Category: Reflection

A Six-Box Year

~ Sarah Powley ~ 3 Comments

The principal at the middle school where I spent yesterday morning brought donuts for his 35 teachers to mark the approaching end to the school year.

The size of the donut array took me by surprise. Apparently, the teacher standing beside me was surprised, too.

“It’s a six-box day!” she exclaimed.

A celebration!

For teachers, the end of the year brings celebration, but it brings emotional overload, too.

There are the usual worries over final exams, the routine but nonetheless draining dismantling of classrooms, the extra stress of tying up myriad loose ends, and lots of anxiety about the first year of the new evaluation system we’ve all been through.

There’s the excitement of culminating projects—the videos, the newscasts, the high-spirited presentations in front of the class–and celebrations, like the ice cream sundae fest that I just witnessed in the school library for the kids who read 20 books in a semester.  Awards ceremonies,  talent shows,  and field days, even—in one school I visit—a field trip after school is over!

There’s saying goodbye to students whom teachers have come to love—or even just learned to tolerate—and that brings another emotional reality.  In a way, teachers are preparing for the grief they’ll feel when school is over, even if they’ve never thought of the inevitable letdown as being a kind of loss.

Many of them pause in this busy time, though, to ask me how this year has gone, whether I have enjoyed my work as an instructional coach, whether I miss the kids.

Did I feel productive? Of course.

Was the work satisfying? Yes.

Did I miss the kids? Certainly.

Especially in the beginning and particularly when I was at “my own” high school and would see the kids I’d had in class just the year before.

In August and September, a lot of shrieking and embracing went on when we’d run into each other in the halls. For them, it was like I’d come back from the dead. They hadn’t expected to see me again, so when they did, the remembrance of all we’d shared would take them by surprise. I’d fly high on those days–but I would bring myself down to earth pretty quickly by remembering that were I at the front of the classroom still, all those displays of affection would not be happening.

And increasingly, as the days went by, my delights rested on the victories of the teachers whose professional lives I touched even lightly as well as those I coached intensely.

A first year industrial tech teacher who felt awkward at the beginning of the year is moving with confidence in her classroom today. The other day she even videotaped the class while they tested the strength and durability of bridges made with cardboard, styrofoam, tongue depressors, and fiberglass. The students were in teams, eager, excited and energized by the competition.

A social studies teacher who’s been struggling all year to marry a set of academic standards that honor recall of a thousand facts with the Common Core emphasis on big ideas and essential concepts has found a path forward.

A special education teacher whose students wrote whole sentences, not fragments; pages, not paragraphs beamed ear-to-ear with them as she returned their papers and complimented them on what they’ve done well.

A world language teacher whose dialogue journals are proof positive that students have increased their vocabulary and their ability to write in Spanish directed her students to look back at their entries from the beginning of the year. What they saw is what they hadn’t realized: their skills had crept up on them.

An English teacher with whom I co-taught a strategy for reading poetry reported that when her students encountered the poem on the standardized state test, they used the new blocking ruler to read the poem line-by-line and reported it was easy!

A science teacher discovered a penchant for etymology–for telling stories about word origins—to help his students learn vocabulary. He plans to spend the summer preparing more lessons about word origins to help his students learn the roots and prefixes that are the building blocks of scientific terminology.

A 7th grade math teacher, after my work in her school on vocabulary acquisition now directs her kids to look at words in a whole new way—quartiles, she told me, for example, made sense to her kids when they made the connection with quarts and quarters and quarterly.

A chemistry teacher developed a modification of the Frayer model—a strategy for teaching vocabulary—and told me her students’ vocabulary scores went up!

Collaborative successes—like the World Food Prize endeavor—have brought utter exhilaration, and I’ve drawn satisfaction from departments that have begun work on curriculum articulation, K-12. Vertical teams have formed in middle schools and horizontal ones in high school disciplines. I’ve had a hand in those endeavors and that’s been cool, too.

How do I measure success at the end of the year? Is it in the number of professional development presentations I made to whole faculties? Is it in the number of team meetings I facilitated? Or the number of individual conferences and observations I conducted? Is it in professional development conferences I attended and learned from myself or the quantity of professional books I read? Is it in the curriculum documents that teams of teachers produced? The web site I created?

The numbers don’t lie; the documents that have been produced, the charts and calendars I’ve kept, the book reviews I’ve written, the photographs I’ve taken are all concrete evidence of productivity. They’re pleasing to look at—but it’s the cumulative impact of teachers’ victories, whether large or small, that makes me smile, that brings me satisfaction and delight.

Tomorrow is the last day of school in my district. I’ll be at “my” high school tomorrow, and I’ll be giving a lot of high-fives, I know. But it’s their current teachers the students will be hugging hard.

I’ll miss that.

I’ll be proud of the kids, for sure, but it’s their teachers’ joy I’ll feel tomorrow.

Anybody asks me now how I’ve liked my job as an instructional coach and I’ll have to say, “It’s been a six-box year!”

Two-hour Delays

~ Sarah Powley ~ 2 Comments

For as long as big yellow school buses have transported children to school, snow days have been the students’ not-so-secret joy, their guiltless revenge on a system they can’t control: Nature is more powerful than the principal; snow keeps the teacher at bay. What kids don’t realize—at least when they’re little—is that snow days delight their teachers, too—even when it means extending classes an extra day in May.

