Last three weeks of school

It is easy to coast the last few weeks of school. Especially if, like so many of us, those last weeks include state testing. The students are exhausted, as are we, drained, and it's easy to do what is easy, to sit at our desks and just coast, hoping no one notices until we're at the last day.

I decided to actively fight this and instead focus on reflecting on what I tried this year, start planning for how to refine it next year, and use these last weeks to experiment a bit.

@callmemrmorris has blogged about getting rid of his teacher's desk, and I've seen others share similar stories. It got put on the list of things I'd like to try but kept getting put on the back burner. Then the last couple of weeks I found myself sitting at my desk a LOT. Not moving around, not sitting with students, not monitoring, just tired, and sitting. It's been a long year, frankly they all are, and teachers this time of year are exhausted.

So I rearranged my classroom (AGAIN?!? Doc my students exclaim as they walked in) and got rid of my teacher desk.
Kinda.
So, the computer hooked up to the projector is in the front of the room, and I project my lessons which de facto makes the front a focus. BUT we do station rotations, so it's there as reference not a lecture focus. My class is divided into three groups of seating, and I've tried to get more tables than desks. I've tweaked these groups/rotations throughout the year, but here's what I ended up with that I think works best:

1. a group that works with me on mini-lessons. Sometimes this is their mentor text. Sometimes it's looking at something in their own books. This is often a teacher led station, or at least one where I hover more often.
2. a group for projects. This is near/at the computers so students can build, actively work, look up stuff.
3. a group for them. This is the station that's new-ish and what I most want to refine for next year. It's near the white boards that run the whole room and what I want it to be is a place where they talk, work stuff out. It has been independent work on whatever we're focusing on that day, but I really want it to be more active than passive.

Now, I do have a podium up front, for taking attendance, entering in the computer. Where handouts for week get stashed. BUT, I noticed even with this, not having a desk meant today in class, I took my stack of grading, and as students worked on their exploring Japanese mythology worksheet I sat with one group, then another, then another throughout the period.
This proximity meant they were all on task as they worked. It means I talked to one group about why a student was suspended. It meant they stopped texting and worked as I sat down. It made a huge difference.

Now, I know that not everyone feels comfortable with this. That's fine. But more and more I find in my practice that I am questioning the assumptions of teaching.
We assign homework- why? We know it punishes students from certain backgrounds and is classist.
We assume students have computer/technology access.
Teachers must have desks.
Students must be compliant which is not the same as learning.

Many of these structures serve to reinforce power dynamics and have nothing to do with learning. When I first became a teacher a mentor said, "Be sure your decisions are always based on what is best for the students not on what is easiest for you" and I have made this a guiding principle. I get that precarious faculty and higher ed will argue against this since much of this work is unpaid, and I have no good answers to a broken system that functions and moves along through free labor.

More and more, below is my guiding principle. And if I don't have a good answer then I need to not be doing that in my classroom.



With just a few weeks left, I've also started thinking about next year. I saw a neat idea I want to try that I think will help my students.
This year I taught English 9 with each of our 6 markings periods dedicated to a genre- so personal narratives, non-fiction, short story, novel, drama, myths/epics. Next year, I'm going to refine this so fall semester focuses on narrative, and spring semester on informative and argumentative. I am still going to focus on a single writing assignment and project each marking period but have tweaked those some. Also, each marking period, students within those broad genre guidelines, will choose the specific genres to study and the theme focus.
Here's the rough scope and sequence. 

