Word Play Day

I learned at the UCTE conference in November that word play is important for our students. For years I have loved words. I remember calling my mom after classes where we talked about British poetry and telling her how I could TASTE the words. Taste!? I'm sure she thought I was going crazy, but it is an experience I will never forget.

You dont have to wait until college literature courses to fall in love with words and the way the fall onto your tongue. So today we played word games and watched some fun videos that helped my students understand the musicality of ordinary words. Here are a few of the clips we watched:

haha, I may be an English nerd, but I feel that these are fun to watch. They make you want to say funny words. I had my students write down words that they found fun to say. I gave them a challenge to say at least one of those words 5 times throughout the day. They found the official definition of the word and practiced saying it. Really, they already knew what the word meant, but this helped solidify the word in their minds. (Plus, often times big, unknown words are the most fun to say).  Some of the classes had extra time to work with a group to make a song using their favorite fun words.

I loved it!!

Here is my list of fun words:

• bubbly
• superfluous
• befuddled
• meanderer
• pompous (especially fun to say when you relax your lips and cheeks)
• 
  

What words are on your list?

Funny moments

Seventh grade really is an awkward stage. Now that i'm not the one experiencing it, this age is so much more enjoyable to observe. I think my favorite has been when one of my boys came in and said, "Ms. Mayans, do you know what is the worst? It's so embarrassing when you are talking to a cute girl and your voice cracks."  Hahaha, yup, I guess that would be kind of awkward. 

Well, another great moment came with the end of  our comma unit. After weeks of comma lessons and days of review and test preparation, I gave my student an overview test. To commemorate the memorable day in which they would prove their comma mastery, I wore my roommate's comma shirt to school (yes, I have a roommate who clearly is an English lover as well).  My students loved it!  I even had one student draw a picture of me (in my "normal" clothes that day, and in my "comma girl" superhero clothes). Oh, I love it. They then took the test and most of them did a pretty good job on it. I was pleased with most of the grades. Yay for commas!!!!

So here is another moment of seventh-grader-greatness. I was having a bit of a downer day, but this little jewel made me laugh out loud. Here is an email I received from a student. Besides the fact that it is slightly inappropriate to tell your teacher that she is hot, this grammar fatality is priceless.

Being Creative Takes Work!

This week I realized some of the differences between fun/creative/active lesson plans and some of the more hum-drum lessons....fun lesson plans require a whole lot more work. Work before. Work during. Some work after. I pushed my creativity during this week and it seriously wore me out. The hard part is this: I'm not even sure it was all worth it. I saw some students engaged and excited to learn, but I also saw plenty who remained unengaged and seemingly uninterested in the lesson I was teaching. Boo! :(

We started talking about argument and persuasion this week. To introduce it, I showed Super Bowl commercials and other persuasive ads and had the students analyze which ads they found most convincing and why. It was a pretty fun lesson. Yesterday we talked about the use of ethos, logos, and pathos in persuasion and argument. I'm not sure all of my studnets completely understood those terms, but we will use them a lot more this week and hopefully that helps. I have learned the power of repetition in the classroom. Whatever you want to stick in the students' mind, you just have to repeat about 4 bazillion times.

Speaking of repeating things, next week my students will take a test on the use of commas. This week we did so many comma review activities, I could almost see the commas coming out of my students' ears. I don't know why, but I love commas....I even plan on wearing my roommates shirt that has commas all over it for the test day (yes, I have a roommate who is basically as comma crazy as I am). I hope all this repetition has paid off and I can see how they have mastered these concepts.

We are also fully in motion in our Outsiders unit plan. I love coming to school and hearing my kids say, "Ms. Mayans, are we reading today!?!?" They groan when I say no. I'm hoping they love it more than just because they get to draw as they listen to the audio book. (One of the activities I discovered from a fellow teacher is a graffiti wall where the students draw symbols they find in the book. It has been a great assignment so far).  Next week we will read some more and talk about some more symbolism from Robert Frost's poem, "Nothing gold can stay" (which is in chapter 5 of the book).

Speaking of teaching next week, I have been assigned a practicum student to come observe my class and teach some lessons. Weird! It seems like forever ago that I was a practicum student walking into Mt. Nebo Junior High for the first time. This guy will probably be my replacement intern next year, so this is a great opportunity for him to see the dynamics of the school. I've given him a few lessons to teach this week, and I am excited to see what he is able to do in my classroom. That will be next week's adventure.

