Caring and teaching

Lee over at College Ready Writing has a post that I really relate to.  She writes:

As far back as I can remember, if I’ve been teaching or coaching, they’ve been “my” kids….

This has continued on as I have taught and coached; I was the one nagging the college swimmers about their health, their eating, and often the one they confided in. It’s a lot harder now because I have more and bigger classes. There is also a distance that is implied in higher education a lot of the times between professor and student. But whenever and however I can, I get to know my students and find ways to let them know that I take their education seriously.

For me that caring has also been a part of my teaching.  I really believe that I am teaching students, not ESL.  They are human beings first and students second.

This morning I went to school to go with one of my students to talk to another of her instructors.  She wanted the support and, if needed, the translating.  We made it through that fine, and I hope we have found a solution to her problem.  But what really matters to me is that she knows I care about her.  She knows she can turn tome if she needs to and I will try to help.

When I taught in Louisiana I was constantly talking to students, listening to them.  It was, I believe, part of what made the administration uneasy with me.  But that is another story.   It was important to me that the student had someone they could confide in, and I was willing to be that person if there was no one else.

This concern for my students is part of my official teaching philosophy.    I am proud of it — although not everyone sees it as a virtue.  But if we don’t care about our students, can we really teach them?  I don’t think so.

Check out Lee’s post.  It’s a good one.

I love this job!

As I walked around the classroom this morning and listened to my students discussing the story they had read as homework, as I watched their animation and enthusiasm, I couldn’t help but think about how much I love teaching.  I have a great bunch of students this semester, and they are all anxious to learn.  It is wonderful!

What have I learned?

As  I prepare to  get my classes together for the fall, I have to think ab out what worked and didn’t work last year.  What did I learn?

One think I learned is to limit the number of tools I use with any one class.  The wiki, the blog, their blogs, and Blackboard are too much for one class.  (I don’t think I actually used all those with any one class,  but I came close!)   Some students  really preferred the blog approach to Blackboard.  Others preferred the familiarity of Blackboard.  But regardless of which side of that issue they took, they got confused about where to post which assignment.  I have learned that I have to streamline that process.  I think I can use blogs with the wiki or my blog, but  throwing Blackboard into the mix is too much.  So I will use Blackboard for classes with quizzes and a real need for the more  “secure” environment.  Otherwise, I will use  blogs and the wiki more.

This is only one thing that I learned last year.  Hopefully there were other things  that will become more apparent as I get further into my planning.

Working ahead to avoid doing what I should do

The semester is over.  I have a million things to do, thin gs that need to be done sooner rather than later.  But what am I doing?  Trying to decide where I want to house my courses for the fall. I have my blog Nancy’s Classroom, my wiki, and today I started playing around with Kafafa, which I read about some time ago on Free Technology  for Teachers.  In addition, I have been using the learning management system at school.

One thing I discovered last semester was that using non-standard tools can be difficult for some students.  Some of mine last semester loved using the blogs but they never got into the wiki.  Others hated everything other than the university-sanctioned program they were used to.  I know there is no way to make everyone happy, but I would like to try!

This coming year I am not going to be teaching in the language lab every day.  I have found that it is great when I want them to actually do something on the computers, but otherwise, it  is a terrible place to hold class.  So I asked to  teach somewhere else.  And it will be good.  But it means that I am going a little lower tech than I have been.

My students turn everything in electronically.  So I could have them post everything to their own individual blogs again.  That worked pretty good last fall.   I think I like that option best.  I  can have most of the course on the wiki and then they can just do their work on the blog.  I would then have to email them their grades.  Drafts of papers  become a little tricky, though.

The purpose of adding another  website, the one on Kafafa is unclear to me.  It looks a lot like the blog, actually.  But  I always seem to have to try everything!

Maybe what I need to do is use the blog for classes, keep the wiki for more long-term storage,  and forget Kafafa.   One new  site is enough for students to have to learn is enough, I think!

Anyway, that is what I have been doing today instead of working on my more immediate projects.  It has been fun, but I think it is time to get back to work!

