Thursday, Mar. 03, 2005
Juniors, posted at 11:00 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com Second entry of the night, since the gym trip and the coffee has me energized. No 8:30 bedtime tonight.This year, after three years of teaching just 9th grade, I was finally granted a request to broaden myself and teach a different grade level. I was given 11th grade English in addition to 9th grade. In sort of a cruel joke, it was also the year when 11th grade English went to an A/B (every other day) schedule, which I didn't know, which means that I have 170 students total, up from the already incredibly high 142 from last year.
The first time you teach a course, you're sort of feeling your way through it. This goes double for me, I think, because I think I'm slower than the average smart person. I really have to read something a couple times to undrestand it well enough to teach it, and most of the time I'm realizing things as I teach. I hadn't ever read Lord of the Flies before this year, hadn't read MacBeth since the 10th grade, hadn't read Frankenstein since summer reading for freshmen year of college. Colleagues have given me tons of materials and such, but you have to sort of make it your own before you just hand out dittos. So I read the books, plan the units, design my own handouts using ones in front of me as guides, and try to build a cohesive unit. This is tough to do when teaching a course for the first time. I mean, it's fun, too, but challenging.
The other course is also kind of new. I'm teaching Honors Freshmen English for the first time. This course has a couple of extra texts (Go Tell It on the Mountain most notably, plus all of The Odyssey rather than just excerpts) than previous versions of the course I have taught, plus I've been adding specific activities designed to help these kids score well on external assessments they'll have to take during their Junior year. I think I've been tough and I think these kids have learned a lot. Teaching Honors kids is pretty fun. A lot of them are sort of geeky, in the best sense of the word. Like, today a kid brought me To Kill a Mockingbird in Hebrew. He had bought it for himself and knew one of my life goals was collecting as many different versions of that book from around the world as I could (uh, yeah, speaking of geeky...), so he bought and brought me one. There is still a huge range of kids in terms of ability and work ethic, but I guess the difference is you get a few that are really intelligent and hard-working and that raises the bar for all the kids a bit.
However, I've made no secret about the fact that the Juniors have been a pain in my ass. I freely call my A day Juniors "assholes" to my colleagues. I say it nice, and they say, "Oh, you've got such a great attitude about such a bad class." But it doesn't feel like it. One class is a mixture of attention-starvations, loudmouthiness, laziness, moodiness, hatred of reading, and chronic truancy. They seem to have little desire to be in 11th grade English. For example, I had to incorporate a daily grade for being in your seat on time when the bell rings, working on your drill. The other junior class is much the same in terms of laziness, but at least they're nice about it and I can joke with them.
Half the kids failed first semester. That's right; out of 55 juniors, 27 got below a 70. A few had stopped coming, but that number is still exceptionally high. I tried going into the new semester with a new attitude, also thinking that I should give more extra credit and classwork to help get grades up. I've had some varying degrees of success. For example, instead of giving a long essay test on Frankenstein, I decided to give them an essay assignment and had them do a presentation as their final assessment. Kids had nine choices, from pretending they were a lawyer defending Victor to imagining that Victor had come to them for advice about whether to create another monster. I had one girl who came in dressed in a beatiful gown fashioned for Elizabeth, and she spoke in a British accent an insightful plea for Victor not to create another monster. A couple others were really good, too. A kid wrote a script imagining Mary and Persy Shelley's contest with Lord Byron, how that might have gone, and the mini-play lasted ten minutes, with props and good acting. Still, about half the kids didn't bother to do the assignment.
All the more reason why I'm so happy that I just returned from my workout and had this in my mailbox: "Mr. (Epiph): This is _______'s Frankenstein essay. Sorry, I e-mailed it this late, but I did't want that 10 points off." Not only does she care about her grade, but she's apologizing for e-mailing it so late, at 10:30. That makes me very happy. By the way, this girl has a two-year old son. She went from a 57 first quarter to an 88 second quarter - definitely a success story. There aren't enough, though.
Tomorrow I start MacBeth with the asshole class (which, ironically, has the kid I'm most close with, "Bobby," who I gave $100 once and offered him a place to stay. Yes, he's sort of an asshole in class, but at least he's nice about it). I'm hoping reading something in class will spark their interest more than reading old Mary Shelley at home.