It’s the beginning of a new school year, and I am considering keeping a blog journal of my classroom this year. I think it will be to reflect on my curriculum, what is working etc… I hesitate only in that it is public, and I will have to be very careful to respect the privacy of students as I reflect on the goings on in class. I don’t think this will be a problem, and as I am also strongly considering writing a book about teaching in a sober school, I think this journal could come in handy for my professional goals.
So there you have it. If you have stumbled across this page, welcome to the wonderful world of a working teacher. Let me tell you what I did today. My first duty day is actually tomorrow, but tomorrow is a Tuesday, and it just felt too weird to start back to school on a Tuesday, so I went in today.
I had pulled out a lot of the things from my art cabinet and I had piles of photocopies around, so there was a lot to organize. My file cabinet consisted of piles of files, not organized or generally labeled, stacked in the two drawers. I went through a lot of papers, organized my copies by literature or informational/worksheets, recycled many folders worth of old worksheets that the previous teacher had left 5 years ago, and so on. I thought I would finish, but I still have about 2 hours to go. I’ll make it, and my classroom is going to be better off because of it.
I am teaching a “Speech and Composition” class this year, somewhat in honor of my Speech teacher and mentor from high school who died tragically a couple of weeks ago, and somewhat because I have not offered a Speech class recently. The idea is that it’s a semester long class, they will toggle between composition assignments and speech assignments, and some of the compositions will turn into speeches. I have not taught either of these subjects in this manner before, but it seems to me that it will make sense, and of course it’s in line will quite a lot of the State Standards.
The other academic class is “English Literature,” where we will study, and it almost goes without saying, literature topics.
Since our school is small, only an average of 70 students, we only have one English teacher, me. There is also a Special Education teacher who, depending on the needs of the students, may have a small English class as well. She generally focuses on more of the very basic English skills that kids may have missed in their other schools or that they need more help with. It’s nice to have the option of a much smaller class for some of our students. My classes are small when you compare them to other schools – we keep it under 22 students in a class. If you saw how small my room is, though, you would wonder where I could possibly put all of them.
The challenge of having a very small program is that I have a vast array of skill levels in my students. We range from ‘could be in college right now’ to average grade level, one or two years behind, 5 years behind, and so on. Trying to hold a class that meets or approximates meeting the needs of every last student means that basically, I do a lot of ‘differentiation.’ If you’re not familiar with the term, it means having a realistic set of requirements that is still stringent for each student based on their current skills. It’s kind of hard to do. Well, it’s easy if you are creative to modify assignments for students. What’s hard for me is keeping track of what requirements I have set for each person.
I should say right now that I don’t end up doing it for literally every student – usually there are 3 or 4 per class – usually one who wants more of a challenge and a few who just aren’t ready to do the level of difficulty that I have set for the class. I don’t have a detailed plan in mind yet for this year, but I do know that it will involve keeping written documentation. In the past when I have made verbal agreements to modify assignments for students, I have forgotten the details of some of the conversations, and that makes it hard to know whether the grading is fair.
Besides my “academic classes” – each of the above classes will be offered twice in the day, I teach three classes which meet once a week each. They are Poetry Slam, PEASE Publisher, and Crafts. We call them ’sixth hour’ classes because the happen during 6th hour. 
We also have an Art class that meets on Fridays. I teach that along with a resident artist. She was hired several years ago, and we came to find that we live within six blocks of each other, which works out well because we have taken community ed art classes together.
Well, that’s probably enough of an introduction. I will try to write every day! Sheila
