Bora Zivkovic wrote an article posted in the Scientific American has some tips on how to break into science writing, but it has good advice on how to write, or get read, in the internet age. His original piece is a mine of useful links, but I'm posting a summary below for my own purposes.
1) Find a niche:
"Try to figure out your beat (or obsession)
– what is it that excites you the most? Write about that. Try to find
your own niche. Become a “go to” person on a particular topic, become an
expert (or at least a temporary expert) on that topic" (18).
2) But show your writing versatility:
"Practice the usual journalistic forms – the feature, the interview, the
brief news story with inverted pyramid. You will need to demonstrate
that you are capable of writing in such forms and styles. But don’t limit yourself to traditional forms. Experiment with new forms. Explain animal behavior by letting animals have a dialogue. Explain science in the form of a fairy tale, Science Fiction or a poem. Try your hand at photography. Draw or paint or graph your own art, illustrations, infographics, cartoons and comic strips. Put some effort into making a video or animation every now and then. Record a podcast sometimes. Give data journalism a try. Try your hand at learning to code (but see). See what works for you" (17).
Also, see this prezi.
3) Don't worry about what's hip:
Blog with some regularity, even if it's just a few links, but you don't have to blog every day. Your readers will find you if they like you Make your blogs as long or as short as you want.
4) Practice:
Writing, of course, even if it's not something you publish, but also reading. How do writers accomplish their goals. Emulate them until you develop your own style. Pay attention to what editors change about your writing.
5) Get some training:
In addition to full-on master programs, there are summer workshops. You can also try an internship.
Educate yourself about writing ethics. Build credibility by citing your sources. Moderate your comments and be present to respond to comments occasionally.
6) Promote yourself:
Don't be afraid to write for free. Nominate yourself for awards. Submit to contests. Make a nice homepage with a simple URL that contains links to everywhere else you are present on the web.
"Your blog can serve as your homepage, or be a prominent and central part
of your homepage. If not, make sure your homepage prominently links to
your external blog. Make sure your homepage has a well written and
accurate About/Bio page, contact information, link to your CV, and your
Portfolio with links to all of your published work (perhaps your
photography or videos or art on separate tabs). And of course, provide
links to all the social media where you have accounts."
As for managing social media, Zivkovic recommends choosing two that work well for you (probably twitter, a professional facebook account, and google+ for the heck of it) and managing those, but also get accounts at other ones that can link back to your homepage.
7) Collaborate instead of compete:
Before, newspapers had
to compete for readers. Now, there's so much competition that media
outlets need to make allegiances with other media outlets with similar
goals. After all, there's so much bad stuff to wade through, the best
way to get your message out is to get other people to recommend it--if
you recommend messages of similar caliber. This makes sense. Previous
advice on how to get into blogging suggests that you comment on other
blog posts and post a blog roll. It's also a good idea to join a group
blog or do guest posts. Attend some events and network.
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Showing posts with label teaching. Show all posts
Friday, April 5, 2013
Wednesday, July 4, 2012
Overentertaining Engagement
American students are spoiled.* There, I said it. This New Yorker article assumes that people already know that American children are spoiled, its thesis mostly couched in the "why?" But if American children are spoiled, doesn't if follow that American students are spoiled as well?
*While I am focusing on American students, this does not necessarily mean other nations' students are not spoiled.
To clarify, spoiled doesn't necessarily mean well-equipped. Far from it. More often children/students are spoiled in direct proportion to how neglected they are, not the other way around. You can picture the child with the latest DSL, PSP, X-box, what have you, but no discipline, but also picture students whose classes have been dumbed down to the point of having coloring for homework in high school. Of course students won't perform such token homework; it doesn't teach them anything. Both of these children are lacking in responsibility, giving them the impression that they cannot handle responsibility.
I think there's too much emphasis on teachers being "engaging." If engaging means meaningful and interactive, then school should of course be engaging. However, more often than not engaging means entertaining. The best teachers would be entertaining as well as engaging, but even they can't keep it up 100% of the time. Not even academy award winning movies entertain everyone all the time.
I and many of my friends were(are) good students, which means we learned the material regardless of the teacher. I'm not one of those people who claims to have learned nothing in college, in part because I actually put effort into my classes and found them engaging. Chicken or egg?
But I was a terrible student in Chinese school. The worst. While I had one of the highest reading levels and was doing extra math from a textbook a grade level up in regular elementary, in Chinese school I was one of those kids who stares at the wall the entire time, doesn't do homework, and writes nothing on tests. Chinese school was volunteer run by parents, not teachers, so . . . they weren't necessarily the best teachers. I certainly don't remember any of them being engaging. Would I have paid attention if my teachers had been? Maybe, but what would have helped me a lot more was if I had had adequate training and materials.
I was not properly placed at Chinese school. All of my classmates knew bo po mo fo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) ABCs of Mandarin Chinese. To this day I still don't know this system. Therefore, unless I memorized what sound went with each character in class, I had no reference. My spoken Chinese was also subpar, and we were using Taiwanese elementary textbooks (most 2nd language Chinese textbooks are designed for adults; Chinese elementary textbooks would use simplified characters). That mean there was no English. At all. Which meant that even if I had known the sound for the character, I wouldn't have known the meaning.
These obstacles wouldn't necessarily have made it impossible for me to learn Chinese, but they did decrease my motivation to the point that I made it impossible. Engaging should mean meaningful, not necessarily fun.
No offense to Sir Ken Robinson or anything, but sometimes you need a factory-type system. While unfortunately schools are becoming more and more factory-like, often what you get in schools is a system that fosters neither creativity nor competence (as in literacy). Prepping for standardized tests is definitely not creative, but neither is it meaningful. Students are not taught self-discipline for the sake of accomplishment; they're taught to eat up SAT classes and their tips and tricks to game the system (I kid you know; my students take an SAT class that for the essay portion teaches them to write large, fill up the page, and even tells them how many lines per paragraph to write. Then my students talk about how they like to end a paragraph at the beginning of a line, so that it looks like the essay takes up more space--see?).
