More and more people look at me and honestly want to know the answer to one question: "Why do you {still} teach?" My standard answer is: "I love it. I can't not teach. It's who I am." This used to suffice, and anyone who really knows me knows it's true, but not so much anymore. Today people are starting to see more and more teachers leave the profession and they recognize that teachers are leaving not because of the low pay and long hours (please don't tell me you still think teachers get every weekend, holiday and summer off---because it's simply not true), but for other reasons such as over testing, poor physical working conditions, disrespect from students and parents, government regulations, and a host of other reasons. I too face all of these things and after seventeen years I will be the first to agree that teaching has changed a lot in the last two decades. Yet I'm still here, in a failing inner-city middle school, and honestly can't imagine doing anything else. The true reason is related to my last post---perspective, and also choosing what thoughts on which to dwell. This week is a prime example: the class schedule has changed four times in two days, I'm finishing giving a four part standardized test while simultaneously preparing materials and filling out forms for the next standardized test (to start in two weeks), three of my students have received notice that their vaccinations aren't up to date, one student recently returned to my class after a stint in a juvenile detention facility, I was shoved and hit from behind in the hall yesterday and today I didn't get lunch because I spent it dealing with a student exhibiting unsafe behavior who then chose to threaten other students if I followed school procedure and reported the behavior to administration. All of this is in addition to teaching my regularly scheduled five subjects in a classroom with questionable heat, a leaky roof and 25% more students in my class than are actually supposed to be enrolled with 30% fewer books than students. If I chose to dwell on the negatives I would be in tears by third period and quitting by lunch. Instead I choose to focus on what really matters: the student who finally figured out how to subtract integers after six weeks of instruction, the student who came in with a smile on her face because she's finally back in school after three years of being out due to unrest in her country, the student who opened his locker by himself for the first time all year, my teacher-neighbor whose daughter got an A on her math test yesterday, the secretary who managed to find the last ream of paper for the copier just when I needed it..... Every day I have a choice and today I choose to remember the good and let the bad blur into the background.
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This week I walked into my classroom to find that I had two new leaks in my ceiling. As I spent a good chunk of my pre-school hour seeking out new buckets, getting them perfectly aligned under each water feature and marking around them with tape (so when the kids bump them we know where to put them back) I couldn't help but start thinking: this is the kind of stuff (among other things) that the teachers in Detroit were having sick-outs over last year. As I continued working and thinking I came to the conclusion that it's all about perspective.
My prinipal was already aware of the issues with my classroom (she spent a lot of time during my evaluation watching the leak and asking questions about it) and has done everything she can to help me. She even got facilities management to come out and look at the problem again. When faclities couldn't do anything for me at this time (read here: probably ever) she offered to find us another classroom. Here is the e-mail I sent her in return: "Thank you but we're fine. We call them our "water features"---let's see those fancy suburban schools beat that! They don't have waterfeatures! :) In all seriousness, we're able to work around them easily enough for now and the students use their word walls and other reference materials on the walls a lot. Facilities says it's going to be awhile and they're getting a real roofing company out to take a look. Now if the Promethean bulb goes, then we'll be in real trouble and want a new room! Thank you again for the offer." Her response was a huge laugh and then over 24-hours later (as we sat in another late-into-the-evening meeting) she was still talking about it and laughing. All I could think again was: it's all about perspective. Yes, I could have demanded a new classroom, complained as I moved or made my principal's life miserable until the roof was fixed, but what would that have gained me? Higher blood pressure, more unhappiness? Is that really going to help me or my students? Now I won't lie to you---if given the choice I would prefer to not have water features, or a black & brown garden (mold) on my ceiling but that's just not within my power to control right now. So rather than complain and make everyone's lives miserable I'm choosing to put a positive spin on things, be thankful for what I do have (currently the heat in our classroom is working!) and do the best job I can with what I have for the students. It's all about perspective. It never fails, no matter the grade, subject, city, type of school I always here the same theme from many of my colleagues: "You classroom is so organized....I wish my classroom looked as nice as yours....How do you get so much done in a day?" The comments vary slightly but the theme is always the same: my classroom is hyper-organized and hyper-efficient and my colleagues want to know how. I've written about organization before, see my Classroom Organization post from 2014, but the theme has continued and my OCD organization has become very important to me this year. As I've shared before this fall I implemented a new program model, including two new subjects/curricula, my class sizes doubled, I returned to school to add a certification, joined the union executive board and (just because all of that wasn't enough) got married and moved to a new city which doubled my commute. Knowing last summer this was coming I did as much pre-work as I could, planning out six new units for each of the new curricula and working with the various department heads to plan out which of the objectives were most important and needed to be addressed in which order (I have a multi-grade classroom of new arrival, interupted education, zero-proficiency ESL students--we can't hit all the objectives for all the grades represented.). This did help to take some of the burden off the fall but it has still been a rough ride at times and I've felt like I was running around like a chicken with it's head cut off, but still the comments kept coming. As I begin a new semester (let's face it--this is teacher-time, January is not a new year---August/September is the the new year) I've been thinking back and trying to articulate an answer to the oft-asked question of "How do you do it?" and these are the six concrete things I've done that I think really made this fall possible:
