Do it with all your might

"Whatever your hand finds to do, do it with all your might, for in the grave, where you are going, there is neither working nor planning nor knowledge nor wisdom." (Ecclesiastes 9:10)

Sometimes, I feel like my job as a high school English teacher (at the private school I work at) is the most important job in the whole world. Where else do you get the opportunity to pour into the lives of so many young people – to introduce them to the rich world of a number of written and visual works, to encourage them to use their creativity and individuality to create new pieces of art, to help them think critically and to express their ideas and opinions clearly and interestingly, to prepare them both for further education and also for navigating the world around them (for communication is, of course, essential in most areas of life). It’s a rewarding and immensely pleasurable calling, and I love my job.

I heard the question posed the other day, “If you died tomorrow, is this what you would want to be doing on your last day?” and it truly is. But some days, I catch myself wondering if – as a Christian - it’s enough. If teaching high school English is really “going about the Father’s business” to the extent I should be. It’s not that I don’t feel called to teach – I do. Really do. And I feel rewarded and fulfilled and all that important stuff. And my students! I LOVE those kids. They’re so funny and creative and amazing. BUT, sometimes… sometimes I wonder if teaching essay writing and marking test papers on “the form of a short story” has eternal value. When I stand before my maker, will he feel like I spent my days on things that built his kingdom? Things that made this world better? Things that have, as I said, eternal value?

A colleague mentioned the other day that as a Christian teacher, everything I do – including teaching an essay and marking a test – should be done in a way that honours Christ – that points students in the direction of God. It helped, to think of my job as that, as being a living testimony And, of course, to remember that verse that says, “Whatever you do, work at it with all your heart, as working for the Lord, not for men” (Colossians 3:23).

It also helped to remember that being able to think critically and to understand texts can help students as they navigate this life through their faith lens, and being a good communicator can also be a tool in kingdom building. And that seeing things from a variety of perspectives (as we strive to do through texts and discussions in English class) is an important step in loving the world around them, in wanting to make change things. And these things do have value, I think.

 And maybe my humble job as a high school English teacher can help build future generations of thinkers and communicators, who will make a lasting difference in this world. And if that's the case - or actually, now that I'm writing it down, if I even manage to point one person in the direction of their loving, forgiving, redeeming, amazing creator - then none of this is meaningless. And then this is enough.

You'd forget your head...

"You'd forget your head, if it wasn't screwed on tight".

This was a sentence I heard many times, as a child and then as a teenager. My band teacher was particularily fond of it. She also once said that forgetting something was actually a choice: you forgot something because, deep down, you wanted to.

This is not true.

For instance, I did not want to forget my son's swimming lessons last week. I didn't want to look up from my desk, where I was lesiurly preparing for the next day's lesson, and realize my little guy's swimming lesson started in 10 minutes. And I was 40 minutes from home. And it was half an hour long.

Poor guy didn't go swimming last week.

I also didn't want to forget my monthly staff meeting today. The same meeting that has been in my work calender and personal calender for a month. The same meeting I told my husband about on Monday when arranging for him to pick up the kids. The same meeting that is mandetory for all staff members in my small school. But I did. The meeting started at 4, in the meeting room.  I stayed at work, at my desk, until 4:30, when I took my coffee cup, walked PAST the meeting room to the strangely empty staff room, rinsed out my cup, and walked back to my classroom PAST the meeting room again. After a final tidy, I locked my door and left the school, 20 minutes before the hour-long meeting was over. 

I did not then want to arrive at the children's daycare and find them already picked up. I did not want to get home and have the husband ask, "Why are you here so early? Didn't you go to your staff meeting?" I did not want to explain to my admin. how I somehow managed to miss this regularly scheduled, mandatory, fairly important staff meeting - for no other reason than I simply, inexplicably forgot.

(Sigh). I suppose it is lucky my head is screwed on tight.

Why Marking Short Stories Makes Me Miserable

I don’t like marking short stories. I love assigning them: the students have the opportunity to be creative and original, and use a number of very important tools in their Language Arts tool chest. But marking these pieces is terrible for so many reasons.

One is that, since students are only between, generally speaking, 13 and 18, their work is in many cases quite rough. Some haven’t quite mastered the idea of a SHORT story, either, so their writing experiment goes on for quite some time. Also, being young, many miss important editing and revising, making me feel, as I read page after page of horrifying English abuses, like a complete teaching failure. This is depressing and demoralizing and I dislike it.