An Incredibly Long, Short Week

You may look at the title of this post and think, "What does she mean by 'a long, short week'? Has the girl gone nuts?" Well, sickness will do that to you. Teaching while you have a runny or stuffy nose is the pits, and this week I experienced both. I had to put away my pride and blow my nose in front of my students (usually I like to keep my nose-blowing to myself), and they looked at me with sad puppy-dog eyes and asked incredulously, "Ms. Mayans, are you STILL sick!?!?" Yup, my dears. I am most certainly sick. And that makes for a very long week.

To add to it, my mentor teacher came to observe my class on one of those sickness + headache days. Lets just say, I wasn't my most chipper self. Just last week we had a meeting about using positive reenforcement to get a students to change and obey, but I was feeling way past the point of using round-about techniques to get what I want. Ironically, when we met after for a post-conference about the lesson, she complimented me on my positivity while speaking to the students. REALLY?! I felt that I hadn't been too kinda that day, but I guess I managed to still be civil. What a surprise!

Anyway, so those are the reasons the week felt so long, but in all actuality I only taught 3 out of the 5 days. Maybe it was a good thing I was sick this week.

On Tuesday I had a substitute teacher while I went to a conference put on by the district for new English teachers. They focused on engagement in the classroom, and I re-learned a lot of strategies to implement into my lessons. Even though I haven't been teaching for very long, I can already feel how easy it would be to allow myself to get into ruts with teaching. Once a strategy has worked once, it is so easy just to run with that for a while. But honestly, I know my students will learn better if I always mix it up and try to get engagement from all of my students. All in all, the conference was successful in allowing me to re-imagine possibilities in my classroom. I am excited to try out my new ideas.

Friday also turned out to be a free day for me as well. The 7th graders had "Job Shadow Day" and didn't come to school, so I had the whole day to myself for planning and grading. I caught up on all my grading and planned my next few units. It feels so wonderful to have all my days planned up until mid-March. With me being sick, I am actually very pleased that I was so productive.

So at the end of the week, I have survived my sickness and am starting to get a little better (I hope). I have taught about commas and appositives. I have discussed stereotyping with my students in anticipation for The Outsiders. I have bought an audio book to do the reading for me in class (also a great idea I came up with while being sick and not wanting to lose my voice), and I have graded, planned, and prepared for the months ahead. Not a bad week, but I do hope next week is better.

A fresh start

This week was the first week of the new semester. What doest that mean?  Well, it means that, although I still teach the same kids, they have all moved to be in different class periods. I'm still trying to get used to the new dynamics (especially when you put "loud-student-from-period-1", "loud-student-from-period-5", and "loud-student-from-period-7" into the same class period. Yup, my new crazy class is 5th and 6th period because all my yapper students are condensed into those 2 class periods. I actually feel really bad once again for the good students. I had one girl come up to me and say, "Ms. Mayans, this class is so talkative. I don't know if I like it." It is so frustrating for me to see students robbing their peers of their opportunities to really learn and enjoy learning just because they can't seem to find the self control to stop talking.

Well, the change isn't all bad, and I love seeing my students interact with each other in new ways as they get comfortable with these new classes. This week we went over rules and procedures again, introduced prefixes and suffixes, and talked about the difference between fact an opinion in anticipation for our unit on persuasive/argumentative writing. I think it will be a very busy (and hopefully fun) term.

So another surprise came my way this week. My BYU professor, Dr. Coombs, sent me an email this week asking me if I would like to work with her and a few other new teachers on a proposal for NCTE. NCTE is the "National Council of Teachers of English" and they have a conference every year where teachers from across the country meet and teach each other the great things they have done in education. This year's theme is "(Re)Inventing the Future of English." Basically, my professor wanted us to talk about how we have taken a classic text that has been taught in classrooms for years and changed the way we have taught it so that it relates to our students better. Let me tell you, it was an exciting yet intimidating invitation to work on this proposal. Once again, I will admit that I went to Dr. Coombs' office and shed some tears as I told her how to felt like an impostor teacher and inadequate to the task. But I will also admit that I have an awesome mentor in Dr. Coombs and she helped calm my nerves and remember all of the good qualities I have as a new teacher. It is so hard for me, but I need to stop comparing my weaknesses to the strengths of others. Anyway, we brainstormed some ideas and wrote up the proposal with the other ladies who are participating. If our proposal is accepted, we will be presenting in the national conference in November in BOSTON! Woo hoo! It would be such a great experience. We will just have to wait and see what comes of it.

