"my teacher rapping"

Susan, sent me a link to this video of an 8th grade math teacher in LA rapping about slope-intercept.



I then stumbled across a plethora of YouTube videos of teachers rapping. How interesting.









What? If I was still in college, this is definitely something I would have written a paper about.

Attention adoring fans! (i.e. Mom)

For anyone interested, Cross Country Co-Teach, is back in action after a long hiatus due to the mid-winter slump.

the mid-school-year slump

I'm in it. I just can't seem to keep up with everything that needs to get done. Or I probably could, if I wasn't such a perfectionist. I have this compulsion, though, to do everything 110 %, or whatever. This is not me bragging; this is me wishing I wasn't such a control-freak since it's seriously damaging to my mental health.

I have a really hard time not thinking. Like, I get home from work on Friday afternoons, and all I want to do is lay on the couch and drool. But then my mind just starts working faster and faster until the next thing I know, I'm on the phone with a parent coming up with some action plan for changing a kid's behavior. Or I'm leaving endless voicemails on my co-teachers cell about what else we can be doing to track progress. I want to be able to slow the fuck down, but I don't know how to do that. I mean, I really want to know how.

So I decided to watch a bunch of sappy movies, because those usually get me all swept up in admittedly shallow emotional plots so that at least for an hour and a half my mind stops reeling. Last night I watched Love Actually (which I'm not embarrassed about liking), and The Notebook (I know). I just tried to put on The Prince and Me, but Jess protested, "There's a thin line between sappy and terrible, and this movie is definitely terrible." I had to agree.

So here I am at my computer catching up on my weekend news, and look: Urban League's closure leaves community-watchdog void. Another bummer.

I will say that one happy thing I came across this weekend, is this guy's lesson plan for this coming week. I really like this, and will probably adapt it for one of my groups of kids.

Also, I finally got a chance to post to the vlog, which I was missing. Susan, if you're reading this, I'd like to have some thread of our conversation go in the direction of action-research in the classroom, conducted by teacher and/or by students. I'm trying to collect some data on my classroom environment, quantitative and qualitative, and am finding it to be a tinse overwhelming. This might have worked better as an email.

what a good blog

Susan introduced me to this teacher blog a little while ago with this post, which, basically, blew my teacher mind: (Click photo to see post.)

And I really like today's post, too. I like that if you look closely, the blogger seems to share my aversion to Jim Burke.

things swirling around in my brain right now:

1. Susan is almost 7 hours into her drive. Suckerrrr. Except it's really cool that she's moving so far away, and I'm going to miss her.
2. I need to reply to Didi and Wendy, but I have so much I want to tell them, so I don't know where to begin.
3. I left my phone in Matt's car which simultaneously sucks and is awesome.
4. Whoa. I'm starting school in 3 weeks.
5. I'm SO excited to spend my afternoon reading English Journal (There's an article called "Teaching Ethnography: Reading the World and Developing Student Agency." And how good does, "Walking the Talk: Examining Privilege and Race in a 9th Grade Classroom" sound? So good.)
6. I also continue to be enthralled with How to Interpret Literature. Just about to head into the chapter on Marxist theory. Yessssss.
5. I want to make a poster for my classroom that asks these questions that I found in an EJ interview with Linda Christensen, social justice educator extraordinaire:

key questions:
Who benefits?
Who's marginalized?
Why is a practice fair or unfair? How could it be different?
What kind of society would I like to live in, and how could I get there?

6. Bobbie Fein is so cool and hilarious.
7. How the hell am I going to pull off this move next weekend with no vehicle?
8. Hhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhhh I don't want to pack.
9. The Cranberries are so underrated.
10. I wonder when Michael's coming home.
11. I hope my teaching certificate comes in the mail soon. Really soon.
12. I am so happy I started using Google Reader.
13. I'm feeling a major life shift coming on, and I don't really know how to feel about it.
14. I don't know what to do with myself right now.
15. I want someone to tell me what to do with myself right now.
16. How can I justify showing Do the Right Thing in my World Studies classes? Can I?
17. I want to start reading Sherman Alexie's blog, but it's overwhelming. I don't know where to begin.
18. Wouldn't it be cool if there was a way to quickly inject all of the thinking that happens when you read something into you so that you could "have" all the reading that you want to "have." Except that you don't "have" reading; you read. It has to be a process, and it has to be an effort, otherwise we wouldn't even think it was cool, and we certainly wouldn't want to be injecting ourselves with something uncool. Now would we?
19. I've probably been called "Ms. Burrito" for the last time. Sad. I hope the kids arrive safely back in Texas this weekend.
20. Whenever I'm having a bad day, I think I'll look at this:

an ode to Susan's new sweet blog

reasons (besides my family) why I like visiting my parents' house:

1. Art Institute membership card
2. My mom always has goat cheese in the fridge.
3. driving my Dad's car and listening to Neil's mix CDs
4. my parents' badass remodeled bathroom
5. the Friends bookstore at Oak Lawn Library where books cost 25 cents
6. Pappy's and Irish Manor and Elia's
7. delicious and nutritious home-cooked meals
8. basically, the food in general, especially since I'm on vacation from being a vegetarian
9. walking on the lakefront
10. when my Dad says work was "taxing"
11. getting my English Journal and other sweet mail that's collected since last time I came home

I wish all my friends had blogs.