Why we do it

John posted a comment on my last post that I have read and thought about for several days  now. I decided it was time to actually write  about it.  He said:

When I focus on the externals, teaching can be almost unbearable dealing with rooms, equipment, administration. When I focus on the students, I am usually thankful I became a teacher in most cases.

How true!  That is one reason why Spring is more difficult me than the fall semester:  I teach a heavier load in the fall, and I literally don’t have time to think of much else.  I don’t have time to get caught up in the problems.  I just deal with them  But in the spring, I have more time to actually fret about them.  I can get so caught up in the externals that I almost forget about the students at time.

This semester was an easy one in some ways and a difficult one in others.  Students had all kinds of problems outside of  class, and that always worries me.  Inside class, some of them didn’t care.  Others cared but not enough to work hard.  It was discouraging in many ways.

But then Monday a young lady came to see me.  She was one who had some trouble outside of  school this semester.  She won’t be back in the fall, and she came to say good-bye.   When she told me she would come see me Monday, I expected her to be arguing about her  grade or something like that.  Instead, she came to thank me and to give me a gift.  She told me how much she will miss me and how thankful she was for my concern and assistance.

I was shocked.  And I remembered, as John said, that this is why I am a teacher.  Not every student comes at the end and praises us for our efforts, of course.  But it only takes one to remind us that what we do does matter.  It gives us the strength to take on the next class, the next set of challenges.

I would like to thank both John and Cindy for reminding me of this.

Paper and pencil

If you haven’t seen it, you really should check out Adventures in Pencil Integration, you really should.  It is a hoot!

(My apologies to whoever it was who blogged about this several days ago.  I seem to hvae lost the original link.  If I find it, I will post it here.)

Switching gears

Up through Tuesday evening I was holding out hope that Moodle would be up and running in time to start the semester with it.  (We have permission to sue Moodle but they won’t let the server housing it access the internet!  Hopefully that will change soon.)  So yesterday morning I had to scuffle to figure out how I was going to handle the quizzes and answers to homework that I was going to post to Moodle.  I already had the courses basically set up on a wiki, so what I ended up doing was creating pages for the answers to be posted and another for the quizzes.  I am only going to post them for the time that students have to check their answers and take the quiz, and then I will take them down and later post the next answers and quiz.  It isn’t a perfect system, but I think it will work.

I could, of course, have used Blackboard.  I looked at it and even posted my syllabi there.  But I really don’t want to do that.  I will give Moodle a couple weeks and, if we still can’t use it then, will just continue with what is already in place. If it works that long, why not stick with it?

My students have started posting to their blogs.  You can find the list here, if you are interested.

Standard English

Over at EFL Classroom 2.0 there is a survey about standard English.  He asks if there is such a thing as standard English and whether or not it should be taught.  I have a little problem with the question as it has two parts and I might agree with one part and not the other, and there is no option for that.  It is an interesting question nonetheless.

When I was in grad school, one of my professors told me that anything a native English speaker says is correct.  (My MA TESOL came from a linguistics department rather than English or education or someplace else.)  I have always believed that.  English has no regulating body that determines correctness, and I like it that way!

That does not help us much when we think about what kind of English we need to teach our students, though.

I really believe that there is no single answer to the question of what we should teach our students.  Everyone’s needs are different.  In my English for Academic Purposes institute, I believe I have a responsibility to teach my students more formal academic English.  I am not concerned that they be able to talk to people on the street as much as I am that they be able to understand academic texts.  I have a more prescriptivist approach to grammar with these students than I did when I taught migrant farmworkers.  With them I was more interested in them being able to communicate with doctors and police and their children’s teachers.  If it wasn’t “perfect”, none of us cared.

Go on over to EFL Classroom and take the survey.  And, if you want, let me know how you voted here!

Why am I so slow to figure things out?