Finding Support Through My Many Freak-outs

I wrote the following on January 12th... and then I forgot about it. Sorry I didn't post it earlier

Yesterday was a tough day for me. I still had to come into work although none of the students came. It was an in-service preparation day because we have just finished term 2. I was comforted by the thought that I could come to school in sweats, but I was horrified by the fact that I had to drive in a Utah blizzard to get there.

Freak-out #1: So, leaving my house around 7:05, I began the perilous trek. There was so much snow on ground, snow on the roads, snow still falling from the sky, snow everywhere. The snow plows had yet to come clear the streets. I drove so slowly, yet I still could feel my car sliding from time to time. The freeway was especially scary since cars around me expected me to go faster than I was actually willing. The scariest moment of the whole thing was when I tapped my breaks while on the freeway and my car freaked out on me. I lost control and spun around a full 360 degrees before coming to a stop in the middle of the freeway. IT WAS SOOO SCARY! Luckily, there weren't any cars around me, and I spent the rest of the car ride to the school thanking Heavenly Father for protecting me. ....and then I got stuck in the snow right in front of the school parking lot. A few helpful souls helped push me out, but I didn't appreciate their judging scoffs at my not-made-for-snow car. Well, to end the morning, I finally parked my car, got inside the school, and burst into tears. :( What a stressful morning.

Freak-out #2: End of term means grades go out. Grades going out means that I look at a multitude of Ds and think, "What am I doing wrong!?" (I swear I had this exact same experience at the end of 1st term. Will I ever learn?). I had one class that had 13 Ds (I'm not even exaggerating here). It is hard to balance grades so that they reflect what students have truly learned and not just what they have or have not turned in. For example, most of these Ds were the cause of missing Articles of the Week and monthly Reading Logs. So, with tears gathering in my eyes, I rushed to a neighboring teacher to ask for advice. The tears did come as I told her of my predicament and asked her for advice. She suggested that I lower the worth of those assignments so that they not monopolize my grades so much. Instead of having a Reading Log be worth 50 points, she suggested that I lower it to 25 and see what that did to my grades. Her argument was that the students who turned in the Reading Log on time and got 50 out of 50 in the first place were probably already A students and the extra credit they would receive from getting 50 out of 25 points now wouldn't change the high grades very much. Well, I tried it out....AND IT WORKED! Yay! So, what did I learn? I learned that you need to make sure the points you assign your assignments balance each other out. A reading log should not be an unseemly amount of points compared to assignments you do in class where you see your students learning in the moment. It is a hard concept to actually put in practice, but at least that is one more freak-out that I can put behind me.

Starting a New Year!

I wasn't excited to come back to work, but my day was made so much better when I heard this:

Student: "I decided to write in Biblical language, Ms. Mayans." (then he begins to read his bell work about winter break, which was supposed to be written in 3rd person) "It came to pass that on the fourth hour of the 20th day of the 12th month of the 2012th year, there was a 13 year old boy named Jarom. Having a tummy ache, (and great was the ache thereof), he ran to the bathroom and spat food into the toilet. Nevertheless, Jarom did brush his teeth and went back unto his rest, and good was the rest thereof."

hahahahahah. I usually don't want to know about my students being sick, but this seriously made me cry, it was soooo funny!

To be honest, today wasn't the greatest day. It seemed that all of my classes were chatty and off task. We did some goal setting for the new year and upcoming new term, and we finished off the class period by reviewing some old stuff and reading a short story. I really didn't think my students would be in the correct mindset to learn something new, so we will wait a few days for that.

The final project for The Devil's Arithmetic is due on Friday, but some of my kids have already turned them in. THEY LOOK AMAZING!!!! Oh my gosh, I am so impressed and so proud!  Everyone who turned it in today got an A. I could tell they had really spent a lot of time and effort on these projects and they learned a lot. 

I now have to worry about planning my next unit plans. I need to teach argument writing, essay writing (5 paragraph essays), how to have discussions, The Outsiders, words for the spelling bee competition (coming up on February 7th), prefixes and suffixes,.... um, and I think that's it. That will last us a few months. I hope I survive! In addition to that, I also need to think about what I can do to prepare my students for the state testing in March. Even though I will never see the results, I want to help my kids do their best (and of course also demonstrate through their test scores that I am a decent teacher). So much to do, and the time just whizzes past.