Summer Reset for Teachers: Post #1

Summer Reset for Teachers

I have been teaching in a public high school in a major U.S. City for nearly 20 years, and each year I long for the summer when I will feel totally renewed, refreshed, revitalized by the time school rolls around again in the Fall. 

After years of disappointing summer routines: too lazy, too busy, too much teaching, too little preparation, too much preparation, lonely, not enough travel, I have come up with what I think is a balanced approach to the summer and a way to use those precious 60 (or so) days in the best way possible, to bring yourself back into equilibrium and start with a fresh slate, prepared and hopeful for the coming year

While none of these ideas are groundbreaking, I always find it useful to take a new approach, reflect on my life, refresh my perspective and start with a plan and a clean slate for a new year. 

Tip #1: Get out of Town

I have found, over the years, that my best bet for a fresh start is to get out of town as soon as

school lets out. Just for a couple days. Otherwise I just get sad, like a bit lost. That is me, though.

You may be good with unstructured time, but many of my fellow colleagues are not so much.

As much as I want to be away from all the kids and the administrators and schedules and loud noises and early mornings and demands of teaching, I feel a big absence when it ends.

The transition between the end of school and the beginning of summer can be difficult for me. I have learned it is very helpful to get out of the city and into the woods for three full days. I usually take my husband or meet some friends at a campground in a nearby state park. The organization required to put together a camping trip with food and tents and bug spray and foldable chairs and books and swimsuits gives me some energy for the last weeks of school and gives me a fun and complicated event to plan for. 

Helpful exercise:

Brainstorm some places you can get away to - even if it's just a day trip. Somewhere you can reset your mind and reorient to summer. Which of these places will be most useful to your mental and emotional reset? Can you find some time or space for yourself to reflect and be forward thinking?

Playing hookey

An article in the city paper this week stated that resignations are up 200% from last year, and 90% from the prior year. It seems as though everyone is somewhat miserable, or underwhelmed at the least. I've been feeling it, for sure, the kids seems stressed, my friends seem stressed, and I have just felt blah now for some time. My hypothesis is that life, generally is kind of boring and upsetting now, and almost more than ever. The severity of the pandemic has dulled, there is nothing emergent to react to, now, well, beyond the decimation of the Ukranian people, which is horrifying and baffling and I feel totally powerless to do anything about. We've otherwise been kind of lulled into a complacency about everything and that is super lame. 

So I took a day off. I didn't get Covid somehow, at all (yet) throughout the pandemic. So, I took a day off. I don't feel like being a crazy martyr woman who goes to work so I can be the only one who is always there. My students, I am sure, were happy to have a sub for the day (note, I am a high school teacher, so it may be different for primary school teachers). 

I went out in the garden and cleared weeds, moved dirt, turned the compost, moved my body, moved some rocks. And I truly don't think there could be much better than that. To be in connection with something larger than myself, the Earth, is a gift, and I am going to give myself these kinds of small gifts, play hookey every so often, and wait for life to start back up again. 

Diversifying the Curriculum

When I first began teaching, 14 years ago, the texts to which we had access in middle school ELA were somewhat limited. Working at a school in a poor neighborhood in Philadelphia, HOLT's Elements of Literature (I think it was a year 2000 edition) still had a majority of short stories by white dead men. Not to say they weren't useful for instruction, but Poe's The Cask of Amontillado and that ubiquitous story where the man is hunted, The Most Dangerous Game, are a far cry from relevancy to what was then a majority African American population. In the years since, money has been made available to teachers to buy a wider range of texts, and the textbooks have been significantly updated and diversified. I've submitted and been granted many Donorschoose grants for relevant novels, and I've learned a lot about selecting literary texts that can be used as high interest AND instructional texts for the purposes of analysis. 