Another reason is simply that this marking process is incredibly time consuming. I spend, on most pieces, up to half an hour a piece. When I have 75 pieces over three classes to mark, the time required adds up.

The third reason I don’t like marking these pieces, and the most significant I think, is that it’s incredibly difficult to assign a numeric value on writing of this type. We English teachers strive to be objective, as objective as possible in our field, there is nevertheless an undeniable level of subjectivity. “Form”, for instance, is one of the areas I mark the stories for. At times, it’s quite difficult for me to say whether a student has used “excellent” form, or merely “good”. Sometimes it’s a clear “4” out of 5, but sometimes the lines are fairly blurry. The difference between one piece utilizing “superior skill” in language and arrangement, while another uses “effective skill” can be small indeed. And when the topics and styles are so vastly different, it’s tricky to be completely confident in my assessment.

I have tried, mind you. I use, for each piece, a very detailed rubric, which should make marking these pieces simple. But when dealing with creative works, there is very little simplicity about the marking. And students also take these marks very personally, since many of them can’t help but feel I am marking them, personally, as opposed as simply marking their writing. Because creative works like stories are so filled with personality and can become so personal to the writers, receiving a mark on a short story, especially a low one, can hurt. And that’s quite hard for me as well.

So, here I sit, trying to mark these short stories, and feeling sick about the whole thing (as usual). I love this assignment, but I so hate the marking of it. Sometimes I think Alfie Kohn was onto something. Most of the time I don’t but sometimes… sometimes I do.

Cold Coffee

45 seconds. Start.

This is me reheating my coffee for the 4th time this afternoon. Yup, 4th. I remember when I used to detest the idea of reheating coffee even once. Ideologically, I still do. Microwaved coffee is somewhat disgusting.

But we have a Tassamo now. And Tassamo discs are getting more expensive each week. ("Suckers", Tassamo company execs and marketing folks everywhere are saying, as they rub their hands together in gleeful anticipation - their evil plan of of tricking consumers into buying their reasonably priced appliance and discs, only to jack the disc price once we're hooked, has come to fruition at last) - And so, being the hard working mother of two who realizes the value of a dollar, especially when bills are overdue, I'm reluctant to dump my cold cup of coffee and brew fresh. I'm also not drinking it as quickly because I"m multitasking right now. (playing ponies, marking papers, blogging, Facebooking, and periodically yelling at my Boxer-Mastiff, who has been merrily digging holes in the backyard all day, with blatant disregard for the fact that the husband will be displeased with me for letting her).

So, I reheat this coffee. Not great, but it will do. One day, maybe I'll be better at budgeting, so I won't need to mic it. OR maybe I'll do away with this money-sucking yet awesomely convenient piece of equipment. Or maybe I'll give up coffee.

Or maybe I'll just start drinking my coffee a little quicker.

Too early for resolutions?

Well, back from my English Language Arts province-wide annual conference.  I admit, it was actually very good this year and it actually made me feel a little bad about yesterday's post.

The conference was well organized, efficiently run, clearly communicated, well presented.  And, inspiring to boot.  I left there (a little early, in typical teacher fashion) with a folder full of great ideas and a sudden rush to update my courses, finish my marking, and generally be an even better version of me. 

I love teaching and I love my students. I believe I'm a much better teacher than I was 5 years ago. But after conferences like these, I leave with this new energy to bring even more of myself to my classes, to improve my practice, to produce better writers and more literate writers, to get my marking done sooner and make the feedback much more meaningful.

As a byproduct of this teaching inspiration, though, I find myself suddenly wanting to improve myself on a vast array of fronts.  I came home and walked my much-neglected dog, Pekoe. I organized my bills.  I tidied up the shoe-rack and dealt with my overdue emails. 

And I thought of a number of other things I think I could be doing, to improve as a whole-person. Eating healthier, for instance. Reading more.  Exercising. And then I remembered - it's only October! Far too early for resolutions, I think. I mean, it is, right?

So, I'll stick to trying to make sure I keep the leash handy and take my Pekoe for a walk most days. Oh, and - er - the teaching stuff too. Some of it, anyway.

ELA Teachers are the WORST

We English Teachers, as a whole, do not do our profession particularly proud when it comes to putting on conferences or creating publications for our peers. Now, I of course only speak for the English Teachers in my Province, but it's a fact that our ELA teachers don't exactly rock the professional development realm. 

