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Thoughts from the Grammarian About Whom Your Mother Warned You

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No Good Deed Goes Unpunished

Today was our annual Bloodmobile. While it requires a large portion of planning and coordinating, the work is fairly simple, it more or less all falls into place, and it's great watching students performing such a selfless act of humanitarian effort. Well, we like to think they're doing that but the truth is, the students see it a way to get out of a class for an hour.

The event has been on the calendar for months. Posters advertising it have been up for weeks. I've given information about over the announcements for weeks, too. Teachers knew what day it was, they also knew that student council members would be requesting to be absent from class to help, and they also knew that students would miss classes in order to donate. I have no idea how long student council has been hosting Bloodmobile, but they've been doing it long before I came on staff or agreed to be a co-sponsor of student council. So, to say that an email and the actions of one teacher irked me over the last couple of days is to say the least.

After a verbal altercation with another teacher during Bloodmobile last year, I made it perfectly clear to teachers that if they had questions or concerns, they needed to contact my fellow co-sponsor or myself before the day of Bloodmobile. A teacher did contact me about three students. One of them is a student council member who requested to be absent from her class today to help. Fair enough. The other two students signed up to donate blood. Being teenagers, they of course picked the one class they didn't want to attend today and that happened to be her class. I emailed her back to tell her that I would see what could be done to reschedule them, but made no promises about it. We managed to reschedule one students but the other was not able to be rescheduled. I understood her concern, but our big drive in our building this year is to bring back a spirit of character and integrity amongst the student body, and community service is a part of that. Besides, it wasn't as if we were requesting they be absent all week.

The student who couldn't be rescheduled came into Bloodmobile and told me that the teacher was angry. He explained to her that we were unable to reschedule and she told him education was more important. HUH?! Since when was saving a life not as important as education? A minor incident put us thirty minutes behind schedule and the student in question spent almost two hours at Bloodmobile from the time he came to check in to the time he left the canteen. Said teacher came out of her room searching for the student and another and demanded they tell her why they hadn't come back to her class. They explained, and when my co-sponsor went to speak to her about it, she turned away and left. He tried to track her down but apparently didn't hear him or ignored him.

Personally, I find her behavior inexcusable and unprofessional. We all were in agreement that we wanted to build a more positive atmosphere in our school and focus on character building and integrity. Bloodmobile is a prime opportunity to do this. Even before school started, I spoke with the principal about issues we'd had in the past with teachers confronting us and demanding to know a student's whereabouts during Bloodmobile even after receiving information on how the day would work. She indicated that it would not be a problem because it was one day out of the year and it was a great way to give back to the community and show the community that great things do happen at our school.

The incident which put us behind required that we remove students from the room to another location where we could ensure their safety and whereabouts. Essentially, we were covering ourselves. The issue I had last year came from a teacher in the same department. They are always the ones to complain the most when we try something different or when their routine must be interrupted. I understand. I don't like my routine interrupted either, but as educators, we know we must prepare for last-minute change. It wasn't as if we weren't supervising these students, and had something happened on a more serious scale, we would have to have accounted for the location of the students in the room at the time. If they had gone back to class, the responsibility and blame
would have landed squarely on the shoulders of my co-sponsor and I.

It baffles me that adults have to discourage students from doing good things in the name of getting their own way.
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Posted: Wednesday, October 01, 2008 7:52 PM by the_frumious_snark | 0 Comments

Do as I do, Not as I say...

The majority of our staff had high hopes for how the school year would run under the new administrative changes. We seem to have gotten off on a good foot for the first few weeks, but now that we're settling into the first full month, I'm beginning to wonder if all the decisions we made as a staff were just to placate one another into thinking we did have a say.

There have been many times where a co-worker has addressed an issue with a new policy only to get a response that indicates that the administration had not planned for that specific scenario. Case in point: We added in-school suspension to our discipline policy but because of the reluctance of the school board to hire someone to monitor it, the duty is passed around to a handful of teachers. Students who are immediately put in the in-school suspension room often don't have work for their classes that have not met yet that day, and so those of us who have them later in the day are sent scrambling trying to put something together for them to do while they are in in-school suspension.

