Mr. B-G's Blog

I ran cross-country in high school, and was a captain my senior year. My best mile was 5:10. While I don't necessarily have ambitions to run that fast again (although I'm certainly open to the idea), my plan for 2010 is to make running a regular part of my routine. Starting today, I vow to run at least two miles four times per week. By doing that consistently, I will be able to bring balance into other areas of my life and have more energy and mental focus. Here's to good health for all in the coming year.

For the last couple of weeks, I've been arriving at school around 6:30 a.m. and leaving, on average, around 5:00 p.m. I've been planning, grading, organizing, messaging, filing, cleaning, e-mailing, calling, researching, tweaking, printing, copying, editing, recording, reserving, requesting, previewing, reading, and reflecting. I've also done some sighing, laughing, and talking, usually with others but sometimes just with myself.

There is SO much that goes into the planning and execution of a teacher's day. When students walk in it all seems so simple: there's an agenda on the board, a fresh handout to take, and a lesson to do. Students don't see the hours that go into the crafting of each day's plan. I sure do. I experience it at the end of each day when I come home feeling like I've been drained by Dracula. Yet somewhere I'm finding the reserve to go for a jog or lift some weights. One of my goals this year was to be active at least four days a week, hopefully more, but at least four days. So far I've been sticking to that plan, and it feels good.

Today for the first time I feel like I was actually able to do some advanced planning. I'm getting a better handle on where I'm going with all my classes, and it feels good. I'm starting to get to know the kids a bit more, and individual and class identities are starting to form. I like my students, and I love what I do. The thing is, there's just so much to do. And I want to do it all well, and as a result, I spend more time than I probably should on some things. Yet each year I become better and more efficient at older tasks, which gives me time to experiment and try new ideas.

The key is finding a balance between the new and the essential, keeping it fresh while also ensuring the foundation remains solid.

As I'm sure you've probably realized, I've been on vacation. Not only a vacation from school, but also a hiatus from blogging. Between a wedding, honeymoon, week-long hike on the Appalachian Trail in Vermont, and a new house I'm still moving into, I've been busy.

Unlike last summer when I blogged rather frequently, this year has been full of adventures, commitments, and activities outside the electronic realm. This is a good thing, as one benefit is I've been jogging nearly every day for the past few weeks.

Up until the past couple of years, I'd always been in relatively good shape. I ran cross-country in high school (my best mile was 5:10) and also played recreational basketball. I continued jogging and shooting hoops throughout college, my tenure as a newspaper journalist, and graduate school.

It wasn't until after my first year as a high school English teacher that I fully understood how much time, work, and dedication the job truly required if one was to do it well. While I've definitely made significant strides in my teaching from year one to what will now be year five this fall, I can't say the gains I've made in my body have been all that positive. I've probably put on about 20 pounds since I first started teaching.

One of my goals for 2008-2009 is to find a better balance between school's demands and my own personal health. This means continuing to jog and eat well. It also means getting to bed at a reasonable hour. My natural circadian rhythm finds me wanting to go to sleep at 2 a.m. and wake up at 10. When I was a reporter, my penchant for late nights meshed well with the job, as I usually went in to work around 3 p.m. and stayed until midnight or later.

During the school year, I usually wake at 5:00 a.m. I like getting to school just a little after 6:00, as I find I'm able to accomplish a lot in the quiet morning hours. The one caveat is that I need to go to sleep significantly earlier than I'm naturally inclined. I'm the type of person who needs a full eight hours of sleep to function, although I can get by with seven. More often than not, though, the past few school years I've ended up getting about five hours of sleep each night, coming home tired, eating something because I'm hungry because I ate lunch at 10:30 in the morning, taking a nap, then eating something again.

Obviously this is not a pattern for sustainable health. This year I will strive to eliminate afternoon naps and force myself to stop whatever I may be doing once it becomes 9:30 p.m., brush my teeth, and get to bed. My afternoons will consist of something active (a jog, a swim, a game of hoops, a bike ride), and I'll eat dinner at a reasonable hour. Rather than join a gym, I'm planning on getting a treadmill so I can jog in the winter.

The key to this whole plan is efficient time management. The unfortunate thing is, though, that even if I arrive at school an hour early and stay an hour late each day, I still won't get everything done that needs to get done. This is the reality that those who don't teach are oblivious to. They think, "Oh, you only work a 6.5-hour day, and you have summers off and all those vacations." It doesn't need to be stated here, on an education blog, that the majority of teachers are not "off" during those vacations.

There's always a stack of papers to read, a lesson to create, a continuing ed course to complete, a PDP plan to execute, a new pedagogy to read about, a new administrative decree to carry out.

I have resigned myself to the fact that there still will be some late nights, and that there will be times when my school commitment causes me to miss a jog or eat take-out instead of something healthy. The key will be to limit those nights, keeping them the exception, rather than the rule.

