Long ago, I promised myself that if I completed 25 years of teaching, I would try to write a book about my experiences. Next year will be year 25. So I started this last year to begin to figure out what I wanted to write about. I welcome your comments, resources, links to your own teaching blog, book recommendations, etc.
I read somewhere that teaching has always been difficult, but now it’s the wrong kind of hard and that phrase – the wrong kind of hard – resonated with me. So one of my goals this year is to try to explain to myself what that means.
I don’t report back to school until Monday. I received an email today from our new Principal that my classroom is being switched. I was alerted to that email by our Union Rep who wanted me to make sure that I knew the proper procedure for such an event.
Now I get that my room isn’t, strictly speaking, “mine.” That said, this will be my 5th year at the school and my 4th different room. Two of them required so much cleaning that a request for a dumpster would not have been a stretch. Still, the Principal is new. She couldn’t have known that. She also didn’t ask.
She said I was being moved for the sake of “departmental organization.” I get that. There’s value in proximity. You can have all of the meetings you want, but some of the best collaboration comes when you bump into someone. I texted the two other department members. Neither of them is being moved. Hmmm. Now, this new room does bring me closer to the Intervention Specialists I work with, which is, in theory, a good thing. It also frees up my former room for our new Spanish teacher. This will place her next to our ASL teacher. That, for me, counts as “departmental organization.” But if she has to wait for me to move out, when does she move in? Have we now disrupted two days of school? The question of why the new Principal claimed “departmental organization” is nagging at me. Will I ask? Perhaps I will wait to see what has happened elsewhere.
Departmental organization would undo what we did for the last few years – which is to create grade level wings. It didn’t work perfectly, but it did help administrators have a good idea if someone was in the wrong place. Now I suspect she was told this by our returning administrators, but decided that “departmental organization,” whatever that turns out to mean, was a higher priority. And there are Principals, like coaches, who come in to a situation and say, ‘We’re going to do this the way I want no matter the personnel.’ And there are Principals, like the one I had her last year before retirement in Nashville who told me that she spent her whole first year observing and taking notes.
Now, there are practical issues. When do I move? According to the contract, I have to be given a day – a day, I think, when students are present. (This has certainly been the case with other teachers I’ve seen move.) So when is that supposed to be? And to what extent will my moving disrupt other teachers who are trying to have a day of class? And who will have to cover for me? Will I have any help?
And while I reiterate that I know I don’t own a room, moving is hard. It takes time and attention to detail – things that are in short supply at the start of the school year. And I make the same argument that I make whenever I am required to float (change classrooms for different periods) – can I go to an Administrator or someone from the District Office and say, “For this hour, your office is over there. Here’s a cart. Good luck.” No? Why not?
So decide in the Spring. Give the teachers time and assistance to move then, once grades are in and there are a lot of movies being shown. Otherwise, it might be smart to take notes for a while before you make any changes. And if you make changes anyway, make sure you’re, well, transparent, about why you’re making them.
I didn’t know recently that being Senior Activities Coordinator counted as a class. Now that I’ve seen some of what’s involved, I’m glad that it does. Graduation was yesterday, and the amount of work that went into it was incredible. The details. And our Senior Activities Coordinator is remarkable. Positive, patient (even when I haven’t always been the most helpful member of the Senior Team), persistent. She deserves all of the congratulations in the world. And to see the way she was treated yesterday, not by students or families, but by colleagues & supervisors, was just awful. Everyone wants a say in the shiny parts, but no one wants to do the grunt work. But she does it. And she deserves to be in charge of the shiny parts, too. And she gave everyone every opportunity for input and feedback and they ignored her and just announced changes at the last minute, quite literally – on stage.
Something has changed in the etiquette of graduations. I know that’s not new. I was once assigned to sit in a certain section for a graduation and tasked with keeping people from using air horns. I left after seven minutes.
I remember sitting in the front rows but on the side with colleagues only to have our view completely obliterated by people who insisted on moving closer to the stage and staying there (which involved, in some cases, sitting on the floor) and, I guess, taking better pictures?
Graduation during COVID was, of course, odd. After that, I took a break. But these were my Seniors. I started with this group, so I dragged out my regalia in order to sit on stage.
And the audience never got quiet. I’m not talking about celebrating when the Class of 26 was called out or their child’s name was called out. I’m talking about the constant volume and the screaming for a particular child (not limited to when they were crossing the stage). The Valedictorian chokes up during her speech as she’s thanking her parents. Noise. A tribute to a student who should have been graduating but passed away? Yelling and screaming. His mother coming up to collect flowers? Noise.
