Diversity and Accommodation for Your School's Adults

Too often in professional development, faculty meetings, things that schools host or do, they seem to ignore or not even consider the diversity and accommodation they insist on seeing in their classrooms.

Presenters don't use mics. They seem to take pride in saying "I'm a teacher, y'all can hear me."
PD often requires movement, not considering that people may have mobility issues.
PD treats educated adults, like students, not showing/sharing ideas, but forcing adults to go through the steps.
Items are color coded, and not distinguishable otherwise.
Adults are forced into groups, forced to talk.
PowerPoint presentations are shown, but not read.
Fonts are small.
Images and videos aren't cited. Or described.

I have known since I was little that the standard world was not designed for me. I've counted ceiling tiles and window panes to calm anxiety for as long as I can remember. My room was always neat, because I shoved everything troublesome into my closet.
I never felt part of anything, always weird, always different. We moved a lot, and I guess I always attributed it to that. I was enthusiastically me, which never ended well. I took notes passed in class at face value, not realizing I was the butt of jokes. In middle school I ran for school treasurer, telling everyone Spock was my dad and I was the "logical choice." I didn't win. But I did get my ass kicked for weeks. I didn't understand it, Spock was the closest representative I knew for what I was like.

My family acknowledged my inability to eat food that touched. Jokingly said I wanted to join the Navy only because I could eat on divided plates for life. They knew I had few friends, and spent most of my time alone, but I was classified more as book worm than anything else.
I continued to have a hard time socializing because I took people at face value, and always said what I meant.

These things do not go over well.

College was better, if only because I quickly fell into theatre, becoming master electrician, a world of easily understood rules, math, science, and color coding. It was a field my issues became skills in, and I loved it. Everyone was weird in theatre. No one made fun of me. You worked, played, and hung out with the same people, so I never felt like there was a set of social rules I didn't get and failed at.

Grad school was for all intents and purposes a step back. My first one was okay, I liked the CUNY system, and the professors, if not the commute. I was teaching at this point to, so I saw the real connections between my classes and my teaching. My second program was not so great, it was summers only, and suggested that we do the reading before hand. So I did. I was made fun of for not knowing the northeast private school references. For having my reading done and reading "fluff" out in public. For always answering first when the professor asked something. For arguing with classmates.

It was then I realized that these were not quirks, these were real differences. It was also the first time that people actively disliked me for these parts of me.

Later teaching jobs highlighted these issues more.
I would attend a  PD or conference, make notes on things I could try, plan it out, go back and the next school day implement it.
I get told constantly that my issue is I want things to change overnight and that's not how things work.
I think that if there are changes we can do immediately that help kids, any reason not to is bullshit.

These opinions do not make me popular.

I get told that if things don't go my way, I Lucy and the football and go home.
I think that if I put work into something, and you decide to do it differently, a way I no longer believe in, I lose interest because it's not what I want to spend time on.

I am Amelia Bedelia.

I don't play politics because I can't, and worse, I don't understand when others do.
If you ask me your opinion, and I tell you, and you get mad, I am totally confused.
When you ask me out to a social event and I say no thank you, I often don't notice, and never understand why you get upset.

Over the years, I've learned to be formulaic in responses, answers, to try and mitigate the me-ness of me, while resenting the fact that I have to.

I have been told by bosses and supervisors I am too blunt. That I should soften myself so other people like me more. I resent this too.

I always volunteer for things, because I don't believe in pointing our problems without being willing to do the work. But I get told by others I work with, often in what I assume are snarky tones, that I'm making them look bad.
I think if they cared then they should do better.

I wear simple things, often just different colors of the same thing, a rotation I've made work over the years because I have no concept of acceptable, and trying to reason it out gives me anxiety. When I am under stress everything becomes color coordinated.
I can't handle my systems being out of place, the more stressed I am, the more rigid my adherence to Post-Its squared on papers, color-coded writing, becomes.

I used to have a friend who would walk into my apartment, flip corners of rugs up, turn books upside down and wait to see how long I lasted before fixing it.
I never thought these things were funny.

Despite all this, I've never had a hard time packing everything up and moving across the country on a whim. Quitting a job/field and starting from scratch.
Traveling is hard for me, but over the years I've discovered that if I follow my systems- packing the same way, two hours early to the airport, follow the same night and morning routines, I can mitigate a lot of it.

I take anxiety medicine, but while that has helped with me feeling ill, my systems and "quirks" remain as strong as ever.

I might not seem like a great fit for being a teacher. But my non-typical issues have served me well. My organization helps me stay on top of things. I can model systems for students, making patterns and structures they can understand. Color coding is a teacher's friend. And while I routinely mutter "I hate people" on my commute, preferring the company of my dog, because people are exhausting with their social cues I can't read, and their hypocrisy, high school students are honest, often brutally so.