For the uninitiated, it might seem like I don't enjoy my job. That's not true. I sincerely love teaching. It completely engages me and provides for a creative outlet, and I am dedicated to seeing that my students learn the material and hopefully better themselves as a result of being in my classroom.

I think the overall point of this post is that the job is all-encompassing, and when teachers have a true chance to tune off their edu-lives and rejoin the rest of the world - if only briefly - it should be celebrated, not frowned upon. The time away provides us with the distance necessary to see ourselves, reflect, and improve our practice.

I suppose this dispatch signals my return to the world of secondary education. In two weeks from now, I will meet with incoming 9th graders to welcome them to our high school and encourage them to join the Leo Club, a community service organization dedicated to helping children, and Spotlight, the student newspaper, both of which I advise. A week after that, the first late bell of the year will ring, signaling the beginning of another adventurous ride. It's a ride I'm looking forward to, and hopefully with hindsight and another year of experience under my belt, I'll be able to steer clear of hidden rocks and unhealthy currents.

The image at the top of this post was from my honeymoon in St. Kitts, taken from one of the island's inactive volcanoes.

While busily scoring final exams and compiling 4th quarter grades, I received an e-mail from another member of the English Dept. This teacher, a savvy veteran with mostly 12th grade classes, was asking for information about the nuts and bolts of instruction that goes on in the lower grades.

She wanted to make sure her curriculum and expectations were aligned with students' prior English class experiences. What follows is my response to her - a rough summary of what I do with my 9th and 12th grade students. Eventually this teacher hopes to compile a working document that details our department's major writing assignments and instructional strategies from 9-12.

I'm curious to hear how other teachers approach these areas of instruction. It goes without saying that almost none of what I do is set in stone; I'm always looking to tweak, improve, and be as effective as possible.

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Vocabulary - I assign 10 words per week, drawn from class readings and most common SAT words. Usually the students have a say in deciding which words we'll learn. They also have four roots per week, drawn from the most common SAT words, and three literary terms as relevant to class readings & assignments.

Students write sentences which they share out loud with the class. Student-created vocabulary quiz stories with literary term & root utilization questions are used as weekly assessments. I'm thinking I might include prefixes and suffixes next year. I'm also leaning toward experimenting with vocabulary squares and other innovative vocab teaching techniques in lieu or in addition to sentences.

Major writing assignments - Many of these are available on my teaching resources page. A number of them have been updated from last year. If you're interested in the newest version (or something that is listed here but isn't there), leave a comment or fire an e-mail and I'll send you what you want.

Ninth grade (some of these are also used with my 12th grade class):

* Summer reading character/setting fusion synthesis essay (500-700 words)
* Pearl Value Compare/Contrast Narrative Essay (800-1000 words)
* To Kill A Mockingbird quote & concept analysis and expository essay (500 words)
* Old Man and the Sea MCAS Long Comp 5-paragraph essay with three embedded & analyzed quotations (500-600 words)
* Ernest Hemingway research narrative involving three sources, in-text citations, and MLA Works Cited (400-600 words)
* Poet research narrative involving a minimum of three sources, in-text citations, and MLA Works Cited (500-700 words)
* original 700-1000 word short story demonstrating the six short story characteristics (setting, plot, conflict, character, point-of-view, & theme)
* Romeo & Juliet Verona Times Persuasive Editorial Letter (300-500 words)
* Vocabulary in context 300-word original story (3x per year)
* Outside reading book review featuring summary, exposition, analysis, and an outside opinion (300-400 words, 4x per year).
Twelfth grade:

* Oedipus quote & concept analysis and expository essay (500 words)
* Siddhartha Comes to America synthesis/narrative essay (700-1000 words)
* College essay/personal narrative (300-500 words)
* Macbeth theme analysis essay with three embedded & analyzed quotations (700-900 words)
* Lord of the Flies quote & concept analysis and expository essay (500 words)
* Three-search research/interview/narrative essay utilizing direct and indirect quotations, internal citations, and MLA works cited (800-1200 words)

Grammar - In my classes, grammar falls under the broader category of writing instruction. I teach grammar when I teach and assign writing. Some convention elements are explicitly taught as they relate to the assignment or specific goals of a lesson, while others are on an as-needed basis as students' strengths and weaknesses reveal themselves.


Homework - Assignments usually involve reading and responding to a text in some way. Homework responses are always checked on the they're due and usually serve as a catalyst for that day's lesson. Class discussions, activities, and participation opportunities revolve around nightly homework assignments - they're not just busy work. I'll give anywhere from 20-40 homework assignments per quarter, depending on complexity and time needed to complete. Students can expect to spend 30-60 minutes per night.

