First Semester Down, One More to Go

Look at the image at the right. That is exactly how I feel right now. At some point during the course of the second and third marking periods, I lost grip of why I am teaching. I lost focus, I lost something. I am not going to lie, after my students failing miserably in the district benchmark test, I feel like I have no one to blame but my self. My students obviously have something to do with it, but I am not one to say “Oh well its their fault because they have poor study habits,” or “I did what I could.” I honestly don’t think I did everything I could. Looking back I realize that I could have been more rigorous, more mean, more attentive. But there is no excuse. The damage is done, and all I have left to do is to pick up my morale and increase my expectations of my self before I can expect anything from my students.

Truth be told, my students are wonderful. They do their assignments, they participate in class, they are engaged. But their lives get in the way. In my not-so-scientific research, attention spans seem to be constantly on the decline. Finding something to retain a 15 year old’s attention for even 10 minutes is a daunting task, there is always something more interesting in the classroom to do than to listen to Mr. Calderon drone about present continuous, or pluralization rules.  Out of all the district standards and suggested scope and sequence, I must have only accomplished to touch on less than 5% of the material. Standards don’t make anyone smarter, don’t include human engagement, but are meant to be used as a framework. Ultimately, as a teacher one is the master of the class’ destiny.

I am trying to make progress in planning for more than content or activities or standards, but ultimately plan for every day living, so that my newcomer class can gossip about who is dating who in coherent english.

In creating this blog I promised to provide practical advise for new teachers of things that work and how to reproduce such outcomes in your own classroom, but I have failed miserably at that too. I pledge to update this blog more often and provide solutions rather than just whine about how brain tired I feel.

For starters, I propose a poster with procedures about what to do when a student is “finished” with their handout/activity/whatever. In the poster I have in my classroom, I ask students to check for

• Is your name on the paper?
• Did you answer all the questions?
• Did you remember to capitalize the first word in each sentence?
• Do you have the right punctuation () . , ” ” ? !

I would really appreciate any exchange of ideas or lesson plans I could use with ELD 2 students in California.