Teaching From the Heart

A little over a year ago, I took some students with me to meet Erin Gruwell and some of the original Freedom Writers after we had just finished reading The Freedom Writers Diary. They were inspired... and so was I. I had first heard about the FWD when I was in college doing my Bachelor's in English in the credential prep program at CSUN. I saw that there was definitely something different about how that woman taught, and I knew I wanted to teach like that. Maybe not the same lessons, or even in exactly the same style, but with the same...I don't know what one would call it really, maybe.... gusto?


Anyhow, Erin Gruwell herself does a perfectly good job describing what made her experience different in a book she wrote, Teach From the Heart, which she gave me personally on the night I took my students to meet her. She even signed it. :-)


The title of the book really says it all... teach from the heart. It almost doesn't even matter what you teach or how you teach it, but you are bound to make a difference when you teach from the heart. When you teach from the heart, you teach each and every one of them like you would teach your own kids. If they don't "get it," you don't think... "Oh well, let's move on," because you know they need to get it. You rejoice with the student who is proud of her persuasive speech because... well... because she even spoke at all, even if her presentation confused the heck out of everyone. You rejoice because you know its a little victory and because it lifts your heart to see her smile. That's what happens when you teach from the heart.


You know what else happens when you teach from your heart? It breaks.


Teaching, like parenting, is so full of back-to-back highs and lows. One minute I am cringing at the huge number of students who totally missed the boat on the main point of my unit, the next I am brainstorming awesome ideas with my English colleagues, then I am talking about taking a super exciting trip to New York with my drama students, and then I am crying the whole way home at the huge disappointments that can come with loving these wonderfully imperfect children like my own.


But there is always a silver lining. The speeches we have been doing this unit have been about this quote from Robert F.  Kennedy...

“Each time a man stands for an ideal, or acts to improve the lot of others, or strikes out against injustice, he sends a tiny ripple of hope, and crossing each other from a million different centers of energy and daring, those ripples build a current which can sweep down the mightiest walls of oppression and resistance.”

 

It is one thing to get students talking about standing up for an ideal and sending out tiny ripples of hope. It is another thing entirely to watch the ripples of hope happening... to see one student's act of courage cross other centers of energy and daring. I'm still kind of in the wave right now... but I believe the walls of oppression and resistance are crumbling, one stone at a time.

 

And the icing on today's cake... another Donors Choose project funded. We are getting the extra literature circle books for our Holocaust literature circle unit.  :-) 

What can I say.... I am lucky and loved. 

Big day tomorrow, time to get some rest  ;-)

Encouraged

Friday, I wrote an entry called "discouraged" about the downsides to my job... struggles with administration. (Don't get me wrong- I have some excellent administrators that are truly supportive of me, but at a big school, there are a lot of cooks in the kitchen and it tends to spoil the broth). In my credential program, I once had a professor explain that there are three elements to any teacher's success- administration, faculty, and students. In any teaching position, if you feel like you are supported by and have a good relationship with at least 2 out of 3, then you have a situation you can sustain without getting too burned out or wanting to quit. If you have only 1, you will only be able to keep going for so long before you completely burn out. You know what... she was right.

Despite the occasional administrative frustrations, I've got some awesome co-workers, and more than that, I've got some awesome kids.

I was reminded today of why I moved my narrative unit to the beginning of the year. For one, it is one of the easier styles of writing to master, but more than that, it is the unit I most enjoy, and I thought it would be a good way to start the year (and I totally didn't want to pass it off to a sub this year- the narrative unit is mine). One student actually wrote his narrative about an activity I did in class. It was a fortune cookie game, adapted from Erin Gruwell's Peanut Game, and I used it to technically teach sensory detail, but my master plan involved them working with a partner they wouldn't normally choose to work with one-on-one too, in hopes of building relationships and breaking down walls in our classroom family as well. Apparently, it really worked. This student, we will call him Jack, writes about how, through the process of working on the fortune cookie game, he got to talking to his partner, a girl he obviously felt friendly with before but apparently wasn't a good friend, whom we will call Sarah. Somehow through the atmosphere of that activity, Jack felt safe talking to Sarah and revealed a secret he had been dying to get off his chest. This is exactly the kind of thing that I was hoping would happen in that game. Even if Jack was the only one who created new bonds in that game, it was completely worth all the planning and the $30 spent on fortune cookies.

Another little detail of his story made me really happy too. Jack is one of my established drama students; he was in the program last year and has grown as an actor much over the last year. Sarah, whom he was paired with for the fortune cookie activity, is a new drama student. She is one who sort of got randomly placed in the program because of lack of space in other classes. Well.... that's what Sarah thinks anyway. The truth is, I sort of handpicked those kids. See, the week before school started, I was told that there wouldn't be as many sections of environmental science this year, and since it was just a college prep elective, they would need to just place sophomores who didn't fit in another college prep elective or something else. Basically, the only other approved courses on campus this year are my drama class and the music teacher's chorus class, but they told me I could pick which sophomores I wanted in drama before they went through and tried to fit as many as possible into science and other courses. Seeing this as a golden opportunity to get some kids who might really enjoy theater but might not pick it on their own, I went to last year's freshman English teachers, and I asked them to list students who they saw as artistically minded who might enjoy my drama class. Sarah was one of those names who got listed. So... it wasn't exactly random.