I have issues with unschooling, a movement that has hijacked Ken Robinson the way Fundamentalist Christians have hijacked Jesus. They propose no schooling at all, focusing instead on pure, self-directed exploration.
Bad idea. There's a time and place for unschooling. It's not during school time. It's probably not during dinner time or chore time or bedtime either (but I'm not focusing on the degradation of children in general). Just because a system has swung too far to one side doesn't mean the solution is to swing to the other extreme. Ken Robinson said that creativity is as important as literacy, not that it should supersede it. Students need to take some time to know something so that they can deconstruct and reconstruct it. And hey, MATCH schools and Asian test scores agree with me (please see Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell).
MATCH schools serves underpriviledged kids. Un/Homeschooling is only viable for the middle class and above. Either one parent has to take time off work or the family needs money for a private teacher or the family has to pay for multiple non-public school classes. Let's face it. People who attempt this have college degrees. Their children will have the cultural capital to go to college. Children of well-heeled parents come back to school in the fall knowing more than they did in the spring. Good for them and their summer camps and private tutoring. Low-income children, however, come back to school in the fall knowing less than they did in the spring, because they spent a majority of their summer in front of the TV.
MATCH works as a socioeconomic equalizer partially by keeping kids in school longer by extending the school day, the school week, and the school year. Time spent learning is as important as method of learning. I would like to digress for a moment now and argue that schools dramatically reduce summer vacation (who can afford the childcare, anyway?). That way, we can teach slower, but better. We can even reduce homework, the way Race to Nowhere wants us to. This would also benefit teachers because 1) We wouldn't be called lazy for not working in the summer (although my boyfriend has scheduled 5 hours a day for prepping for his classes) 2) we can work less overtime doing prepping and grading. After all, a larger than 40 hour workweek has increasingly diminishing returns on productivity.
Asian National children really outperform American children, including that 2% of Asian Americans, at math. This has nothing to do with genetics and everything with culture. There is a direct correlation between percentage of test finished and percentage score, which means that Asian children don't necessarily get a bigger percentage of math questions right; they just do more of the test. Of course, it's unreasonable for ask a 3rd grader to sit and take a test for several hours. Unless you're Asian. In Taiwan, these kids start schooling at age 2, including for English. When they're old enough to go to real school, they go to class after class.
This is not necessarily a good thing. The pressure for kids in Asia (or at least in Taiwan) is too high. For one thing, there is rampant cheating (i.e. copying of homework) in schools. For another thing, there isn't much room for creativity, discovery, and experimentation. Americans don't want to be like Asia. We are arguably more creative and definitely more independent. That means we're more likely to be entrepreneurial. However, if you do work at a start-up, you have to be prepared to work a lot. Mature a couple of hours at a time for a 3rd grader to an adult standard.
Furthermore, all of this work? It ain't gonna be all fun and games, even if you love the field and the work is really meaningful to you (as it should be), it won't necessarily be entertaining all the time. It may not even be engaging. There's always the red tape bureaucracy and persnickety details you don't have the money to pay someone else to take care of.
For example, my Chinese is now good enough that I'm learning fairly complex Chinese characters (i.e. 幫, which means help). My teacher has taught us all sorts of semantic tricks using the radicals (those individual shapes) involving sound and meaning. It helps a lot (I remember the previous character by remembering that if they are two dirt clods on a white cloth, even an inch would be a lot of help).
However, at the end of the day, the only way to know 1500+ characters instantly (2000 is barely enough to read a newspaper; 8000 characters is considered fluent) is to write them over and over again, repeating the word whilst writing it. So I don't mind if my students don't find their homework interesting. It's not supposed to be. It's practice, which by definition is repetition. That doesn't mean it's not engaging.
*While I am focusing on American students, this does not necessarily mean other nations' students are not spoiled.
To clarify, spoiled doesn't necessarily mean well-equipped. Far from it. More often children/students are spoiled in direct proportion to how neglected they are, not the other way around. You can picture the child with the latest DSL, PSP, X-box, what have you, but no discipline, but also picture students whose classes have been dumbed down to the point of having coloring for homework in high school. Of course students won't perform such token homework; it doesn't teach them anything. Both of these children are lacking in responsibility, giving them the impression that they cannot handle responsibility.
I think there's too much emphasis on teachers being "engaging." If engaging means meaningful and interactive, then school should of course be engaging. However, more often than not engaging means entertaining. The best teachers would be entertaining as well as engaging, but even they can't keep it up 100% of the time. Not even academy award winning movies entertain everyone all the time.
I and many of my friends were(are) good students, which means we learned the material regardless of the teacher. I'm not one of those people who claims to have learned nothing in college, in part because I actually put effort into my classes and found them engaging. Chicken or egg?
But I was a terrible student in Chinese school. The worst. While I had one of the highest reading levels and was doing extra math from a textbook a grade level up in regular elementary, in Chinese school I was one of those kids who stares at the wall the entire time, doesn't do homework, and writes nothing on tests. Chinese school was volunteer run by parents, not teachers, so . . . they weren't necessarily the best teachers. I certainly don't remember any of them being engaging. Would I have paid attention if my teachers had been? Maybe, but what would have helped me a lot more was if I had had adequate training and materials.
I was not properly placed at Chinese school. All of my classmates knew bo po mo fo (ㄅㄆㄇㄈ) ABCs of Mandarin Chinese. To this day I still don't know this system. Therefore, unless I memorized what sound went with each character in class, I had no reference. My spoken Chinese was also subpar, and we were using Taiwanese elementary textbooks (most 2nd language Chinese textbooks are designed for adults; Chinese elementary textbooks would use simplified characters). That mean there was no English. At all. Which meant that even if I had known the sound for the character, I wouldn't have known the meaning.