At the end, like Principals everywhere all of the time, ours asks the audience to remain seated for the recessional. They are not listening. They are streaming out of the air-conditioned auditorium. I recognize parents who have been appalled when I’ve told them about their child’s behavior and parents who have told me how well they’ve brought up their children. It made me think of James Baldwin’s line: “I can’t believe what you say because I see what you do.”
To his infinite credit, our Principal waited until the aisles were clear (though only a partial audience remained) to allow the graduates their recessional.
I thought maybe I was being an old white fuddy-duddy. But then I asked one of the 11th grade ushers if she wanted anything to be different for her graduation, and she said, “I want the audience to listen!” Another usher came in this morning and said she wouldn’t do it again because how much (she estimated) 10 families just abused her.
What are we doing?
I will leave aside any commentary on our CEO’s self-indulgent speech and his terrible taste in poetry and just say this. Next year, I will go early to help out, bring water, pass out medallions (when did those become a thing?), say good words to any students who I’ve missed at school and do whatever else I can do to help.
And then I’m leaving.
There are still a few more days. Perhaps there are 1-2 more 12th graders who I can help push across the stage. This year has reminded me of why I wanted to step away from teaching 12th grade for a while. There’s so much pressure to graduate students, not helped at all by the fact that many of them approach 12th grade as if merely arriving on its doorstep qualifies them for graduation. But this part was not all that new for me.
For me, this was the year AI use exploded. As an English teacher, I have always been on the look-out for plagiarism, an act that’s been increasingly easy via the Internet. And there were students – and I taught mostly 9th grade last year – who dabbled with AI use last year. But this year, to borrow a movie title, it was everything, everywhere all at once.
A student who submitted a long research paper without any, you know, research. When asked about it, she said, “I just know things.” Later in the year, I had to download an app in order to be able to scan for the presence of Smart glasses whenever she was testing.
But where it really got me this year, well, there were two ways. The first was the practice of, “I want to write this by hand,” as though that would prevent me from knowing you’d had AI do the work and you’d just copied it out by hand. Okay, what really got me was – and we all call this different things – bell work, journal writing, quick writes, whatever – when students started using AI for those assignments. For example, in preparation for teaching about Japanese incarceration camps, I asked the students to tell me what they knew. I made it perfectly clear that saying, “I don’t know anything” was a valid answer. And still, AI.
Now I’ve paid for Grammarly Authorship and learned how to check a Google Doc’s version history, but we’re going to be chasing this forever. (And the news recently that a story prize went to a piece that may have been AI-generated. . .) I always think about what’s been added to credit cards, just in my lifetime. We are always going to be at least one step behind.
And I do want to play detective? We have LightSpeed, which works on some of the student computers some of the time, but is my job now surveillance (especially when working with a population that’s already under constant surveillance)? A colleague acknowledged my concerns and said, rightly, that we are English teachers in 2026. Fair point.
And our son, finishing his freshman year in college, reports classmates using ChatGPT in order to participate in class discussions. The Head of Secondary English for my District suggested using AI to generate practice multiple choice questions to prepare students for required Unit tests. I asked my Principal, a former math teacher, why he thought the College Board, which uses a 6-point rubric for the class I teach, does not allow you to assign a 1, 3 or 5 and whether it made a difference. I thought he’d dig in; he asked AI.
I’m firmly in the camp of some of the decline of human behavior is because of the decline of attention to the Humanities. We’ve been all about STEM and workforce development. Meanwhile, we’re over here with one art class. One language class. The goal of the Humanities is to help people understand what it is to be a human being, and we’ve stopped dedicating ourselves to that. Why are we surprised by the results? Obama said that novels taught him how to be a human being. It can work for all of us. Now we don’t read whole books. We rarely read at all. When did I accept the need to read to 12th graders – not on a special occasion, not because I wanted to highlight a certain section – but everything? All of it?
So why do students turn to AI? Some, having arrived at this point in their high school careers, know that they cannot do what is being asked of them. Others are not interested in the “productive struggle” or “intelligent failure.” They want to be finished. In short, they are not buying what we’re selling (at all? anymore?). To be fair, not all students, but the holdouts are few and far-between. And I am so grateful for them.
I’ve tried to adapt. I’ve asked students to create podcasts, apps, speeches – even a mini-TV episode (that didn’t go so well). I ask for art, but even that prompted students to dip into AI. Students are currently finishing a mini-memoir. While they haven’t always been great, they are writing. I ask for a cover page and an About the Author section, and I print a copy for them. They are proud of them, so that’s something. But teaching writing these days? I see all of these conference sessions about teaching writing in the age of AI, and I just don’t know. More and more, I think I may be staying at this beyond my expiration date. It might be time for me to turn my Clever Touch pen over to someone else. Maybe I just need summer to come.
It’s a professional development day. At the session before lunch, we were introduced to a supplementary program our District has purchases.