I don't need to figure out what my students mean. They tell me. They don't lie. They don't dissemble.
I think me being different, which I'm open about in class, how I learn, like things, understand items, makes my classroom more accessible, more welcoming, to all kinds of students who may be different.

My students don't mind I'm honest, it's one of the things every year that they say it's one of the things they appreciate. My college students didn't always agree- evaluations frequently said I was too blunt.

I never have issues with days just spent with my students.
It's only ever the adults.

I dislike being forced to join groups of people I don't know at meetings. It makes me irritable to have my time wasted when I'm told to read a book for PD and then they read it to me. I don't like group work, although I'm always willing to work collaboratively if I can complete my work on my own. I don't like small talk, I don't see the point. I'm bad at it, and I long ago just stopped trying.

Department and faculty meetings and professional development are not designed with me in mind.

Some schools are finally, way too late, starting to insist on diversity, representation, and accommodation, from their teachers and in their classrooms. But too often, like lots of things, these become just the latest fads to check off, without any real investment. Lip service but no real change.

I think if schools really cared about these things they'd have staff priorities to hire more educators of color. Not just read about poverty in schools but hold teachers accountable for implementing real change to address poverty in their classrooms. They hold anti-racist workshops, and make teachers create action items they're held accountable for.
Schools would model representation and accommodation in how they lead meetings, the readings they assign.

The mantra I've had the last couple of years is "I love my students more than I hate X" with X being whatever nonsense I don't understand that week. This week, I had a hard time with that.
Just as the constant gaslighting women, and WOC, and queer women, receive all the time, especially at work, wears on us, exhausts us, saps our strength, I wondered how much my stress about anticipating how to act in a world not accommodated for me, wears me down too.

I know my happiest days are those with no adults in them.

Educate is an Action Verb. But Before That Comes Some Hard Work and Hard Truths.

I've always believed that the reflective teacher is the best teacher. That the teachers that are problems in schools, actively harming students, are the ones who do not stop to ask WHY students are reacting a certain way, WHY they're teaching certain things, IF there is a better way. Teachers who teach the same thing year after year, despite having different students, or who teach how and what they were taught, despite years and sometimes decades of change in thought, resources, and approaches, actively harm students. Teachers who are not aware of and participating in the major conversations in our field are actively harming students.

Race, class, poverty, representation, should not be checkboxes in lessons and practice, only during certain months and days but the foundation.

But before THAT important work can happen, teachers must first do an inventory of themselves.*

Growing up in Connecticut, the people of difference I knew were Lebanese (early 1980s) and Jewish. When we moved to North Carolina, they were African-Americans (1990s). When we lived outside of D.C in Maryland, it was Asian-Americans, mostly Korean, and the Black people who lived with us in government housing.

My grandmother's first husband was an Army chaplain, and they were stationed in Japan for a while, later Germany, so growing up when we lived with her, the house was a museum of things from these postings. Name Day dolls from Japan. Hummels. Japanese lacquer furniture, tea sets, fans, prints, a koto, a full kimono.
On International Day in elementary school, I dressed up in the full kimono. These artifacts were never presented as the colonial/imperial appropriation, the "right" of armed forces to take cultural artifacts for their own, for display in homes, but as relics of my grandmother's travels.

In similar ways, my mother did harm by, in her misguided hippie way, telling me that people of different color, and ethnicities were "just like me." She intended to teach me to not "see color" or be prejudiced. What she did was erase centuries of oppression and violence, placing us all on the same, level playing field.
Yet in my house, when we moved frequently, throwing clothes in big black garbage bags, my mom called this "Puerto Rican luggage" and the phrase "gypped" out of something was common.
These lessons were learned along with first-hand accounts of the Holocaust, the grand piano in my grandmother's house was full of black and white pictures. The story she told was that half the pictures were the American family who fought, and dies and in World War II and the other half were the German Jews of the family who died in the camps.
When I lived in North Carolina and heard the n-word I knew it was wrong an racist, as were the Confederate flags that flew everywhere but as a student, and later a teacher, in that same school, I rarely spoke out against these things, in fear of my job, and just cowardice.
As a student in high school, when I was bullied by Black girls, I fell into the racist trap I'd been taught, that they were racist against white people. It would be decades before I unlearned that awful lie.
I grew up with people who were gay, from different cultures, races, and everything I was taught at home taught me that these people were the same as me, I was the same as them.

I never interrogated the problems, the contradictions of these lessons against my social-justice, hippie mother, and Civil Rights marching grandmother.

I certainly never saw myself as racist, but an honest look at growing up, I was repeating racist behaviors and phrases, which IS the definition of racist.

When I started working on my Masters in education, I was introduced to Diane Ravitch's history of NYC schools, and I loved it. I ashamed to say my love continued until last year when I learned from Twitter (I learn everything from Twitter) how damaging and incomplete her work was. The damage that forwarding the "factory model" of schools does.