Listen. I understand that being an English teacher is busy.  In fact, come to think of it, perhaps it's the gross quantity of paper we deal with everyday that creates the chaos in all our other professional endeavours. The tears of futility and disappointment we shed over each 5 page essay shamelessly brutalizing the English language; the bitter taste of failure we swallow with each short story (the size, somehow, of a small novella) which seems to be written in some kind of Pig-Latin. 

Perhaps the sheer time and energy of marking the many many MANY things we mark simply drains us of all our ambition and creative power. Maybe it sucks us dry of the desire to do right by our colleagues. But I just know that every time I attend a conference organized by our province's association of English teachers, and every time I pick up that association's publication, I find myself astonished at how poorly we manage to do the very things we teach our students.

For instance, our association's magazine is always the WORST.   The design looks like something thrown together on Microsoft Publisher (like, a version from the late 1990s), and the plethora of fonts seem to be modeled, roughly, on the drop-down font style menu in Microsoft Word. (Ahhh... that's what Baskerville Oldface looks like!) The margins, spacing, and title placement are all different on each document, making me wonder: did each contributor type up their article, print it off at home, and bring it in for stapling and photocopying? 

We are supposed to be teaching, among the many other things, the importance of a professional, finished product. If we are doing our jobs, no student would EVER produce anything nearly as horrendous as our own association's publication - done by educators. That's embarrassing. 

Our conferences are no better. While some other association's conferences (like math or science) have meticulously designed handouts, carefully planned lunches, and an organized system of signing up for sessions and then being admitted into the session for which you signed up, OUR conferences seem to be put together haphazardly. YES, you can sign up - but surprise! It's actually rush seating! And we seem to cancel sessions on a whim - no notice necessary!  Not to mention the fact that we don't ever offer any lunch and the snacks consist of juice and donuts (I do appreciate the donuts, just not the 10 block walk to a restaurant, or the parking gamble, where I drive and then lose my hard-fought parking space.)

Now, I realize I seem to do a lot of complaining for someone who has not yet volunteered to serve on any English committee, to write for our association's publication, to organize our conferences.  I know. But it doesn't mean that it's not true. Besides, how can I volunteer? I'm too busy marking the latest atrocities to the English language.

Oh, and complaining.

So, that's akward...

One of the things about teaching is that it's a very active kind of a job. Active, in that you are up, doing your teaching thing, in front of various classes of students all day; writing on the whiteboard, handing out papers, going to individual desks to help students; not to mention walking down the hall and up the stairs, picking up binders and papers you may have dropped on the floor, opening the window, hanging up posters... you get my gist.

Imagine my horror now, when at the end of the day, I stop to use the washroom and realize I have a HUGE whole in the seat of my pants, along the seam. The stitching is pretty much gone. In the bum of my pants. And it was like that all day.

Sigh.

High Heels

Click-click, click-click, click-click.

This is me walking down the hallway at work. I believe I'm the only teacher at this school to wear heels on a regular basis. Students always laugh and say they can hear me coming from across the school. There's no sneaking up on a misbehaving student, that's for sure!

Click-click, click-click, click-click.

I also think it's disruptive in class, when they're writing a test or working on a project. Anytime I cross the room to help someone, there's this very rhythmic, fairly loud, undoubtedly distracting noise.

Click-click, click-click, click-click.

"Why do you wear heels, anyway?" Students have asked on a number of occasions. I try to explain. The husband likes heels on me - he's fairly tall, and I think he likes me a little taller too. (Plus he just likes the look of heels on me, but I don't tell them that part.) Also, I feel like they finish the outfit and give it a more polished look. Being fairly petite (5'1), with proportionately short legs, means I feel a little child-like in flats. And I can't really switch between flats and heels, since most of my pants are shortened to fit with one height of shoe (in this case, heels). When I wear flats, my pants drag along the ground, getting dirty and tattered. So, I wear heels. And although heels aren't terribly comfortable, they're okay because I'm used to them: the worst part, as I've mentioned, is the noise.

Click-click, click-click, click-click.

So what I'm left wondering is where on earth can I find comfortable, quiet, professional-looking, closed-toe heels? I wonder if they even make them. Sometimes, when students are writing a particularly grueling test, I'll take my shoes off and pad around in my socks, so I'm not so distracting. This technique is also useful in checking on groups working in the hall - your know, to maintain the element of surprise. But sock-feet, I suspect, are even less polished looking than flats, and I do limit this kind of behaviour. 

I wonder who invented the high-heel shoe. And I wonder if I should be grateful (it certainly does make me taller - not to mention doing very nice things for the calves) or furious! (who thought walking around with our feet at such an angle was a good idea?) And did they always make women's high heels out of such hard material??