Anyhow,  so in Jack's story, he mentions that Sarah commented that she wished she wasn't in drama, because she didn't want to act. Funny thing is, no one HAS to act in drama if they don't want to. There are a lot of crew positions available, but someone must have talked Sarah into auditioning, because she did, and she did a fantastic job. I gave her probably the biggest, strongest female role in the play. Although I could tell she didn't have any experience, it was just a good fit. The beautiful thing is, she is GREAT. Sure she doesn't have all the terms down and learning blocking is new to her, but she is a good student and a quick learner, and she has a ton of natural ability. We will have to do some work on diction and volume, but she is owning the character and is definitely one of the strongest actors in the play.  Who knew?  I think I have a certain 9th grade Honors English teacher to thank for that one.
:-)

I love my job... at least right now anyway. I am going to try to hold on to this feeling all week.

What would Erin Gruwell do?

Even working in a relatively supportive charter school, I am finding the problem with budget cuts to be absolutely detrimental to my teaching.... Let me give you a fantastic example of the problems facing education today, that those who are outside of the system probably don't really see.

In order to get money, we need to use funds from the government Race to the Top program. In order to get that, we need to promote and prove student improvement and achievement. In order to do that, our school is using, among other things, a group of fantastic programs from a company called Renaissance Learning. One of those is a reading program in which they take a diagnostic reading test to determine their reading level, and then they are expected to read books at their own level (genius idea) for which they take tests through a program called Accelerated Reader. It is a fantastic program that actually is well-tested and has very few kinks or issues. Overall, it really did help my students make progress last year, and it helped track that progress very well. Now, we will be using this data to implement a literacy program and get some Race to the Top funds for showing student achievement.

The problem... in order for my students to test, they need laptops. We don't have a lot of computers at our school. We have 4 laptop carts, but there are about 25 teachers, so that is not really the greatest ratio and leads to battles for the carts. We really, really, really need several more carts or something... but alas, with the budget cuts, it is a miracle that I still have a job and that I haven't taken a pay cut at all, so there is certainly not money for more carts. I planned way ahead and scheduled one of our school's 4 laptop carts to use for the 2 block period days this week. I booked it back in May. However, because of budget cuts, our IT department is understaffed and overworked (aren't we all), and the laptop cart I scheduled is not ready for use due to some severe student abuses and just wear and tear on cheap computers that now needed a lot of maintenance over the summer. (What can I say... they are high school kids. We try to be careful, but it happens). I think I will be able to share the cart that my neighboring teacher is using, as she said she is willing to split it half the period tomorrow. The other problem... it only has 25 laptops, and of those only about 17 are really working. Now, if my class size was still 25 people or less, like it was my first year, then this would be something that I could probably make do with... but due to budget cuts, our school is slightly overcrowded this year and my class sizes this year are somewhere around 28-33. This means that for half the period, I will have the computers, and only half of my class will be able to use them at a time, so I need to somehow get them to finish the 90 minutes worth of computer stuff I have to do in about 25, so that they can trade off. I also need to come up with a lesson plan for the rest of the time, and something engaging and quiet that the rest of the students can be doing while the ones using computers take the tests.

Ironically... one of the things I need them to do is take the Accelerated Reader quiz on their summer reading, which was The Freedom Writers Diary. If you are familiar with the book, the teacher, Erin Gruwell, isn't even given books for her students and has to use her own money to go buy them the books she wants them to read.

In teaching this book, I bought the book The Freedom Writers Diary Teachers Guide, which has all of Erin Gruwell's great lesson plans and a bunch of reproducible pages for engaging lessons and vocabulary practice to go along with the book, so I found some activities in it and was going to copy them... but our copy machine is broken. I am sure that they will get someone out to fix it. In the mean time, I could use the back-up, the duplo machine, but last year, due to budget cuts... we couldn't renew the maintenance contract on it. Our director dipped into his discretionary budget and bought the ink, but we all knew that we are basically screwed if it breaks. Well, it basically isn't working. Yesterday it ate half my paper. It would copy a page, eat a page, copy a page, eat a page. Paper is a valuable limited resource in my world, so I cannot afford to waste it like that by trying it again, and I asked around and other teachers said it was doing it today too.

So what would Erin Gruwell do?  Would she pull a rusty, unrelated lesson out of a file cabinet, just because she has nothing else? Or would she head to Office Depot where they offer a 10% discount on photocopies for teachers, and use her credit card to pay for the copies, because her account is overdrawn....

I think she'd go to Office Depot, so off I go, for the second night in a row... because last night, I was there buying pens for the students who couldn't afford to get them this year. Not even kidding....