The Living Rockumentary

Who dis?

Congratulations, Henning, on what sounds like an unforgettable experience earlier this week with one of your all-time faves and biggest influences.

It's been a considerable amount of time since I last posted but I always wonder how interested people are in non-musical posts and music is only a slight presence in my daily life nowadays. I've been exposing my carpool partner and fellow clinical English teacher Sarah Paige to Humbert tracks recently but I don't play my guitar or actively seek out any new music to listen to. I do have my afterschool recording studio club on Thursdays but that's more for the kids and would fall under the umbrella of school stuff more so than music stuff.

At any rate, I thought for those of you who might be interested, here's how my Monday played out (compare and contrast with Henning's):

5:20 am-6:50 am: Rise, shave (everyday now, a real drag but I've grown accustomed to it), shower, make lunches, rouse the wife and daughter, breakfast with daughter (Shelly eats later on, after I leave), give Hannah vitamin, daily asthma meds, get her dressed, make coffee (never used to touch the stuff but it became part of my daily regimen when I started getting only 5-6 hours of sleep a night)

7:20 Arrive at school, make copies of MLA format packets for students who've lost them;

7:50 (A period) Set up at table on 3rd floor, where I have duty during A periods. Basically, I sit here and correct papers or read in front of a bathroom sign-in sheet for students to sign. I check their passes, make sure they sign both first and last names. 1st period, there aren’t many kids who need to visit the bathrooms so I spend the period finishing off the exceedingly dry reading I have assigned for this afternoon's Adolescent Growth & Development class. I end up reading about 20+ pages and am just 3 shy of finishing.

8:50 (B Period) Back downstairs to teach one of my English 12 College Prep classes. Today we work on the second half of T.S. Eliot's "The Love Song of J. Alfred Prufrock," a long dramatic monologue suffused with allusions, most of which I don't expect the students to get but we did go over Marvell's "To His Coy Mistress" last week so I'm hoping they get at least that one. Do they? Yes and no. Not right off the bat, but with a leading question, they do. Anyway, I truly enjoy the teaching of poetry. Lemme cut and paste a quotation from one of my posts in my online Technology In The Classroom course to illustrate:

In my experience thus far, I have found I really enjoy teaching poetry. Appreciating, analyzing and learning "with" poetry is like approaching a swamp. One looks at a swamp from dry ground and smells the stench and sees the muck and is filled with disgust and a touch of fear. And as you start to wade into it and feel the slimy filth start to envelop your feet and legs, the discomfort heightens but if you can just push past the anxiety and submerge your head in the muck and splash around in it, the feeling is just marvelous and euphoric and man is at peace with the natural world where he belongs. The world of human experience compressed into a viscous fluid of language: dense, messy, filthy, pungent, erotic, sensuous, intoxicating- pleasure awaits if total abandon is indulged. As Bob Dylan once said, "I'm a poet, I know it, hope I don't blow it." But then there are the words of my student Alycia, in response to the rapture I take in teaching poetry, "Mister, you gotta be crazy. Dumb crazy."

“Getting students to connect to the literature of the curriculum affectively can be difficult if the piece utilizes archaic language or if it doesn't on the surface directly relate to their lives. In order to do this, I might place students in the pieces- I play the part of J. Alfred Prufrock, updated as an awkward dorky adolescent version of Mr. Westcott who is enamored of Alyson and in agony trying to figure out how to ask her to the prom; in "My Last Duchess," to illustrate the idea of a suitor picking cherries for the duchess while she rides around the orchard on a white mule, I'll update it to Brandon inviting Amanda to share his bucket of fried chicken when he sees her driving around Forest Park in her Charger.

And this is not necessarily part of the UDL framework but it is a reality of our teaching, at least at Central, which is that I find myself presenting or reviewing material in different methods if the class falls on fifth or sixth period. Then it's time for group work or more drama- I'll get down on my knees and read "To His Coy Mistress" to Jeremy, who's sitting on a chair in the front of the room wearing a wig and winking coquettishly, playing the part without having to be expressly told what to do. Once I start the reading, the message, regardless of the archaic language, becomes clear- this is basically a 17th century Puritan version of 50 Cent's "Candy Shop."So given the three poetry examples here (Eliot's Prufrock, Marvell's Mistress and Browning's Duchess), I try to support affective learning by incorporating various learning strategies, often based on the times of day, relating the themes of the poems to adolescents. In these cases, adolescents should be able to relate to Prufrock's indecision based on fear of rejection, Marvell's elaborate argument to try to "smash" this lady or the slight that the Duke feels when his wife appears to appreciate fried chicken, I mean cherries, on the same level as she does his attention. These are all emotions most teenagers can relate to as they fall in and out of love with each other.”

