Snow Days.....Purrrr

As I watched the news all week and heard the murmurs of a pending storm, I was more than excited. In my rush to be the doer of ALL and slacker of nothing, I have become overwhelmed and down-right exhausted. I have let things pile up around me once again and needed the Gods to bless me with a SNOW DAY! As teachers we feel we must be everything to everyone. In the meantime we lose track of who we are as people, start drowning in our work, get off our exercise regiments and do no one any good. This week we got not one, but TWO SNOW DAYS of bliss! I am getting caught up again on work and SLEEP. I am feeling excited about seeing the kids again so that we can continue with our different projects. I am just so much more RELAXED. So then I started asking myself, how do the kids feel? Do I overwhelm them with assignments? Is my homework always justified? Should I really be stealing away the few hours that they have to be with their families to finish up the things that we could just as easily do in class? Is it really that easy to do it all in class? NO. There simply isn't enough time in the year to do the work that we need to get done. So I am setting a new goal for myself. I want to work as hard as I can to only assign a maximum of 30 minutes of homework a night. I know how difficult it is to have a life outside of school. I certainly put in more than 3 1/2 hours of work a week on my graduate work and my grading. Why should middle schoolers be burdened with this much work? What are they really getting from it. I have a few books on homework that I plan on reading (in all of my free time). One is called "The Homework Myth" by Alfie Kohn and the other is called "Rethinking Homework" by Cathy Vatterott. The longer I teach, or maybe the older I get, the more I feel that people need to have lives outside of their school or work obligations. This is a topic that I hope to revisit. I really want to find an answer that I can live with even if I don't solve this age old debate. For now, I am going to get back to knocking down the piles of work with the extra time I have been gifted from the heavens.

Feeding the soul vs. training for standards....

This week I was reminded that sometimes we, as educators, need to nurture the soul of our students, not just their minds (purrr). At the middle school level there is a big shift in expectations. We keep telling our ten year-old fifth graders that they need to act more maturely and that we expect so much of them, while the year before they were still kids that played with dolls and celebrated holidays. This year I fought for the giving of valentines. I know it seems simple, but it was something that no one would agree to last year (twitch). There was a feeling that it would add to the middle school drama and that they couldn't be trusted to handle it maturely(twitch, twitch). In fact, with a few conversations about not leaving people out, the kids handled it marvelously. I realized that the kids couldn't learn to be accepting of others and show their maturity without these opportunities(purr). It was one of those opportunities that we remove under the pretense that Valentine's day is for elementary school, it takes too much time and that kids wouldn't want to participate anyway. Well this year the kids filled each others' envelopes with notes of friendship, small treats of appreciation, and more importantly, EVERYONE walked away knowing that someone in that school cared about them. The kids got a lesson in humanity and a boost to their fragile self images through a day of recognizing and building on relationships with their peers. Yes, I took a day out of our busy schedules (5th-8th) to make handmade valentine receptacles instead of working toward the standards, but isn't it just as important to feed their souls, and to teach them to be caring human beings? I don't think you're ever too old to appreciate another person or to be appreciated.

Twitch...Twitch....Hissss

I am frustrated that my students are so used to being entertained that they don't really know how bad it can be or understand how good they really have it. I have found some great videos on PBS Circle of Stories (http://www.pbs.org/circleofstories/voices/index.html) that allow them to hear the words, voices, music etc. of true Native storytellers and yet they complain. I try to remind them that it is not always possible to bring in guest speakers and that I am trying to find the next best thing. Yet they act bored and put in very little effort on the analysis sheets that I created. I just get so very annoyed with them. I am trying to give them the opportunity to express their learning in new and diverse ways, such as with the Wabanaki Perspective wikis and yet they fight me every step of the way. I feel like we sometimes move at a snail's pace because they are so hard to engage. I know it isn't like this every day, but lately it seems worse than usual. Before I came, there wasn't ANY use of technology in English class. The kids were literally working out of a grammar book day in and day out. Why can't they just try for me? I am trying so very hard for them.