WTJ: Fill in this Page When You are Really Angry

Call me a perfectionist. Or a neat freak. Or anal retentive. Or detail oriented. I don't care. It's what I am. Things in my world have a place, or an order, and if it's mine, I like to keep it that way. I try not to impose my structure and orderliness on anyone else. If you want to leave your things sprawled all over the place, good for you! That's your way. But don't -- DO NOT -- come into my space, and sprawl my things anywhere but where they're supposed to be.

This rant is stemming from a recent experience in my classroom. I'm away one day and I come back to find my window wide open, several of my "good" pens and pencils missing (yes, I have good pens and pencils that are off limits to students), my desk calendar scribbled over, several of my course binders off the shelf, sitting on my desk with scribbles on some of pages inside, and the students' desks in various places throughout the room that they don't belong. And that was all discovered as soon as I got here. Since then I've even found magnetic bookmarkers of mine that have been removed from my textbooks and torn apart. Are you kidding me?

Sigh. 

I hate blog ranting... Sorry. So, to be more visual I wrecked my journal today as a different kind of anger outlet.

My apologies to anyone who had to read this on Facebook, Twitter, and now here. I do appreciate your patronage, though.  

PS. I'm aware of the melodrama dripping from this WTF WTJ page.

Friday Funnies #16

I literally have only 28 more school days until exams. I can't even put into words how excited that makes me. In fact, I haven't even used exclamation marks because even this many won't really explain to you the excitement levels coursing through me!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

That said, I'm very much in a school mind-set. Even though I'd rather not be. I fight with myself every morning to not zone out. It's not even May, after all, so I better stay focussed. So today, in the spirit of fighting to keep my brain switched on, I'll share a few English-teacher-y funnies.

Hey, I didn't say they'd be appropriate... Just funny.

Happy Friday!

WTJ: Rub Here With Dirt

Today's return to Wreck This Journal is a post marred by self-pity and just a general need to vent.

You've been warned.

When I opened my journal today, looking for something to do to take my mind of the headache of a class I had just "taught," the words on this page jumped out at me.

"Rub Here With Dirt"

It is a metaphor of sorts.

The arrows might as well be pointing at me; the instructions directed at my students.

Most days, when they leave, I feel the need to shower to scrub off all of the crap they throw at me for 60 minutes -- complaints, comments of an inappropriate and somewhat sexually explicit nature, sarcasm, defiance, blah, blah-blah, blah-blah...

In essence, I feel covered in dirt. They leave my room in an absolute mess of their personal garbage and filthy attitudes.

To rejuvenate myself today, though, I transferred that mess, that dirt, into my journal. It was a transferral of the mess they make of my class, to a little mess on a blank page of a journal just begging for it.

Take that, obnoxious students journal!

And anyway, it was really only one hour of my day. I'm actually pretty lucky. Once they stampede out of here, I'm left alone for lunch and prep in one of the few classrooms with a window and green leafy plants (where I got the dirt from), so I can admire the spring sunshine and decompress with a blog post.

Thanks for listening! to the melodramatic ranting of a teacher.

Hitting the Books

After a brief (if you can call 3 months brief) hiatus, I've cracked the spine of delicately opened a new book and am ready to tell you all about it.

But first! Where have I been?

1. Started teaching... It was a crazy few months getting started and adapting, etc. I won't get into the details.. This isn't really a teaching blog... but let's just say it was tough. And now that March Break is over I'm ready to turn over a new leaf (you might even say a "new page")... and that means getting back into things that made me happy BEFORE my life became all school work and vegging-out in front of the TV to cope with long days at school.

2. Planning a wedding!! This is the more exciting of the two hiatus reasons. I got engaged in January and since then there's been a lot of travelling back home to nail down details and meet with vendors. We've really gotten into it now and are getting very excited for our October 20, 2012 date!

3. Ignoring a sub-par holiday-themed book that I just couldn't get into but couldn't convince myself to walk away from.

BUT... I have finally convinced myself that it's okay sometimes to not finish a book when you've started it. So I have closed "The Gift" and started a new series that I am infinitely more interested in.

The Mortal Instruments series. Book 1: City of Bones

In only a few days I'm already about 100 pages in and I catch myself thinking about it throughout the day. Definitely a good sign. I believe there are 4 books already released with 2 more on the way. It's a supernatural series about demons and Shadowhunters, Downworlders, etc. HERE you can link to the website that will describe the whole world for you.

I think if you read and enjoyed Twilight or Vampire Academy you can probably sink your teeth (no pun intended) into this series too. And that's a recommendation after reading 1/3 of one book! I'll let you know for sure soon!

It's good to be back!

Friday Funnies #14

If there's one thing I've noticed since I've started teaching, besides my severe slacking in blogging, it's the severe slacking in grammar... More specifically in the ability to use a comma correctly.

I've always taught students that when composing a list you must include a comma after each item. This includes before "and" and your final item.