The duties of these teachers also cover the monitoring of students who are sent out of class for sleeping. Teachers would need to send students out of their classes but did not know where to send them.

Yesterday, I learned from a co-worker that another colleague had a conflict with our new head administrator. The teacher in question has the same policy as I about students being in their seats when the tardy bell rings: If a student is not sitting in his or her chair but wandering about the room, we count them as tardy. This teacher also gives students a tardy if a student must go to his or her locker to get a textbook or pencil because he or she came to class unprepared. It was preached to us at the beginning of the year to have some sort of plan in place to encourage students to come to class prepared and encourage them to modify the lackadaisical behavior of the last few years. My policy is that they may go to their locker to retrieve the item, but they must serve five minutes with me either before or after school. Apparently, the other teacher has been reporting a large number of tardies because of students not coming to class prepared or for being out of their seat when the bell rings. The principal wanted to know what could be done to cut down on the number. The teacher explained that the policy is written in her syllabus and she was under the impression that we were to deter this sort of behavior. After a lengthy discussion, the principal backed off.

Also yesterday, we were told we needed to cut down on the number of out-of-town workshops we attend. I'm slightly confused here: If we're to find new ways of prepping our students and teaching our students, how are we to do it without workshops? If we're told that we need to find ways of deterring lazy behavior in our students, how are we do this when the principal tells us to find these ways but then requests that we change them?


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Posted: Saturday, September 06, 2008 11:49 AM by the_frumious_snark | 0 Comments

Transitions

It seems to always take me a couple of weeks to regain a sense of routine when school begins again. I seem to adapt to getting up early and going to work, but by the end of the day, I seem drained. It's entirely too easy to fall into a lazy routine during those free days in the summer.

The beginning of this school year is no exception. We voted at the end of the last school year to switch back to a seven-hour day. My first year in the district, we had a straight block schedule. It sometimes felt overwhelming, but having student-taught in a school with block scheduling, I transitioned well into the routine. The proceeding years were a hodge-podge of variations on modified block scheduling. Some of my classes were 50 minutes long and met everyday while others met every other day for 90 minutes. When the schedule meant that I saw my sophomores for 50 minutes everyday and my seniors for 90 minutes, it worked well, and it made sense. Last year, the schedule was so discombobulated, it was as if I had three preps rather than two. I looked forward to the seven-hour schedule. It was something with which I was familiar from my own high school days.

There is a distinct difference between being a student with a seven-hour schedule and a teacher with a seven-hour schedule.

When I came home on Monday and Tuesday of this week, I felt completely wiped out. I sat down in my chair and didn't move for about an hour and a half. Good thing the Olympics are on still this week because I couldn't even motivate myself to pick up a book. Yesterday wasn't too bad and today, I feel slightly better.

I feel like I'm performing a 6-ring circus, especially with my planning period at the beginning of the day. I'm beginning to wonder what the rates of kidney and bladder infections are like among teachers.

I know eventually I'll settle into a comfortable motion of routine with this new schedule, but it certainly makes me wonder how MY teachers did it all when I was in school.
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Posted: Thursday, August 21, 2008 6:15 PM by the_frumious_snark | 0 Comments

Improv...teacher style

I have no idea what triggered the thought, but this morning, as I was brushing my teeth, I realized I might not have enough textbooks for all my students. It didn't send me into a panic, because I knew there would be some sort of solution out there, but it certainly was a nice motivator for me to go out to the school early this morning and start moving all the books out of storage.

My concern quickly came to fruition: I am around five books short of what I need in order to have enough books for all my students, a classroom set for those who don't come to class with the proper material, and books for the para-educators who will be in my room. When the new books were purchased last summer, I know the powers-that-be looked at the projected numbers based on last year's freshmen class. They were a large class for our district, around 86 students or so. We received 88 textbooks last year, and never had a problem with there not being enough textbooks for all students. From the projected numbers at the end of the last school term, it appeared that I would have that same number of students.