Because there's nothing I love more (maybe besides, you know, my family, teaching, Jesus Christ Superstar) than reading friends' blogs.

I think I'm going to make my students blog. Well, I can't make them do anything, but I think we're going to do that instead of daily journaling. It is the 21st Century after all.

a call to action

a little bit of a rant, my apologies

Today in class Susan said something really cool: (I'm paraphrasing.)

"The objective of homework should not be to train students to be responsible. Homework shouldn't be about controlling behavior."

I love that; so interesting and optimistic.

On my more cynical days, I get a little nervous about how schools are these intensely whack institutes of socialization of which I'm about to be a part. Students raise their hands and wait to be called on; they walk in single-file lines; they write five-paragraph essays; they organize into cliques; the boys get good at math and science; the girls get good at art; everybody learns that abstinence is the coolest; smart students pass; dumb students fail; young minds are filled with knowledge. ...This is what I'm doing with my life?

But Susan's suggestion in class today was basically, "Um, fuck that." It's the novel idea of respecting students' time, intelligence, and individual motivations. If they don't want to do the homework, then they shouldn't necessarily have to. Make assignments more interesting and/or relevant and maybe students'll see the point and do the work. Or, if teachers want to make sure students've learned something, why not let them prove that in class. Why are students simply expected to care about their coursework outside of the classroom? Because most of the time, they don't. They don't do their homework, and then their grades reflect that. Then, they get put into lower track classes, with less motivated teachers (in general), and less motivated students (again, in general). And what's the point? To teach responsibility? To teach students that "I'm the teacher." and "My class is important." and "You should respect me."? Why is all that stuff simply expected of students? Are not teachers supposed to teach? I'm not saying that responsibility and classwork and respect aren't important. Au contraire. I just think it's outrageous for teachers, of all people, to expect students to immediately know and comply with these conventions.

This whole respecting students thing is particularly poignant for me today; because, when I was observing in a high school this morning, I watched one of the students get punished for saying ass. First of all, who. gives. a. shit. Seventeen-year-olds say ass; the world is an imperfect place. Secondly, in a Language Arts classroom, above all, I would think that all language would be interesting and worthy of examination. Isn't it funny that someone whose job, I would think, is to help students become critical readers and writers of the English language, could be so unwaveringly punitive when it comes to "cussing"? (Or is a teacher's job really to teach students to uncritically adhere to convention?)

Finally, and most importantly: whether the no-swearing-rule is whack or not, the student broke it because the student was trying, I bet, to preserve a shred of dignity in a class where he consistently displays signs of embarrassment. He's failed the class twice, on account of the fact (the teacher has explained to us observers and aloud to the student in question in front of his classmates) that he doesn't turn in his homework. In fact, he didn't turn in the assignment I gave him last week. He's demonstrated to me in class, though, that he can do it. I know that he's met my lesson's objective. She knows that he does know the material. Today specifically, we read a short story that he's read before. His participation in the class discussion demonstrated that he was well able to meet the objective for today, probably to the point that he was bored with the material. So when the teacher, frustrated, burst "I'm trying to figure out why he did that [said ass]," I suggested that maybe he was feeling a little contemptuous at having to spend a whole class period repeating information he already knows. Her response? "Well, you know why he's here? Because HE. FAILED. So he needs to get over it." Awesome. Stunning attitude. I'm shocked that you haven't been able to engender this student's respect. NOT.

Here's a t-chart of my weekend:

Is it achy or achey?

Jesus, Etc.

So Susan sent me a link to this really cool video yesterday:



There are two things I notice about it: (1) when I watch it and try to imitate the morphing women, I end up doing a robot-type dance, and (2) all of the women are white and most of them have eerily passive expressions on their faces. When I showed it to my roommate, Melissa, she thought the same thing (About my (2) at least. I didn't ask her about the robot thing.) Huh.

Then we got talking, somehow, about how Jesus gets artistically imagined. I can remember the first time I saw a painting of a Black Jesus. I was about ten, and I was at Swap-o-rama, a flea-market near where we live, with my dad. It freaked me out. It wasn't that I necessarily preferred seeing the white Jesus to which I'd grown accustomed in my religion books at school; more like, "Whoa. People can imagine Jesus looking millions of different ways."

Anyway, I Google Image searched Jesus, and these are some of the Jesus pictures that came up.






I think these two are particularly good stuff: