Not much, just chillin’

Today was the state writing test. Students were asked to (basically) write a letter to parents explaining the meaning of [respect] in a modern teen’s life.

As I am walking around the room proctoring I glance at one of my lowest level students papers. The greeting at the beginning of his letter?

“Dear Respect,”

I can’t WAIT to get those scores back. :/

(Details of the prompt edited, just in case…)

I read a fascinating article from the New York Times today called “Building a Better Teacher.” It basically focuses on the fact that, as most teachers would acknowledge, teacher training is largely ineffective and the efforts of a few individuals to nail down how you can teach teachers to be better at their job.

It is well worth a read:

http://www.nytimes.com/2010/03/07/magazine/07Teachers-t.html?pagewanted=1&emc=eta1

So there’s a teacher at my school who always addresses the issue of staying later than we are required to after school and/or working on the weekends by exclaiming that he doesn’t “work for free.” This bugs the heck out of me. As far as I am concerned, teaching is a salaried job. I signed a contract at the beginning of the year saying that I would accept X amount of money to do my job; if my “job” isn’t done for the day then I stay until it is. This does not mean that I am working for free!

With that said, I was cleaning out my purse after work yesterday and I found my last pay stub. On a whim, I decided to figure out exactly how much I made per hour this week.

First, I determined how many hours I worked (these are at school working hours, not including paper grading at home).  

Sunday - 12:30 - 6:00 - 5.5 hrs
Monday - 7:50 - 5:30 - 9. 5 hrs
Tuesday - 7:50 - 5:00 - 9 hrs
Wednesday - 7:50 - 7:00 - 11 hrs.
Thursday - 6:45 - 4:45 & 5:45 - 7:15 - 11.5 hrs.
Friday - 7:50 - 4:00 - 8 hrs

If you don’t include Sunday, I worked 49 hours total this week; with Sunday, it is 54.5. This is on the upper end of what I consider a pretty typical week (45 - 50 hrs.)

So as not to unduly depress myself (I could already tell that this was going to be bad) I decided to make my calculations using 49 hrs.

Gross Salary for a month= $2,720 / 4 = $680/week
$680/49 = $13.87/ hr. 

Take home salary for a month = 1, 869 / 4 = $467.25/week
$47.25/49 = $9.5/hr.

 Obviously, these are rough calculations, but still. I have been teaching in North Carolina for FIVE YEARS now. Fourteen dollars an hour.

This is why articles like this piss me off: http://www.intellectualtakeout.org/blog/teacher-pay-rewards-and-tenure 

(Two students in my 2nd block after a discussion of Civil War pensions).

D: “Mrs. B., how much is an army pension these days?”

Me: “I don’t know exactly. It depends on whether you served in combat, whether you were injured, that sort of thing.”

“You get more if you are inured?”

“Yeah.”

“When I’m in the army I’m going to wait until, like, my last day there and then cut off my arm and say I was hurt in combat!”

(T, another student, interjects) “But dude, then you’ll only have one arm!”

D: “Nuh-uh. By the time I’m out of the army they’ll have, like, cool robot arms.”

T: “Well, that’ll be after 2012, so I wouldn’t count on it.”

(Me, sensing that this is getting heated and trying to insert some reason into this conversation) “Guys, let me sum up this argument for you to see if we can get a handle on it, ‘I’m going to have a robot arm!’ ‘No you’re not, the internet says we’ll all be dead’ Is that what you’re arguing about here?”

D: “Yup.”

T: “That about covers it”

Me: “Oookay then.”

Fresh off of six hours at school grading (on a Sunday!) I feel the need to remember some of the funny things that have happened recently to keep my spirits up.

Last week …

We were discussing U.S. Imperialism in my APUSH class, specifically, the Spanish quelling the rebellion in Cuba. I discussed Weyler’s concentration camps, warned the kids that some of the pictures I was about to show were graphic, and then clicked the PowerPoint to show a couple of pictures of Cuban POWs which were printed in Hearst’s newspaper to stir up anti-Spanish sentiment. The pictures are intense; one shows a skeletal prisoner and the other a group of youngish children, clearly skinny, draped in rags being inspected.

The kids are appropriately solemn looking at the pictures and then, just as I am about to move on, one kid tentatively raises his hand.

“Mrs. B., um, not to be inappropriate but, um, why are that kids pants down?”

“What? Oh. Well … they’re dressed in rags.”

“No, look! Around his ankles.”

“Oh. Hmm. Umm… so they are. I’m…not sure. Maybe it was an inspection … of … something.”

“…”

“Moving on.”

I turn around to click the PowerPoint on and I hear veeeery softly coming from about three kids at the back of the room…

“Pants on the ground, pants on the ground…”

I died. The class died. It took a while to reconvene. Inappropriate laughter is the best laughter.

I was sick, sick, sick last week with strep throat. I dragged myself to school on Wednesday, but took all day Thursday and Friday afternoon off. It’s never easy to be out of school, but this was a particularly wierd time. Monday of last week was the first day of this semester, so I had only had my English kids for three days. I didn’t even have anything to assign them while I was out!

Then, this weekend, my area of ENC got about six or seven inches of snow dumped on it; snow that turned all of the road around town into ice sheets. The snow fell Saturday morning, we had Monday, Tuesday and Wednesday off of school (we really could have gone back on Wednesday). So between my sick days and the snow I have missed four period with APUSH and five period with English II.