It seems that Itake forever to figure things out.  Take thesis statements, for example.  Or rather, take teaching thesis statements.  I was having no luck at all getting my student to understand what I was talking about.  Then on Monday I showed them a couple videos, and suddenly a bunch of them really understood what I was talking about.

This was the first one: 

And this was the second:

At the end of these two short videos, most of my students were able to write halfway decent thesis statements.

Why didn’t I think of this sooner?

Cell phones and other burning issues

I am late getting on this topic.  I read the post on change.org when it was made,but I didn’t have time to really pay a lot of attention.  I pretty much dismissed it almost immediately.  While I don’t love phones in general, anyone who says

Cell phones baffle me.

is so far from my world that I didn’t pay a lot of attention.  But Ira’s post over at SpeEdChange made me look at the original post again.  He says:

This teacher is talking about nothing here but her own comfort and belief system. She thinks best when it is quiet. She thinks best when focused on one thing. She believes there is a specific way to study a text. And it is her job to bring these students to her beliefs.

The fact that some of us might function best in other ways, that some of us might need other structures, does not occur to her. If we would only “come to the light” – we would understand.

He encourages people to go to the original post and read the whole discussion, so I did.  It was fascinating.

The original post discusses everything from cell phone rudeness in class to the author’s belief that

By forcing them to put their phones and laptops away, I am giving them the opportunity to stop the random, jittery stimulation and instant information that surrounds them at all times, and instead turn their attention to a deep and slow understanding of one specific text, idea or question.

What strikes me most about the original post is the author’s conviction that she is right.  Maybe I am crazy, but I am seldom convinced that what I do in the classroom is “right”.  I am constantly experimenting, looking for a better way to do things.  While you may not agree with me, I do not think this makes me a “bad” teacher.  In fact, I think it is one of my strengths as a teacher.   But, of course, I may not be right.  Maybe it is a weakness.  What I am sure of is that if I continue to question my own teaching, I will discover if I am on the wrong track pretty quickly.

The discussion after the original post is even more interesting than the original post.  Both sides of the issue (and maybe a couple other angles, too!) are represented.  Ira himself posts his rules for cell phones in his classroom:

(1) Keep it out, on your desk. That way, if you’ve forgotten to silence the ring, we’re not waiting for you to find it in your backpack.

(2) If you need to talk, go outside. No big deal.

(3) Have it on all the time – we’ll be using it – polleverywhere, todaysmeet, SMS questions to people out of the classroom, sharing links, putting important notes in our calendars.

Of course the discussion that follows points out that not everyone has internet access on their phones, but basically Ira’s rules make sense to me:

1. Keep the cell phones out. It gretly increases the chance that you will remember to set the phone to silent.  I have on occasion forgotten to do that.  If I had taken it out of my bag, I would have remembered to do  it.
2. Keep the phones on.  I have no problem with that.  Like Ira, I don’t mind if a student has to leave the room to make or receive a call.  If it happened all the time, it would make me wonder if the student has a problem I need to know about or if I am somehow just not engaging him/her in class.  If my students are not engaged, I need to know it.
3. If I didn’t teach in a computer lab and if my students — even some of them — had access to the internet on their phones, I would definitely use them this way.  As it is, that is how we use the computers in front of us each and every class.

Another comment talked about it being more important to have students respect us than to like us.  I agree.  I do not have to be my students’ friend.  But I also don’t think that they will respect me because I tell them to put their cell phones away.  I earn their respect by creating a learning environment where they feel free to express their ideas, where they feel respected in every way.  Students don’t respect us because we exercise our authority but rather because we demonstrate qualities that they see as worthy of respect.  Respect doesn’t come automatically with your teaching credentials or your degree.

If students are consistently using cell phones in non-academic or non-emergency ways in class, it is time to think about what you are doing as a teacher.  If they use them to cheat on exams, maybe you need to change your exams.  If they use them to escape from the monotony of a boring class, maybe you need to try to make it not so boring.

As teachers, we are responsible for what goes on in our classes.  It is our responsibility as the professional educator to look for the causes of the problems we encounter, not merely to deal with the symptoms.