss this indescretion.

After explaining to her that this was very serious and something she could not continue, T looked up at me and immediately began sobbing.  The tears rolled down her face and her body shook as she clung to my midsection.  At that point, all I could do was hug her.  It was one of those cries that I remember having as a child (and adult) where you feel utterly helpless and just want someone to care.

The sobbing lasted only a couple of minutes.  T looked back up at me and, with tears still falling, explained to me that the teachers knew it wasn’t possible for her to remember all the things she needs to know for her tests.  She told me that she “was slow and got it from (her) mama”, a line she repeated several times.

As her teacher, I promised her that I would help her find some really good ways to study for those tests.  I reminded her about the tutoring her mother signed her up for the day before.  I reassured her that I knew she could do this 5th grade thing on her own (without the cheating) and made sure that she understood that when she did really do it, she would feel amazing.

Even after the pep talk, I’m still a little bit heartbroken for her and her image of herself.  Hopefully we can repair that a little bit by the end of this year.

Tags: school, self-image, study habits, teaching

Important Things

The best thing to come out of my preschool teaching job that I held before graduating college was the knowledge I acquired from Kathy, the school’s director.  When it comes to pre-school kids, Kathy knows it all!  I learned about NAEYC accreditation and how to layout a pre-K3 classroom for success.  During one of my last staff meetings, she introduced us to a wonderful book that I use at the beginning of every year.

by Margaret Wise Brown (illustrations by Leonard Weisgard) presents different objects in new ways to students.  The illustrator weaves the words into each picture, creating an interesting aesthetic.  Each page describes an object by listing some of its characteristics, but it always points out the “most important” characteristic of a daisy, the wind, or a spoon.  I personally love the way these descriptions force me to think about mundane objects in new ways.

This book is especially great for the classroom thanks to its predictable text structure.  Each page begins and ends with the same “skeleton” of words.  This skeleton lends itself to student adaptation.  They can easily choose an object and think about its importance in their life.  By filling in the skeleton with their object and its importance, they have already written two sentences and are instantly feeling accomplished (making the description part less intimidating).

Today, I led them in a discussion about the five senses and using these senses to observe their thing.  These observations would provide the inside or the “meat” to put on their skeleton sentences.  By the end of it all, students were describing how games taste (eating buttery popcorn while playing their DS) and the sounds of basketball.  They were, in fact, looking at common items in new ways.  Success!

Tomorrow, they will be returning to school with their rough drafts, primed for a little peer editing before writing and illustrating their final copies.  These final pages will be glued into a hardback book I got from LP Pencil Box, and we will have published our first class book!

I would definitely recommend this activity to any upper elementary/lower middle school teachers.  In my classroom over the past few years, it has really started my students on the path toward thinking and observing as writers.

P.S. In looking for other resources, I ran across this lesson plan where a teacher uses the book as a self-esteem/community builder.  We might revisit the book later in the year and use the text in this way!

Pop Culture

Today, my students kicked off their day with a 30 minute long practice writing prompt.  Our state administers a writing assessment in the spring of our students’ 5th grade year, and the students prepare for it all year long.  For them to be prepared, we practice.  And then we discuss.  And then we practice again.  And then we discuss and teach.  And then we practice again.  And then we….well, you get the idea.

Fifth graders are asked to write a narrative in response to a prompt they are given.  Today’s practice prompt asked them to write about an imaginary place they would like to visit.  I didn’t have the opportunity to read many of their responses, but one I did read was an absolute gem.

It was about visiting Atlanta (note to student:  Atlanta is a real place.  Not imaginary at all.) and staying at “the hotel motel Holiday Inn”.

I wish I was kidding.  But I had to laugh.  Don’t lie–you laughed too!

And don’t worry–I have only had my students two days, so we’ll be working on this.  In the student’s defense, his actual writing wasn’t too shabby!  We will just have to tone down the pop culture references and be sure to read the prompt more carefully.

P.S. Bonus points if you can name that song.

Tags: prompt, school, standardized tests, teaching, writing