In the early 2000s, I first encountered Lies My Teacher Told Me. It changed my practice. I actively taught chapters in my AP classes, I reoriented my American Literature classes to start with the narrative of Indigenous, the Taino, and challenged my students to ask why American History and Literature erased them, ignored their narrative.

In schools where was Columbus Day was celebrated, I pushed back, I taught primary documents and historical texts and op-eds about the real story.
I did the same for Thanksgiving. I would show this clip was Addams Family. I thought I was shaking things up. Being subversive.

But I wasn't.
I was replicating the same crap in different ways.
Wednesday Addams is an uber-white girl, surrounded by uber-white, privileged children, in brown face, performing Native narratives. She has taken revenge/retribution away from the people wronged, appropriated it all as badly as the Thanksgiving narrative does.
I did harm teaching this.

I still start my American Lit classes with Native voices, but I let them speak for themselves, providing context, but much more aware of whose voices I'm elevating and privileging. I start classes with land acknowledgements, point out Native authors in our classroom library, point the students towards action.
I show the students that we are on Pueblo lands.
I ask them why they do not learn about Hispanic, Chican@, Native history in their classes in Albuquerque. How many Black, Women, CHican@, Native historians, mathematicians, scientists, writers they study.
This year I actively worked to include these writers and voices in my classroom library of books the students read independently and in the mentor texts I use.

But I've been teaching 18 years. And I just made these changes this year.

It was only last year that I started actively teaching my students not to use ableist language.
I still struggle not the think phrases like "crazy as a bag of cats" or "bat-sh*t crazy." I'm rewiring my brain and mouth after a lifetime.

That I was explicit about the ways language and the words you use matter.

How much harm did I do in the 16, 17 years before that? I would have told you that I was a well-intentioned, anti-racist, not-bigoted teacher. My honest reflection shows otherwise.

I am ashamed of the teacher I used to be. For me, these last few years, it was as though I finally realized just how high the stakes were. What happened when I stood by silent. When I did not call out or name racist, sexist, misogynistic, homophobic, transphobic behavior and language. That my fear of losing my job or facing consequences should not be a greater concern that the safety and life of others.
It is also my privilege that allowed me to live my white, cis, life like this, to ignore for literally decades, these truths that others live so brutally with every day.
I mistakenly believed that growing up poor, with a single mother, meant that I was aware of these issues, and acted accordingly. I was wrong. That was a lie.

Even if teachers do not think they are doing harm, even if they see no harm in their use of curriculum, resources, phrases, if they are not listening to others, they, I, am actively harming students. 
I am pretty horrified at the damage I did to my students over the years.
It doesn't matter if I intended it or not.
It doesn't matter if I am sorry.
It does not matter that I have radically changed my practice.

I say all this not to excuse my past behavior. There is no excuse. It's important to see that combination of environment and ignorance influenced me, and was systematic. That I was not actively taught otherwise. That my education, my learning, has occurred late in life, in recent years, and is due to the work done by disability scholars, educators of color, who should not be bearing the brunt of my education.
Do I think I am different from white supremacist Nazis? Racist, bigots who fly the Confederate flag? Yes.
But I would not be honest, and would be doing a disservice if I did not acknowledge the white privilege and supremacy I forwarded and participated in by replicating these systems, particularly as a teacher.
I've written before that I am not the teacher I used to be. In part, because my teaching models for toxic models of masculinity, and I did harm too in emulating and modeling their behaviors and practices. It was only once I identified these things, honestly looked at them, that I was able to see how toxic and harmful they were, and change.

I see a lot of (mostly white, sometimes men, but often white women) educators actively performing their anti-racism online, as though we (and I do use the we here purposely) should get credit for the retweets, the links, the statements. And I DO think this is our job, but it can go wrong. It can become  the online equivalent of "But I have a black friend."
I put off writing this because I did not want this to read like that- "look at me, I'm so cool for my anti-racist work." As others have written, there are pitfalls to being open about the work white people need to do. We should be privileging others' voices, not putting ourselves in front, using our power, privilege, and voices to grant access and platforms to others.

On the other hand, one thing I've learned, especially from the #ClearTheAir work and conversations and readings, is that until I do this reflection, this work, until I catalog all that informed me (growing up, family, educational lessons learned and not), until I stop and ask myself what harm I have done, and honestly think about that, I cannot possible be better. Be active. Be anti-racist in my work.

I cannot be the educator I want to be and that my students need me to be.

This is scary work. There are repercussions, in the classroom, in schools, with parents, with the Internet at large. There are consequences, and hate. But what I have come to realize (late, oh too late) is how severe the consequences are of not doing this work. Of not speaking out. Not changing my practice, my behaviors, my language.

