I volunteered to do something in my school. (Uh oh.) I’m an adviser for tenth graders — and all tenth graders are required to do this “big” community service project. One of the observations that we advisers made this year is that the kids aren’t getting ramped up for it — that they see it as a chore.

So I thought — hey, let’s loosen this whole thing up and show the students that even though it’s required, they’re going to be doing something important, even if it’s only for 3 days. And they should think about the issues they’re going to be dealing with (hunger, illiteracy, etc.).

And they should have fun with it.

Right now we as educators are looking at this activity as a learning activity. But as soon as you put the veneer of “lesson plans” and ask students to write responses to “prompts,” community service goes from being something potentially rewarding and becomes something that is a chore. At least, that’s how I think this is all playing out.

So in our last meeting, I offered the idea we make a blog that all the students in the grade could post to, for all the other members of the grade to view. The way I presented it was:

1. There should be 2 “group posts” (where each group doing a particular project posts something they all wrote together) — one before and one after the community service project.

2. There should be 3 required “individual posts” where each student can write about anything they want relating to their project. The kids could post pictures, videos, interview someone, write about a particular moment, chronicle their days, do whatever.

And then there should be a contest for the “best group blog post,” “best individual blog post,” and “best picture/video blog post.”

I might be heading this up, and I’m happy to, but I’m afraid that there will be a lot of talking and not a lot of doing. I think if we treat this as something exciting, make the blog an “event” and into something that isn’t a chore, then we’ll get a good response.

Here’s a sample document that I made which I’d love to give to the kids explaining the blog and what we’re going to be doing. (It is good design, by the way, and I’m darn proud of that.)

I’ll keep you updated on what happens with this project.

There’s a tradition at my school: teachers grab a drink after work on Fridays. I think it’s been happening for years, but it’s a tradition that has really come into it’s own recently. And normally on Friday five to fifteen of us go to a local watering hole and unwind. Stories are shared, annoyances are vented, and we get to actually enjoy each other’s company for longer than the frequent “how’s it going?” as we pass through the hallways of the school like ships in the night.

Each Friday around 1pm an email gets sent out by the “leaders” of happy hour which pokes fun at the school and the goings on of that week. This week, I accepted an invitation to be a guest writer:

Dear thirsty compatriots,Sam Shah, guest writer extrodinarie here. I thought in light of the school’s committment to self-reflection and goal-setting, that I would share with you one of my SMARTgoals.

Currently, as a first year math teacher, there are a number of areas in which I can improve: namely bring in more cupcakes. But that goal doesn’t quit fit any tenets of teaching. (But it is a tenet of being a good person.) Our plane would still fly whether there were cupcakes on the fold-down trays or not.

What would make the plane crash, literally and metaphorically, is if there was no fuel. And addressing that is my SMARTgoal. Keep yourself well-fueled. As the new school nurse said to the US this week, hydrate yourself. It wards off the colds that cause 2.2million days of school lost, and keeps you focused and attentive to help students out. (And bake cupcakes.) So my SMARTgoal is:

Be healthy. Drink copious amounts of beverages of all kinds in equal measure frequently. That means… well… you know where this is going…

[Bar Name Here]

Today. 4pm.

AND LET THE NEW HEALTH REGIMEN BEGIN!

Recently I’ve been going to happy hour and I have a better and better time each week. The bartender (she works every Friday) has gotten to know me well enough that she asked “hey is your crew coming today?” and then she gave me 2 free Guinesses! And afterwards, I went to dinner with three teachers.

The best part about all of this is that this is exactly the place where I feel like I’m becoming part of the community. It’s where we talk about things and (best of all) I hear gossip.

Gosh I love gossip.

School is now in full swing and I am getting acclimated to the bombardment of … well … everything. Meetings, questions, classes, students. And yet, I feel like I’m doing things half-assed. So far I’m still teaching to the book — almost exculsively — and I’m only able to get my lesson plans done the night before the lesson. It makes for a very nervous, day-by-day existence, like I’m precariously perched and the slightest breeze is going to knock me down. I guess with all those bombardments hurtling at me, I need to be extra careful.

I’m dog tired now, so here are some things I wanted to jot down:

0. I love teaching. I still have a lot to learn, a huge margin for improvement, but getting to pass on something you love is a pretty awesome thing. I feel that way especially about my calculus class — even if they were crazy talkative today. It’s harder to get excited about the material in the other classes, but at least for the middle school class, it’s easy to get excited about the students.

