I woke up with a scorching sore throat and called in a reliever. I’m at a coffee shop right now, putting down some echinacea tea but, sore throat or not, I needed a personal day. It’s been a rough few weeks, light on blogging, which, if you’ll recall, is as good a sign as any that my job satisfaction is tanking, that someone needs to send a St. Bernard up the mountain after me.

In the middle of all this, Ian Garrovillas got a T.A., a class tutor, and a new lease on his career. Also, Jen, a first-year English teacher somewhere in the Los Angeles Unified wrote:

I don’t normally post on good days, so I just wanted to take a moment to say that today went pretty well. This isn’t to say today was smooth — crying girls, a special ed kid going off the wall, and a surprise admin observation were just part of the fun — but it was functional, kids understood the lesson, some real punkasses did a bit of classwork for a change, and we even had some laughs. Maybe there’s hope for this year, and this career, yet.

And I’m encouraged by these newcomers. I still wonder, though, exactly how low I have to set my standard before I can qualify days as “good” or, especially, “sustainable.” Reasonably how low, I mean.

There’s nothing in this world more fun to teach than proportional reasoning. I mean, if you can’t make magic out of proportions, check yourself into math teacher rehab or something, ’cause you’re missing the view.

Two things:

1. The fact is that many successful people couldn’t pass a summative Algebra exam. I wouldn’t give my principal or my superintendent – both smart, successful people – good odds in a fight with a quadratic equation. So why do I teach this stuff?
2. This question pounds at me a little harder with this year’s remedial Algebra group which, on an individual student average, has seen more hard time than I have in twice their years. I understand that passing Algebra and (by prerequisite) graduating high school increases one’s earning potential, etc., but what kind of sales pitch is that to a kid who’s raising himself and his sister and who is, at fourteen, a high-functioning alcoholic, who is, right now, feeling pretty proud of himself for just catching the metro line to school. How am I supposed to tell this kid to solve for x? Needless to say, when you’re dealing with a kid who very literally has nothing left to lose, you’ve also gotta rethink your usual set of motivators.
   

The University of California, Santa Cruz, e-mailed my department last week looking to match its student teachers with mentors. New teacher training inspires me more than anything lately so I e-mailed my department head looking for his endorsement. No response.

We examined last year’s assessment data at the next department meeting. Good, not great, and as fully one-sixth of my department, I must shoulder a good amount of blame for my time-sucking, standards-unaligned Feltron Project, which sunk a lot of my Geometry students, I’m positive. The fact is this: if we post the same growth this year as we did the last, we won’t make Adequate Yearly Progress, putting us a year away from Program Improvement.

The department head acknowledged that, yes, mentoring novice teachers is an essential part of this job but, at this critical time, we need better than novices in our classrooms. He didn’t shut the door but gave us all good reason to do it ourselves.

I can’t really square this aspect of NCLB with my conviction that its problems (and we likely disagree on what constitutes “its problems”) result of poor implementation, not of policy itself.

I can see how simply absolving student teachers of any obligation to adequate yearly progress would lead to all sorts of awful scheduling, mendacious administrators assigning the most needy students to the most inexperienced teachers.

I can’t see what NCLB is doing to the onerous process of training new teachers except to make it more onerous.

Sup Teach?, a group edublog for new teachers, is the sort of blog you toss in your feedreader to keep your eye on that incoming link you received the other day but which, even though it’s ramshackle and scattered (the category list in the sidebar includes “king koopa” and “slaying dinosaur-esque turtles,” for no obvious reason) you can’t bring yourself to unsubscribe, simply because it’s too much fun.

Consider “When expletives lead to memorable teaching moments“:

Student 1: “Miss S., you look pretty today!”

Ms. S: “Why? Do I usually look nerdy?”

Student 2: “No, I dunno where you got that.”

Student 3: “She always looks pretty, dumbass. I like your vest Ms. S.”

Ms. S.: “Ladies and gentlemen, we do not use that compound word in my class. BUT…it’s compound words ROLL OUT TIME!”

Student 5: “Bittersweet!”

Student 6: “Basketball!”

Student 7: “Bathroom!”

Student 8: “Sunset!”

Student 9: “Redwood.”

Ms. S.: “Redwood?!”

Student 9: “Yea, it was in our pop quiz yesterday, remember?”

Ms. S.: “OH. Yea.”

Gah. Too fun. Reminds me of when I was a new teacher, and young, so long ago.