A long time gone, but I'm coming back

Sorry for my absence, absent readers. Where weren't you when I wasn't here?

We are in the home stretch, my students and I, of the fourth quarter. As a strangely warm March heats up message boards everywhere with boring arguments about climate change (who are these messengers, anyway? Who reads other people's crap on the computer and then comments on it?), I am once again reassessing my instructional style and its impact (or lack of) on my students.

200 kids a year, now finishing up my 7th year of full-time teaching -- hold on, let me run to the math teacher next door and -- okay, about 1,400 students have (mostly) made it through my class.

Here's the thing, though, dear absent reader -- and please respond if you feel the same or different or just want to ask me to please, God, stop writing -- I am tired, so tired. Like Bancini in Cuckoo's Nest, I am tired. Whew, Oh Lord, I am awful tired. I was tired when I started this blog, and I'm tired now.

Promises made on unread blogs are wondrous and powerful in their flexibility and ability to be dropped, so here goes: I am going to change it all up next year:

"Simplify and activate" will be painted over "Wing it with Worksheets" on my classroom coat of arms (the one with a picture of Mark Harmon from Summer School overlaid with bits of PBJ sandwiches lost in the numerous spit-takes when I was struck dumb by students who didn't know, for example, that there were no sharks in Lake Michigan).

Simplify -- I've been assigning current events as homework with the intention of generating current event knowledge and opinion during class discussions, but time has prevented those discussions and, judging from reading their summaries, they are getting little understanding of the world from this assignment.

There are a few other things that I'm going to rethink. More on that later.

Activate -- I'm tired of seeing indifferent faces and hearing comments about dull assignments. To be honest, I'm sick of what I seem to becoming -- a worksheet jockey who's first Christmas present is always for the guy who runs the copy center. Can't be without work to keep them quiet and punish them!

So I'm going to cut back steeply on the lectures (which I'm already pretty minimal on). I'll keep some -- students need to learn to take notes. But there are so many ways to deliver information that get kids out their seats.

To process and apply that information, I'm also going to use activities. The InterWeb is full of ideas -- it seems the hard part is narrowing them down. I just read this on the drpezz blog about a nifty (yes, I said nifty) to make bar graphs with sticky notes.

I. Can. Do. This.

And the thing is: I think an engaged classroom is going to be a lot less tiring. Harry Wong has a thing about how the student should be more tired than the teacher at the end of the day. I can't find it offhand, but if anyone knows it, please let me know. But it makes sense.

I want to become a better teacher

Jaime Escalante. Rafe Esquith. That woman who divorced Patrick Duffy. Those are great teachers. Why can't I be one?

Maybe it's because I can't follow through with promises to myself. In my first post I called myself out on using rhetorical questions and I obviously couldn't keep that down for even one post. It's not that I don't have some good ideas, buy my follow-through, my persistence, my sticktoitiveness (a word I encountered during an institute day presentation) looks more like Goofus than Gallant.

There are issues with the teachers I mentioned about their commitment and possible lack of home/family life, but that's a topic for another day. Time is certainly in short supply for me, being a parent to three children, two of whom just had to be born at the same time. There is time enough, though, but the energy is in short supply. I feel like an old lithium battery that just can't hold a charge anymore.

Does anyone else feel that whoosh of lost energy at about 4 p.m. every day? Last night, I sat in the recliner as my lovely wife got dinner together for the doodle duo (and they played in big cardboard boxes that brought their cute pink chairs). I closed my eyes, and . . . well, y'know, there were 10 minutes gone.

Of course I know that my job is not special in terms of causing exhaustion. I'm not complaining about my lot in life and I do understand that most occupations have their own private hells. The grass does look greener sometimes, even when I look at what my lovely wife does -- special education -- and how few students are under her care (about 40 to my 140). I see her come home exhausted, I listen to her stories about trifling colleagues, I've even visited classrooms with her and met some severely affected kids; and, yet, I drool over that lopsided ratio as if the fix is all in the numbers. But I know it is not.

The key is science. Or at least the scientific method, since science is, of course, banned now in U.S. public schools. Observation and notes, the hallmarks of good scienticians, are the keys in my pursuit of a Golden Apple (I don't care about awards, but of course I do). As I mentioned, I have good ideas. I need to try them, reflect on the outcomes, and then keep what works and ditch the rest.

I guess, to follow the method, I need to get some kind of picture at what kind of condition I'm in now as a teacher -- student grades being the most concrete makers. So, next post: The Data!

My goals for this new project

What is this blog about? What do I hope to acheive? Will it make me a better person? What can you get out of reading it? Can I move beyond tired gimmicks like rhetorical questions?

Okay, here are my goals, in no particular order:

1) Become a better teacher. More on this in my first real post, coming up ... soon?

2) Practice my writing. It's been a long time. Once upon a time I had authorial aspirations, but novel-writing -- more specifically, plot construction -- is not a strong point. I do enjoy, however, sitting at a keyboard and, in the words of the understandably but sadly underrated John From Cincinnati, "dumping out."

3) As the title implies, I need to figure out my energy deficit issue. How can I increase my energy outside of a risky affair with pharmaceutical speed? "Living on reds, Vitamin C, and cocaine," may help Sweet Jane, but, really, whatever became of her? No, I need to add something healthy to my diet, or more likely, subtract what is not healthy. I'm looking at you, beer and coffee.

What is this blog supposed to do for my energy? Sure, it's one more thing to do (or not do, as my history of new projects would suggest). I think, hope it will be an outlet so I can dump out and maybe see clearly what has been going on in my head. In this way, I can become more aware of where my bad habits need to be expurgated and my good habits expanded.

4) Lose weight. I'm not sure that this blog is the means to that particular end, but why not? As long as I'm putting together a wish list, why not throw that in? Like a congressional pay hike tucked secret-like into some patriotic defense bill.

5) Continue being a happy Dad? More on that later.