Over the summer I stumbled across the Writing Next report. Its chief findings regarding effective writing instruction are as follows:

Recently a teacher from Missouri e-mailed me asking for info about how I've used blogs with my students. Here's what I've done so far, and what I'd like to do in the future:

Last year students posted three assignments online - a short fiction story, an essay on The Old Man and the Sea, and a favorite poem from their poetry anthologies (click here for more info on the anthology project).

Students wrote the essays at home and in class using laptop computers from one of our school's two computer carts. After peer-editing and revision activities, students passed around one of my USB drives and saved their writing as word documents on the drive. I then uploaded the text to Blogger by copying and pasting their writing into the "create a post" text boxes.

Some students also saved images as jpeg files, and I included them with their writing. Click here, here, and here to see the three student blog pages I created last year.

Once their entries were up, I posted comment criteria, and as a homework grade, required that they provide specific responses to a minimum (three to six) number of posts. This year, I am also going to require that the original authors reply to the comments, in an effort to further the dialogue and encourage reflection, insight, and improvement.

In an effort to protect student's identities, only last initials were used. I have also only used my initials in identifying myself, and have not referenced the name my school.

My purpose in creating classroom blogs was to give my students a real audience, and to allow them to grow and learn by reading each others' work. Some of my students are very strong writers, and exposing classmates to their work and insights into the writing process can only make everyone stronger articulators of the written word.

A number of students were also able to share their writing with friends and family members, which helped to demystify just what exactly we "do" in English class.

One of my goals for this year is to find another teacher to collaborate with on similar assignments. I think it would be great for students to receive feedback from a group of peers in another state or, even better, country. If any teacher is interested in collaborating - even just for one assignment - please click here to contact me by e-mail, or post a comment below.

Eventually I would like to teach students how to create their own blogs, and give them more ownership in the process. Right now I am planning to again have class blogs, where students give me their writing and I do the postings. Eventually I would like to segue to individual blogs, but it will require teaching Blogger (or some other application) and instilling a code of ethics and guidelines, as well as getting parental consent.

If any of you have had success with individual student blogs as venues for students to share and receive feedback on writing, please leave your links in the form of a comment so I can check them out!

Also, anyone who has questions about what I did last year or plan to do this year should feel free to ask.

On Saturday morning my fiancee and I will head east to Gloucester's Good Harbor Beach for a final care-free weekend before the reality of school's impending start fully sets in.

After this Sunday, I'll be back in edu-world. Fortunately, school doesn't start until Aug. 30th, so I have a little bit of time to wade into the waters and re-acclimate. I'll be heading in three days next week - one day to set up the room and print handouts for the first week or so, another to attend a professional development workshop on Podcasting, and a final to take part in our 9th grade orientation, dubbed "Tracks to Success."

Depending on how much I accomplish, I might go in one other day before Aug. 29th, which is a mandated "teacher day," although most of the day is consumed by meetings. Part of me is looking forward to returning to the classroom, while another has really appreciated and taken advantage of the much-needed downtime, and doesn't want it to end.

Looking back on last year, it seems I only remember my successes and the fun classes and the kids who did amazing work and the students I feel I reached and really challenged and inspired to dig deeper. I tend to forget the failures, the students who dropped out, or never made an effort, or whom, for whatever reason, I never connected with. I definitely dwell on my accomplishments. They make me remember why I love this job, and how it truly can be rewarding.

This isn't to say I don't reflect on my failings. I do. Although I don't think I actually "fail" so much as "trickle." There are some days when a lesson or activity is like a huge tidewater or a class 5 rapid. It storms the classroom, enraptures everyone, and takes us along on an invigorating ride. And then there are the weak lessons which just seem to trickle by, never really gaining momentum, never capturing or inspiring.

I want to be a roaring tide. But not everyday. It would be too exhausting. Perhaps my motto for this year will be "more flow, less trickle." Or less dribble? I don't know. I do know, though, that I've stumbled across an idea I had no initial intention of writing about. I was going to blog about the beach, but I've kept the focus on what I'm doing after the weekend, as I'm thinking about what I'll eventually be doing when school starts.

Am I digressing a little? Perhaps. Maybe this is an example of a first draft of something that could be more cohesive and polished. But am I not following a single thought wave? Doesn't this entry "flow?" I'm not entirely sure.

Writers on any level must have opportunities to share their writing with other experienced writers and readers before they declare it final. Good writing owes much of its success to good eyes - those who provide a writer with honest and helpful feedback.

One of my goals for this year is to find ways to get students to feel comfortable critiquing each others' writing. And I don't mean finding comma splices and fixing its/it's. I mean responding to higher-order concerns like ideas and organization. I also want them to look at sentences not just for grammar, but for fluency. For beauty. For artistic and expressive merit. For originality. For their ability to capture and enthrall. This means students need to see authentic first and second drafts, and they need the revision process modeled and explained. They need opportunities to take risks and to trust and to feel the power and satisfaction that comes with expressing one's self in the written word.