I also collect a pile of Introductory paragraph plus First main Paragraphs for student research papers.

9:50am (C Period) This is the period I always look forward to. During C, I have Room 127B to myself. No other classes are scheduled in this room belonging to my mentor teacher so I have space to clear my head and time to devote to all the menial secretarial work- entering grades and attendance logs into the Gradekeeper computer program, checking attendance sheets to see who may have cut class, correcting papers, shaping lesson plans. Today I do all the aforementioned things, then use the rest of the period to start penning my reflection paper based on the reading I completed earlier (or almost did- I never in fact read those last three pages).

10:50am (D Period) Time to head to the second floor for Creative Writing class. At the moment, the kids are working on Onion-like satirical newspaper articles. Today we go over the dreary lesson where the kids learn how to approach any kind of basic newspaper article writing so that their satirical or funny articles sound like real newspaper pieces. So we talk about covering the 5 Ws (who was involved, what happened, etc.), we talk about eliminating bias, the inverted pyramid (main, general details upfront working towards supporting details). Some of my favorite student-composed funny headlines: “Dead Dog Plays Dead For The Last Time,” “McDonald’s Revises Employee Bathroom Policy: At Least Use Toilet Paper for God’s Sake,” “MC Hammer Gets Nailed,” “50 Cent Unable To Change,” “President Bush Discovers Object Known As ‘Book,’ Inserts Under Broken Table Leg.”

11:50 Lunch in Teacher’s Lounge

12:25 (E Period) I spend this period back in my mentor teacher’s room. He teaches E while I resume my writing on the computer. I complete my reflection paper just in time- it’s due that day in class.

1:25 (F Period) My other English 12 College prep class. I’m just beginning “Prufrock” with this group. Given that it’s last period of the day, I don’t expect to get too far- when we next meet on Wednesday morning first period, we can get into the poem in more depth. Nevertheless, the majority of the kids are engaged in the piece today and we get a good 1/3 of the way in. “What kind of a love song is this?” Exactly. Wait till we get to “Do I dare to eat a peach?” Yup, they get that one. Or one meaning of it anyway. Collect more Introductory paragraphs.

2:25 The high school day is over. Sarah and I meet up and head over to Chestnut Middle School where our Adolescent Growth & Development class is held. We’re there until 5:30.

6:15 Arrive back home. I play with Hannah for about 20 minutes while Shelly fires up a DiGiorno frozen pizza.

6:45-7:45 Dinner, check emails, fam-time, read Hannah a bedtime story

7:45 Checkbook/bills online

8:00 There’s not much in the way of lesson planning tonight. I’m still working on “Prufrock” in both English classes, which I’d worked out the plan for over the weekend. Since D period meets tomorrow after lunch, I put off Creative Writing lesson plan until tomorrow to work on in one of my prep periods. What I need to work on tonight is plowing through correcting the pile of Introductory paragraph/First main paragraphs for my two English class’ research papers. I never did get to correcting during the day because I was working on my own homework. It’s double the work because not only am I correcting them individually but using the flaws I find in them to develop a lesson plan for what needs to be addressed for the classes as a whole. See, these students have a good handle on how to develop paragraphs and how to incorporate quotations and all that- some of the things they’re having trouble with are: using present tense when speaking about literature, favoring general/abstract over the specific/concrete, and spending too much time simply summarizing events in the novel rather than developing their arguments.

10:00 It’s around this time that I start to look at the assignment for my class after school tomorrow, which runs even longer. I end up getting home on Tuesdays around 7:00, just in time to catch Hannah before her bedtime. Anyway, tonight I take out the case study assignment I’d started previously. The assignment was to invent a situation that interests us where we have some question about education law. The following day we’re going to be visited by a guest lecturer who practices education law. He turns out to be a fascinating guy (and a part-time folkie musician) who also happens to know Pete Seeger. Anyway, my case study involves a student of mine who comes to school each day blazed. I have to research online the school law, state law and federal law as it applies to my case study. I do some of that and save the rest for tomorrow to hand off to Gladys, my partner in this collaborative assignment.

11:20 bedtime