I am grateful for the communities of Twitter that I have learned from.
I encourage people who are not in schools where there are like minded people to both do your own homework and listen to those giving of their valuable time and knowledge when they do not have to.
Because of them I NOW actively think about the texts I teach, how I teach them. I am explicit with my students about WHY we read them. I call racism racism, sexism sexism, misogyny, transphobia, homophobia, by their names. And then I call them wrong.

I want my students to feel seen. Heard. Represented. I want them to see themselves in the works we read. I want them to see, no, DEMAND their place in the world. To shout from the rooftops that they belong, and claim their place. To fight tooth and nail to be seen, heard, listened to.

That is the work I do now. Those are my goals.

It's a work in progress. I'm only sorry I started so late.

*I'm trying really hard to avoid using "we" and "our" as I write about these issues because who is the "we"? It almost always centers white folx, and assumes because WE'RE not doing the work, it's not being done, which is a lie. I still slip. I'm a work in progress.

The Paradox of Lesson Plans

I am a firm believer in Understanding by Design and designing lessons with the end in mind. I strongly believe that if you want your students to learn how to analyze a text YOU as a teacher need to have a clear sense of the skills needed to get there, and the assignments/activities they need to practice to get there.

One of the greatest gifts though that my experience and graduate education has allowed me is the ability to shift and adapt those plans to what my students need if they're not getting something, or if something isn't working.

Yet K-12 education seems designed to restrict this sort of responsive teaching by its insistence on structures.
For examples, my observations by my assistant principal, follow this rubric:

In the past, if admin did not see a feature in the class they were sitting in, you did not get credit for it. Other admins interpret the rubric differently, checking things they know you do. The end result is all over the spectrum.

There's all kinds of literature about how teacher evaluations are often just a box to check and rarely do what they should which is observe teachers and offer feedback and resources that help them improve. Up until our new governor, student performance on state tests figured into our end of year evaluations which meant that if you taught all honors/AP and your students scored better on the state test, you would have a higher score than teachers who taught other classes, special ed, etc. This requirement no longer is in effect.

We have one schedule observation in the fall, one unscheduled in the spring, and a couple of walk-throughs.

For the structured observations we're required to upload our lesson plan within 48 hours. In my building lots of people complain about this, which honestly, I do not get. Is it a hoop to jump through? Absolutely. If your teaching is doing what it should, it should not be a big deal to type it up.

Another issue with observations though is the "dog and pony" show aspect. When there is no habit of informal drop bys, observations, or when teachers are not comfortable being observed and receiving feedback for improvement, and reflecting, then what happens is on the one day they're observed, suddenly teachers are speaking to students, engaging, in ways that are not a regular occurrence in the classroom. Usually this is evident from the odd looks on students' faces, but not always.

Here is my lesson plan for my fall observation. The district and school do not require a specific format like other places I've taught, but they do recommend that you use the rubric to design/format your lessons.

My school does "require" an essential question and learning objectives to be posted clearly in the room. They also "require" a closing activity, like an exit ticket and bell to bell instruction. So these are often the first things checked off on your observation.

I like being organized. I like my lessons to be accessible.
I rough plan out my year in week by week calendars divided by marking periods. Here is the one for AP Lang, here is the one for English 9.

I post hardcopies of the calendars in my room, and in Google Classroom so the students always have access to it. It is a live doc, which I tell them, with me making changes as needed. I try not to move deadlines on them, or make major changes once the marking period has started.

In addition, for each unit I create a version of the Understanding by Design unit template, changed over the years to fit my needs. Here is the one for our novel unit this marking period.
One of the biggest changes I've made over the years is to give the students copies at the beginning of the marking period and making it more an interactive worksheet.

I edit, revise them as the marking period progresses. Maybe I move a story, or change a reading, based on what we're doing in class, or maybe I add a mini-lesson when I see them struggling with a skill. While the broad strokes are in place in August, based on skills I know I need to teach, testing requirements, etc. the specifics and details only get put in once I know and can respond to my kids.

This year I used this planner, which I really like, and each week I look at the next week in the calendar, and plan the specific breakdown of class. If there are resources, I hyperlink them on the calendar, but this is the nitty gritty work. Once this is done, I write my learning targets based on what we're doing.

Next, I use my planner to write the day by lessons that project to the students each day. My AP students do have a class notes set of slides, but it's not this detailed.

Here is the slide for my English 9 students. It's not as detailed as I used to make them because I realized students weren't thinking and responding about stuff, they were just copying. So the Notebook Time prompt gives them a topic, but I don't give specifics because that's our discussion.
The station rotations I try to give questions to get them thinking more than locked in things.

I post the link to this in Google Classroom so they always have access to it. This is really helpful when the rotation requires them to watch a video or read an article, because I put the hyperlink on the slides.

I used to make them more colorful and with multipages with images, but I've gone to this because students said the slide being laid out how they should organize their notebook helped, and the less busy it is the more I think it helps them focus.