These obstacles wouldn't necessarily have made it impossible for me to learn Chinese, but they did decrease my motivation to the point that I made it impossible. Engaging should mean meaningful, not necessarily fun.
No offense to Sir Ken Robinson or anything, but sometimes you need a factory-type system. While unfortunately schools are becoming more and more factory-like, often what you get in schools is a system that fosters neither creativity nor competence (as in literacy). Prepping for standardized tests is definitely not creative, but neither is it meaningful. Students are not taught self-discipline for the sake of accomplishment; they're taught to eat up SAT classes and their tips and tricks to game the system (I kid you know; my students take an SAT class that for the essay portion teaches them to write large, fill up the page, and even tells them how many lines per paragraph to write. Then my students talk about how they like to end a paragraph at the beginning of a line, so that it looks like the essay takes up more space--see?).
I have issues with unschooling, a movement that has hijacked Ken Robinson the way Fundamentalist Christians have hijacked Jesus. They propose no schooling at all, focusing instead on pure, self-directed exploration.
Bad idea. There's a time and place for unschooling. It's not during school time. It's probably not during dinner time or chore time or bedtime either (but I'm not focusing on the degradation of children in general). Just because a system has swung too far to one side doesn't mean the solution is to swing to the other extreme. Ken Robinson said that creativity is as important as literacy, not that it should supersede it. Students need to take some time to know something so that they can deconstruct and reconstruct it. And hey, MATCH schools and Asian test scores agree with me (please see Outliers by Malcolm Gladwell).
MATCH schools serves underpriviledged kids. Un/Homeschooling is only viable for the middle class and above. Either one parent has to take time off work or the family needs money for a private teacher or the family has to pay for multiple non-public school classes. Let's face it. People who attempt this have college degrees. Their children will have the cultural capital to go to college. Children of well-heeled parents come back to school in the fall knowing more than they did in the spring. Good for them and their summer camps and private tutoring. Low-income children, however, come back to school in the fall knowing less than they did in the spring, because they spent a majority of their summer in front of the TV.
MATCH works as a socioeconomic equalizer partially by keeping kids in school longer by extending the school day, the school week, and the school year. Time spent learning is as important as method of learning. I would like to digress for a moment now and argue that schools dramatically reduce summer vacation (who can afford the childcare, anyway?). That way, we can teach slower, but better. We can even reduce homework, the way Race to Nowhere wants us to. This would also benefit teachers because 1) We wouldn't be called lazy for not working in the summer (although my boyfriend has scheduled 5 hours a day for prepping for his classes) 2) we can work less overtime doing prepping and grading. After all, a larger than 40 hour workweek has increasingly diminishing returns on productivity.
Asian National children really outperform American children, including that 2% of Asian Americans, at math. This has nothing to do with genetics and everything with culture. There is a direct correlation between percentage of test finished and percentage score, which means that Asian children don't necessarily get a bigger percentage of math questions right; they just do more of the test. Of course, it's unreasonable for ask a 3rd grader to sit and take a test for several hours. Unless you're Asian. In Taiwan, these kids start schooling at age 2, including for English. When they're old enough to go to real school, they go to class after class.
This is not necessarily a good thing. The pressure for kids in Asia (or at least in Taiwan) is too high. For one thing, there is rampant cheating (i.e. copying of homework) in schools. For another thing, there isn't much room for creativity, discovery, and experimentation. Americans don't want to be like Asia. We are arguably more creative and definitely more independent. That means we're more likely to be entrepreneurial. However, if you do work at a start-up, you have to be prepared to work a lot. Mature a couple of hours at a time for a 3rd grader to an adult standard.
Furthermore, all of this work? It ain't gonna be all fun and games, even if you love the field and the work is really meaningful to you (as it should be), it won't necessarily be entertaining all the time. It may not even be engaging. There's always the red tape bureaucracy and persnickety details you don't have the money to pay someone else to take care of.
For example, my Chinese is now good enough that I'm learning fairly complex Chinese characters (i.e. 幫, which means help). My teacher has taught us all sorts of semantic tricks using the radicals (those individual shapes) involving sound and meaning. It helps a lot (I remember the previous character by remembering that if they are two dirt clods on a white cloth, even an inch would be a lot of help).
However, at the end of the day, the only way to know 1500+ characters instantly (2000 is barely enough to read a newspaper; 8000 characters is considered fluent) is to write them over and over again, repeating the word whilst writing it. So I don't mind if my students don't find their homework interesting. It's not supposed to be. It's practice, which by definition is repetition. That doesn't mean it's not engaging.
Friday, April 13, 2012
Teaching: A Halfway Job?
Teaching is considered an easy job. For one thing, we only work three-fourths of the year (five-sixths, but who's counting?); for another thing, the content of our jobs is easy. It's the equivalent of babysitting. So I'd like to break down the duties of a teacher.
Babysitting:
Teachers are responsible for the lives and livelihoods of 20-30 (or above) live bodies at a time. If you're a kindergarten teacher, you have my respect. If you're like me, you're working with sleep-deprived adolescents. Fun.
We literally are in charge of these kids' safety. We don't take attendance for nothing. Heck, we're practically prison guards to way we keep track of how long it takes for a student to go to the bathroom. Even during non-classroom time, teachers are often called upon to supervise groups of students during lunch, school events, and field trips. This is not fun. When I was Head Director of a mentorship program we took kids ages 4-15 on field trips every quarter. I was constantly counting bodies as we moved from place to place (say, in a science museum), and freaking out when people were missing. Sometimes a child just went to the bathroom. Usually the child had told his or her mentor, but no one told me. Did I mention this field trip was with 10+ competent adults? Teachers have to do that without the 10+ competent adults.