Alarm Bell #1: We were told that we could set the program to Automatic or Manual. Automatic allows to flip the switch at the start of the year and the program will evaluate the student, choose assignments, grade them and provide data. But, we were told, “if we really want to be hands-on. . .” Then we were introduced to the manual option.
Alarm Bell #2: The students’ first task is to write a summary of what they’ve read. It gets scored, and they have an option to ‘get feedback.’ This feedback is not from me, but from AI. After that, they can submit their work to be scored (by me, if I’ve chosen the manual option). So, yeah, not doing that.
Alarm Bell #3 (and where I switched off) My first unit for 12th grade is based on that classic question: What makes someone a hero? Tired, perhaps, but I can work with it. I asked how to find the support resources for a particular theme. Answer: They aren’t organized that way. Question: Is there a search function that would allow me to find these materials? Answer: No. In order to find out if there are any related assignments, I’d have to open every single one. I’m not going to do that. If the students who need support are not reading about and considering heroism, how do they return to the assigned curriculum and do the required “hero” essay? My answer: They won’t. They can’t.
Conclusion: The students’ ideas don’t matter.
How do we develop our ideas about heroism? Coming-of-age? The balance between an individual and society? The ethics of technology? We rehearse them, we read about them, we offer ideas and encounter problems, dissent and nuances, and then we refine our ideas. Rinse & repeat.
But, the message of the session was, ideas are not important. What’s important is that they are able to choose answer A and not C, which was the heart of the 8am session.
And then I took it a step further. What does it mean to deny children of color the time and space to develop their own ideas? It means THEY, gulp, we (I’m complicit by association) don’t want them to have their own ideas. It follows then that we are abdicating this idea development process to AI and social media & that our real goal is for them to have no ideas or our ideas. That makes them easier to control and the apathy becomes the identity.
I’m a high school English teacher.
I presume you’ve heard about all of the efforts to ban books. I wish I could tell these people to save their time and energy. My students, most of them, aren’t reading.
The ‘death of reading’ articles keep coming.
Last year, a professional development leader showed us how to encourage students to use AI to summarize something we’d assigned that they thought was too long to read.
Separately, another presenter showed us how to access a program supplemental to the one we’re required to use. This would allow students to have AI fix their work before they submitted it.
There’s an AI school in Arizona. There’s one coming in Texas, I think. Rich people who’ve used their money to ‘fix’ education in the past want there to be more such schools.
When I tell people what I do, I get a “Keep up the good fight” and a punch on the arm as though they know I am engaged in a battle I’m not going to win.
And maybe my profession should become obsolete. Technology has done that to other jobs.
But there’s still some tread left on my tires, and so I will continue to fight, not with the certainty of defeat looming over me, but the knowledge that victories often look different now, smaller. We will read books, whole books. We will read and write poetry. We will discuss the issues of the day. Maybe AI can do all that, I don’t know. I haven’t spent much time with it (nor received any real training).
And I have settled one thing in my mind: is teaching a science or an art?
It’s an art. Full stop.
Sure, like any good artist, knowing the science behind the mixture of colors, for example, will make me better.
AI will never smile at my students or recognize when they are sad. It will never bring the passion I can bring to works I’ve taught for years and years. It will not laugh or get frustrated or figure out when students can use a break to do some art. (I can hear people saying, ‘It can be taught to do those things.’ But it’s not the same. You know it isn’t the same.)
Teaching is a human profession. It’s also humane. We simultaneously de-emphasize the humanities in schools and are stunned and aghast at how our children behave, We ban phones; we set curfews. We are chasing symptoms like ghosts.
Obama said that reading novels taught him how to be a human being and look what he became. And I don’t just mean President.
And so I continue to fight. Join me?
Yep, it’s one of those days. Standardized testing. They take this particular one in the fall and now, again, in the Winter. They know it means nothing for them. This is to demonstrate whether they’ve learned anything from being in my class. Based on the first three results this morning, the students have gotten, well, less good at this test.
I still remember one student who got a very good score in the fall. When he saw it, he shouted triumphantly, “I told you I can do ELA!” I went over to congratulate him and by the time I returned to my proctoring position, I was feeling hollow. He thought he could do ELA because he’d gotten a good score on a standardized test – one that is entirely multiple choice. He hadn’t written a word.
I’ve gone through several stages in my response to testing over the years – what’s the big deal? –> necessary evil –> testing is a legacy of Jim Crow/Social Darwinism. But it remains.
People lament how much time testing takes up, but they have no idea. Granted, I’m no tech wiz, but the amount of preparation that goes into setting up for testing, granting students extra time, finding students who need to make-up tests (which means they miss class), dealing with students, often sleeping ones, who are aware they are not going to do well and are therefore very test-resistant – it’s exhausting. And for what?