But here in Indiana, snow days have been rare in recent years, so now we experience a not-so-secret tingle when weather that warrants at least a two-hour delay is in the forecast. A two-hour delay brings

  • An extra hour of sleep
  • An extra cup of coffee
  • Another load of laundry done
  • Bonus time for grading
  • Snuggling with our children
  • Juggling daycare
  • Remaining hopeful, even after the delay is called, that it could turn into a snow day
  • Driving to school in daylight instead of piloting through the dark
  • Dithering about whether to leave for school or stay at home
  • Treacherous driving either way
  • A parking place close to the door (if you’ve made the former choice)
  • Working in the quiet of the classroom until the students start to arrive—you could find yourself humming along with the air ducts as they fill with warm air
  • And sometimes, arriving at school at the usual hour just to discover you missed the call on the  two-hour delay

And once school does start:

  • Driving stories from excited kids who were behind the wheel on snow and ice  for the very first time
  • Adjustments to everything—the bell schedule, the cancelled Homeroom period or special appointments you might have had during your prep hour
  • Disorientation—because the bells are different
  • Speed teaching—only half an hour with each class
  • A growling stomach because lunch is at a different time
  • Feeling, at the end of the day, like you’ve run a gauntlet—because the number of human contacts, decisions to be made, problems to be solved, details to attend to don’t decrease—they just come at you faster.

But still, a two-hour delay is a break in routine, a small triumph over time. And  BONUS: no having to make it up!

A New Frame

~ Sarah Powley ~ 4 Comments

Recently, my husband and I took a piece of art to our favorite framer. The print had been hanging on the same wall for so long it was part of the background, something we didn’t even see anymore. A remodeling project had caused us to rethink the way we had displayed many of the objects in our house, and that is how we came to reconsider the way this particular print was framed.

When the framer took the piece apart, we realized that it had originally been framed when we were 22 years old, newly married, and not knowledgeable enough to know that a fine art print should be mounted on an acid free board and hinged at the top so it would appear to float. We hadn’t known enough to tell that framer of so many years ago not to tape the print on all four sides to a piece of ordinary cardboard.

“I haven’t seen something like this in a long, long time,” our framer remarked as he removed the old metal frame and lifted the mat.  We could clearly see the adhesive that pinned the print to the board.  On top of that, the mat itself was not acid free, and it had left a burn line all around the print itself.

Fortunately, the piece could be restored and appropriately reframed.

As I listened to the framer talk about methods for framing art and thought about our own need to reconsider the way we were displaying this particular piece, I was put in mind of the remodeling project going on in education.

Some of the things we do as teachers spring from habits and approaches we developed when we were novices. It’s a complex thing, teaching, and in the beginning, when something works, we are so pleased and relieved that we keep on with the practice until it becomes so much a part of what we do, we don’t even know we are doing it. In other cases, we continue a practice because it appears to do what it is supposed to do. It’s hard to make yourself change when you think what you are doing works.

But with the introduction of the Common Core State Standards, teachers will have to undo the habits of years.

For example, for years English teachers have relied on textbook companies to lay out a scope and sequence they can follow with confidence —solacing themselves for capitulating to a company by remembering that the textbook companies are advised by practitioners and scholars.  If we use the anthology conscientiously, many teachers reason, by the end of the year we will have exposed our students to the most important writers and their most accessible or well-known stories and poems.  And, if we progress at a brisk pace from August to May, we will have “covered the curriculum.”

However, a wide but thin acquaintance with great writers does not result in students who are enthralled with literature.  This approach doesn’t whet their appetites for more. It does not give them a deep understanding of any of the writers they’ve read, and it doesn’t particularly develop their critical reading skills.  What it does do is produce students who can play Jeopardy.

The Common Core State Standards present us with an opportunity to “reframe” our English courses.  They ask us to read deeply, rather than broadly, and connect texts and text types to each other and to other disciplines. They ask us to do close reading in our literature classes and approach informational text with a focus on the content, not on prior experiences that may not even be relevant to the topic. The Common Core standards ask us to have our students write more often and use evidence from the text to build an argument.

It isn’t really that we are teaching content and skills we’ve never taught before. The picture is still the same. But it’s framed differently.

Some content will be taught earlier than it used to be—various grammatical concepts, for example, are supposed to be introduced earlier than they often are now. By high school, teachers should be able to conduct conversations about style and discussions of writing technique that are predicated upon students knowing the vocabulary and structure of English grammar. As it is now, we repeat basic grammatical concepts year after year, and by 10th grade, some students still don’t know what we’re talking about. Is it just remotely possible that this is because we repeat ourselves so much (parts of speech in grade after grade, for example) that kids realize they really don’t have to dig in and learn the material?

Some modes of rhetoric will be emphasized—like argumentative writing—and others—such as narrative writing—will be called for less often.  But shouldn’t our students know how to set up and defend  an argument? Shouldn’t they know how to spot specious claims? Detect holes in arguments? Shouldn’t they know how to use quotes and statistics and examples—and how not to misuse them? And narrative still has a place, make no mistake. Narrative writing is still specified in the Common Core. It’s the emphasis that has shifted.

Students will be doing research with more frequency than usual. But that doesn’t mean a series of full-blown research papers four times each year—rather, the skills involved in research can be teased out, presented sequentially, and the ante upped gradually.  Teachers can challenge students to learn a variety of presentation modes—including those in the multi-faceted world of technological presentation. Students can develop their expertise with technology skills just as much as they can develop skill with  traditional print forms of reporting information.

The books we ask the students to read are supposed to reflect higher lexile levels—but really, it isn’t just the lexile level. There are other measures of complexity than that, so many of the texts we use now, we’ll still be using when we teach the Common Core. And if our texts are more difficult, no one is arguing to throw the kids a book and let them flounder. Instead, we’re asked to support the students with appropriate instruction—scaffolding, it’s called.

Novels we typically teach will no longer be stand-alone units of instruction. As teachers, we’ll look for and connect the books to poems that reflect the same themes, to essays that address a shared topic, to informational texts that elucidate ideas pertinent to the story. Assembling readings that are related by topic or theme and creating instructional tasks that ask kids to think deeply about a subject is actually fun and refreshing for the teacher. Why not start with a book we already teach—an age-appropriate and complexity-appropriate one—and collect other texts (poems, essays, magazine articles) that complement it and lead students on to an exploration of the common theme? What would be new? Maybe some of the readings, but not the anchor text. Not the need to build vocabulary,  develop comprehension, or teach writing and research skills to go along with the readings.

With the Common Core, we’ll make interdisciplinary connections, and even, in the best of circumstances, teach collaboratively with our colleagues. As it is now, the curriculum often overlaps from discipline to discipline and creates redundancies that dull our students’ appetite for learning. I am thinking of a unit I created once that began with the excerpt in our American lit text from William Bradford’s “Of Plimoth Plantation.” It was a unit that called for students to envision what they would do in a new world. (That was its name: Starting Out in a New World: What Would You Do?)  I presented  the students with information they didn’t already know about the Mayflower and a list of resources the intrepid souls on that boat had (and didn’t have). The activities of the unit took the students deep into Bradford’s text and other primary sources from the Puritan time period, texts which were available on the internet and in print in my room.

The enthusiasm that I expected for the task wasn’t there. Why not?

My students had studied the Pilgrims in elementary classrooms every year of their lives and then considered the Puritans again in 8th grade American history and then again in 11th grade American History—and here I came with yet another “unit” on this topic from the country’s far, far past.  What might have happened if the American history teacher and I had collaborated? Might we together have generated some excitement among our students instead of both of us hearing questions like “Hey! We’re doing this in history (or English)? Why do we have to study it here?”

The Common Core was introduced several years ago, yet I am still hearing resistance—and in some cases, foot-dragging–in the hope that it will all just go away.  I hope it doesn’t.

The Common Core Standards do not ask us, really, to throw out our old art. Instead, they ask us to reframe what we’ve always had hanging on our walls.

This could be fun. It’s all in one’s frame of mind.

By the way, you should see the print my husband and I had reframed. It seems like a whole new piece, but really, it isn’t. The frame is new, and so we look at the piece afresh—but suddenly, it has come to life again: strong, vibrant, exciting our imaginations.  I see no reason why reframing for the Common Core shouldn’t have the same impact.

The Bus to Friendship

~ Sarah Powley ~ 4 Comments

Today, a former student, one of my Russia Travelers (kids I took to Russia 10 years ago) and I met together as colleagues in the same middle school. She, working with kids; I, working with teachers. We got to talking about our trip together years ago, and I told her I was working on another essay about those weeks we spent together so very far from home. I spent many hours, during those years of the exchange, preparing the kids for those trips. We talked about cultural adjustments they’d have to make…about differences in values…about similarities in matters of the heart. My students had no idea that their teacher was learning to cross cultures, too… 

When I traveled in Russia, the loss of independence was the hardest adjustment I had to make.

As the coordinator of an exchange program, I expected to travel about on my own to the school, to the market, to the restaurants my students frequented, and to the parks where they played.  After a few days of riding the bus with Irina, the host teacher, I was ready to travel alone.

But Irina was not convinced.

The trick to riding the bus in Russia is to push your way on like everyone else. In a crowded bus, your body is not your own, and personal space is only in your mind. You have to accept intimate contact with strangers. Courtesy demands that you remain silent or at least quiet in your conversation if you are with someone else. You have to be wary of pickpockets (I was told) and conscious of older people who deserve the seats. That sometimes means hanging on to overhead bars, or in really crowded situations, allowing yourself to be supported by the individuals packed in around you. You hang onto nothing in these situations and grab for the bar when the bus stops so you won’t be swept away by those who are exiting.

The conductor, usually a matron, pushes through the crowd asking to see passes and selling tickets to those without them. She makes eye contact with each individual, gives a brief nod when you hold up your pass, and for those who don’t have a pass, she somehow accepts money and even makes change as the bus lurches along. She never forgets a face, so there’s no danger of her asking twice to see your pass or overcharging you for your ride—but she’s ever on the alert for freeloaders.

Irina could see I knew the drill, but she still wouldn’t let me ride alone. “I can’t let you do that,” was all she would say.

Then one day I needed to meet my students at an hour that was inconvenient for her; she was forced to let me go.

I received strict instructions: Bus #17 from her stop straight to Lenin Square.

Bus #17 came. I boarded a nearly empty vehicle and took a seat on the right so I’d be sure to see the stops. At first, everything was normal. Then the bus pulled into a parking lot I’d never seen before, and everyone else got off. I sat there until the conductor gestured that I, too, had to leave.

I won’t say I wasn’t anxious. I realized that even if I asked for help, people wouldn’t understand me—and I wouldn’t understand them. So for just a minute, I considered that Irina might be right.

Then I noticed that the people on my bus had moved to a spot at the front of the lot and were standing there, waiting. The conductor and the driver had gone into a building that looked like a shed.  Other buses entered the lot; the same thing happened.

It was a shift change!  Sure enough, another #17 bus came along, and I climbed on. The bus resumed the usual route, and I met with my students, as planned.

As a matter of pride, I didn’t tell Irina about this incident. Besides, I was afraid that if I revealed even a moment of anxiety, I’d never be on my own again.

By the second year of the exchange, the Russian teachers with whom I stayed had accepted the fact that I could and would ride the bus alone.

One day I met Irina for an afternoon of shopping.  At the conclusion of our time together, she put me on Bus #1 to “Kristy,” the area at the edge of town where I was living. I had been told to take Bus #4, but Irina assured me that #1 went to Kristy, too—she used to live there herself. We parted, and I rode Bus #1 down Octobrisky Street toward the bridge I knew the bus would cross on its way out of town.