Example: Jane likes apples, bananas, and oranges.

I've been told this is incorrect. I've been told this is outdated. I do it anyway.

Recently, thanks to the wonder that is shared photos on Facebook, I've learned that my usage of that last comma in a list is called the Oxford comma, and today I'd like to dedicate my blog post to that endangered comma.

Oxford Comma, this one's for you!

And finally, I'd like to share the importance of all commas everywhere.

Enjoy your weekend! ... And SAVE THE COMMAS!

Friday Funnies #13

I'm definitely in a school-work state of mind, so today's Funny comes from an old lesson I taught in a Gr. 12 English course. It's a Hamlet parody told through a Facebook Newsfeed.

Funny stuff for anyone familiar with the play. Enjoy! (It's a little on the small side here, but if you click it, it'll get much bigger!)

Enjoy your weekend!

WTJ: Cover This Page With Office Supplies

It looks like celebrations are in order. After one week in Toronto I've gotten myself hooked up with a full-time contract teaching position at an independent school! I don't start until January, and it's a random assignment without any English classes, but that's okay. No English means less marking and more time for pleasure-reading instead of school-reading which is obviously a benefit for me... Though don't get me wrong, I loooove teaching English.

Anyway! The timing couldn't be more perfect since today is World Teachers Day!

So, to commemorate both the new job and the international day for teachers everywhere I cracked open my just a bit dusty Wreck This Journal and completed pages 71 and 72: Cover This Page With Office Supplies.

Post-its for notes and page marking, staples, tape of the masking and Scotch varieties, paper clips big and small, rubber bands, white-out tape, highlighter, and the all-powerful Sharpie were put to good use, and appropriately all things you are likely to find in a teacher's desk.

The colours and randomness make me very happy ... But not nearly as happy as my new job.

Umm Hi... Remember Me?

Coming back to the blog after a month-long hiatus is a lot more awkward than I thought it would be... There's so much to say but I'm wondering if I'm just standing on the stage of an empty theatre now... Has the audience gone home?

Ah, who cares. I'm not too good to blog for no one... AND I know there's always randoms who happen to cross my page when they're killing time clicking the "next blog" button after they're done reading what they actually logged on to read. (Seriously, try it. When you're done reading mine, of course. It's quite addicting).

So, where have I been the month of July?

The honest-to-goodness-boring truth is that I was teaching summer school English (Gr. 12) and barely keeping my head above water. In between marking and planning super-engaging-spectacular lessons and activities (I try to be a SuperTeacher at times), I was struggling to keep ahead of my students in Orwell's Nineteen Eighty-Four. (What kind of English major has never read that novel!? ...This one).  After skipping only 1 chapter (Bad Teacher...) I managed okay... Except I was at school for 7am, and by the time I was done teaching, marking, prepping, and reading, it was usually 9pm... Which gave me enough time to veg-out mindlessly in front of the TV for an hour before passing out on the couch and hauling my sorry self to bed in an effort to do it all again the next day.  Throw in a few wedding-filled weekends, and I'm still not quite sure where the H July even went?

So, to recap...
Books Read:
1. Nineteen Eighty-Four by George Orwell (Which I did enjoy despite the fact that it was "Required Reading")
2. The Summer of Us by Holly Chamberlin (Which I did not finish in July but in the early few days of August when school finished. I enjoyed it, but the mid-novel hiatus thanks to summer school kind of affected my enjoyment).

Now, with only one month of summer vacation left before I move 7 hours away from home and must find some kind of sustainable job, I plan to read as much as I can because in a month I won't have a lot of reading time because I'm going to get a great job that eats up a ton of my free time. Next on my list: One Day by David Nicholls... Coming soon to a theatre near you! Because I've prattled on entirely too long for an awkward blog-return, instead of describing it, I'll just post a handy video of the movie trailer. Enjoy!

I hope you have enjoyed my recap of this past month, and also my attempt at putting positive thoughts out into the universe in hopes that they'll come back to me. That's from a book isn't it?

WTJ: Climb Up High... Drop the Journal.

It's been a slow, slow week of supply teaching for me. 1 call out in 5 days. Not great. But it's June, and that's to be expected.

What was unexpected was on my 1 day in the classroom this week, the high schools were on a "late start" so the teachers could participate in a workshop in the morning. This means, I got to attend. The topic was "Differentiated Instruction." Anyone who has attended a Teacher Education program in the last few years can understand the internal groan that coarsed through me when I found out. DI is a fantastic approach to teaching, but the topic itself is so exhausted in BEd programs, workshops, memos, etc. that I find it hard to believe there's anything left to say about it.

My instincts on this were correct; there was not a whole lot of new information presented. There was however, one "fact" or "statistic" that caught my attention (for obvious reasons):

"25% of people are book lovers. We must find ways to engage the other 75%."