 Now, something I've struggled with the last few years is the idea that I am replicating work and I'm not always sure why.

Practically, to do my job, I just need the calendar and the planner. But I do the other stuff because it helps me communicate with parents, and it makes my class more accessible to students.

Some students like checking my notebook (below) if they've been absent rather than the class slides.
Also, this year I have committed to doing the work with the students, so when that's applicable having the sample to show them helps.

But all this means I'm often typing/recreating the same thing over and over again. Which means when 2nd period's class points out an issue, and I change things, it's easy to change the slide for 5th and 6th period. But then the notebook is not up to date. So I spend a lot of time ripping pages out, or covering notes with Post-Its.

Last week when I taught a station rotation on problematic favs as a way to get students to think about representation and lack thereof, each class had radically different reactions to the topic, so the materials I'd prepped fell flat for two our of three classes. Which was fine, because I was able to change my approach for them, but it also means that the class I taught did not resemble the class planned. There are some schools where that flexibility and responsiveness is not praised but punished.

I mention all this because I think it's a concrete example of a basic paradox and issue with teaching. We should be tailoring our lessons and teaching to the students in front of us on any given day who are not necessarily the ones in front of us tomorrow, or Monday. Yet the mechanisms of administration and housekeeping restrict these ideas or mean that if you're committed to doing this work, you're doing a lot more of it to comply.

Should teachers wing their whole class with no concept or feeling of where they're headed or how to get their students there? Of course not. But in many ways, the requirement of boxes and paperwork to check off feels like another way we don't trust teachers to be professionals.

Like it or not, part of my job is to cover the Common Core State Standards.
Yet I can't be trusted that I'll do this, I have to put them on paper and prove it.

It is my job to serve all the needs of my students.
Yet I can't be trusted to do this, I have to list target students on a lesson and explain in detail how I'm serving them. This means identified students get written down, but on any given day I don't know which of my students is going to need more help, more attention, and most days it is not an identified kiddo.

It's also part of my responsibility as a teacher to communicate with parents, call home with concerns and praise, let them know what we're doing in class, make sure my lessons are accessible (for English Language Learners, technology, special education modifications) yet none of these are checked in an observation. I know teachers who refuse to call home. Hate grading. Literally two-thirds of the job.

More and more I've realized that it is my job to be actively anti-racist in my teaching, pushing back against sexism, misogyny, homophobia, and transphobia in the classroom. Yet there are no measures of that.

There are lots of things that we should all see in all classrooms. Yet few of them are reflected on the piece of paper called a lesson plan.

I understand that teachers need to be accountable, we shoulder a great responsibility. But I wish we as a profession were trusted AS professionals to determine what we needed to do our jobs and what we did not. I think if we had less boxes to check, and more freedom to try things out in our classrooms that our students would benefit because we'd be focused on them and not getting in trouble for not covering X or submitting Y.

Assessments, Grades, Ungrading, Grading Contracts, and Condescension from Judgey McJudgersons

Over a decade ago I attended a conference that was centered around assessment, data, and Dufour's approach.
My big takeaway was to reorient less around grades, let formative assessments in more, and be more specific and reflective about data informed assessment.
I went back to my school, started doing more formative assessments, and redesigned my tests/assessments at the end of units/marking periods. These new assessments were designed by four levels:

• Level 1 basic knowledge, matching and identifying terms
• Level 2 comprehension on what we covered
• Level 3 theme, webs, paragraphs, provide evidence
• Level 4 a written response

Each test after followed the same format. I sat down after I graded and tracked data in a spreadsheet. It allowed me to see both individually and as a class what I needed to reteach, gaps, what they struggled with. I'd then ask if they struggled because the test/prompt was bad or if it was actual knowledge.

Because each test follows the same format I can then see if there's improvement from marking period to marking period.
There are issues with this, my current school has a chronic attendance problem, so students absent on test day are question marks as most do not make up the tests. Also, even though I let them retake for a higher grade, none have taken advantage of this.

I have my students track their scores on a chart so they can see areas to improve- literary elements, providing evidence, taking a stance, etc.
I've had schools insist on data walls where this data was in the classroom shaming students, and I have pushed back.

I am more interested in the students reflecting on how they did, make goals to improve, then work towards that.
The assessments get graded by 4 points. Each level is a point, with partial credit awarded, .25 up.
The rough correlation is a 4 is an A, a 3 a B, a 2 a C, a 1 a D. Part of that Dufour conference included not giving zeroes, which I don't, a failing grade for missing work is a 50, failing grade for work turned in but not acceptable is a 55. Both are still failing grades, but let a student see that things are recoverable. If they're out, hospitalized, have family drama, or just have an off marking period, they can still pass.