Just before the bridge, the bus unexpectedly turned. I noticed the deviation immediately and, with a sinking feeling, watched the buildings go by. A few blocks later, the bus stopped at the railroad station and everyone got off.

I approached the conductor.  “Kristy?”

She replied in sentences I didn’t understand, wrote #4 on a piece of paper, and gestured toward the corner where #1 had unexpectedly turned.

My moment of panic was short-lived. I would walk to that corner, catch the right bus, and continue my journey.

Just then, a taxi pulled up and I heard a familiar voice call my name.

It was Irina. She had read a sign on the side of the bus as it pulled away that indicated the route had changed. Concerned that I would be frightened and not know what to do, she had found a taxi and pursued me to the railroad station. That is when I understood at last the depth of her concern for me. I surrendered my pride, climbed into the taxi, and we laughed together all the way to the corner.

I learned later that the name of that corner bus stop is “Friendship.”  Fitting, because that is the place where I gave up my obstinate insistence upon independence—truly an American trait—and understood the motive behind her guardianship. That was the moment real friendship began.

How Children Succeed

~ Sarah Powley ~ 4 Comments

I saw her in the high school library on a Tuesday afternoon at the end of the day. She was bent over her books, head in hands, her long black hair a kind of curtain around the pages that were open on the table.

“How are you doing?” I asked, interrupting her study. “It’s so good to see you!”

She lifted her head, brushed back her hair. “Mrs. Powley!”  Then she smiled and answered the question. “I’m fine—but kind of stressed now, to be honest. My classes…” Her voice trailed off.

“What are you taking?”

“Pre-cal, College Comp. Chemistry, Government. You know.”

Yes, I do know.  Kids are sometimes surprised that senior year is stressful. So many of them confuse arriving at senior year with finishing senior year and have the mistaken notion that the last year of high school will be a slide. A lot of them give up when the pressure becomes intense.

But not her.

“I thought you were going to have early dismissal this year,” I said. “What are you doing here?”

“I do. But I only work three afternoons a week—40 hours, but only 3 afternoons.”

“Forty hours?”

“I work all day Saturday and Sunday.”  Her parents own one of the small Hispanic grocery stores in the area. I got the sense—last year when she was in my American lit class and from this conversation in October—that her family is working hard to make a go of it. “If I go home,” she continued, “I get distracted. If I stay here, I get my work done. I’ve got to.”

She wants to go to college. She’s not a A student.

I’ve just finished reading, for the second time, Paul Tough’s riveting new book, How Children Succeed. It confirms everything I’ve known for years—from experience and by  instinct—about why some kids are successful and why some aren’t. It isn’t about IQ; it isn’t about money and family resources. It’s about character.

It’s about having the discipline to make yourself study when you’d rather be playing video games or texting or driving around town with your friends on a fine spring night. It’s about persistence—about seeing a teacher after school to get something explained, about giving up a lunch period to visit the math lab, or revising that paper when the assignment to do so is optional. It’s about memorizing the formulas and going over the study notes. It’s about setting a goal and moving toward it, step by step by step.

Character counts.

A few years ago, Paul Tough wrote Whatever It Takes, a book about the Harlem Children’s Zone in NYC. It was while he was researching that book that he became interested in issues of success and failure. Research shows, he found, that character is a better predictor of success in college than GPA scores. In his book, Tough identifies a handful of character strengths that can be taught in school if they haven’t been cultivated at home.

Most of Tough’s book is focused on the children of poverty. He summarizes a number of studies conducted by psychologists, neuroscientists, and even an economist that point to character strengths such as determination, resilience, conscientiousness, self-control, and what Tough calls “grit” as being the reasons some kids, against all odds, succeed. But where does it comes from, this thing we call “character”?

To begin with, children who are nurtured when they are young are more likely to develop these character strengths than the children who are not. Why?

There is a physiological explanation. The conditions of poverty, under which twenty to twenty-five percent of our children live—conditions of family dysfunction like violence, anxiety, abandonment, alcoholism, abuse, frequent relocations—cause stress for kids. The stress of living in poverty causes changes in kids’ cognitive functioning—and that means these kids can’t sit still, can’t pay attention, can’t control their emotions. They do poorly in school. “When you’re overwhelmed by uncontrollable impulses and distracted by negative feelings,” writes Tough, “it’s hard to learn the alphabet.”

The preventative—and the antidote—is a strong, nurturing relationship with an adult. Ideally, in childhood, with a mother—but not necessarily a birth mother. Tough makes the point that it is the rearing mother that has the impact, so a child raised by grandparents, by an adoptive family, by another relative who gives the child the love and guidance and support she or he needs can become a young person with these crucial character strengths. The role of the mother—whoever she or he is—is to soothe, guide, counsel, and support the child in learning to deal with adversity. She’s the teacher, if you will, of a home school course in stress management.

That might lead you to think that it is only the children of poverty who lose out on early character training, not the children of privilege. But Tough points out, in observations based upon the reflections of teachers and principals as well as research he cites, that parents who rush in to rescue their children whenever they are in a tight spot—those we call “helicopter parents”–are just as likely to be disabling their children as the neglectful parent living in poverty. Increasingly, even at the college level, teachers know the kind of parent I mean: those who contest every poor score their child receives or seek accommodations no other student will have. (Surely there is a retest? Surely the extenuating circumstances I am telling you about excuse the fact that he didn’t pay attention in class, didn’t come in for help, didn’t study? Surely he can do a make-up because his outside commitments—sports or 4H or whatever—had him just too busy for your test?)  Or, parents whose relationships with their children are “distant,” but whose expectations are nonetheless high—sometimes impossibly high.