In the last few years, more of my students have been of Chinese, Vietnamese, and Cambodian descent, and I have been dragging my heels trying to find good, relevant texts to support and reach these learners and engage them with culturally relevant texts. I am currently on a fact finding mission to identify, read, and create instructional plans for texts that are written by Asian-American writers, but also works in translation from these countries. I have found it particularly challenging to find Chinese novels in translation that are useful for higher level English literary and analytical instruction. 

I am trying to take a dive into Chinese science fiction with The Three Body Problem by Cixin Liu (as suggested by this cool individual on youtube), but am stuck somewhere in the middle, trying to get a general understanding of the physics concepts involved. I keep joking that the Chinese education system probably churns out students who have a generally better physics background than Americans might, so the science is not remotely dumbed down for readers like me. Sad, but true (says the English major who didn't pay much attention in physics class in high school).

Anyhoo. This is a journey I am on, and I look forward to continuing and finding some great texts to develop plans for in the next bit. 

School Building: Nobody's here

 The last few weeks the school just gets emptier and emptier. Teachers are out, administrators are dwindling, kids, for the most part are showing up, except when they are quarantined. It feels like we are in the midst of a seismic shift in education, and I fear that little intention is involved. The papers are reading like: "Admin says: Teachers are Lazy," "Teachers say: Kids are Tested Too Much," "Kids say: School isn't Engaging," and the Public says "Why Can't these People Just Do Their Jobs and Take Care of My Kids (better than I do at home)". There is a modicum of editorializing there, to be sure, but it all feels terribly yucky and lacking idealism in a very dangerous way. 

I think that education is having an identity crisis. Why are we educating students? College readiness, career readiness, building a national citizen, training a future conformist, equipping a future revolutionary, building a citizen of the world? I think that truly, each person coming into a school building has a different notion of what the goals are, and this is one major flaw with how this is all going. 

I am of the mind, (since I have this platform I suppose I can just spout my beliefs willy-nilly) that education is for equipping students to be citizens of the world, to be stewards of our economies, environments, cultures, and governments, who can understand that they have the capacity to form the world around them by participating in its institutions and reinventing them. It is truly idealistic, but I feel like education is the place for that. I went to a fancy prep school, and among my peers, I am the least successful, I think. They are truly leading in the fields of biotech, government, press, and academia. I turn on the radio, the TV, open the New Yorker, and I see their names everywhere. I believe, in part, it is because of our high school education which took the tack described above. We were told we would shape the world, so we did, well- they did;) I am just writing a blog that (hopefully) nobody will read. 

The factory school model is broken. The people in charge keep buying "programs" and software to help teach our kids, they keep asking for data, they keep evaluating the teachers, but I think it isn't really working. I think we may be dealing with the proverbial dead horse here.. 

Invisible Man Passage Analysis: Opening Paragraph of the Novel

     I am working on my Youtube skills. This morning, recorded an example of a one page analysis from the opening paragraph of Ralph Ellison's Invisible Man. I found that it is incredibly blurry.FYI- When you do a screen recording using quicktime, be sure not to select part of the screen. It stretches and thus blurs the screen video. So there you have it. A first try. I figure because I enjoy being creative for work and it might help students and teachers, I will give it the old college try. 

    Glennon Doyle said in one of her most recent podcasts, can't remember which, that when she first started writing, she had a blog and would write every morning for an hour, and no matter what she had at the end of the hour, she would post it to her blog. I like the approach, therefore, I am doing the same here. No shame, no blame. Just creativity and sharing. Why not? We will all be dead soon:)

Teaching, Existential Crisis, and Independent Reading

        I've been listening to Glennon Doyle's podcast, We Can Do Hard Things lately. If you've not read her most recent book, Untamed, I would highly recommend it. Yesterday, she had the famous relationship expert Esther Perel on her show talking about human relationships in the context of this moment in time and place. Perel had a really unique and compelling way of describing our current experience as humans as defined by an existential crisis. We are all in a kind of trauma from the pandemic, from living in a world with climate change breathing down our necks, a hostile political environment, and a sense that our time here is limited and unstable. She argues that these factors create an emotional acceleration for all of us. If we are partnered we are thinking about moving in together sooner, recently moved in or married, maybe thinking about babies. If we are unhappy in a job, we are quitting it. If we are not living the way we think is meaningful, it needs to be changed right now. "Why wait," we think. This is our "one true and precious life," as Doyle says. 