I have sat in meetings for students where they had a 10 or 16 in a class mid-semester. There was no mathematical way that student would pass. And the teacher wondered why they didn't try.
I do not understand teachers who don't seem to understand their students are people, and seem to equate punishment with rigor.

I allow students to turn in missing work up until the week before the end of the marking period. This is a practical choice so I can get grades in.
After that, we have rolling grades, so they can still turn it in OR if they don't remember the original work, can turn in a Make Up Missing Work Assignment. For full credit. Because if it's important for them to learn it, it's important for them to learn it.
Students can rewrite any assignment and resubmit. Retake any test. Higher grade replaces previous.
Because I want my students to get it.

Over the years I've tweaked and changed my grading. For a while now I have notebooks/classwork 25%, writing assignments 25%, projects 25%, tests 25%. Some kids aren't good at a type of assessment, and I don't believe in punishing them for that. Each marking period we have 1 writing assignment and project we spend weeks on. A test at the end of the marking period. I use interactive notebooks/daybooks, which record what we do each day. I grade them weekly, students choose their best page from the previous week, and tell me what grade they think they should get and why.

Years ago I dumped cumulative final semester exams, students submitted their writing portfolios instead. For years these have not quite done what I want although I stuck with it because it was better than alternatives. I WANTED it to be an end of year curation of their best work AND demonstrate their grasp of certain genres, ideas.
Things that always tripped me up:

• I'd choose the genres based on school's curriculum, end of year tests, to ensure I was teaching what they needed (don't at me about teaching to the test, I KNOW, but there's what we want, and reality). But I constantly adapt my lessons to my students, so we'd get to the end of the semester and I'd realize I hadn't taught something they were supposed to include.
• I always scheduled time at the end of each marking period for students to fix/revise their writing and then upload it to the writing portfolio. The idea being that by the time the portfolio was due, it was done, and they just had to reflect. That time always got eaten by other things, and so never worked.
• Too many students did it at the last minute. No reflection, no process, just dumping stuff.
• Because I do this in Google Docs, there were often issues with permissions, which is a whole other thing.

This past semester, since I started using learning targets last year, which I loved, I made a part of their final "I can" statements where they provided proof, demonstrated they could do the statement. I LOVED the results, it really showed me what they knew. It also ended up counting as their total final because Internet went down exam week and they couldn't work on their writing portfolios.

So I'm going to keep the I can statements for spring. But I'm redesigning the writing portfolios, making them more like what I did for my first year composition courses because I think it will do what I want.

Students will:

• In a single document (so hopefully no permission errors) write me a letter about where they thought they started as writers, big challenges, big success, and how they ended. I will ask for specific evidence about things that helped, for example, when we sketched our ideas in our Daybooks it really helped me see X.
• After the letter, they will choose one assignment that needed revision and revise it. Before the assignment they will write an explanation of why they chose the revise it, what the revisions were, what they fixed, then include the revised assignment.
• Next, they will take one assignment and change the tone, audience, purpose, or genre. They will also write an explanation for what they changed and why, what the effect was.
• Finally, they will pick one assignment, from my class or another, that they think is their best work, and write an explanation of WHY it is their best work.

I think these revisions will get the students to think and reflect on their progress, growth, and the assignments are one, more manageable, and more reflective, better assessments of their skills. I can more easily budget the time at the end of the semester to do this.

I think a lot of times as teachers, we think that because we said something in August, or because it was on the syllabus, it's set in stone, locking us in. I do think that we have a moral obligation to not move the goal post on students. BUT I think too that if something is not working, if there's a better way, if as educators we can admit something isn't working, we owe it to our students and ourselves to do better.

I put my week by week scope and sequence as well as my daily lessons online (through Google Classroom) for students and parents to reference. But I also tell students and parents in my opening spiel that these are "live" docs. Always up to date, but subject to change if I need to to better serve my students. I've never gotten a complaint about me changing things I think because we reference the docs all the time, the changes are never used as a gotcha, and I talk a lot with the kids about hey, X didn't work like I wanted, I've sorry, I want to try something different.

So, over winter break, a lot of conversations on Twitter were focused on grading less, going gradeless, and different teachers and professors sharing approaches. Although for years I've moved away from lots of work, more formative assessments, more long term work, there are still parent and school expectations. Again, I think if you're clear and communicate you have more leeway but for example, my current school has tried for years to mandate teachers give 1 assignment a week and put it in the online gradebook so parents can see it.

There's a lot wrong with this. First, you can't mandate professional choices, or take away our professional choices (which is why the union fought it). Second, this mandate was in response to parents saying they didn't know how their children were doing. Well, that's a whole different thing. That's teachers not updating grades in a timely manner (I had students complain that one teacher didn't put in grades until the day they were due, so they went all marking period not knowing what their grade was). This is teachers not calling or emailing home touching base and informing parents. It's teachers not communicating with their students on what their grade is based on. In short, it's teachers not doing their job.