1. I still don’t know 80% of my students’ names. It’s really awful. And they’ve stopped putting up their name cards. It’s easier for me to remember the boys’s names and faces, because they tend to stay constant, while the girls tend to change their look hourly. The good news is I took their pictures so I could study them. The bad news is: I don’t have time to study the said pictures.

2. I was so busy at school today that I didn’t eat breakfast or lunch until 2:30pm.3. I had a really good weekend, not overly-filled with work, which makes me think contradictorily (a) “I can handle this whole teaching thing” and (b) “how is it that I can still go out and have a good time while all the other teachers I’ve talked to have told me that I am not going to be able to have a life my first year? I must be doing really poor work. And I know I can do better. But that would sacrifice sleep, which would sacrifice my ability to function well during classtime.”

More to come. Now I sleep.

I survived.

Below is a working draft of the syllabus I’m writing for my high school classes. It’s not easy for the same reason that teaching isn’t easy — it’s a delicate balance between being serious and light-hearted, and between putting the onus on the student and on the teacher. Comments and fresh ideas are greatly appreciated.

UPDATE: I’ve decided to post a pdf version that can be downloaded here.

Today at dinner with some friends, we got to talking about the Filipino prisoners dancing videos, followed by rousing round of the the “would you rather go to prison or X” game. It was during this time that it dawned upon me:

If you’re soft, you’ll be eaten alive; if you’re hard, you’ll be respected. But what an awful analogy! Who wants to compare school to prison? [1] What we need is an analogy that somehow incorporates cloyingly cute and wonderful things, like puppies and sneezing pandas.

[1] I guess besides all teenagers, that is. (And Michel Foucault.)

Yesterday I went to the first day of technology and computer training, the first of three 5 hour sessions. I was (and am, actually) really thrilled by the prospect of learning different pieces of software and hardware. Mainly I was hoping to get inspired for some grand project I could come up with that wasn’t using blogs or wikis just for the sake of using them (e.g. I want to avoid the “everyone write a short report on a famous mathematician, post it on a blog, and comment on three reports by other students” syndrome).

Perhaps we’ll get introduced to some cool things today. But yesterday was the day for basics — logging into the computers, backing up our computers, and worst of all: email.

The email system is part of this larger comprehensive system that the school uses which does email, instant messaging, a calendar, an address book, and a still ambiguous concept of “conferences” which are (I think, but truly I have no idea what the heck they are) akin to a web 2.0 email listserve. The whole system is poorly designed from: an aesthetic standpoint (terrible design elements, the important things aren’t easily findable) and a functional standpoing (too many choices all the time, not very customizable, lots of small annoying quirks). And I’m certainly not technologically slow; sometimes I’d even call myself tech savvy.

However…

I spent a long time yesterday being frustrated with learning the system — and just not “getting it.” There are two things I took from this episode. First, and this was pointed out by the girl sitting next to me, who I think was incredibly insightful: this is what happens to students when they don’t get something. They get frustrated, agitated, angry, and start acting out. Second, I absolutely have to master this system before the first day of school. It is going to be such a time sink in my life if I’m struggling over every email, trying to figure out how to plan a “conference” (a what?), trying to remember to not accidentally send an email to the whole school.

I really do want to go through my litany of complaints about the system — especially before I get too used to it and all the quirks and bad features are naturalized — but since this is something that I can’t change (I can’t re-code it, and I certainly can’t … at least not yet … have the entire student and faculty population switch to something better), I don’t think it’s worth going into detail about. It is worth dealing with proactively and positively by spending a lot of time trying like Sisyphus to make it over the steep learning curve.

There is one feature of this system in particular that causes consternation: you can view an email’s “history.” In other words, if I send an email to three students informing them about tomorrow’s assignment because they were (gasp!) absent, I can see if and when each one read the email. Sounds useful (if not a bit Big Brother-y). But the reverse is true: students can find out when I’ve read an email. Which means I have to revise my email checking and answering practices, or at the very least, come up with explicit guidelines about email. Let me tell you what I’m afraid of. A student emails a question at 3am the night before a test, or similarly, a student asks for a meeting after school the next day. I tend to wake up and check my email in the middle of the night. They will know I’ve read it and start whining that I didn’t respond, that I don’t care.

Of course I can stop this by coming up with a policy that I’m not required to respond to any emails received after 6pm. Or something to that effect. But as you can see, now I’m forced to think of a policy.

I swear I’m not a technophobe, and I’m not generally scared of new things. I am just cautious before jumping on the technology bandwagon without thinking it through.