Click-click, click-click, click-click.

It's beginning to look a lot like...

Okay, so no – it’s not exactly the Christmas season yet. Here in Canada, we’ve already had our Thanksgiving, but Halloween’s still coming up, and we’re a good two months away from Christmas. I mean, everyone agrees - even most of the store flyers, by the way – that it’s way too early to start thinking about Christmas. My four year old told me, when I asked what she thought she wanted for Christmas this year, “Mommy, I don’t know. Christmas is still too far away”. Yes, yes it is.

But somehow, I can’t seem to convince my oh-so-easily distracted mind of that fact. I find myself making Christmas lists when I should be marking tests, and browsing sale flyers instead of planning lessons. I catch myself looking wistfully out of my classroom window, wondering when the first snow will fall. I’m counting down the days until November 1^st, when I’ll start creating my Christmas playlist for my Ipod.

I’m obsessed with all things Christmas. And I find it very hard to focus on work as the joyous Christmas season approaches and as every breath of cold fall air brings us closer to winter – and as we know, winter carries Christmas on its beautiful white metaphorical wings. And I can’t wait.

A Spark to a Flame

A cautionary note, before I begin today's post: As an English teacher and a woman of great literary passion, I claim entitlement to unmitigated use of beautiful but cliche metaphors.

That said...

The husband and I were on our way home the other day and passed by a diminutive brush fire in the ditch on an industrial road. The area was fairly small and the flames periodically brightened and then ebbed, seeming to be on the verge of vanishing completely. Husband, not usually given to caution, dialed 911 to report the fire. I'm sure on their recording, they could hear my whisper, "tell them it's not very big. Maybe they don't need to come at all". After he finished the call - during which they told him they would send a truck - he told me that even little fires like this have the potential to get very big very fast, and that although this seems small to me, looks are deceiving.

Sure enough, within minutes, the fire - which seemed so close to burning itself out - had grown into something almost frightening. In fact, it would have been so had the wail of the siren in the distance not promised swift and decisive action.

Which brings me to my metaphor. It's crazy how little things in this life, which seem so insignificant, have such great potential to grow. That spark, when representing something negative, can do such damage. In relationships, for instance, careless words, a sarcastic remark, an ill-considered piece of information, a secret slipped, can very quickly cause irreparable harm. In teaching, I've seen a piece of great literature with maturer content, when I've failed to prepare the kids or to approach it as carefully as it required, grow into an unnecessary issue that sucks the value right out of the otherwise enriching piece of work.

On the other hand, when that spark represents something great - like an idea or an understanding, it can take a little good and multiply it into something amazing. As a teacher, one of the greatest rewards is seeing a spark of inspiration turn into a flame of creativity or critical thinking or passion or insight. When that little spark of interest, which seems like it may go out at any moment, grows into something bright and beautiful and sometimes even breathtaking.

Welcome to my Latest Attempt

Okay, so I’m a bit of a haphazard blogger. This is for two reasons.

1. As an English teacher, I feel like I need to organize my life thematically. So, therefore, I need to organize my blog-life thematically too. When I started blogging years ago, it didn’t really have a “theme”. Well, it did, but the theme was just – me. Which is a nice enough theme, perhaps, but a broad theme, to say the least. Then, when I took a year and a half off to just be at home with my two kids, I tried starting another blog, more topically centered on my life as a domestic diva. I discovered this type of life is more exhausting and creatively draining than I first imagined, not to mention quite boring to write about (no offence to Mom bloggers out there! Just – boring for me to write about). Not that I didn’t LOVE living it. My time home with my two kiddies was absolutely amazing – I wouldn’t trade that experience for anything. I was just lousy at putting it into words.
   
   
2. I’m also a fairly lazy blogger, paired with being a fairly busy individual. These two things don’t make for a very reliable blog.But, seeing as I’ve embarked yet again in a new stage – that is, an old stage (teaching) at a new stage (a thirty-something mother of two) which makes the whole stage feel familiarly new – I thought I’d start my third attempt at keeping a blog. I know, I know - this is a fairly odd time to start one. One, because I’m so very busy already and Two – because I think regular blogging is fairly passé (don’t most people video blog these days?) But I thought I’d do it anyway, simply because I feel like it.

So, here it is. My newest blog. And, in the spirit of thematic organization, I’m going to focus on navigating my life as a high school English teacher. I’m not sure if anyone’s interested in my musings, but I’ll put them into words here for you nevertheless.