Teachers really are babysitters, or "chaperones" if you want to put it in more polite terms. We need to account for every student body at all times, even if the student is a reliable teenager who can be trusted to not go around having sex or doing drugs. I explained to one such student that we were responsible for students in case there was an earthquake and a cabinet fell on her. She said that she thought she could get out herself.
Policing:
Luckily they were good kids. If they weren't I would be reduced to doing this. I do have to stop kids from running in the hallways, eating food in my classroom, and be prepared to take responsibility for their safety at all times. Except that I was given zero training in this.
Researching:
A lot of people think that teachers can do their jobs on their feet and in their sleep, and some of us sometimes do, but knowing one's content is actually a pretty important job. There's a reason we're supposed to have at least a bachelor's in what we're teaching. For one thing, although you may not cover college level material with your high-schoolers, you're supposed to be preparing them for college level material. Besides which, you might just have some advanced students in your class that need more material to be engaged. Lastly, I believe in infecting students with my love of learning. I used to think, "My students don't care about English, I shouldn't be too nerdy around them." Then I read an article about infecting my students with one's love of learning, and I realized I shouldn't be ashamed of my love of the English language. I should be modeling it. One of my favorite teachers in high school was my calculus teacher. He couldn't spell and encouraged us to correct his spelling. He waxed his whiteboards with car wax. He read math textbooks before going to sleep. I didn't learn to love calculus from him, but I gained an appreciation for math from him.
Therefore, a teacher should be constantly researching his or her subject matter. This does, of course, include the content material. It's not enough to read the textbook (though one should, at the very least, read the textbook). One should be reading novels and criticism and Sparknotes. Especially sparknotes: it will help you catch plagiarism. I remember one English professor I had who was originally a technical writer for IBM. He loved and cared about the integrity of his job so much that when he was a TA, he read every single piece of criticism on the text that he could get his hands on. Of course he immediately identified a plagiarizer. In addition, reading criticism gives you an overview of what stuff you could cover, should you choose.
Because teaching literature, or any other subject, is not about being about to cite from memory (or in your paper) myriad facts gleaned from reading or lecture. It is about analyzing the primary sources on one's own and being about to create and synthesize new information. Therefore, teachers should not only be researching the content of their subject, but how to teach students.
Though I would love to someday have the time and resources to skim through peer-reviewed scholarly articles about education, for now my informal research has unearthed such gems such as what material to use to teach reading comprehension, why reading fiction is important, another way of teaching grammar, and how pronouns are a clue to personality and writing style. Most of that has to do with my content knowledge. I also hope to review articles about Bloom's Taxonomy, ways to effectively question students, how to do backwards design, and how to effectively differentiate instruction.
Presenting:
I recently read an excellent book about introverts called Quiet, the Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. In the book, the author, who used to be a high-powered lawyer herself, talked about men and women in similarly high-powered jobs where they occasionally had to give a speech or a presentation--some kind of talk. Introverts don't like doing this, but they put up with the occasional presentation because they like other aspects of their job. At this point I was starting to think I needed a career change because teachers give presentations every day, usually several times a day.
My schedule is a bit unusual, but I have three academic classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, one academic class on Tuesdays and Fridays, and two academic classes on Thursdays. That means, on any given week, I will have to prepare and present ten different presentations.
Presenting is difficult because you have a captive, sometimes unwilling, sometimes sleep-deprived audience who aren't as excited about pronouns as you are.
Preparing the presentations also takes a lot of thought and planning, and I find it one of the most enjoyable aspects of teaching. However, lesson planning is usually usurped by other duties, such as--
Editing:
I have no idea what the average editor or copy-writer reads per day, perusing hundreds of lines with different colored pencils underlining this or that. An editor's job is to make a writer's language more coherent, to catch mistakes in reasoning, and to catch grammatical mistakes. A good editor also helps a writer develop his or her own personal writing style, if the writer is not adept at this already. I happen to be a English teacher, but I'm sure teachers in the other humanities have this trouble as well. Math and science teachers probably spend a bit more time looking at math problems gone awry or diagrams of cellular or atomic structures. In any case, all students should take notes.
Granted, my students are not working on novels. They don't even turn in papers every day--only about once a month. However, each time they turn in their papers, I have a stack of a minimum of sixteen papers to grade. It takes me about half an hour to go through a paper with a rubric. I stop grading if I catch myself skimming over works and glazing over when deciding which box to check on the rubric. Superior papers are easier to grade, and perhaps only take ten minutes. Still, if I have to grade sixteen papers at a rate of ten minutes per paper, I will have to spend 160 minutes, or 2 hours and 40 minutes grading papers for one class. This is probably why I dread starting each stack.
In addition, before the final paper I do at least one teacher edit where I edit a draft and then meet with the student individually to talk about the paper while trying to keep the rest of the class quiet and on task with something else, usually grammar homework.
Of course, that's just for one class. Soon my twenty-four strong class turns in their papers. In addition, my literature classes are consistently turning in quizzes and "short" papers which are one page to 500 words. I have to grade these too--yes, even the quizzes, because I make them write sentences with their vocabulary words and extended definitions of literary terms where they analyze and evaluate said literary terms.
In addition, I also have to critique any number of presentations and projects throughout a quarter. Presentations can consist of powerpoints and prezis. Projects include tri-folds and booklets.
Data Entry:
Data entry is a respectable office job. My boyfriend used to have a job that was nothing but data entry and making phone calls to angry debtors (okay, at least I don't have to do that). Once I get everything graded, I can enter the data onto my computer at a rate of about 30 seconds per assignment, but I usually try and arrange for my TA to do this for me. She finishes in about 2 and a half minutes, but that's 2 and a half minutes that can be spent actually grading quizzes.