I would also like to note that my being out sick (something that doesn’t happen often) has ignited a firestorm of rumors amongst the students over whether or not I am pregnant (answer: no). A lot of my AP kids go down the hall later in the day to the AP English teacher and apparently there was some discussion on Friday over whether I had a “um…um…how do you say? Cracker in the microwave!”

Task number one for our English teacher…metaphors.

I am:

* Finished grading 90 lovely (and not so lovely) essays from my AP students’ midterms.

* Thinking back on the week of testing and work days we just had and wondering where all of my time went.

* Remembering that it went to creating an interdisciplinary “Historical Literature through Film” unit in conjunction with the AP Lang & Comp teacher and a Ning.com project for role playing Gilded Age historical figures. Oh yeah.

* Mourning the loss of Glee and the potential for a Chargers Super Bowl while eagerly anticipating the Olympics.

*  Freezing my not so little hiney off in the unseasonable cold snap we have been experiencing. (17 degrees! In North Carolina!)

* Cleaning my class room so that it no longer looks like small animals nest on top of my desk.

* Dreading my new 4th period standard Sophomore English which has a 10:1 guy/girl ratio.  Starts tomorrow. Oh goody.

* Feeling somewhat guilty for neglecting this blog.

A series of conversations during 4th block group work the other day…

“Mrs. B!”

“Yes?”

“How do you write an ampersand? Is it like this? Or like this?

“Like this.”

“See! I told you!”

“Psh.”

“Ha! Ha!”

“All right, ladies and gents, no gloating.” 

*a few minutes later*

“Mrs. B!”

“Yes?”

“Which is correct, ‘I could care less’ or ‘I couldn’t care less’?”

“Well, ‘I could care less’ is correct if it is meant sarcastically–”

“SEE!”

“Wait, wait, but ‘I couldn’t care less’ is correct as a straight statement. It depends on your intent.”

“Hah! I was right!”

“I was too!”

*a few minutes later*

“Mrs B! Mrs B!”

*sigh* “Yes?”

“Look at the way he’s writing that! It’s not right!”

“Is too!”

“Is not!”

(they proceed to mock-wrestle over the pencil)

“All right now children, calm down. The writing looks  fine to me.”

“I told you.”

“What this group needs is to decide on a designated writer and to let that person do their job.”

(as I walk away I hear muttered..)

“What this group needs is a therapist!” 

Today is a Saturday, but I was up at school for about three hours. I’ll probably be up there again tomorrow for an equal amount of time. What gets me working seven days a week? Give me an A! (A!) Give me a P! (P!) What does that spell? AP!

So yeah, APUSH had their first major unit test on Tuesday and Wednesday of this week (one day for essays and one day for multiple choice) and, while I enjoyed the days of basically having extra planning time for two periods, on Wednesday I was forced to face the fact that I was staring at 45 essays and 135 paragraph length identifications that were going to need to be graded. Oh, also my 29 English II lovelies turned their first essay in on Thursday (great planning Mrs. B!) so lets up that total, shall we? Needless to say, I’ve been an essay grading fiend. The AP papers range from the sublime (“The Quakers allowed a remarkable degree of religious tolerance to flourish in Pennsylvania, perhaps because of their experiences with being persecuted during the English Civil Wars”) to the ridiculous (“When Christopher Columbus arrived from Great British he found the King of New England there and willing to help him.”) but I finally finished them this afternoon. The kids will get their total exam grades on Monday along with their first progress notice. Fun!

I gave the students their Multiple Choice scores back on Friday. I wasn’t too displeased with their scores for a first test–on the AP exam a student needs to get about 60% of the multiple choice correct and write three decent essays to score a passing grade and the class multiple choice average was a 58%–but I knew that the kids would be very upset. Most of them are used to never getting anything but high A’s, especially on *gasp* multiple choice tests. In many cases this was their first real experience with a test they needed to study for. I decided to ease them into seeing their grades, so I projected up the spreadsheet I use to keep track of unit exam grades, minus student names, and showed them the score range and how I calculated their total score from the multiple choice, essay, and IDs. They gasped when they saw the low range of scores, but at least they knew what they were getting into before they stared at all of those little pink dashes on their own scantron. I explained carefully about the 60% benchmark and about what a hard test it was and how they shouldn’t be discouraged if they didn’t do as well as they would have liked (that’s what the AP grade bump is for, after all!) and then I gave back their scantrons. I think the song and dance worked, because I didn’t have a full scale riot on my hands, but at least one girl did spend the rest of the period slumped back in her chair glaring death rays of hatred at me.

I’m still feeling very strong about my planning for APUSH so far this year. I feel pretty genuinely that everything we have done thus far has been purposeful and will pay dividends for the kids down the road. It is a very nice feeling and one I’ve encountered too infrequently thus far in my teaching career. I’m sure eventually I will get to the point where I’m just looking for an activity (any activity!) to kill thirty minutes, but for now I am feeling very focused and I-am-teacher-hear-me-roar about the whole thing.

Yeaaaaaaa AP!

I just updated my “About Me” page to reflect the change in school year and my marital status. I’ve also added a semi confidential email address where you can contact me privately. I love to share teaching materials and resources, so let me know if I can help you out!