A rolling thread where we are teachers

That sounds miserable. I'm so sorry you have to deal with that.

I think I taught the world's first trillionaire this morning: a kid in kindergarten who, for his sharing, had a chart with the main units of money from 20 different countries. He could pronounce most of them--Deutsche Mark gave him some trouble.

(Quadrillionaire, that is--my brain and my hands are often strangers.)

I only come here to moan... By the middle of this week: all of Y8 isolating, half of Y7, Y10 preparing for trial exams told to go on study leave because of an outbreak in their year group, 12 cases in Y9. Y11 have already left, so we're down to about 400 kids out of 1400 and about 25 staff are missing. Could this all just fuck off now please?

And yet people keep repeating ad nauseam that Science Shows Outbreaks Don't Happen in Schools.

How much more of the school year is there where you are? We got done a week ago.

Right? I guess we were pretty lucky in the run up to Christmas but this is madness. We're all double vaxxed but ffs.

School year finishes 23rd July unfortunately. Not even a whisper of closing early.

Science Shows Outbreaks Don't Happen in Schools is/was one of the most pernicious lies told during COVID.

Just signed off on my last remote supply/substitute job of the year. I enjoyed it at first. The last two or three weeks, no nearly as much--much apathy, especially in the older grades. Would be happy to never do another remote job in my life.

We got done a week ago.

When do you go back?

Last day for my partner. She is going drinking with the staff and told me not to wait up

xp Well, that depends on whether I can find a job for next year. They phased out the French program at the school I was teaching at, displacing me, then the school district decided they had too many French teachers and laid me off for real. I'm also endorsed in English, but the district has also been laying off English teachers this year, so the job market isn't looking so good. If I find another public school job I'll go back at the very end of August, otherwise, idk.

Where I am, French or music always pretty much guaranteed you a job (and probably a choice of where you wanted to go).

French is not all that popular here; I think it's seen as the elitist choice compared to Spanish. So when they had to cut costs at my school because they had lower enrollment than before, they chose the French program to get rid of.

To be fair, it made sense if they were going to to cut a language program; there was a lot more demand for Spanish. But it's hard on the high schools that no longer have a feeder school for French, and it's hard on the heritage Spanish students who really do not want to be stuck in a middle school Spanish class.

Languages and music are def not the route to job security in teaching in the USA lol

French, as you might guess, is mandated here; not sure why qualified music teachers were always in short supply, but they were (at the elementary/intermediate level, anyway--not sure about high school).

here in mexico city schools have been closed since march 2020, and from a purely selfish perspective i loved teaching from home and not having to deal with the awful traffic every day, plus having more time for myself to explore the city. sadly it's all coming to an end soon.

it was pretty fun to see the students take advantage of online classes too - every week there was someone connecting from acapulco or cancun excited to show the class their hotel room.

Yeah that was fun. I had students tuning in from Bolivia, Mexico, Taiwan, and down the street. Very weird and I do miss it 😢

how do you fit in grammar, style, and usage lessons in a way that makes sense and has an impact? this is the area of my teaching that i want to improve this year. it's hard to make this stuff not seem boring and arbitrary.

i teach high school english by the way.

do some googling and find some cool videos -- this is basically what i taught (sentences and paragraphs) for 14 years and there is a lot more good stuff out there than there used to be

How is the school year organised in the USA? I'm asking because in the various COVID-related threads I keep reading about American kids being at school in August when I had assumed they would be on their summer break. In England* the school year starts in the first week of September. There are three terms, each with a one-week half term holiday in the middle: September to December (then a two-week holiday around Christmas & New Year), January to Easter (then another two-week holiday), then Easter to mid/late July, followed by a break of about 6 weeks. Exams are usually around May.

*I won't say Britain because for all I know it's different in Scotland

Used to be we went back to shoool in September and got out in June. Now the kids go in mid-to-late August, and get out in late May/early June. This is in the Bay Area. I don't think there are even rules within California let alone the whole country - I think every district gets to do what they want.

The administration of schools is highly localized in the USA. The starting day of the school year, along with the year's calendar of school days, holidays, planning days and parent-teacher conference days is most often set by the local school district and these vary widely.

Cheers

school districts that start school before labor day are objectively incorrect about what summer is

I've only taught in Alaska and in Seattle, but they're fairly different; Alaska starts its school year in mid-August and ends in May, with a winter break and a spring break. Seattle starts Sep. 1 and goes through June 21st, with a winter break, a mid-winter break and a spring break.

Today was the first day back in the classroom! (I got hired back after being laid off by the district.) Man this is exhausting, and it's only been one day. Still getting used to the lack of lag. 50 minute classes used to feel so short when I had block scheduling, but after remote teaching, when 50 minute classes yielded about 30-35 minutes of usable lesson time, it now feels like omg I have so much time to fill.

my partner is in her first week in NYC; she says like a third of the teachers had some sort of flooding issue last night and are trying to juggle dealing with that at the same time as being in class.