Decorators:
In case you haven't noticed, teachers have cheerily decorated classrooms. This is not a coincidence. Some schools require teachers to have a certain amount of charts, diagrams, and students work up on the walls. My students do do some projects which are appropriate for this type of display, but usually I get them to decorate my walls for me by offering extra credit for vocabulary flaps, posters, and large, colorful subordinating conjunctions and wait patiently for them to turn it in--a week before grades are due.
In addition to decorating one's classroom, one is also expected to maintain a space where as many as 80 students may traipse in and out per day, bringing with them their secret colas, candy wrappers, and scraps of papers used to draw doodles or write notes on, or simply make origami out of. Luckily I have a crew of homeroom students who help me sweep the room and clean the tables of drawings--unless they're called to an assembly.
Janitors:
Teachers are in charge of cleaning up scrap paper airplanes and eraser shavings left by students. They also occasionally have to mop up spilled drinks that students illegally sneak into the classroom.
Workshop Leader:
Lecturing is only (supposed to be) half or less of the battle now. Teachers should also be walking students through classwork, groupwork, and discussions--usually designed or modified by the teacher herself. For example, I once had my students diagram how various literary terms such as narrative writing, descriptive writing, imagery, figurative language, metaphor, personification, and simile were related to each other. After that, they had to come up with an example for each and decorate their diagram.
My duty while they were working was to go out and have a cigarette. Of course not. I was walking amongst the groups. Some were on track and enthusiastic and didn't need much help--just some positive reinforcement. Other groups were having trouble understanding the directions or coming up with examples. In some groups, the work not was evenly distributed among group members. In these cases, I was facilitating the workshop process.
Of course leading workshops does give me more downtime than lecture, and I can do some data entry or lesson planning or editing if all groups seem to be on track, but at the same time I have to maintain focus and move onto the next step of the workshop before the students complete their work and get bored. In some (most) cases, some groups are still working while others are done. In this case, I encourage the "finished" groups to add more detail.
Manager:
Lately I've been reading articles from the Harvard Business Review on how to deal with the people you are managing. These articles strike me as very similar to how you would manage your students in terms of happiness and productivity. Schools are factories now anyway, people say.
Salesperson:
I said that being a teacher was like being a presenter or workshop leader, except it's not. We have a captive audience, but they didn't sign up to be there, and may not even care about the extrinsic reward I'm supposed to give them. So really, I'm supposed to sell my subject: why it's important (something my fellow math and even history colleagues don't understand) and why they should love it. I'm supposed to sell my love of learning. I'm supposed to be a--
Role Model:
There is a reason why some teachers can be fired for formally being sex workers. We're supposed to be role models. In my case I teach adolescent boys, and I try and make it so that they will never have access to a picture of me in a bikini (so no facebook friending). It is also unprofessional for me to appear drunk, otherwise intoxicated, or anything but a shade from asexual on--oh, anywhere on the domain of the internet. In addition, it's not wise for me to go to school or be walking around my school's neighborhood wearing shorts and a low-cut tank top, even if the heat is blistering outside.
I am also supposed to refrain (I assume) from taking up my 11th grade girls' offer of trying their new nail polish--at least during class (put that way for now).
Role modeling is a tricky business. On the one hand, I am not supposed to show any religious or political biases. On the other hand, as I once said to a fellow friend and educator, one goes into teaching specifically to influence children, hoping to make them better adults--of course that includes my political views on freedom of speech, equality, diversity, and the environment.
So sometimes I espouse my own views, but more often than not I challenge my own students by asking them what they think, and play devil's advocate either way. Now I have to rant about a fellow teacher.
He is guilty of egregiously making clear his biases because he happens to be a history teacher. Personally, I think he's ethnocentric, and told him so once, but he dismissed my comment. Another experienced colleague of ours mentioned that what he does is particular hurtful because of his field. That being said, history teachers are often biased, I feel. My middle school teacher was fairly liberal, and that influenced my views. My sister's middle school teacher was very conservative, and that influenced my sister's views in a way neither I nor my mom liked. Luckily she grew out of it. My US AP History teacher also had a conservative bent that she occasionally waved, but I was in 11th grade by then and could take what she said with a grain of salt. So perhaps this particular history teacher is not doing his students a great disservice.
Nevertheless, when I overhear his lectures on Modern China, they seem to consist of him mostly making fun of China--something he is wont to do in normal conversations with colleagues. I wonder how his students, who are Asian, take his ethnocentric world view, for example, ordering nachos in every country he visits as an indicator of how developed and modernized the country is (which is a pretty interesting idea).
Unfortunately, he does seem to be influencing his students. I once walked by his bulletin board and saw a chart comparing Islam and Christianity. It was a pretty horrible chart, basically comparing a liberal view of Christianity to the extreme fundamentalist aspects of Islam. I don't believe that indicates good research skills or critical thinking.
Mentor:
While we are on the aspect of this particular teacher, I might as well talk about mentoring. Mentoring can be anything from answering a student's question to asking a student a question, to complimenting a student to sending home a notice of concern about missed homework assignments. It is finding time to sit down with a student personally about what he or she can work on, regardless of the student's performance. It is looking up terms and ideas that students asked you, but which you did not know the answer to at the time. It is noticing when a student is looking tired or sick of down. It is helping students find their place in life, the path they want to be on, and the person they want to be. Then we help them get there.
I can definitely work on my mentoring skills. Now to bag on the history teacher for a bit, I did observe one of his classes and noticed three things about his relationship to the students. One was that he often asked yes-no or remembering questions during his lecture, and did not focus on students' answers by expanding on them; always back to the content. The second was five minutes into some independent seat work, when he came up to and noticed an ESL student had not started on her work yet. While it was good that he identified the issue, he could have taken proactive steps to catch it faster. The third was when on the opposite end of the scale, one of his best, most outspoken, and most articulate student (I determined from observing one class) read her short response. It was critical and articulate. He moved on immediately without even a "Good job."