1. Whenever possible know what's coming next year and use your summer wisely. This is my seventeenth year teaching so even I am laughing at the idea of knowing what's coming but when we're honest we generally have a fairly decent idea of what we're going to be teaching next year when we finish in June. There are always exceptions--such as the surprise grade level move that you get thrust upon you when the newly hired teacher quits the day before school starts, but for the most part we have a general idea of the grade/subject and while the curriculum may not be finalized yet (we love getting new books but hate the work of new curriculum!) we at least know the standards that will be included and can seek out activities and projects that relate to those standards. Spending several weeks of my summer doing nothing but unit planning wasn't exactly fun, but I knew I wouldn't have the 6-8 hours I would need to per unit to do the planning this fall. This one step literally saved my sanity this fall! 2. Organize your material by subject/standard---not unit or lesson. I teach all subjects and have taught all grade-levels so I have A LOT of materials, even by teacher standards. My world is literally held together by plastic boxes and Zip-Lock bags. My file cabinets are labeled: ELA, Math, Science, Social Studies, General, Books..... and in each drawer the files are further organized by topic in alphabetical order. Then my closet and basement storage area is filled with plastic boxes which are also labeled: nouns, verbs, end punctuation, linear equations, fractions (this box is HUGE), animal classification, weather, map reading, levels of government, body parts..... Inside each box are the activites that go with the topic, each activity in it's own Zip-Lock bag and in each bag are all the parts needed for the activity from directions sheet to game pieces to dice to answer keys---it's literally a grab and go. Organizing by subject allows me to reuse materials for different units and with different groups and not have to stand in my office thinking, "Which unit did I use that great irregular verb game in?" The irregular verb game is in the verb box and I just get it, use it and return it to the verb box every time. 3. Use the summer and long breaks to make the extra activty sets you need. I literally spent half my summer feeding my printer, laminating and cutting out game boards, task cards and all of the other manipulatives I use for my various activities. Not all that thrilling but it did give me an excuse to binge-watch some tv shows and not feel terribly guilty about it--I wasn't wasting time, I was working on school stuff. ;) We know that lamination helps things last but we also know that things get lost, accidently thrown away and our class size is certainly not going to go down! Make an extra set or two of each activity so it's ready to go when you are next year. I only got through my fall units and now I'm sitting here looking at next semester's and thinking, "I really don't have time or the motivation to make more of this. I know this activitiy is best as an individual thing but they can do it in pairs, right?" Not the worst thing in the world, but not the best either. Guess what I'm doing over spring break or at the latest next summer? 4. Create unit folders. When you're lucky enough to teach the same grade/subject/curriculum for more than one year in a row you don't need to (and I hope you don't) recreate the wheel. Of course as good teachers we review our lesson plans and tweak them each year, but why would you start from scratch again? I have a file box that sits under my desk and in it is a folder for every unit I teach labeled by the book name, the unit name and unit number. This year when I was getting ready to teach my integers unit all I had to do was grab that folder. In it is a copy of my unit plan and an extra copy of every handout and worksheet for the unit (the original is in the main file cabinet under integers). I looked through it, glanced through the new activities/ideas I've filed in my main integers file over the last year, tweaked the plan and I was ready to go. I took that folder to school and proceeded to drive every other teacher in my hallway insane while I ran off the copies I needed for my entire unit--no searching for a specific worksheet, no Googling to find that one handout that I saw the one time, just a quick trip to the copier. I then threw the papers back in the document feeder and ran them through using the scanner function and created a pdf document that I labeled "unit sheets" and saved on my flashdrive and to my Google drive for that unit as a digital backup (and easy sharing with the curriculum coach who wanders the building asking questions about supplementary materials and how they relate to the standards---send them a thirty page pdf a couple times and they stop asking you questions real quick). 5. Have digital copies and a backup. I keep everything on my personal laptop in a folder with the school's name and then in subject folders and unit folders. That way I can quickly upload things, e-mail things and make changes to my unit plan when I find a new activity or game that seems to work better or be more fun than what I have. I then have all of that on a flashdrive that goes back and forth to school with me every day so I have access to it all at school and also can quickly move things into my flipchart or PowerPoint or other presentations for class. The flashdrive is further backed up on my Google drive which gives me access when I leave the flashdrive somewhere (a regular occurance) and makes for easy sharing of materials with colleagues. All of these digital backups also serve the very important purpose of being my easy go-to place to print a new copy of something when water gets spilled on my unit folder or a page gets ripped or someone does something helpful such as coloring or writing on the origional. 6. Make unit bags. This year I tried something new. Knowing I wouldn't have time to think about planning or materials or anything really, shortly before I went back to school I made unit bags for three or four units per subject, enough to last me until Christmas break. They weren't fancy or revolutionary but they ended up being huge helps. I simply took reusable shopping bags (you know, the ones they hand out for free everywhere now) and desginated one for each unit. In the bag went the unit folder and all of the activities, manipulatives and non-perishable (we have a mouse problem so any food or candy was noted on a sticky and put on the lesson plan so I could quickly pick it up when it was time to start the unit and not feed our furry friends in the meantime) supplies for each unit. Then when I was coming to the last day or so of a unit I simply climbed up to my upper-window storage area (you know we almost all have it---that impossible to reach storage area that's probably filled with the junk of teachers long retired.....yeah, it's worth it to clean it out), found the bag for the next unit, pulled it down, transferred the materials into my active unit bin for that subject and made a trip to the copier with the unit folder in hand. Less than an hour later and I was ready to start teaching the next unit--including making copies. I took one day over Christmas break and repeated the process. My car is now filled with unit bags that will be transferred to my classroom tomorrow morning and hopefully I won't have to repeat the process until next fall. There you have it, the six organizational habits that I believe saved my sanity this fall. They aren't revolutionary and I'm sure thousands of other teachers do the same things but they're what's worked for me. |
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