There was no summary offered for where this data came from, and for all I know it could just be one of those random statistics people make up. (Did you know that 75% of the time facts and statistics are simply made up?)

However, with this stat in mind, I would like to dedicate today's WTJ activity to the other 75%. If you don't love books, you'd probably love to do something like this...

Just so you know, I dropped it out of a second-storey window.

WTJ: Journal Golf

The antithesis to the "Cheers" theme song is that sometimes you want to go where no one knows your name; or in my case, where only 1 person knows your name (but really well).

So, that's exactly what the boyfriend and I had in mind when we packed it up and spent the weekend in farm country, just the two of us.

We did some reading, practiced our golf swings, sat in the sun, strolled through town, ate watermelon, drank wine (for me) and beer (for him), and just luxuriated in the peacefulness that is the Ontario countryside (random cow mooing and sheep bleeting included).

Needless to say, when I woke up this morning in my own bed, 600 kilometres away from there and him (long distance relationships are the worst), with an afternoon of supply teaching looming over my head, I immediately closed my eyes and longed for the weekend that seemed to pass by in blink.

Needing to rekindle a little bit of that blissful magic I turned to WTJ to see what it could offer, and staring me in the face was "Journal Golf."

It may not be real golf in the scenic countryside with my man alongside me perfecting my swing, but it could do for now.

 Although, around here, as in the "Cheers" song, everybody knows my name. And after my front yard journal golfing experience, everybody also probably thinks I'm crazy.

Teaching the Value of Books

In my very first post ever I wrote about how books (and stories) serve so many functions; they can be a friend, an escape, an adventure... I need to reiterate their importance today.

Now, just the other day I wrote about a book that highlights the importance of technology in today's classroom. (If you missed it, check it out by clicking here).



I want to be clear on one thing.  Technology certainly has its place, but so do good old fashioned books. What brings me to write about this is some really unfortunate things I saw in a school recently.  (In a "Student Acheivement Centre," no less).

 

The best way to use this book is to prop up
the desk your computer sits on.

"Extra Reading Materials"
This tub was sitting on an empty bookshelf.



When we as teachers, or adults in general, treat books this way, what message are we sending?  I'd say, that books are not important.  And if books are not important, or not valued, what reason does a student or child have to pick it up and read it?  And then what does that do to literacy?  Maybe it's just the book nerd in me speaking, but I think that modelling the importance of something is just as important as preaching its importance.  Just something to think about...

The Cell Phone Debate

In the age of emails and text messages, one of my greatest thrills is getting actual mail. You know, from that man or woman who walks from door to door dropping off envelopes and packages from all around the world. It's incredible stuff. I'm always most excited when my mail carrier brings something good. So, basically anything that's not junk, a bill, or something from the National Student Loan Centre. Yesterday, the greatest thing of all came... a book! Sure, it was one I ordered, and paid for, and was essentially expecting, but the thrill is same.

The book is called "Teaching With the Tools Kids Really Use" by Susan Brooks-Young, and I was inspired to order it based on a conversation I had with some students a few weeks ago...

While supplying one day, I had caught more than one student trying to sneak a text here and there (they're not as sneaky as they think they are... I, myself, once thought I had mastered the art of the Sneaky-Text in university).  The general rule is that I am supposed to confiscate the phone.  However, I'm a supply teacher, and generally detested among most student populations, so, in an effort to be slightly less monstrous, I usually let the first offence slide. (Shame on me). On this particular day though, I was inspired to do some investigating. I asked them why, when they know they could lose their phones for a day (or sometimes longer), they even bother to carry their phones on them at all. The board I teach for has a strict "No Phones At All" policy, so why not lose the temptation and leave the phones in the lockers? The responses wavered from the 'smartassed' to the somewhat logical, but the one that struck me most was when one student said, "It's just what we know."

"It's just what we know."

In a world where the answer to a question can be found in seconds, no matter where we are in the world, by pulling out a cell phone and "Googling" it, at school we are refusing to acknowledge a technology that most of today's students have grown up with.  I know my argument is a controversial one. But it's a conversation I think is worth having.  In the past 3 years of my very short teaching career I have already considered countless times how to appropriately bring the 21st century and ALL of its technologies into the classroom. Education has evolved over hundreds of years in order to teach to the students of the day, and now, all of a sudden I feel as though we've hit a brick wall of resistance.

I think this book will arm me with some powerful information and strategies for the ideas I'd like to set in motion.  It covers everything from "21st Century Skills," cell phones, mp3 players, social networks, virtual worlds, gaming, and "digital citizenship."  Each chapter explains a technology, strategies for use, and (for the naysayers) "common objections" to each technology.  I've only flipped through it so far, but already I'm highly recommending it to any and all teachers who have a dream of a classroom that engages students fully using methods that are meaningful and relevant to them and the 21st century we're all living in.

That's my lecture for today. I've got a a BlackBerry blinking at me for some attention...