The last thing, which I did not bring up to him but which I thought was very hurtful, was when he asked one student a question and the student said he didn't know. At that point the teacher asked, "You don't know? You don't have any thoughts in your head?" I and other teachers have said variations of that to our students. Perhaps we shouldn't, but when we do we use humorous tones or tones or surprise. He used a disdainful tone, one that he used to talk about certain things in his lecture, but which I thought was particularly inappropriate toward a student.
I have to say I learned a lot more about what not to do from this particular teacher than what to do. I have to say, he has very well-prepared powerpoints and his lectures have excellent content. But I would not call him a great or even a good teacher, at least not for that particular grade level.
The Problem with Teaching:
The problem with teaching is that it is largely a self-motivated job. You can put a lot of time, energy, and even personal resources into it--if you want to. You can do a mediocre or a great job and no one will notice or give you recognition for it, monetary or otherwise. Your students will complain about the homework you give them and ask to watch movies in class like other, cool, teachers.
In addition, there is a lack of mentoring in education. From what I read about most businesses, there is a corporate culture that you are trained to fit into and your supervisor trains you--or at least tells you what your duties are. Most schools don't seem to have that; most teachers are in their own classrooms doing their own thing, occasionally collaborating with a friend. Even when senior teachers are willing and eager to observe and mentor you, your schedules might conflict. Little to no time is set aside for collaboration.
If you think about it, teachers are like small business owners, or rather, like managers of a store that is given no instructions on how to run it. There is a customer base, but they are unhappy. The company tells the managers to increase sales and keep customer satisfaction high, but with strict restrictions and little to no support.
This, along with the relative ease with which one can enter the profession, the relative difficulty of kicking out people unsuitable for the job, the low pay, and the low status, make teaching a pretty undesirable position for those who actually care about doing a good job.
I've only been a teacher for a couple of years. I've gone over now familiar material and have achieved a rhythm for my classes and a rapport with my students, but I am still convinced more than ever that teaching is a difficult job. With it's holidays and vacations and leaving at 4pm (but arriving before 8am), it is a halfway job. It is halfway down many jobs--at the intersection of at least 9. Other duties include cheerleader, academic nurse, negotiator, prosecuting lawyer, and petitioner. Other names my colleagues and I have come up with to garner more respect include "information systems management professional" and "productivity and negative disposition rehabilitator."
And now I will leave you with this:
Babysitting:
Teachers are responsible for the lives and livelihoods of 20-30 (or above) live bodies at a time. If you're a kindergarten teacher, you have my respect. If you're like me, you're working with sleep-deprived adolescents. Fun.
We literally are in charge of these kids' safety. We don't take attendance for nothing. Heck, we're practically prison guards to way we keep track of how long it takes for a student to go to the bathroom. Even during non-classroom time, teachers are often called upon to supervise groups of students during lunch, school events, and field trips. This is not fun. When I was Head Director of a mentorship program we took kids ages 4-15 on field trips every quarter. I was constantly counting bodies as we moved from place to place (say, in a science museum), and freaking out when people were missing. Sometimes a child just went to the bathroom. Usually the child had told his or her mentor, but no one told me. Did I mention this field trip was with 10+ competent adults? Teachers have to do that without the 10+ competent adults.
Teachers really are babysitters, or "chaperones" if you want to put it in more polite terms. We need to account for every student body at all times, even if the student is a reliable teenager who can be trusted to not go around having sex or doing drugs. I explained to one such student that we were responsible for students in case there was an earthquake and a cabinet fell on her. She said that she thought she could get out herself.
Policing:
Luckily they were good kids. If they weren't I would be reduced to doing this. I do have to stop kids from running in the hallways, eating food in my classroom, and be prepared to take responsibility for their safety at all times. Except that I was given zero training in this.
Researching:
A lot of people think that teachers can do their jobs on their feet and in their sleep, and some of us sometimes do, but knowing one's content is actually a pretty important job. There's a reason we're supposed to have at least a bachelor's in what we're teaching. For one thing, although you may not cover college level material with your high-schoolers, you're supposed to be preparing them for college level material. Besides which, you might just have some advanced students in your class that need more material to be engaged. Lastly, I believe in infecting students with my love of learning. I used to think, "My students don't care about English, I shouldn't be too nerdy around them." Then I read an article about infecting my students with one's love of learning, and I realized I shouldn't be ashamed of my love of the English language. I should be modeling it. One of my favorite teachers in high school was my calculus teacher. He couldn't spell and encouraged us to correct his spelling. He waxed his whiteboards with car wax. He read math textbooks before going to sleep. I didn't learn to love calculus from him, but I gained an appreciation for math from him.
Therefore, a teacher should be constantly researching his or her subject matter. This does, of course, include the content material. It's not enough to read the textbook (though one should, at the very least, read the textbook). One should be reading novels and criticism and Sparknotes. Especially sparknotes: it will help you catch plagiarism. I remember one English professor I had who was originally a technical writer for IBM. He loved and cared about the integrity of his job so much that when he was a TA, he read every single piece of criticism on the text that he could get his hands on. Of course he immediately identified a plagiarizer. In addition, reading criticism gives you an overview of what stuff you could cover, should you choose.
Because teaching literature, or any other subject, is not about being about to cite from memory (or in your paper) myriad facts gleaned from reading or lecture. It is about analyzing the primary sources on one's own and being about to create and synthesize new information. Therefore, teachers should not only be researching the content of their subject, but how to teach students.
Though I would love to someday have the time and resources to skim through peer-reviewed scholarly articles about education, for now my informal research has unearthed such gems such as what material to use to teach reading comprehension, why reading fiction is important, another way of teaching grammar, and how pronouns are a clue to personality and writing style. Most of that has to do with my content knowledge. I also hope to review articles about Bloom's Taxonomy, ways to effectively question students, how to do backwards design, and how to effectively differentiate instruction.