I really liked the station rotations, and will continue with them. Students said they liked when we did all three things but moved through them whole group, said they didn't feel as rushed. I am going to try and address this, but what they can't see with the station rotations is how it frees me up for one on one time which I think is invaluable.
I love the mentor texts, but this was my first year using them and I want to be more mindful of how I use them next year. I also want to make sure I'm centering them more, returning to them as models and for mini-lessons.
I also loved the 25 minutes of independent reading every day to start class. The students read so much, and were totally engaged. I have my extended social media network to thank for helping me provide all these great books, and groups like Project Lit and We Need Diverse Books for providing the titles. I modeled reading, and got to read so many great things. Also, First Book Marketplace was a great resource for books priced so I could afford them. The last week of school I'm going to let students take home a book for the summer.  My department has also agreed to let students read whatever they want over the summer which is a HUGE win considering the last few years has been a battle of packets for summer reading and required texts.
The grading contracts, and the approach of students telling me what grades things deserve and why was also a radical change. Next year I will continue this but am doubling down. I've usually set up my gradebook so interactive notebook, writing, projects, and tests were all 25% with the idea that some students are better at some things over others and no one thing should tank their grade. Next year I'm making class activities 75% of their grade and summative assessments (projects, tests, final drafts of essays) 25% of their grade. So come to class and participate in the practice and get a C, guaranteed. Then the demonstration of mastery is 25%. I'm excited to try this out.

In general the texts I've taught are totally different. I pretty much threw out the canon and taught engaging, high interest texts with a focus on representation and dealing with the issues and themes of racism and social justice. I am indebted to Valerie Brown and her #ClearTheAir work in this. It literally changed how I taught and what I taught and as I've said elsewhere, all of these changes listed here but especially this one resulted in the best teaching year ever, and certainly the one where I have served my students best.

So I know the last weeks can be hard, and exhausting. But I have found that reflecting on the year, planning for new things for next year, and experimenting with the time I have left, has made me energized, and reinvigorated for the work I do.
And really, the last few weeks are a perfect time to try new things. Your students know you, hopefully they trust you, so it's a great environment to try new things and see what happens.

What Grad School Doesn't Teach You

I once took a class that was an intro to the field for English. It was a foundational class for me. We had to join a list-serv, analyze conversations in the field, create an abstract for a conference, then a paper. This was 10 years ago now, but it became the class I measured other grad classes against.

If I was going to create an Intro to English Studies class now, or any graduate class, I would aim to fill some of the gaps I see in what grad students are taught:

• Join the lis-servs in your field
• This is a great way to learn the people in your field (for good and ill) and conversations in the field
• Join Twitter
• Does the same thing but more up to date, skews younger
• Assignments would include:
• Abstract for a conference that you'd submit
• Conference paper you'd present to class 
• Turning conference paper into a journal article, submitting it
• I'd work with you on it until it was accepted
• Students should also take a class on cultural responsiveness that teaches them how to be anti-racist in practice and research as well as how to best serve their students. These approaches should also be built into content classes.

Other things that grad school doesn't teach you, and really should, in a class you take the semester you graduate:

• How to write a book proposal
• How to submit it, shop it around
• Key ways to approach your first monograph
• How it differs from diss
• How to use/read reviewer notes
• Differences/choices between monographs, edited collections, articles, how to prioritize them

Also, as part of a job market prep class that should be the semester before students go on the market:

• The economics of a university/college job
• Awareness
• Also, how engagement and enrollment is key, and how you'll be expected to contribute
• How higher ed has changed especially the last few decades and what this practically means for you as a professor
• Differences in fit
•  R1, SLAC, CC, HBCUs
• What this life really looks like, expectations, tenure, lecturer, precarious
• What you can and cannot negotiate

Somewhere in the first year, maybe as part of the Intro to the Field course, grad students should be introduced to the idea of service, presented with options of the kinds of service they could do, opportunities in the department, and uni. In general, grad students do very little that we'd consider service, yet every job interview will ask you what service you'll do at the department and college level. 

These are all pretty easy moves, changes, that grad programs could make and would make a huge difference.

In addition to all of this, I think all programs need to post up to date data on percentage of students who finish/graduate, what they do after graduation, how long those moves take them, and partnerships department/uni has with alt-ac places. Students need to be aware of just how horrible the market is before they take on tens of thousands of debt. I'm still in disbelief that at a dinner a few months ago two grad students graduating in May, were totally and completely unaware of the numbers and reality of the job market. This is a systematic failure.