Flash forward to this school year, and because I have four students repeating their entire year of sophomore English and six students entirely new to the district, I am short on textbooks. From my calculations, we didn't receive back seven textbooks at the end of the last school year. In the past, I most likely would have panicked, but thanks to the need for local assessments, I'll have a few days where I won't have students in class. In addition, I have some supplemental activities I can use in a pinch. This will allow the necessary books to be ordered and delivered, as well as reinforce some vocabulary skills, but the entire situation has made me appreciative of the fact I work in a district where I have this privilege.

I sincerely don't know how teachers in bigger schools with less money do it. My hat goes off to those teachers because they are some of the real teacher-heroes out there. I know I have it good, and this isn't a whining post. It's merely a reflection on the state of schools today and the dividing line between those who have and those who have not in education. It makes me wonder about where money is sometimes invested in schools and school districts. It seems that the longer No Child Left Behind bears down on us, the more the schools already suffering, suffer more.

One of the things we were asked to focus on this year is giving students an opportunity to experience things they might not have experienced before or would have never had the opportunity to experience. How are these other schools giving these students those opportunities when teachers can't even provide their students with materials their peers elsewhere in the country use?

But, I digress. I'm almost ready for the year to start, and I look forward to the challenges and successes which lie ahead, textbooks or not.
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Posted: Wednesday, August 13, 2008 5:55 PM by the_frumious_snark | 3 Comments

Professional Responsibility

I'm sure it's pretty clear from my blog subtitle that I am an English teacher. Save the jokes and the spars because I've heard them all. I don't correct other people's grammar or writing outside the confines of my classroom, but I am always on the outlook for examples of why proof-reading is important. These grammatical errors in books, magazines, newspapers, and other media pop up on shows such as "Late Night with David Letterman" or "The Tonight Show" because of their humor, but a discussion today made me ponder the professional responsibility of proof-reading and proper grammatical structure and usage.

One of my colleagues told me about a picture she found of the US Olympic team's jackets. The picture shows a replica of the track and field team's jackets, only the word "field" is misspelled as "feild." We both sincerely hoped that this glaring mistake wasn't stitched on the actual jackets. If they were, someone made an unfortunate mistake.

While mistakes like this are humorous to an extent, it's an excellent example of someone not taking time to double-check before clicking on the "submit" button. I'd like to think this sort of "excuse" applies to the mistakes I often see in communique from my fellow colleagues.

Lest you think I'm being overly picky, let me say these mistakes are on relegated to just mistyping words or transposing letters. I'm thinking about common, and pointless errors such as using the preposition "to" in place of the adverb "too." If we all think back to 3rd and 4th grade grammar, I am sure we all know that only verbals can function as another part of speech, yet I see professionals misuse these words frequently.

Just as obnoxious as that mistake is the misuse of the words "our," "are" and "hour." Obviously, a pronoun is not a verb and it most certainly is not a noun. Another common one? How about "they're," "there" and "their."
It's pretty cut and dried: "They're" is the contraction of "they are," "there" is either a noun, pronoun, adjective or adverb, and "their" is a 3rd person possessive personal pronoun. You cannot say "They're house is nice," nor can you say "There dog is friendly." I'm not really sure what the problem is with differentiating among the different parts of speech, words which can function as multiple parts, and words which can only function as one part of speech.

Nothing looks more unprofessional than someone, teacher or not, who does not take time to check his or her work before clicking the print button or the send button. I think it's time that we all start double-checking or utilizing various grammatical editors or grammar checkers (be aware, though: Not all of these programs are as intelligent as us!). It certainly will make us look more professional. It's not just an English classroom problem anymore.
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Posted: Tuesday, August 12, 2008 5:26 PM by the_frumious_snark | 0 Comments

Welcome to My Blog

With the 2008-2009 school year already upon us (where did the time go?), I suppose I should start blogging again. I've been lousy about it in the past, but I think I can manage to keep this one up.

Don't expect anything here other than comments, anecdotes, and incidents from my teaching life. Where should I begin? I'll begin by saying while I feel more at ease about getting things organized and ready for the first day, there are some aspects that I am not ready. It's amazing how co-workers can be just as immature as students. I hope those who are being immature will make the choice to buck up and act like an adult. Either way, the outcome for the end of the school year already looks good for me.
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Posted: Wednesday, August 06, 2008 4:19 PM by the_frumious_snark | 0 Comments