Presenting:
I recently read an excellent book about introverts called Quiet, the Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking. In the book, the author, who used to be a high-powered lawyer herself, talked about men and women in similarly high-powered jobs where they occasionally had to give a speech or a presentation--some kind of talk. Introverts don't like doing this, but they put up with the occasional presentation because they like other aspects of their job. At this point I was starting to think I needed a career change because teachers give presentations every day, usually several times a day.
My schedule is a bit unusual, but I have three academic classes on Mondays and Wednesdays, one academic class on Tuesdays and Fridays, and two academic classes on Thursdays. That means, on any given week, I will have to prepare and present ten different presentations.
Presenting is difficult because you have a captive, sometimes unwilling, sometimes sleep-deprived audience who aren't as excited about pronouns as you are.
Preparing the presentations also takes a lot of thought and planning, and I find it one of the most enjoyable aspects of teaching. However, lesson planning is usually usurped by other duties, such as--
Editing:
I have no idea what the average editor or copy-writer reads per day, perusing hundreds of lines with different colored pencils underlining this or that. An editor's job is to make a writer's language more coherent, to catch mistakes in reasoning, and to catch grammatical mistakes. A good editor also helps a writer develop his or her own personal writing style, if the writer is not adept at this already. I happen to be a English teacher, but I'm sure teachers in the other humanities have this trouble as well. Math and science teachers probably spend a bit more time looking at math problems gone awry or diagrams of cellular or atomic structures. In any case, all students should take notes.
Granted, my students are not working on novels. They don't even turn in papers every day--only about once a month. However, each time they turn in their papers, I have a stack of a minimum of sixteen papers to grade. It takes me about half an hour to go through a paper with a rubric. I stop grading if I catch myself skimming over works and glazing over when deciding which box to check on the rubric. Superior papers are easier to grade, and perhaps only take ten minutes. Still, if I have to grade sixteen papers at a rate of ten minutes per paper, I will have to spend 160 minutes, or 2 hours and 40 minutes grading papers for one class. This is probably why I dread starting each stack.
In addition, before the final paper I do at least one teacher edit where I edit a draft and then meet with the student individually to talk about the paper while trying to keep the rest of the class quiet and on task with something else, usually grammar homework.
Of course, that's just for one class. Soon my twenty-four strong class turns in their papers. In addition, my literature classes are consistently turning in quizzes and "short" papers which are one page to 500 words. I have to grade these too--yes, even the quizzes, because I make them write sentences with their vocabulary words and extended definitions of literary terms where they analyze and evaluate said literary terms.
In addition, I also have to critique any number of presentations and projects throughout a quarter. Presentations can consist of powerpoints and prezis. Projects include tri-folds and booklets.
Data Entry:
Data entry is a respectable office job. My boyfriend used to have a job that was nothing but data entry and making phone calls to angry debtors (okay, at least I don't have to do that). Once I get everything graded, I can enter the data onto my computer at a rate of about 30 seconds per assignment, but I usually try and arrange for my TA to do this for me. She finishes in about 2 and a half minutes, but that's 2 and a half minutes that can be spent actually grading quizzes.
Decorators:
In case you haven't noticed, teachers have cheerily decorated classrooms. This is not a coincidence. Some schools require teachers to have a certain amount of charts, diagrams, and students work up on the walls. My students do do some projects which are appropriate for this type of display, but usually I get them to decorate my walls for me by offering extra credit for vocabulary flaps, posters, and large, colorful subordinating conjunctions and wait patiently for them to turn it in--a week before grades are due.
In addition to decorating one's classroom, one is also expected to maintain a space where as many as 80 students may traipse in and out per day, bringing with them their secret colas, candy wrappers, and scraps of papers used to draw doodles or write notes on, or simply make origami out of. Luckily I have a crew of homeroom students who help me sweep the room and clean the tables of drawings--unless they're called to an assembly.
Janitors:
Teachers are in charge of cleaning up scrap paper airplanes and eraser shavings left by students. They also occasionally have to mop up spilled drinks that students illegally sneak into the classroom.
Workshop Leader:
Lecturing is only (supposed to be) half or less of the battle now. Teachers should also be walking students through classwork, groupwork, and discussions--usually designed or modified by the teacher herself. For example, I once had my students diagram how various literary terms such as narrative writing, descriptive writing, imagery, figurative language, metaphor, personification, and simile were related to each other. After that, they had to come up with an example for each and decorate their diagram.
My duty while they were working was to go out and have a cigarette. Of course not. I was walking amongst the groups. Some were on track and enthusiastic and didn't need much help--just some positive reinforcement. Other groups were having trouble understanding the directions or coming up with examples. In some groups, the work not was evenly distributed among group members. In these cases, I was facilitating the workshop process.
Of course leading workshops does give me more downtime than lecture, and I can do some data entry or lesson planning or editing if all groups seem to be on track, but at the same time I have to maintain focus and move onto the next step of the workshop before the students complete their work and get bored. In some (most) cases, some groups are still working while others are done. In this case, I encourage the "finished" groups to add more detail.
Manager:
Lately I've been reading articles from the Harvard Business Review on how to deal with the people you are managing. These articles strike me as very similar to how you would manage your students in terms of happiness and productivity. Schools are factories now anyway, people say.