By never allowing their children to learn how to manage a disappointment or a setback, these parents, too, are handicapping their children. If a child is never allowed to fail, he or she will lack resilience—the ability to bounce back after a defeat. My grandmother used to say: Whatever doesn’t kill you makes you stronger. She had a point.

But it won’t work to throw up our hands in despair and write off such children. We can’t just chalk up their failures to “lack of parental support” or “helicopter” parenting and be done with the matter. Tough goes on to say that the character traits he enumerates and explains in his book can be taught in school. Using examples of whole-school programs, classroom initiatives, and extra-curricular clubs (such as a chess club in an impoverished school community that has led to amazing accomplishments for some middle school students), Tough shows how teachers and principals can make a difference, can instill those character traits even in students who have lost out at home. Furthermore, character can be shaped, the examples show—even as late as during the teenage years. It’s not ideal, it’s not easy, it’s not the same—but it can happen.

What it takes is a mentor, a teacher, who believes in that student, teaches that student well, expects the best—and gets the best. Remember that Tough specified a strong, nurturing relationship with an adult, a specification that has implications for turning these kids around even as late as high school. It could be a pastor, a 4H leader, a surrogate mother—but because kids go to school, it is often a teacher. Every good teacher I know has had at least one student like this, often many more: a student in whom the teacher invested an amazing amount of time and energy and effort, one they know they reached, one they know they turned around, one who will forever be changed.

 

Back to my girl in the library: I remembered how, last year in late May, when she came in after school to make up a quiz, she stayed after that and asked me for help with vocabulary. She wanted to learn more roots. I gave her one of my books and a huge list of Greek and Latin roots and their derivatives.

Who knows where her determination, her discipline comes from? I think she must have the kind of continuing parental support that breeds success. Consider the work ethic of her family. She herself works 40 hours. It seems too much for a 17-year old. But in this case, she’s the lucky one.

So in the library that day last October, I told her not to worry. “Keep on like this and you will be fine. Determination and self-discipline are what make for success in college. You’ve got what it takes.”

And she does.

Russian Mother

~ Sarah Powley ~ 1 Comment

The holiday season is just about over. I’ve ingested my weight in cookies and confections, yet when someone urges another delicacy upon me, it’s impossible to say no. It’s cultural habit to urge calories upon friends and family in December, and indulging in culinary decadence has reminded me of another time and place in my life when eating too much was more or less an expectation, one I had to help my American students understand, too. We were together in Russia, ten years ago…   

I told them to just say “No.”

Politely, but “No.”

It didn’t do any good.

Their Russian mothers continued to heap food upon my students’ plates and ask again and again, “Wouldn’t you like more?”

“Aren’t you hungry?”

“Don’t you want something to eat?”

“Kushai! Kushai!”  they implored.  In English, “Eat! Eat!”

In preparing my American students for their three-week stay in Russian homes, I had explained that the Russian mothers would associate food with well-being and the serving of it with hospitality—indeed, their own mothers had done the same when the Russian teenagers had visited us in Indiana. Still, saying “No” and stonewalling the urgent pleas of the Russian mothers was easier to imagine than do. My students struggled, and so did I, with hospitality that seemed to have no end.

In Russian homes, mothers serve the food at the table—even ladling it onto the fathers’ plates. We couldn’t help ourselves to small portions and thus strategically leave room for more. In fact, the mothers more often than not served the Americans giant portions to begin with and gave their own children the smaller portion sizes that are the rule in Russia. Perhaps they had heard that Americans’ plates are generally heaped, but probably not. The over-sized helpings were more an expression of generosity than cultural accommodation.

We tried saying “No, thank you” in Russian: Nyet, spasebo. That didn’t work. We tried “I’m full.” Ya sita.  It produced the opposite effect:

“Wouldn’t you like some more meat?”

We learned Russian slang for “I’m full.” Ya ne slon. “I’m not an elephant.” That didn’t work either.

In fact, mealtime became a kind of battle of wills. The mothers, worrying and kind, urged more and more food upon the students, tempting them with packaged wafer cakes, elegant confections from the city bakery, peach juice and pineapple juice, and the incredibly smooth chocolate that is so hard to resist. The students begged, pleaded, shook their heads, held their stomachs in mock pain, and tried every Russian phrase they knew to say, politely, “Enough.”

It was the same for me, and I got nowhere, too. The teachers told me that the mothers were concerned. The kids weren’t eating. It wasn’t that they didn’t eat specific foods. No, the meat and potatoes were familiar and the desserts were delicious. The Russian “salads”—mixes of diced vegetables, fruits, nuts, meats or seafoods, all held together with mayonnaise—were tasty.  The trouble, the mothers said, was that the students weren’t eating enough.

I used such moments as opportunities to instruct my own hosts in American eating habits.  “We usually mean it when we say no,” I explained. “The kids will eat when they’re hungry. Don’t worry about them. Don’t worry about me.”

But they all did continue to worry. It became a kind of a joke, eventually, although sometimes it produced irritation. I began to dread meals. My waistline was thickening and I was usually still full from the previous repast—and yet, out of politeness I couldn’t completely resist, and out of gluttony I couldn’t pass up the desserts at all.

“Irina,” I said to my good friend, the teacher I stayed with the first time I brought a group of students to Russia, “you’ve been to my home in America. You know I don’t eat such big dinners. I don’t usually eat seconds.”

She nodded.

“In fact,” I said, “How did you get enough to eat at my house? I didn’t keep asking you if you wanted more.”

“I knew you’d ask only once,” she said knowingly. “I knew to take seconds the first time they were offered.”

I just shook my head.

