Catching up: Exciting developments!

I can't believe it's been over 2 weeks since I've written. (So much for the freebie grade for Nelson's class for writing each week. It was spring break, though!)

There have been some really fantastic developments the past couple weeks. Maybe the most exciting is the new look of the blog. What do you think? (Luke gave me the good feedback that all the dots in the old template made reading my endlessly long posts harder on the eyes, so I'm trying out this new look.)

First, things have totally shifted in my 9th grade class to the point that there's really no resemblance to the class that it was at the beginning of the semester, when I felt like I was just falling on my face each day and they were just looking at me as if they thought I was an imposter impersonating a teacher.

I think there were a few keys to my success:
1. My master teacher really got off my case. I feel so much less pressure from her there's really no comparison, and in fact she hardly ever observes me anymore. Though we do still have our weekly meetings, I know what she wants for them and feel able to give her what she wants. Our meetings are about her offering me suggestions and me asking her opinions rather than about me justifying my plans or proving that I'm prepared (which was even harder when I wasn't prepared).
2. We shifted to material I actually enjoy. We started the semester with mythology, which is required for this course, but I totally hate mythology and really just wanted to get through that component of the course, whereas when we shifted to To Kill a Mockingbird, which I like, things totally changed and I felt much more comfortable. It made sense to me thematically to start with mythology, but in the future I'm going to start with material I feel passionate about (like Black Boy, which I did with my 10th grade class).
3. I started devoting more energy to this class, which I had actually been dreading and kind of procrastinating for a while because of the poor beginning and issues with my master teacher.
4. I had a great meeting with my master teacher where she helped me construct my TKMB unit based on the final assessment I'd chosen, and that realy helped me see how to plan better. (Doing a unit plan for class before actually teaching was not the same.)

Another really great development relates to me actually moving more clearly in the direction of changing the world, which, as the blog title states, is really my agenda. I gave my students a project where they have to choose a social issue that's important to them or that they're interested in, and they have to write a persuasive essay--we're calling it a persuasive article because they hate the word "essay" :)--where they explain the issue and give suggestions of what people can do to help. To make the assessment authentic and to be able to leverage their work to help others, I recently bought a domain (studentschangingtheworld.com) that we'll put all these "articles" on. The context is that they are writing with other students in mind as their audience, and their goal is to inform other people about the issue and persuade them to care and take action to make a difference. I let them know that by putting their writing on this site that this is something they'll be able to put on their college application or on their resume, and I think they were into that.

I constructed my first rubric on rubistar http://rubistar.4teachers.org/index.php, and that was a really great experience. I felt really good about explaining the assignment and what Im looking for since I had that rubric. It was also amazingly easy for me to create the rubric--partly because that site is really user-friendly (I really strongly recommend it if only for the formatting aspect (saves time than messing around in Word)) and partly because I actually had a really clear vision of what I was looking for. Today I gave my class a model essay that we went over together. I wrote the model about a topic that is really important to me--factory farming and vegetarianism--and I love that I gave myself a context to address this issue. The students said they were really interested in the topic, too, which was cool to talk about and answered their questions on. The paper I wrote was a really good model, too, and we went over the rubric and talked about what was good about it in terms of organization, sources, etc.

At the same time that we're doing this paper (they're doing all the research outside of class), we're also reading Night, and I feel like that's going really well. I'm having them write a journal response every night and we're doing a lot of checking in about the emotions we're feeling while reading.

We also had a really cool development I want to share before I forget and get in bed and start grading. (I fall asleep on my papers most nights.) The first day after spring break, I made the very spontaneous decision to have us sit in a circle. In my 9th grade class, we only have 16 students, which is so nice. (The 9th grade classes are really small at my school; I have 31 in my 10th grade class.) We were going to be discussing their research on social issues over the break, and I felt like putting us in a circle would work better and just be a nice switch for the day after break. It was amazing to see the students' reactions as they came in and saw the new setup. They were so excited! So, the next day, some of my kids got there early and asked if we could be in a circle again. We were doing the second half of the two-day activity on these issues, so it actually worked really well and I had thought to have us be in a circle again anyway. I asked for them to help with the chairs, and we got into our circle. During class, someone said that we should sit in a circle everyday. I really like the circle, and I said I'd love to but that it's not my classroom, so we'd have to put the chairs in a circle and put them back each day before and after class, thinking that was the end of that. But several students said they didn't mind moving the chairs, and so we took a vote on whether they'd want to sit in a circle each day if it meant moving the chairs before and after class, and almost all of them voted for it, so we've been sitting in a circle each day ever since. It's been so nice and really shifted the mood of the whole class, I feel.

O.K. After writing my "persuasive article" model yesterday and doing a bunch of entering grades, my wrists are a wreck and I need to get to bed and work on grading.

Need to work on my unit for Merchant of Venice tomorrow and write two tests--one for the first half of Night and one for The Woman Warrior--for next week and grade a whole lot of essays this weekend. Thankfully next week is STAR testing, which means we will only have class for three days (one of which is a test in each of my classes), so next week should be pretty chill, which will hopefully give me some time to finish my grading and work on my iCAP, which I have not even begun. Yikes.

Need to update the blog about my 10th grade class (all of the above was about the 9th grade class), which is going ok but not as well as it was or as the 9th grade class is. Oh, and need to update about a student named Allen. Remind me in case I forget.

Things are feeling somewhat under control. I had a moment of epiphany about that on Thursday,too, which I need to relive. Until then...

G'night.