Soon I will appear in Room 512 as Mr. B-G and strive to summon the streams of knowledge, but not yet. This weekend I will just be Peter. Just one more person seeking solace from the sun's August rays. One more guy trying to catch a rideable wave.

Each year at the end of August, our superintendent shares his goals for the upcoming school year with the entire K-12 staff. This meeting is followed by a second gathering, where the high school principal and his administrative team share their goals for the high school. In a third meeting, the English Department chairman shares his goals for - you guessed it - the English Department.

Teachers are then asked to declare their personal goals for the school year. I am not sure what my "official" goals will be for 2007-2008, but below are some of the things I would like to accomplish (Included are also some things I know I will accomplish... it makes the list less intimidating.):

* Continue professional development by attending a podcasting seminar this August, and the New England Association of Teachers of English conference this October.

* Continue working to establish a professional school culture by collaborating and sharing with colleagues.

* Work to maintain open communication with parents (via blog, e-mail, phone, and student/teacher/parent conferences).

* Spend more time focusing on the writing process, and consider assigning more weight to brainstorms, freewrites, rough-drafts, and revisions.

* Improve implementation of writer's workshop by better modeling the drafting process and explicitly teaching what constitutes effective peer feedback.

* Create assignments that foster higher-order thinking skills.

* Ensure students write every day.

* Ensure students read every day.

* Provide the opportunity for students to think critically every day.

* Spend more time developing a reader's workshop, and improving the reading skills of all students.

* Be aware of students' multiple learning styles and provide opportunities for ALL to engage in small group and whole-class discussions. This includes finding ways for students who struggle with public speaking to comfortably express their views and thoughts.

* Do a better job helping reluctant readers to read class literature outside of class. I'd really like to arm these students with a list of reading strategies and get them to tolerate and perhaps even find pleasure in reading.

* Use non-fiction articles and shorter writing pieces to flush out themes and major ideas from the required curriculum in hopes of making the novels, plays, and short-stories more accessible and engaging .

* With my journalism class, find a balance between teaching and assessing concepts and skills with time for students to work independently on our high school's newspaper.

* Build on the use of blogs as a place to post and share writing. Perhaps this also means starting a class wiki or using podcasts and other technological tools to lend a 21st century bent to various assignments.

* Get students reading newspapers and paying more attention to current events. See this post here about the thoughts I have for my classroom's Current Events Cove.

* Find ways to hold all students accountable during small-group discussions by setting baseline standards that all students must meet when working in groups.

* Elucidate the steps required for an in-depth discussion, rather than simply hoping one will organically evolve. Sometimes the students will naturally take a discussion into deeper waters. I need to do a better job of observing the conditions present when this happens, and then be able to articulate it so they understand what led to them having a "really cool" or "awesome" discussion.

I could probably spend a few hours sitting here writing about what I'd like to do as a teacher next year, and what I'd like my students to accomplish, but I think I'm going to try to bring this post to a close, as it's getting close to dinner time, and I want to do some reading a bit later.

If any of you have thoughts or suggestions about some of my goals, or would like to share any of your own, please do!

One of my goals for this blog is to post comments multiple times per week. I would like to focus my responses on content - on what I'm teaching, what I'm learning, what I'm discovering. I'd like to document my process, and the highs and lows prevalent to the teaching profession.

I would like to limit my responses to curriculum and pedagogy as much as possible. As I begin to publicize this blog with my students, colleagues, and friends, word will get out that Mr. B-G has a blog. Unlike some other edu-blogs, I do not plan to share my personal feelings about individual students, teachers, administrators, school policies, etc.

This blog's main purpose is to serve as a virtual extension of my classroom, so what isn't discussed in class won't be shared in the blog. I am comfortable with people knowing who I am and that I am blogging, and as such want to be as professional and objective as possible, knowing my audience could literally be anyone.

That being said, I would be remiss if I did not mention that we had a bomb threat yesterday, that school was released, and that it was disruptive and troubled me greatly. It's a shame, because we just returned from vacation, and are at the point where we're switching gears - the quarter is ending and a new semester is starting. Teachers are wrapping up units and planning great things for the second half. Yesterday's disturbance was a momentum killer.

One of the nice things about working with students, I must say, is their resiliency and ability to bounce back. Their positive energy today was inspiring, and helped me feel better. Tomorrow we'll be back in the computer lab, making edits and revisions in preparation for our short story postings next week.

On a final note, I don't know if anyone but me has yet to read these entries. Eventually I hope to comment on some of the other teacher blogs included in the link list on the right, in hopes that they can learn I'm here and drop a few comments in return.