Salesperson:
I said that being a teacher was like being a presenter or workshop leader, except it's not. We have a captive audience, but they didn't sign up to be there, and may not even care about the extrinsic reward I'm supposed to give them. So really, I'm supposed to sell my subject: why it's important (something my fellow math and even history colleagues don't understand) and why they should love it. I'm supposed to sell my love of learning. I'm supposed to be a--
Role Model:
There is a reason why some teachers can be fired for formally being sex workers. We're supposed to be role models. In my case I teach adolescent boys, and I try and make it so that they will never have access to a picture of me in a bikini (so no facebook friending). It is also unprofessional for me to appear drunk, otherwise intoxicated, or anything but a shade from asexual on--oh, anywhere on the domain of the internet. In addition, it's not wise for me to go to school or be walking around my school's neighborhood wearing shorts and a low-cut tank top, even if the heat is blistering outside.
I am also supposed to refrain (I assume) from taking up my 11th grade girls' offer of trying their new nail polish--at least during class (put that way for now).
Role modeling is a tricky business. On the one hand, I am not supposed to show any religious or political biases. On the other hand, as I once said to a fellow friend and educator, one goes into teaching specifically to influence children, hoping to make them better adults--of course that includes my political views on freedom of speech, equality, diversity, and the environment.
So sometimes I espouse my own views, but more often than not I challenge my own students by asking them what they think, and play devil's advocate either way. Now I have to rant about a fellow teacher.
He is guilty of egregiously making clear his biases because he happens to be a history teacher. Personally, I think he's ethnocentric, and told him so once, but he dismissed my comment. Another experienced colleague of ours mentioned that what he does is particular hurtful because of his field. That being said, history teachers are often biased, I feel. My middle school teacher was fairly liberal, and that influenced my views. My sister's middle school teacher was very conservative, and that influenced my sister's views in a way neither I nor my mom liked. Luckily she grew out of it. My US AP History teacher also had a conservative bent that she occasionally waved, but I was in 11th grade by then and could take what she said with a grain of salt. So perhaps this particular history teacher is not doing his students a great disservice.
Nevertheless, when I overhear his lectures on Modern China, they seem to consist of him mostly making fun of China--something he is wont to do in normal conversations with colleagues. I wonder how his students, who are Asian, take his ethnocentric world view, for example, ordering nachos in every country he visits as an indicator of how developed and modernized the country is (which is a pretty interesting idea).
Unfortunately, he does seem to be influencing his students. I once walked by his bulletin board and saw a chart comparing Islam and Christianity. It was a pretty horrible chart, basically comparing a liberal view of Christianity to the extreme fundamentalist aspects of Islam. I don't believe that indicates good research skills or critical thinking.
Mentor:
While we are on the aspect of this particular teacher, I might as well talk about mentoring. Mentoring can be anything from answering a student's question to asking a student a question, to complimenting a student to sending home a notice of concern about missed homework assignments. It is finding time to sit down with a student personally about what he or she can work on, regardless of the student's performance. It is looking up terms and ideas that students asked you, but which you did not know the answer to at the time. It is noticing when a student is looking tired or sick of down. It is helping students find their place in life, the path they want to be on, and the person they want to be. Then we help them get there.
I can definitely work on my mentoring skills. Now to bag on the history teacher for a bit, I did observe one of his classes and noticed three things about his relationship to the students. One was that he often asked yes-no or remembering questions during his lecture, and did not focus on students' answers by expanding on them; always back to the content. The second was five minutes into some independent seat work, when he came up to and noticed an ESL student had not started on her work yet. While it was good that he identified the issue, he could have taken proactive steps to catch it faster. The third was when on the opposite end of the scale, one of his best, most outspoken, and most articulate student (I determined from observing one class) read her short response. It was critical and articulate. He moved on immediately without even a "Good job."
The last thing, which I did not bring up to him but which I thought was very hurtful, was when he asked one student a question and the student said he didn't know. At that point the teacher asked, "You don't know? You don't have any thoughts in your head?" I and other teachers have said variations of that to our students. Perhaps we shouldn't, but when we do we use humorous tones or tones or surprise. He used a disdainful tone, one that he used to talk about certain things in his lecture, but which I thought was particularly inappropriate toward a student.
I have to say I learned a lot more about what not to do from this particular teacher than what to do. I have to say, he has very well-prepared powerpoints and his lectures have excellent content. But I would not call him a great or even a good teacher, at least not for that particular grade level.
The Problem with Teaching:
The problem with teaching is that it is largely a self-motivated job. You can put a lot of time, energy, and even personal resources into it--if you want to. You can do a mediocre or a great job and no one will notice or give you recognition for it, monetary or otherwise. Your students will complain about the homework you give them and ask to watch movies in class like other, cool, teachers.
In addition, there is a lack of mentoring in education. From what I read about most businesses, there is a corporate culture that you are trained to fit into and your supervisor trains you--or at least tells you what your duties are. Most schools don't seem to have that; most teachers are in their own classrooms doing their own thing, occasionally collaborating with a friend. Even when senior teachers are willing and eager to observe and mentor you, your schedules might conflict. Little to no time is set aside for collaboration.
If you think about it, teachers are like small business owners, or rather, like managers of a store that is given no instructions on how to run it. There is a customer base, but they are unhappy. The company tells the managers to increase sales and keep customer satisfaction high, but with strict restrictions and little to no support.
This, along with the relative ease with which one can enter the profession, the relative difficulty of kicking out people unsuitable for the job, the low pay, and the low status, make teaching a pretty undesirable position for those who actually care about doing a good job.
I've only been a teacher for a couple of years. I've gone over now familiar material and have achieved a rhythm for my classes and a rapport with my students, but I am still convinced more than ever that teaching is a difficult job. With it's holidays and vacations and leaving at 4pm (but arriving before 8am), it is a halfway job. It is halfway down many jobs--at the intersection of at least 9. Other duties include cheerleader, academic nurse, negotiator, prosecuting lawyer, and petitioner. Other names my colleagues and I have come up with to garner more respect include "information systems management professional" and "productivity and negative disposition rehabilitator."
And now I will leave you with this:
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