        For teachers, this feels more true than ever. We work hard every day to make sure that we are the stabilizing force for thirty-three students, five times a day. We try to generate creative, interactive, and fun lessons every day to be sure we are holding the attention of those precious beings, all the while competing with their shiny, blinking phone screens. We prepare for the administrative walk-throughs, officials in suits coming through to judge our worthiness. Some of us get to work early, some stay late, but none of us are getting the correct amount of sleep, the right ratio of vegetables to protein to carbs. We all are bringing home to work and work to home. It is a difficult time in our profession. 

        This year, I am trying to integrate some measures into my teaching routine that support me as a teacher, while maintaining professional standards. One of those measures is that Fridays have become an independent reading day for my 9th grade students. This is not code for free-for-all, but a structured independent reading program for students in which they are spending 20-30 minutes each Friday reading a book of their choice and then responding to a chosen prompt. Students are required to stick with the same book until they have read up to 50 pages, and then they are allowed to switch. Students who are finished a book are asked to write a tiny book review and post it to the bulletin board for others to read. The key for me was buying enough high interest books for students. I probably spent about $500 on books this year, but it has left me with a quiet Friday to look forward to each week, and gives me a chance to do student conferences, grade papers, and watch children enjoy reading. 

        I justify the choice to implement this program based on the National Council of Teachers of English  positive and formal stance on independent reading that you can read here. Also, in my years teaching middle school and 9th grade in an area where many students did not have grade-level reading skills, I have found independent reading to be incredibly useful. When I first started almost fifteen years ago, it was the "100 book challenge" which argued that if a student reads one hundred books at their independent reading level, they can level up one grade. I found this to be accurate.

        Independent reading is something that impacted my life immensely as a young person. Most of what I learned about the world came from novels that I read in my spare time. From history to human emotion, from friendships to cultural background, novelists taught me about worlds I could not imagine by myself. In this time of mass existential crisis, how could we better equip our students, and how could we better cope as English teachers? We need to give ourselves the gift of time, and our students the gift of books!

    My currently unfinished and free resource for independent reading is linked below. Feel free to check out and send feedback. More resources are forthcoming. 

Invisible Man

For about 2 years I have been actively creating and selling products on Teachers Pay Teachers. Using lessons and units I have taught over the course of several years, I have been able to make a small amount of money through my store. At this point, given my small successes, I am taking it up a notch to find new ways to share and connect with teachers who are doing their best to create authentic and meaningful educational experiences for their students. 

My most successful product is my Invisible Man 8-week unit plan, and, in fact, likely one of the best units I teach. Four years ago, I went to a seminar through the NEH that focused on integrating existentialism in the classroom. Smartypants from all across the country came to read Sartre and while I was initially in WAY over my head, I learned a lot, and was able to integrate my Invisible Man unit with Camus' The Stranger, Thoreau's Walden, and Hesse's Siddhartha. I taught this to my IB Literature HL 1 students, and the whole kit and caboodle has been a great success. 

My students are not private school or prep school students, they are public (magnet) high school students in a large East Coast city. Some come extremely prepared for reading, analysis, and writing at this level, but others need a lot of support. Still, the quality of Invisible Man as a literary text is an amazing way to start the year, and the relevance of existentialism to a bunch of teenagers remains significant, year after year. 

I am excited to share what I learn with others, and if I can be of any help to other teachers, I will be happy. These past few years have been difficult, and I know that we are all quite stressed, so anything we can do to help each other is valuable.