I have this one class that goes badly about 50% of the time and I'm really starting to worry that it's getting too late to turn it around. The kids are super smart but rowdy, like to test authority, and loved their previous teacher, so they push back every chance they get, and I'm reluctant to start coming down hard on them because I know their previous class had a really warm positive vibe and I'm still hoping I can get there. But the reality is I'm not as experienced a French teacher as their previous teacher was, and I'm still getting a handle on what they know and don't know, and so this part of the year is just going to be me trying stuff and seeing if it works - which of course comes across as incompetence to them because they're smart middle-schoolers who live to judge adults. Today's class went really badly, and what's really frustrating is it didn't need to. The activity wasn't bad, I just hadn't quite calibrated it right for this class and I'd left too many opportunities for them to get distracted, and they took all of them.

I wish I were better adjusted and didn't react to bad classes with this panic spiral of "I am a bad teacher and I won't be able to come up with a good plan to get out of this hole I'm in because I am a bad teacher."

It's supposed to be a reflective profession...I'd always take bad days and disastrous lessons home with me. Usually things get better just because things usually get better.

I wish I were better adjusted and didn't react to bad classes with this panic spiral of "I am a bad teacher and I won't be able to come up with a good plan to get out of this hole I'm in because I am a bad teacher."

as an alternative to just gritting your teeth through it, remember your reaction to things can change for the better (as well as your class!) but only YOU can do it -- you need to focus on noticing when the panic spiral starts and shutting it tf down. it's possible, it's work, and u can do it!! :) don't let a job eat you alive. i am here to post this as many times as i need to.

Real bad teachers really dgaf when their classes are going badly.

Thank you all!

LL is right, Lily Dale— and just a reminder that we all have off days, and to be kind to yourself.

Thanks, everyone. I really appreciate the pep talk. I had a talk with the class today - "I'm not happy with yesterday's class, part of that's on me, but part of it's on you, let's talk about expectations," and then switched up my plans for the next couple of weeks, because I can tell they're sick of review, and jumped into a new unit that they seem to be on board with. And it all went pretty well! It's sometimes hard for me to remember that I'm not a first-year teacher anymore and I actually have the skills to pull the class out of a slump if I can just chill out enough to hear myself think.

That' great to hear, Lily. I also have found that especially with teens and younger people, sometimes actually acknowledging that things aren't working and having a conversation about it can yield a much better dynamic.

I think so much of being a teacher is working out your boundaries and that can take months, even years. The corollary of that is certain lessons (indeed, whole classes over whole terms/school years - I have the scars!) that can collapse around you - particularly in the early years. I don't know that there's a shortcut for it. It's that old saw that you 'can't learn experience'. It sounds like you've handled it well. A reset, a re-drawing of your expectations and a new topic can work (small) wonders, I think.

I also think you just grow a thicker skin with this stuff; as time passes, you're less likely to catastrophise and will just shrug those lessons off because in the grand scheme of things...

This won't really help you--you seem to have righted the ship anyway--but something I wrote on the board two or three times after particularly awful days. It's a quote from Earl Weaver: "We do this every day." And I'd talk about it--no matter what happened yesterday, you get to come back the next day and try it again. The thing that makes teaching so hard is also the thing that sooner or later fixes the problem.

Right— when I was adjuncting, I had a class that collapsed around me in spring 2018, but luckily I was also teaching another course at the time that was one of the better courses I'd ever taught, up to that point. The collapsed class still made me feel horrid, but much of the fault there can be laid upon working with a crap syllabus that someone else wrote (not my choice!) and two students in a class of 20 who made sure to be disruptive every chance they got. I failed more students that semester than I ever had previously, and blamed it on myself for awhile, but no more.

^This.

xp That's great clemenza. I'm going to steal the quote and your reading of it for the teaching book I'll never write.

My day. I have a new tutor group. 31 11yr olds every morning. They were berating today for not wearing a tie because it made me look 'informal'. Fine. One kid looks at me thoughtfully and says 'you look like a dad who's given up'. Oof. Skewered. Utterly.

Christ, look at that post. Can you tell I've been teaching minor sentences?

I think it also sends a message to the students, who, starting in the junior grades, will get it: no matter what you throw at me, I will be back here tomorrow. (Weaver was talking about the difference between baseball and football: "This ain't a football game, we do this every day.")

important article about professional burnout, passion for one's work and my favorite scale for measuring burnout, the MBI. recommended reading!!!!

https://www.refinery29.com/en-us/2021/09/10692458/burnout-work-millennials-ambition-scam

I am not a teacher but we got a message from kid's high schools saying "we know there's a Tik Tok "slap your teacher" challenge, please be advised that if you slap a teacher you're getting expelled" -- jesus, teachers, is this a real thing, are kids slapping you for Tik Tok clout, or is this a bizarre moral panic about something that doesn't exist?

i heard someone else mention it too -- i think it is a thing (i do not teach k-12 so i did not get slapped)

Thanks for that, LL. Needed it today, which is my last day freelancing for a company I've been working for on and off since the year began. At first I was really worried about not having a job, and then I realized: oh shit, I get to have my birthday (on Monday) to do what I want, for the first time in YEARS. I'm going to do things I want to do! It's going to be great.

In other words, I have often preached the sort of lessons that this article is offering, namely that work can be joyous and fun, but that no matter what, it is still *work*, and it cannot be the center of one's existence.