Changing marking periods from 9 to 6 weeks does not fix this problem.

Mandating an arbitrary 1 grade a week per student does not fix this problem.

This problem SHOULD HAVE been fixed by admin addressing one by one the teachers doing this. Offering support, feedback, resources, then following up with consequences if they didn't.

Teaching, grading, lesson planning, communicating with families. That's the job description of a teacher. I continue to be baffled by teachers who hate/won't do most of the parts of the job.

Anyway, all these conversations over break got me thinking. I had a lot of students last semester out for weeks of hospitalization, homeless, weeks of depression, issues. Good kids, that just struggled. So, I revisited my Elbow, and drafted grading contracts. I hope this helps my 9th graders see how absences impact grades (not for legit stuff I mentioned above, I'm talking about kids who don't come). I'm hoping it helps my kids who feel lost, giving them clearer targets. For my AP kids, who I was disappointed to see last semester either didn't do the work or didn't do the assignments that built up to big assignments and just threw stuff together, that they will see the levels, the building blocks they should be striving for.

I redid my calendar so rather than the last day of the marking period being our test, I've backtracked it so the last day is them reflecting on grades, and us conferencing on their progress.

I'm hoping too that the contract gives them comfort, maybe gets them to not stress, as a lot said in their end of semester surveys that anxiety and depression were big challenges that semester. I hope freeing them from the stress will enable them to focus on the fun, the discussions, the learning.

But we'll see. It's all an experiment. One of the gifts of eighteen years of teaching is that I'm fine with giving up this control, seeing what happens, and being okay if it's messy.

BUT, these conversations and thoughts also overlapped with other ones I want to mention. First, social media lost their minds over Marie Kondo's statement about throwing out books. The Judgey McJudgersons were out in full force. Suddenly you were a troglodyte if you threw out/gave away/pared down books. You hated literature. You were uneducated.

Ugh.

Look, I grew up in a house where we broke bookcases because of the weight of what we stuffed in them. Where books were 3, 4, 5 deep on the shelf. Where I grew up thinking that you read library books by picking the first book on a shelf and then just worked your way down. I have a PhD in literature, I'm a high school English teacher. I love books. I love their smell. I love cracking them. I love marking them.

But people need to get the hell over themselves.

Because all of the above is true. And I've still given away a truckload (actually, several truckloads) of books in my quest to pare down and live more simply the last few years. This was a result of stressful grad school, not feeling like I had a lot of control, and wanting, needing to have control over SOMETHING even if it was just how a room looked. It was about in my 40s, letting go of expectations other people and society had of me, and not letting that make me feel bad (I hate skirts and heels- so why did my closet include both, which I never wore? Their sole purpose was to taunt me, and make me feel bad). Part of it was, the older I get, the more I find myself reverting back to the life we had growing up, the life of a hippie mom, with simpler joys. 

As I pared down books, I asked two questions- was it beloved, and would I read it again? My underwater archaeology books stayed, because they're beloved. The books I teach, and the subject books from grad school stayed because I'll use them. Lots of fantasy series, mysteries went to the classroom, because I won't read them again, but my students will.

Yes, there are elitist issues with minimalist lifestyle. There is the implication that if you give it away and miss it, you have the ability to buy a replacement. I get it. But I grew up poor, and growing up with less was part of our poverty but was also part of Mom's hippie-dippy lifestyle. 

This quote was a guiding principle growing up. As I get older, I try to get back to this. Spend less. Do more with less. Rediscover simpler joys, NPR on Sunday mornings. Vinyl in the afternoon. The joy of wandering the library. Walks in the park.

A nice effect of all the paring down the last couple of years is discovering and rediscovering things I love. A way of refinding and refining myself as a way of healing from the trauma of grad school. Another is a chance to save money, and give to charities and organizations whose work I think is more important now than ever. Living and acting more ethically.

Look, I still have a ridiculous t-shirt collection. HUNDREDS. Knick-knacks. But I also argue about how many plates I NEED. In The Accountant, he has one plate, one fork, one knife, one spoon. GOALS. But seriously, I spent months debating whether I needed a toaster. When my godmother gave me one for Christmas, it ended up at Goodwill because it turns out, I didn't need one.

I don't think these are bad things. The truth is, there are lots of reasons why people may get rid of things, by choice or necessity. The changes I've made the last few years work for me. They make my life better. Both the ones I've made personally and the ones I've made in my classroom. And I have real issues with the Judgey McJudgerson's that seem to think their lives are so rarified that they can sit in judgement of the rest of us.

This happens a lot in education. More and more people have pointed out that the loudest voices in education, telling us what to do, judging what we DO do while not listening or caring about context, the names trending, tend to be men, entrepreneurs, who have traded classrooms for lecture circuits, and who seem to book proclamations on what the rest of us our doing wrong with a confidence and authority only white patriarchy gives you.

