UPDATE: I'm being mocked.

Not funny.

OK, it is.

on performance anxiety

Molly, Sydney, and I went to the girls' basketball game last night, and as we were watching and chatting, the subject of teaching as performance came up.

Because it totally is.

At new teacher orientation, our superintendent told us, and I'm paraphrasing, "Seek help when you need it, because it's too important not to. You have the power to inspire, but you also have the power to destroy a child's dream." Um, can you say pressure?

So there's that fundamental weight hanging above us, and then there's the day-to-day need for standing in front of twenty-ish people and finding something important enough to say that they'll all listen. I mean, you can have a kick-ass lesson planned, but if you can't orally deliver instructions well, it's likely it will bomb. Sometimes, I still get nervous when the bell rings and the kids start coming in.

I think that's why I'm so exhausted all the time. It's performance anxiety.

I feel kinda silly writing this, because after every sentence, every paragraph, I can hear my college-student-self saying, "Um, duh. Get over it." And in no way do I mean this post as some kind of complaint. I LOVE my job.

It's just scary sometimes.

three scenes from school today: a good day

We have this one student who has a learning disability and is really self-conscious about it. He's got this really out-going personality, and he's constantly making sure that everybody in the room knows that he's smart. The other day he was bragging to me about how large his vocabulary is, so we decided to capitalize on his large vocabulary, his loud personality, and his need for academic affirmation. We've got him teaching his classmates a vocabulary word a day. He writes it on the board, gives them the definition, and asks them to come up with synonyms. Then, he chooses one volunteer to write a sentence on the board using that word. Today, his word was bamboozle. The volunteer he chose wrote, "Ms. Dahlke and Ms. Janney bamboozled (student name) into thinking that he in charge of something big."

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Our students have been learning to do narrative writing by writing family stories. One of the things about the assignment that's been tripping them up is that they need to write from the perspective of someone other than themselves. In other words, they can't be the narrators of their stories. So to help them practice playing around with perspective today, we reviewed the events in "The Three Little Pigs," and then held a "press conference" about the disappearance of three little pigs. Each class period, four students volunteered to be the Big Bad Wolf, the Big Bad Wolf's grandmother, a relative of the Pigs, and a police officer on the case. The rest of the students questioned them. It was hilarious. In one class period, when the the students asked the police officer what he found at the scene of the crime, he launched into a monologue: "Well, I was licking the donut glaze off of my fingers when I got out of my car and found the Wolf. I thought, 'Mmm... He smell like bacon. Sweet swiiiiine... smelling so diviiiiine.' So I say, 'Wolf, what happened to all the cribs? They all gone, Wolf. You goin' to jail!'" Over the sound of all of us dying laughing, he goes, "Thank you, I'll be here all week. Actually, I'll be here all year."

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I'm teaching an after-school version of my class for an alternative education program for kids that need to learn in a different kind of setting than the regular 50 minutes, 4 minutes, 50 minuts, 4 minutes, 50 minutes, 4 minutes deal. At the end of each session, I have to walk the students out. So I was walking the last kid out, and he needed to stop at his locker. He put all of his materials away, and was like, "Dang, I need a bookbag." I told him that I have an extra one in my classroom that I can give him. And he goes, "Oh, thanks. But let's keep it between me and you that you gave it to me." I thought that maybe there was some rule that I didn't know about that prohibited us from providing those kinds of things for the kids, so I said, "Oh, why?" And he goes, "Because I got a rep to protect."

The Problem of Silliness in U.S. Public Education

I went to an all-day workshop today on co-teaching with my co-teacher. Co-teaching is one way that schools are trying to meet the goals of inclusion of students with special needs. Basically, we don't want to "pull kids out" for "being special" anymore. It's stigmatizing and humiliating. So we put a general educator and a special educator in a classroom together with students who have and do not have disabilities, and find ways to make sure that all of them learn and achieve. Which is easier said than done. Hence the workshop.

The presenter, who, incidentally, is the sister of Cheryl from Curb Your Enthusiasm (!), asked those present to name one thing that they feel like they need in the classroom in order to be successful (i.e. a desk, a computer, an arrangement of student desks that allows for easy accessibility, etc.). And this woman in the back goes, "Chocolate!"

At that point, Molly, my hilarious co-teacher, mutters under her breath, "Jeezus! I hate that kind of silliness!" I giggled, and then refocused on the question at hand. At lunch, though, the matter re-emerged. Why is there so much silliness in the teaching profession? Why do so many (white, middle-aged, female) teachers wear those gawd-awful emboidered apple turtlenecks, denim jumpers, and dangly earrings that match the lesson of the day or the nearest holiday? Why the cheesy teacher-bags? Why the annoying signs with truisms on them like "Where there's a will there's a way!"? Why the surplus of tackniess? Why the relative out-of-touchness with... I don't know, reality?

Am I being overly judgemental, here?