Two summers later, Irina, her daughter Anna, and her daughter’s friend, Olga, met me at “Lavitsa,” a restaurant  that specializes in the delicate pastel cakes and mouth-watering chocolate tortes created at the city bakery. Displayed in splendor in a glass case at the entrance, the cakes tantalize customers who enter intending just a cup of tea. I’d “saved up” for this occasion and was in a dither choosing.

“I remember you like the one called cappuccino,” Irina said.

“Yes, that’s right, I do. Let’s order that. And how about Anna and Olga?”

“Oh, nothing for us,” they replied.

I arched an eyebrow. Skinny teenage girls. They should eat something, I thought.

When the waitress brought our cakes with the requisite teaspoons for eating dessert, my slice was as big as the Ritz. By comparison, Irina’s was small. And Anna and Olga had nothing.

I took the situation in hand.

Dve lozhki, I said to the waitress. She brought me two more spoons. I gave them to Anna and Olga and pushed my plate in their direction.

“No, no,” they said in chorus. “No, thank you.”

And then I heard myself say it.

“Kushai, kushai.”

My tone was urgent.

I jiggled the plate again and nudged it another inch across the table. “Kushai! Kushai!”  I repeated.

Irina looked at me and shook her head. I had become a Russian mother.

International Flavor

~ Sarah Powley ~ 1 Comment

Last night was the 10th annual International Dinner at my high school. It’s a carry-in. The food is prepared by the students, and all of it is fare from the cuisines of countries other than the United States. This year’s spread featured beignets, potato latkes, pico de gallo with tortilla chips, borscht, rice and bean and zucchini casseroles, fajitas, German chocolate cake, and cookies and sweets from around the world.

The foreign exchange students proudly offered food from their home countries. This year the most exotic dish was Giorgi from Georgia’s khachapuri – dough stuffed with cheese and “fried” in the skillet in olive oil—a sort of stuffed crepe. He’d never made the dish before. Apparently, it was quite a feat. Two Chinese cooks on YouTube, speaking Chinese, provided a demo, and his host mother, my colleague, gave him a hand once they found the recipe in English.

After the dinner, there’s entertainment—sometimes a talent show, sometimes performances by World Languages students, sometimes games or simulations teachers have set up. This year, the French teacher—who plays the fiddle and the guitar—led the crowd in French and French-Canadian songs and taught the students a folk dance that involved a broom and dashing in pairs down an alley of other students lined up to take their turns doing the same thing.

These dinners began ten years ago as a social activity connected with the exchange program I sponsored then with a secondary school in Russia. Each year, 9 American students welcomed 9 Russian students into their homes and into our school. In June, we switched—I took the Americans to Russia. But in the fall, the Russians were with us. In those days, the American host families came to the International Dinner, too, and the Russian students provided the entertainment after the meal.

When the exchanges ended, the dinners continued. In fact, it was while the exchanges were active that my colleague (Giorgi’s host mother) and I initiated the International Club, an extra-curricular service and learning organization that is now the largest club in the school.

My colleague taught Spanish then, and she was the mother duckling around whom our slim number of Hispanic students flocked. During the years of the exchange, she and I took the Russian students, their American “brothers” and “sisters,” Spanish Club students, and Hispanic students on field trips to Chicago. Other students in the school became curious about and then interested in all our “doings.” The spirit of appreciation for other countries and cultures was growing in our school, and when the exchanges ended, we wanted that spirit to continue.

To do that, we founded the International Club. The first year, the membership was small—mostly the few kids who had been with me to Russia and a few others from my colleague’s Spanish classes—but today, the membership crowds 100.

The International Club, we decided, would have three purposes: Service, Learning, and Fun. Since then, the students have
• Made greeting cards for Russian students in Beslan following the terrorist attack there
• Contributed money and person power to clean-up efforts in Louisiana after Hurricane Katrina
• Electrified a school for the deaf in Isiolo, Kenya
• Raised the money for playground equipment for an elementary school in India
Furnished a school library in El Salvador with books and computers
Paid the secondary school fees for 6 years for a girl in Rwanda
• Raised money to send 10 secondary students to school in Burundi
• Made flags and alphabet posters for primary schools in Rwanda
• Collected toys for an orphanage in Haiti that was destroyed by the earthquake
• And this year, they are raising money for an elementary school in Cameroon

Fun we have had; learning we have done. But most of all, the students’ horizons have expanded and their interest in global affairs has increased. More and more of them are eager to travel to other countries during Spring Break; more and more of them tell me they plan to study abroad while they are in college. Friendships with international students have been forged and sustained. Best of all, most important of all, appreciation of other countries and understanding of people from afar has had the contagion effect I had hoped for when I first took kids to Russia.

My thought then had been this: If my students could get to know and genuinely like just one other person from somewhere else, if they could come to understand that we are more alike than different from those from afar, then that attitude would generalize to people everywhere. My students would accept differences; they would embrace diversity. They would not fear “the other.” The kids I took to Russia did more than “genuinely like” their sisters and brothers from Russia; they fell in love with their Russian families. The same thing happened to the Russian students—they grew to love their American families.

And such has been the experience of so many other students during these past 10 years. American students who have hosted exchange students have gone to European countries to see them again and meet their families. This year for the first time, one of our boys has gone on a year-long study abroad program. He’s in Germany, living with the family of the boy who lived with him last year in Indiana.

So, watching the students last night—Sylvie from Kenya dancing down the gauntlet with her friend from rural Indiana; Victor, whose family is from China, dancing with Lili, whose family is from Iran—I marveled and rejoiced at what has happened in 10 short years. Organizations like the International Club are usually personality-driven. They don’t have national charters, like Future Farmers of America, or an established purpose, like the Student Council. They aren’t recognized high school entities like the National Forensic League. They usually die when the sponsor withdraws.

