2017-05-26 - 8:28 p.m.
Today was the last day of school. It was an admin. day. i.e, no students. So I had to clean my room and get a bunch of signatures. Here is a partial list of the signatures I was required to obtain: textbook clerk, technology person, custodial staff, semester grades have been properly submitted person, ASB outstanding club dues person, library staff, a vice principal, department chair, and finally the turning in of the key person.
It was an Odyssey to hunt down the people. Some were at lunch.
I got to school at 8 in the a.m. After not surfing and a large latte from Peet's I was not in the best of moods. The energy level was waning. I hustled to grade about 60 essays over To Kill a Mockingbird that my junior class wrote in order to be able to submit my grades. I taught five classes this semester and for each class this quarter, I probably had 30 separate grades, which is low for me and doesn't do the students a service. In my experience, the more weighted the grades are and the more spread out, the more opportunities the students have to earn points, the better they do grade-wise.
As a teacher, I think it is best to teach to the test, insofar as it is a test of my own design. English is an odd subject to teach because it is not divided up the way say math is into Geometry, Calculus etc. So in English, every year, I feel compelled to throw everything but the kitchen sink at the kids. Within English there are a lot of skills to teach, paraphrasing, inference-making, using attributive tags, passive voice, verb-tense agreement, creating bibliographies, speaking in diplomatic and academic registers and so the question for me is always, where to begin. And so I broke it down into three categories: skills, literary devices, and grammar. And I think there is a more or less logical progression order within those three. But all the while, writing and reading must be practiced. But every year, I develop a system and for next year I'm excited about my system.
At noon we had a potluck, R made a beautiful arugula salad. I talked to a number of the teachers and a lot of them were giddy because of the end of the year. I found out Mr. K. is going to be the new Vice Principal, one of them, which will be great because he's a calming presence and a great science teacher. His students did an interesting P.S.A.- hyperdoc- green-screen multimedia project about extinct species. I found out that Z works as a part-time bartender during his summer "off." I think one of the bigger confusions about teaching is that during the summer teachers just have it all free. Brief breakdown of my summer: School starts back July 31st, we just ended today. I have endless things to organize from this year, papers to put in binders etc. that will take me days. Then there is a training next week for curriculum development. Starting June 19th through July 7th I have a training with the National Writer's Project. Then there is another training the last week of July. And in the in between parts of summer I will be creating lesson plans, designing a blog project, adding to my Handy Helper, typing up assignments that I can upload to my classroom websites, etc. Everyday I will be working on teaching things, if everything goes as planned. And hells yeah, it's fun, creative, leisurely work and I get paid for the trainings. But to say I have summer "off" is a misuse of the word off, unless it means off from teaching five classes of students per day.
There was a palpable energy to the potluck conversation, but because I was feeling tired from the end of the year, I absented myself at the first available opportunity (an empty plate with scant more than chicken bones and some residual pasta salad was social cue enough to leave).
A few students from the Link Crew came by to help me during the day. There was Yojairo, Viviana, and Samantha. They helped organize and clean out the Yeti room which had become stuffed with student projects and random papers. Definitely I've noticed that the best thing I can offer students is a listening ear before school, after school and during lunch. It's easier said than done though, as I'm often scrambling to finalize the order of my lessons for the day or grading and planning at the end of the day.
I saw my student Estefania, who I just wrote a letter of recommendation for Camp Royal, crying in the hall because of all the culminating emotions surrounding the end of another year. A counselor, Mrs. L. was consoling her. The students Desire and Michaela helped out with the potluck. Afterwards I realized (even though he had told me earlier in the year) that coach Y is leaving and so I hugged him. He's an awesome coach and just an all around great person.
Finally I got my signatures and was able to leave. I got home really early for a school day (4:30) and talked to Matt, Chris's sister's husband who is putting in our new redwood fenced with compressed Douglas Fir posts. He's an affable person.
And then I went into my garage, my man-cave, to organize papers and school supplies. In my garage for the summer, I've got the perfect desk set-up for writing and can be doubled as a surfboard shaping or waxing station. The bench (in the middle) has a perfect place to rest my feet. Surrounded by books and binders and surfboards and bikes, it's the perfect place to do some writing. It's just uncomfortable enough to get some work done. There's no need for cars in my garage. It's also an OSHA safety hazard, boxes in the rafters, balanced precariously, waiting to squash somebody. It has neither a true inside or outside. It's the last refuge of masculinity in there. A place where my testosterone levels can soar to their pre, in-my- -almost-40's-levels and becomes a raging river of manliness. In my garage, exotic odors creep in under the misaligned doors. But mostly it just reeks of old motor oil and cat piss. There are backpacks, books, records, random sporting equipment that mostly symbolizes there to be a time in life when I will have the free time to actually use the aforementioned random sporting goods. Like, why do I have a pogo stick? One day, am I going to wake up and say, "You know, I think I have some extra time today to do a little pogo sticking?" It's a cavalcade of all the good things, unveiled with just one easy click of the opener.
