I Wanna Teach Alone

For years, I've hated working in groups. It probably has to do with the perfectionism in me, but throughout high school and college I tried to overcome this weakness. Still though, when dealing with less than ideal groupmates, I get frustrated at the decisions they make that I now have to deal with.

Needless to say, team-teaching has played out like most of my group experiences have; normally I'd be worried, but apparently this has been the common scene for all groups at Institute. You end the experience taking your team relationships to the extreme: love or hate.

I think I've said it before, but as a team we rotate among the concepts we teach. And in math, the whole idea is that the concepts completely build off each other, so once something is taught one way, you're pretty much committed to teaching and reteaching it that way for the rest of the lessons.

One of my groupmates tries way too hard to be the cool teacher and in doing so, decided that he would teach factoring of polynomials using the "factor booty" method. I can't describe it in words, but I will say that one of the steps involves drawing a "butt" on your paper, and now I feel like an idiot in class every time we have to factor something on the board. Let's just say our styles of teaching don't quite mesh...

But I can deal with that. What I'm having trouble dealing with is the style of our faculty advisor. Each teacher trainee must have a registered teacher in the room at all times for the scenario to be legal, so our faculty advisor is him. The thing is: even though we do all the teaching, he does all the grading. When the students got their progress reports for summer school, he even added in comments that he had not told us about prior, so now we have students asking us why there are certain comments on their reports, and in some cases all we can say is "...I don't know- I'll have to ask Mr. Sanchez for you..." And I am just waiting for the phone call from Ms. Valladares wondering why her daughter got 30 points taken from her for texting in class (and as a result going from a C to an F-... That's right! An F-! Now I have Jackie thinking that there's nothing she can do to pass the class, so why try...) The sad thing is that when TFA leaves this school in a week, the faculty advisors teach for another two weeks, so they have the final say in grades.

Now don't get me wrong, I definitely wouldn't have students pass that obviously have not learned the material, but I would still do many things differently if I had the class to my own. I'm sure I'll look back at this and laugh at how good I had it with all the support people around me, but in the meantime, I wanna teach alone!

On my way back from lunch I saw someone's dorm window with a "5 days left" poster. I'm sure they'll turn it into an "hours left" poster by the end of the week. I have a feeling this last week will be rough. After all, it's crunch time for our students: they have to take another assessment on Thursday so TFA has their student achievement data!

In the meantime, soccer...

The Good and the Bad

I’ve decided that regardless of the overall tone of each entry, I’m going to start them on positive notes. The problem is that the urge to write for me comes hand-in-hand with the need to blow off steam, so this will definitely be a challenge for me from here on out. I promise you won’t be subjected to entries like this very often; I only feel like I need to set some context for what I’m dealing with day to day.

Good news first. About half my class has an A or A- for progress report day. Some students have seriously completely transformed their studying and participation behaviors over the short period of two to three weeks, and their written reflective responses to their grades after the first test have been very interesting reads – a few have explained how they originally didn’t want to be at school but now they really care about math and succeeding. Things like that make me feel all warm and fuzzy inside.

On the flipside, we have six failing grades and a handful more on the brink. Two of our students even got worse scores on their test than they did on their diagnostic test on the first day, even when they were the exact same exams. It’s scary how easy it is to leave someone in the dust and not even know it – especially when the student is quiet enough that they don’t speak up when they don’t understand a concept. Hopefully we’ll make up for lost time with those students this week so that they can actually comprehend the current lessons. I’m actually meeting with one of the students this Sunday for extra time to catch her up to where we need to be. It just would have been nice to know about her learning disability before talking to her mother on the phone about what I can do for her child.

As painful as Institute training is, four weeks teaching in summer school is really not an ample length of time for what we want to accomplish. For one, four weeks isn't even enough time for the school to legally tell us which students have an individualized education plan due to a learning disability. I’ve found that it’s really hard to have the goals of realistic teacher training and student achievement mesh well, because what helps a teacher prepare for teaching on their own doesn't necessarily align with what helps students achieve. For instance, we work in teaching teams, so my students see three teachers each day, rotating through each lesson. However, when I'm not leading a lesson, I have to act like I don’t exist in the classroom anymore. If a student has a question, the lead teacher has to answer it; if the class misbehaves or gets totally out of control, too bad – the lead teacher has to deal with it because “in your region you have to deal with these things alone.” I understand the idea behind this, but ultimately, class time is often wasted just for teacher “experience.”

That being said, Teach For America is one of the most reflective organizations I have ever known. They survey regularly after each procedure or experience is complete – and at the end of every week – to figure out what they can do to make things work for us. They are super receptive and actually send representatives from their operations team to have emergency meetings when surveys uncover corps member dissatisfaction. Already in these past few weeks, there have been many procedural changes and even staff “leaves of absence” as a response to surveys and discussions, so I definitely see the advantages to the high level of structure and organization in TFA. It seems as though their goal is to make it so that corps members have absolutely no excuses during their experience here, and I truly appreciate that. And with that plug, I feel it only fitting to share the video we watched in session a few days ago. It gave me chills. This guy is my new hero: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=RxsOVK4syxU

On the normal side of life, I made time for a movie and saw “500 Days of Summer,” and walking out of the theater we saw Kate Beckinsdale. Alright, I only saw the back of her head, but everyone else with me saw her face so we know it was her. Anyway, I loved the movie and recommend it to everyone.