This weekend alone men said if we're happy to celebrate the end of school on Friday we're apparently monsters who hate teaching.

Another said we're choosing to give grades, harm students, and not focus on students' learning.

Woo boy.

Look, there is active hard done in schools. Teachers who are racist, biased, misogynist, who choose to continue to teach the white, mostly male, canon, and disregard, erase all the other voices. Who support and build onto institutional and structural racism. Teachers who don't teach their students not to use ableist language, be anti-racist, or teach about consent. Who don't consider poverty or class or real life when designing assignments, curriculum, or interacting with students or families. These people do harm.

Me glad to have a weekend to recharge is not doing harm.

Me reflecting on how to work best within a system that expects grades is not doing harm.

In general, the Judgey McJudgersons, ESPECIALLY the ones presenting themselves as champions of whoever while the rest of us clearly don't care can sit the hell down and shut up.

Done

"If it were done when 'tis done, then 'twere well

It were done quickly"

Macbeth Act 1, scene 7, lines 1-2

I just hit send on sending my book manuscript to my editor.
And I think I'm going to throw up.

I am immensely proud of the work. I think it is a great new voice in scholarship, and I think it does important work. It is a longue duree approach to the political English devil. It crosses genres and periodization. It applies folklore scholarship in how I analyze the devil as a vehicle for historical concerns.

But I still think I'm going to throw up.

Because I have heard a voice in my head all week as I typed up and did last looks.
And the voice said...

It said I was a high school teacher, not a professor.
It said I wasn't good enough to get hired at a university, so I certainly wasn't good enough to get a book published.
It said that I may have gotten a contract, but the peer reviewers were going to trash it so badly that it would be dead in the water.
It said this book will never be published.

It whispered then shouted that I, and this work, was trash.

I mean, everything associated with academia has told me, again and again...

This is not a new feeling for me. I felt this when I was working on my MA, as other people in my program looked down at me. I felt this when I was rejected from PhD programs. I felt this as I struggled with the first dissertation rejected, and I tried to find my voice again.

I don't know if everyone feels like this on submitting their first book manuscript.
Maybe it's just because I feel so disconnected from academia, that community, that support.
I mean, I don't know what happens next. I know it goes to peer reviewers, but after that? No clue.
How likely is it they hate it?
How likely is it they tell my editor it's trash and to throw it out?
I have to imagine that happens, right? Just like articles?
Or is the emphasis more on fixing, notes?

I don't know.
I know that I immediately worried I'd messed up an Ibid citation, made a weak argument. Cut the wrong thing. That my approach will be dismissed as too fringe, too out there.
My brain has no problem coming up with all the ways the work, and I, am a failure.

I also know that with no higher ed job prospects on the horizon, with me most likely continuing my life as a high school teacher, the worst case scenario of the book sucking and never getting published are absolute nil.
My students, admin, school do not care if the book is published.
My advancement does not depend on it.

I reworked my conclusion to be less timely-specific to modern day politics, and to present more a big picture look about how even after the early modern period, we continue to demonize political enemies in a variety of cartoons.
Again and again the same visual and written rhetoric that marks the devil as threat and a danger in medieval and early modern texts is recycled and revised in a variety of political cartoons.

Devils could topple monarchs.

Devils were associated with rebels, the ideas of revolt, countering authority.

They represented fears over granting equal rights to Blacks, historically constructed as devils.

Women, for the ways they sought authority they weren't entitled to were constructed as demonic. Here, Mrs. Satan ensures the entire women's suffrage movement was demonized.

The same demonic rhetoric appears now, demonizing some so that others can define themselves in opposition to the devil figure.

We continue to construct people, often ethnically and culturally different people, as threats, dangers, and therefore demonic.

It's good and fun stuff.
By far my favorite political devil cartoon is the one below.
It's not medieval. It's not early modern. It's not English.
But it conveys in one image the modern-day work my work leads to.

And I am proud of it, no matters what happens.

So, with pride, and trepidation for the future, I present to you The Political Devil in Medieval and Early Modern English Literature...

For the first time in five and a half years, I am done.
I know there is work to do, the author instructions suggest to start working on the index. I have two pamphlet covers I need to get image permissions for (no idea how to do that, chalk that up to something else they don't teach you in grad school).

But I am done.
For the first time in a very, very long time, I do not have a single academic project I'm working on. I have nothing to fill weekends with. Nothing.
For all intents and purposes, when I return to my high school teaching job tomorrow, I just have that job to do.
It feels a bit like when I finished the dissertation, defended, then graduated. A bit anti-climatic. A little surprised it's not a bigger deal.
And tired. Very, very tired.

So I will rest. I will focus on my job.
And I will try as hard as I can to take that voice, shove them into a dark room, close the door, and pretend they don't exist.