week one debrief (pt. 1)

Yesterday I finished my first full week of teaching. It was a good day.

In a style true to The Program, we each begin our lessons with a "Do Now" exercise on the board. These are usually academic, either testing retention of the previous day's objective or asking the students to begin thinking about what we will learn that day. Since it was Friday, and they'd been great all week, and we were curious, we gave them a non-academic Do Now at the beginning of each of the two periods: On a sheet of binder paper, write down any questions you have about your teachers. Do not write your name on the paper, and be sure they are not personal questions.

They grumbled for a minute - what can they ask that's not personal? - but after about 30 seconds and a reminder that they only had two minutes, all of them fell to writing. Some of the questions they wrote were for all four of us: What schools did we all go to? Do we like teaching at our high school? Aren't we just practicing on them and we'll go be real teachers elsewhere? Why are we so strict/boring/into assigning homework? Others were for individual teachers, and I was really happy with the ones I got. From an incredibly bright boy who I don't allow to talk out of turn regardless: You're cool - so why do you try and act mean? From another student: How many years have you been teaching? On Thursday, I walked past as our class cut-up quickly tore out a sheet of paper and said, in Spanish, "The teacher's coming! Take out some paper!" I tried to hide it, but it cracked me up. He gave me the shrewd eye, and come Friday, tons of questions asked, Did one of the teachers speak Spanish? Which one? Do I speak Spanish? Did I just take it in school, or am I Hispanic? Another asked, Ms. L, what is your favorite sport? (They will be thrilled when I tell them it's soccer- which I'm hesitant to do because of all the high-level Soccer Talk sure to follow. How do you explain that you're only a lay soccer fan?) And maybe my favorite question, the one that validates my disdain for the unofficial but much-repeated first rule of teaching, Do Not Smile Before Winter Break: Does Ms. L always have such a nice smile?

We discussed one of these questions in my second-period class - why we chose to teach at our high school. I told the kids that honestly, we were assigned to that school, but that we did all choose to teach high school, because even though it might not seem that way, we all genuinely love high schoolers, and that we all chose to teach at schools very much like this one: mostly urban, mostly without some of the resources and advantages that schools in rich areas have. They asked me, rightly so, what I knew about it, and I told them that I was pretty familiar with schools like this one, from where I grew up and from the work I did in college. S, the kid who asked me why I try to act mean, asked what college I went to, and seemed surprised that I was from California. I told the class that I grew up in Salinas, California, and they started buzzing immediately. Salinas? She's from Salinas! "You from Salinas?" asked S. "Then you do know."

Now they are trying to pull stuff on me. I bust them for talking instead of working, and they say, "C'mon, Ms. L, you know how it is. You from the ghetto."

Yeah, I tell them, and I know how hard you have to work to get out. That shuts them up pretty well.

My lesson went pretty well, I think. It was about identifying structures and content of different types of informational text, and it let them get up out of their seats a little bit and stop listening to me talk so much. We're all very aware of how easy it is to just stand and lecture, and also that we have about 5-7 minutes of lecture time before they glaze over and shut down, so Goal #1 is for week 2 is to Shut Up and Let Them Learn.