Okay, back to lesson plans.

Halfway through Institute

So I guess I'm really more than halfway done, having been here at Loyola Marymount University in LA for three weeks of our five week stay, but in reality everyone has their own way of measuring the time passing here at Institute. Some measure it by what we get for lunch this week, some with a countdown of days in their dorm window. I'm just measuring it by the number of teaching weeks gone by. Thus far, I have been an Algebra 1 teacher for 9th and 10th graders at Hamilton High School for two weeks.

I suppose I should say this whole experience began in Berkeley even before coming down here - mind you, this happened only a week after graduating, so the pace of life has not slowed since frantically finishing my senior capstone project at the U. I found that it's quite an ordeal to make sure I've "said goodbye" to all my friends in that short span, especially with the need to prepare my things from school and from home to move my life from Seattle in a matter of days. But one "last night out" and two overstuffed luggage bags later, I stepped onto a plane heading to the Bay.

In Berkeley, we experienced the week-long version of Teach For America logistics presentations and what they consider training to get us ready for training in LA. I really only took two things away from that week. The first: TFA is a well oiled machine, almost entirely statistic-driven and quite corporate-feeling on the large scale (good or bad, I don't know). Second: Institute teaching training is not meant to be fun - and it won't be. Myself and friends were pretty sick of being told this by the end of the week, and I particularly didn't enjoy this opinion being made for me. All in all, TFA is a great organization, but that is not to say I don't have my rants... more on this later.

One thing TFA does well is incite a level of camraderie amongst its corps members. Good or bad, ups and downs, we definitely have the feeling by now that we are all in this together, which is weird, because I often feel a little out of place among the Ivy League graduates. Now that's not to say that I am friends with everyone here; there are a handful of people that I just want to ask blatantly to their faces "How did YOU get here?" It's just definitely an interesting dynamic. I keep telling people that the corps is full of type A personalities so things can get pretty intense and heated throughout all of this, and then at the end of the day you realize that all these people have varying degrees of "work hard play hard" personalities. It's weird to think of the possibility that all my teachers from elementary to high school would all get drunk or go clubbing on the weekends... I suspect this is one area where, as recent graduates, we won't be quite like the other teachers.

But enough of that- I'm sure I'll have more to talk about on that subject throughout the next years (that's weird to say). Anyway, here I am at Institute, and I will admit, the first week was hell: so much information being hammered into our heads from so many angles through various strategies of repetition... Being able to actually teach has been the best part about this experience, because after two weeks of wondering what we got ourselves into, we got reminded exactly why we are here.

I wake up around 5am every day, leave for school in school bus full of teachers (quite a sight when we unload at the school) around 6:30 and my three person teaching group welcomes students with a handshake into Rm 607 at Hamilton High School to be seated and ready to learn Algebra (again) by 8am. The catch is that this is summer school and all our kids have failed the class once before. Let's just say I was not mentally prepared to reteach adding and subtracting negative numbers when the lesson plan for the day was to teach solving two-step inequalities. Oh yeah, they don't know how to multiply or divide negative numbers (and sometimes positive numbers) either, which makes it difficult to explain how you need to flip the inequality sign when you multiply or divide by a negative number...

That first week was rough. I've told people that I felt bipolar for those first days in front of the class. After all, my kids really seem to like me (one student said I should teach their old teacher how to teach), but understanding the material takes a lot more than them just liking me. Since then, I have gotten into a better groove of things, but our exam results from Friday left our group a little discouraged. To no surprise, TFA sets a summer goal for each student based on an entrance exam, and their reaching of the goal is measured in an exit exam (the exact same test) taken after teaching the material in summer school. Overall, our kids met 56% of those goals in the class. Unfortunately, our own goal as teachers is to on average reach 100% of those goals, and even worse is that some of these goals for students would still equate to C or even D grades during a normal year. Apparently getting them to pass the class alone is a bigger feat than imagined.

I'm sure I'll rant about this later, but you'll notice that these students of mine just experienced Algebra 1A - a semester class - retaught in two weeks (ridiculous I know). Tomorrow we begin Algebra 1B, even when a few students didn't improve at all in proficiency in the first ten days of class. Each day we break into small groups with the three teachers, and my group is the one that needs the most help, so I'm hoping to finish this Institute experience strong!

As far as being told Institute is not fun, I very much disagree. For four weeks now I have surrounded myself with some of the most motivated individuals I have ever met from all over the country. Most of these people have amazing life stories and are incredibly sincere, opening up to help others as well as themselves during this experience. There is a group willing to play soccer pretty much every day after school (...whether or not it's a good choice, since we have seriously limited free time) and every weekend there are new and fun plans with friends. Last night we went out to Korean BBQ and karaoke afterwards... so guess what, TFA? I'm having plenty of fun and there's nothing you can do about it.