But our International Club—unique in Indiana as far as I know—continues to thrive. In part, that’s because of the committed efforts of my colleague and two other teachers, who are now the sponsors, but it’s also because the Club itself has become institutionalized. It is a recognized entity in our school community. The activities are fun, the service projects are meaningful; the learning is measureable. Look how many were there last night!

And I was there, too—savoring international flavors and celebrating amazing friendships that extend beyond national borders.

How sweet it is.

Always the Kids

~ Sarah Powley ~ 3 Comments

The final bell had rung, the halls had emptied, and a small 6th grade boy struggled with a Trapper Keeper, three heavy textbooks, and his trombone case. One or the other kept falling out of his arms.

“Can I help you with some of that?” I asked.

“Yes, please,” he answered.

“Are you trying to make the bus?”

“No, my mom is waiting for me. “

So we made our way together down the long hall, chatting about school, his homework, his family’s plans to celebrate his grandmother’s birthday that evening.

He was open and trusting because even though I was a stranger, I was obviously a teacher.

I delivered him with a smile to his mother.

It was a small encounter, but a significant one for me. When I turned away, I felt that I was part of the staff, a teacher of children again.

In another school, a teacher came to me and asked if I could help an 8th grade girl in her study hall find a library book. “She’s read all the Wimpy books, but she says she doesn’t like to read. I know it’s not in your job description, but could you help her? I’m not an English teacher.”

Of course I would try. The student and I went to the library. I had never seen a Wimpy book, but quickly learned that the series features engaging graphics and fairly large text in a font that replicates a child’s printing. The Wimpy books are humorous stories about a middle school boy whose struggles are the same as the ones the kids who read these books experience.

“What kind of stories do you like?” I asked. And she responded in the way I expected.

“About real kids. I don’t like made-up stuff.”

So no Harry Potter (She didn’t even like the Harry Potter movies), no vampires, no princesses, no science fiction. The school’s library had graphic novels—but only classics like Robin Hood and King Arthur.

“Can you tell me why you don’t like to read?”

She was unusually aware. “It’s the way the print is on the page,” she said. “It’s all blocky and together.”

Sure enough. Every book she rejected had conventional print. In every book she liked, the spacing between the lines was wide and the right margin was not justified.

We found several books that met her requirements. She picked one, and I took her back to study hall. On the way, she told me she is supposed to get glasses.

In my own high school, where just a few months ago I was the one at the front of the room, I had a chance to co-teach with a colleague. It was an AP history class, and we were working with the students on writing thesis statements, the first step in learning to write the elaborated but precisely constructed essays that will be required for students to earn a high score on the tests they’ll take in the spring. We had planned the lesson well, and my colleague is a star, so instruction unfolded like a ballet: perfectly choreographed, graceful and smooth in its delivery.

And yet, my very favorite moment came when a student who had grasped the concept of a thesis and the way each part of the statement previews a point that will be developed in the body of the essay, raised her hand and asked, “But what if you don’t know the information?”

My colleague and I chuckled.

“That is what all this means. You will have to do the job of learning.”

And we, the job of teaching.

In my new role as an instructional coach, I have met with teachers in secondary schools throughout my district. I’ve talked with them individually, in small groups, at whole faculty meetings. I have met outstanding educators and seen some spectacular teaching. I have been warmly welcomed, my calendar is full, and I feel valued and productive. I love supporting other teachers. I love my new job.

But there is something I have to get used to.

I wrote in August about my “phantom limb”—my impulse to plan lessons, develop units, create curriculum. Now that school has started, I’ve discovered another missing limb—and it’s the kids. Interacting with them makes me feel like a teacher. So I’ll grab every chance I get to co-teach, to find library books, to carry trombone cases.

I am a teacher.

I always will be.

Going for Gold

~ Sarah Powley ~ Leave a comment

• The bell rings before you reach the lesson’s close.
• A befuddled question from a student translates into a moment of clarity for you: The student doesn’t understand. You’ll have to back up and start over.
• Kids aren’t listening, so you interrupt the lesson to redirect them. But then other kids lose the thread because your intervention is far more interesting than the lesson.
• Your explanation is unclear. You’ve even confused yourself.
• Three boys are spending more time fooling around than completing the task at hand. You shouldn’t have put them in a group together. But too late now. The lesson is underway and there isn’t much you can do.
• The technology fails–the ENO board won’t work right, perhaps, or a bulb blows on the overhead–and your lesson depends on the technology. You spend 10 minutes trying to get it to work. It never does. Worse than that, you lose your cool.
• Eye rolling and snickering from teenage girls: it’s unnerving and makes your knees jump. You can’t shake them off, and you can’t concentrate on your lesson, either.
• The activity you planned is too complex–the kids are not moving into and through it smoothly.
• A parent calls to register a complaint that seems to come out of left field. How could you have anticipated that?

Plenty of things can go wrong every single period of every teaching day. A teacher is a human being interacting with thirty other human beings every period. That can mean 150 kids—sometimes even more—in the course of a day. There’s a text to be understood, a concept to be explained, or a skill to be taught—and an array of technological supports that can fail at any time. When any one of the infinite number of variables goes wrong, any teacher is troubled.

I have experienced every one of the scenarios sketched in the text above.

Imagine if all them (or even just several) happened on the same day. A novice teacher could easily be thrown: her confidence shaken; her resolve, dissolved. Even one such incident can haunt a beginner, and one hour that goes badly can color the whole week. You can feel like a failure within a very short time.

