2002-03-20
Back to the philosophy, posted at 12:09 p.m.
Epiphany in Baltimore has moved to epiphanyinbaltimore.blogspot.com Today has been better. Much better. It's still been a subpar week, but there's a lot of factors as to why. The weather is a big one - it's cold and rainy and in general just crummy. I know we need rain because we haven't had much at all in the last couple of years, but that is only mildly helps my outlook. It's made baseball practice nearly impossible, and I might have to break down and buy an umbrella.About baseball... yesterday was so much fun! We've been splitting up the squad, and half of the team goes with the head coach out to the field, and the other half goes with me to the batting cage. It can sometimes be boring, because the kids have been doing the pitching and the hitting, and the kids' pitching is so inaccurate that sometimes it's tough to get an accurate read on the batters' problems. Yesterday, though, I finally put an end to the erratic pitching and told them I'd throw bp. It was so much fun! I had doubts about my abilities to throw with the necessary mixture of accuracy and speed, but those fears were quelled once I got warmed up. Almost immediately, I was transported back to SHJAA, when I was an All-Star pitcher. I threw mostly fastballs, mixing in a curveball every five pitches or so. Kids got some good hits off me (that's the point; after all, it's batting practice), but they also missed enough to know that I was offering a challenge. Eventually, the kids all gathered around the batter, and whenever I was able to get three strikes in a row against someone, they all cheered in glee. It was definitely a lot of fun. Once again, baseball practice transformed my crummy day in the classroom to a good day overall. What a stress reliever it is.
I also now have a baseball jacket and hat - love 'em both. The kids havebeen chiding me on how I wear them all the time.
Today has been a much better day in the classroom. Yesterday was Career Day in first period, and I wanted to spend some time having a class discussion about what the kids learned. It turned out to be a question/answer session about college life, and it took almost an hour. It was fun, and I think it was useful. The people who had come yesterday talked about college a lot, and I think it can only help kids to hear more. The fact that I'm only nine years older than them and left college only a short time ago makes me reliable. It was a good chat. They asked me about everything from how to study and what to major in to if I partied and my Freshmen year roommate. My reslife experience definitely helped me answer a few of the questions.
I then just tried my first ever formal Socratic Circle with my 2/3 Freshmen. It worked well. I gave 3 points for comments that included evidence/page numbers and tied things directly to the text (To Kill a Mockingbird), two points for slightly lesser answers, and took away for interruptions. It's extremely gratifying to say "Okay, minus one" to a student who is rude and talks while one of their classmates is giving a response. I only had to give out two of them; then, they knew I was serious and we ended up having quite a good discussion about the literature. It's a little off-putting in some ways for me to give points for offering comments like this, as I never liked to volunteer in class either. But it's a skill I wish my high school teachers had made me practice. True class discussions about literature are something that I don't have my kids do enough; I offer the excuse that it's because they're freshmen and they can't handle it very well. I now realize, however, that I'm just as leery of doing it (they always seem to get out of control or off topic after just a few minutes) as the kids are unskilled at it.
One of my favorite aspects of teaching is channeling students' unique, unabashed personalities and opinions into thoughtful, clearly expressed ideas and well-defended arguments in their writing and speaking. I need to incorporate more class discussions in order to achieve this. If literature is taught in a way that promotes understanding without murdering pleasure, it can charge our senses and prompt conversations about ethics, race, gender, history, and culture. I hope that eventually my classroom truly does this.
Much of that last paragraph incorporates ideas from my teaching philosophy statement. I need to make sure that I don't forget those ideas that I clung to as I entered the field. That's one of the reasons I'm in a better mood today; I went back to my teaching portfolio and re-read my teaching philosophy. That was enough to gel my lesson-planning for the day. I feel great.
I gotta get back to creating my vocabulary test (ugh) for Friday. See ya.