Welcome to my life

Help:  I'm drowning in paper work, meetings, planning, grading, recording, and general real life.

Anyone else feel like their real life gets in the way of their writing and blogging and social interactions?


I'm heading back into the writing process.  ONE LAST set of revisions before I send it off to agents. 

Sunday I had 2 hours to work... I wrote three sentences. 

Maybe this weekend I'll get more in. 

The Logic of a middle school student

I've been teaching my 7th graders The Raven by Poe for the last week.

We've watched The Simpsons version of it.

We read it.

We listened to a professional actor read it.  T

hen we translated the entire poem into modern language.  I am personally a BIG believer in doing this.  It's how I've been able to understand all the classics I've read.

My version of McBeth has WAY more uses of the word "dude", than Shakespeare intended.

So after a week worth of studying the most famous American poem, a student raised his hand and said
"I have a question. Why didn't the narrator just walk out of the room instead of spending five stanzas yelling at a bird?"

 GENIUS!!!!!

Yes.  I agree.

I also question the interior design choose of putting a bust of Pallas over your chamber door.   One slam of the door and that statue's is a murder weapon.

URGH Pet Peeve

I'm a teacher. I've been teaching for 10 years. I've been reading YA for about 20 years.

Do you know what I hate?

How teachers are represented in books.

Teachers, 99% of the time, are the bad guys. They don't stick up for the main character or they put the main character in some sort of dumb situation.

URGH!

In the book Hush Hush, not only is the teacher's lesson SO inappropriate he would lose his job, but when the MC asks for her seat to be changed the teacher refuses.<-- yes it's a part of a plot point but still.

Nope.

That's not how I run my classroom at all.

If a kid ever came up to me and said he or she doesn't feel comfortable in the seat, by the time the sentence was over the students' seat would be changed.

OK and say there's a nerdy kid is being bullied and  screams in class.  you know what?  Instead of sending the nerdy kid to the principals office, I'm going to ask him what happened, AND if the nerdy says that the cool kid next to him was poking him and generally being annoying until the nerdy kid snapped.  I'm going believe him.  You know why?  Because for most kids it takes a WHOLE LOT for a kid to scream in class and it's almost always provoked somehow.   So cool kid with a pencil in his hand, laughing, guess what, you've got lunch detention too. (This scene comes from The Truth About Turman School)


I work very hard to make sure every kid feels welcome, comfortable and safe in my classroom.

Teaching is hard enough with the popular opinion that all teachers hate children.


YA/ MG, you know I LOVED YOU GUYS,  but  you're not helping the situation.

Yes it's easy to make the adult establishment the bad guys in YA literature since most kids feel like adults are out to destroy their lives.

I know it makes for easier writing on your part, teachers are an easy target and more so its a easy plot device. 

But chances are there was at least one teacher in your educational career that made you love writing or reading.  Chances are there was at least one teacher that made you feel like a human being.

Please stop demonizing us.

I've read over 15 books in the last three months and so far only 1 book had a teacher in a positive light.  Yikes.

Now this is a two way street and I'll be the first to admit that there have been days when I was not at my best, or I was cranky.  And yes I've had "bad" teachers.  

And in an effort to be fair
A note for teachers:  Most of the time it's an adult who put you in a bad mood, don't take it out on the kids.  Your kids  should make you laugh or smile at least once a day.

Sorry but  it's that simple.

I'm not saying there aren't a few less the perfect teachers out there, but the majority of us love our jobs.  
Authors and teachers, let's create an environment that makes kids WANT to be in school.

Thank you.

I"m getting off my soap box now... the air is getting a little thin.


  

 

Making reading not suck.

I'm a teacher.  I teach middle school and my job is awesome.  Seriously I mentally mock anyone who doesn't get to stand up in front of 25 kids every 45 minutes and spew all sorts of knowledge on them.

Problem is, my kids HATE reading.

You know why? Because we teaching them boring and crappy books that are WAY too hard for them.
1) Frankenstein in 8th grade
2) Watership down in 6th grade
3) Roll of Thunder hear my cry in 7th grade (this isn't too hard for them, it's just sort of a boring book)
4) Romeo and Juliet 8th grade

All of these books are wonderful works of literature... but really above the head of any 10 year old. Add to that, comprehension checks, vocabulary drills, projects, class discussions and wow could you possibly suck the fun out of reading more?

Teachers why do we do this?

Well we need grades.  Yep it's true.  A HUGE part of our teaching lives revolves around a score.
We also need to know if they kids understand teh material... but let's face this fact too, if they don't understand there's not a lot of time to go back and reteach.

This year I told my students up front-- sorry guys, the stories we read in class are going to be LAME.  Sorry.  It was out of my control.  I didn't make up the curcilulum.  But to make sure you don't hate reading I want you to read outside of school.  Good books.  Books you care about.  Hunger Games, Gone, Twilight, Maxumin Ride.  Whatever book you enjoy.

Everytime I read a book I share it with the class.  I will tell them I read Little Brother and it's really for mature readers.  I will be upfront if the book has a sex scene, or mature language or whatever.  I tell the kids that if your reading a book for a sex scene you will be SADLY disappointed because it's like one sentence and if you're reading a book for one sentence, you've missed the point of the entire book. 

If I don't recommend the book, that's cool.  Not every book out there is going to be amazing.

I'm keeping a list of everybook I've read all year, online. 

Students are going to keep track of the books they've read all year.

Students will do book reviews online about books they've read.


I think book logs suck.  I think keeping track of how many minutes you read a day is bull.  I think having parents sign off on it is a joke.  A kid is going to read or they are not.  It's really just fostering a community of liars instead of readers.

This is what I want to do.

I want the parents to keep a list of books they are reading and post them online.

I want kids to recommend to EACH OTHER books they've enjoyed.

I want student's grades to be based off of how many kids enjoyed the book they recommended.

That's what I want.

Let's see how it goes.

Followers

Hi,
If you are kind enough to follow this blog, I am returning the favor by following yours, IF you have a follow button on your blog.

Yes, I'm sort of smart, but I'm not clever enough to subscribe to your blog via Google reader. Beside I don't really like Google reader *checks over shoulder to make sure Google isn't going to murder me* I like reading things through blogger, I like reading comments and I like seeing the blog itself.

So if you have a friend who blogs and you want to send them my way. I promise to follow your blog if you follow mine. As long as you don't blog about something creepy and weird that isn't work safe.


Yes, another new layout, which one did you like more? Let me know

On a side note, I'm a teacher, I'm pretty honest about my job. So why is it that whenever I meet someone and I say I'm a teacher, they want to tell me all the problems with the education system? I didn't cause the problems and quite frankly I'm not going to be the one who fixes it. Please don't call the teachers at your child's school, "a dud" or "terrible because they lost a paper."

I'm not going to rant about how broken the education system is, or how to fix it, because its really broken and I have NO CLUE how to fix it. I'm not going to rant about other teachers because I don't know what it's like in their classrooms.

I'm just saying PLEASE don't unload your venom on me and then pretend to be cool with me ten minutes later. I'm an educator and a pretty out going person, but that doesn't give you the right to freak out on me on my day off. I don't freak out on you because you work for BP or the Banks, or any other system that is broken.

Thank you