I remember spending one whole weekend, when I was a beginning teacher, obsessing over something that happened on a Friday afternoon and second-guessing my response to it. I had had a “horrible week,” I declared to my husband, but in reality, I’d had one bad incident on Friday. By Monday, whatever had happened had been completely forgotten by the students, and I felt silly for letting it ruin my weekend.

This fixation on failure happened to me more than once. I’d let one or two “disasters” during a week dominate my assessment of myself as a teacher. The optimism and confidence I’d started the year out with were soon gone, and I really was in danger of failure. What was I going to do? I wanted to be a teacher. I wanted to make a difference in the lives of children—and not a negative difference, either. After a lot of fretting and frustration, I hit upon a strategy for dealing with disaster: I created a mental calendar to set the record straight.

It was like this: I taught six classes a day, five days a week, so (I told myself) there were thirty chances for success. Each week began with—in my mind—a blank white page gridded like a calendar: five squares across, six squares down, one for every period I taught. If a period went well–nothing spectacular, but nothing awful, either—the square remained white. If a class went badly, I colored the square black. But if the class went well, I made the square yellow, a cheerful color, one most people associate with happiness.

The object, of course, was to achieve a solid yellow page. In the beginning, I was gratified if there were no black spots on the grid. A page that was still white by the end of the week was a huge relief, and on the few intermittent yellows, I rode high. Gradually, my grids started looking like a case of measles—my yellow squares were sprinkled throughout the week. A whole day that was solid yellow was cause for rejoicing; a week of yellow–which took a long time to achieve—provoked a celebration equivalent to the Fourth of July. As time went along, the black days disappeared and the yellow ones dominated. Occasionally, one of those dreaded black marks did occur, but because of the grid, I could put that period into perspective. It was one period in a matrix of thirty opportunities. Not the whole picture, not a portrait of failure. My confidence increased, square by square, and with the confidence, guess what? More and more yellow squares began to appear.

Naturally, as the years passed by, I raised my standards, expected more of myself. Yellow became the new norm. I started going for gold. My explanations became clearer and were illustrated with examples kids could understand. I learned how to structure groups and keep students on task. Through trial and error and a lot of deliberate action, classroom management moved from nightmare to second nature. I learned about learning styles, adjusted my instruction for students at various levels, developed better questioning techniques and pacing strategies. And so on.

I got to gold. One square at a time.

I tell this story now to beginning teachers and others who are temporarily off their stride. Be gentle with yourself. Don’t let one bad day spoil the weekend. Don’t let one bad hour define you. You’ll get to yellow. One square at a time. And then you’ll go for gold.

Phantom Limb

~ Sarah Powley ~ Leave a comment

In August every year, teachers—just like kids—get  excited about the opening of school. They go into their classrooms in the sweltering heat to arrange the furniture, decorate the walls, organize seating charts and other materials, and most of all, to plan their units of instruction. It’s not unlike preparing for the arrival of a newborn. You get the classroom ready and then start imagining all the wonderful  adventures in learning that you’re going to experience with your students, most of whom are still, at this point, abstract.

I am not immune to the exhilaration of August either.  Last year, when I accepted my new position as a full-time instructional coach for my district, I joked with colleagues that this was “voluntary amputation.”  I said that because I knew that I would miss being in the classroom, even though I was—and am—excited about this new opportunity.  I thought I was being funny, talking about dismemberment, but my quip was more on target than I realized.

I have a phantom limb.

During the Civil War–and probably before that–amputees began reporting that they could feel sensations in their missing arms or legs. Today the phenomenon is well known.  No one knows for sure what causes the phantom limb sensation—some neuroscientists think the feelings are evidence of the brain reorganizing itself—but the illusion of feeling in a severed body part is real and widely experienced.

A few days ago, a colleague recommended a link to a great site for art, history, and science visuals to me and all my colleagues in the English Department on our Facebook group site. My mind started spinning, and soon I had a long list in my head of ways to use these images.

Then, while we were driving home from vacation last week, I read an apt and amusing editorial in the New York Times out loud to my husband: Auto Crrect Ths. The article was about the author’s  frustration with “auto correct” and his ruminations on the trend toward loss of spelling skills. I thought it would make a good starting place for a discussion in my College Composition class about the importance—or unimportance—of competence in spelling.  I couldn’t resist the urge: I emailed the article to my colleagues.

Then I received a notification from an online educational products company hawking ready-to-purchase units organized around primary documents, the use of which is a huge component of the new Common Core State Standards that everyone is scrambling to understand and implement. The units looked pretty good—perusing them gave me ideas for organizing my own instructional units.

These and other starting places for new units of instruction (or enhancements for existing ones) get me pretty excited.  But each time I feel my heart racing and my cheeks turning pink from the thrill of anticipated academic adventure, the phantom limb phenomenon brings me up short. I remember that I won’t be in the classroom this year.

Still, just as the severed limbs seem more real to amputees than their intact ones, teaching my 9th graders, my American Lit classes, and my seniors in College Comp seems more real to me than what I’ll be doing next.  To be honest, I don’t know what to expect.  That’s why, as I begin in my new position, I’m going to resume this blog by describing some of my past experiences as a teacher and sharing some instructional strategies that have worked for me.  And, since my new job is all about passing along  experiences and strategies, this is fitting.

I know I will be adding to an already huge store of creative teaching strategies for To Kill a Mockingbird, but I’m going to start with some lessons from this modern classic, a book taught almost everywhere in the country. However, while the lessons are in the context of TKM (as English teachers often abbreviate it), the strategies are widely applicable. I hope they are helpful to someone.

You see? The excitement about learning, and the urge to construct units and share resources, ideas, and lesson plans doesn’t go away even when someone leaves the classroom.

You don’t believe me?  The colleague who sent the link to the visuals?  She retired last year, too. Guess we both have a phantom limb.