We lack the political will, courage and imagination to do better. I know there are pockets in this country where changes are happening, but it’s all just such a waste of time.
Prior to this year, if I’d had a day like yesterday, I’d have taken photographs, shared them with the administration, and want it shouted from the rooftops. But now?
An awesome local writing organization came in – Lake Erie Ink – and helped selected students, students who’d written a strong first draft, polish their poems for publication. If you could have seen the pride the students demonstrated when the students understood what was happening – that they’d been chosen, that they were being called “poets.” One student, asked to write a 6-word biography, looked up at me and said, “I’m going to call myself a poet.”
So yeah, I took the pictures. But then I thought about the reaction – Is this in the curriculum?
So I am keeping the photos to myself. I will do what I can to celebrate the students, but that nothing close to what they deserve.
I had to ask permission to bring in plastic swords for a scene in a Shakespeare play. Granted.
I had to ask permission to teach a book outside of the curriculum. Refused.
Nothing major happened today. It just feels like there were 2,564.3 minor things. I leave at the end of the day feeling like the loser in a 15-round heavyweight fight. I am generally sweating like one, too, though not today. One of my two classrooms was absolutely frigid, air conditioning turned to full blast in anticipation of heat issues that haven’t shown up yet.
First, it’s always been tough for me to sell a curriculum I didn’t create, let alone one I don’t believe in. I’ve taught, for example, books that I would never have chosen myself, but I can usually power through those with help from those who did select it. But this MyPerspectives business? Today’s reading was on “The Value of a Sherpa Life.” Granted, it was only 2+ pages, but I have no idea how to help 9th grade students from Cleveland care about the ethically fraught decision of hiring a sherpa. To be honest, I am not 100% sure I know everything a sherpa does.
Then there’s the do you have a computer, is it charged, do you have the password you need, can you find the assignment you are supposed to do, can you take 2 minutes to look or ask a classmate before you ask me, can you stop talking, I know it’s for a really great reason, but can you stop talking, yes, page 113, can you stop talking, page 113, it’s on the board, no, I’m not trying to throw shade – just trying to remind you that I always put page numbers on the board, no I can’t stop the lesson to assign you a hall pass, please wake up, I didn’t take your book out of the classroom, so it should be there, can you stop talking, please give him back his shoe, yes, you can have a band-aid, does anyone have any questions, okay, so it’s your first day, I’ll be with you in a second, there are kleenex right there, no, you can begin, okay, now there are questions, no I can’t give you a pass, I already have two people out, please keep your head up in class, you’re late because, do you have a pass, please get a pass, no you’re not in trouble, you just need a pass, no I don’t have a charger, where is yours, can you ask quietly to borrow one, that’s not exactly quietly, yes, I know it’s cold in here, you’ve asked me to speak to you on the side if there’s a behavior issue and I’ve done that and yet you are still talking, yes, I know you can multitask, no it’s not your turn for a pass, there are pencils on my desk, help yourself, can you let me finish with her before you ask a question, no I am not being smart, I just want to address one question at a time, as soon as you stop talking, I can address the next person who is talking too much, what should you do you’re finished, no you can’t have a pass because it’s within the last 10 minutes of class, see I’ve posted the times right there when you can ask for a pass, no I’m not being smart, I’m just encouraging you to check the times before you ask, I know you can’t look at your phone for the time and I know some of you can’t read that clock on the wall that’s why I bought this digital one, oh, “what did he say,” so you’re announcing to everyone that you are not listening, okay, I have more pencils, you don’t have to fight over that one, I’m glad you won the game but can you save the post-game talk for later, that’s not why the school gave you computers, you need to go to the office, I don’t know why, that’s why they called, it’s up to you whether to take your things, sure I can explain it to you again, I don’t know why we are not giving out progress reports. . .
This year, our school, a member of an overwhelmingly Black or African-American school district, has adopted a new curriculum – MyPerspectives (SAVAAS). Not only has the District adopted it, but we’ve been given a day-to-day timeline of how much time to spend on each piece with the expectation that certain major assessments will be in the system within a certain window of time. Also, I’ve already had four walkthroughs designed to see whether I was using the curriculum.
My initial impression of it was not positive, but someone I teach with made a good point. She said, “We have to try it faithfully before we can criticize it.” And I tried. . . for a while. Some of the assignments and readings make no sense to me. The lessons about writing mechanics seem random. The sequence of things seems almost deliberately off. And it took 126 pages for me to find a work written by a Black author. It is a poem, a great poem – “blessing the boats” by Lucille Clifton.
I thought we had this part figured out. I came to teaching with training in the classics and quickly realized that choosing Pride and Prejudice wasn’t always the best idea. Then I came to understand that not every story of a person of color should have its origins in trauma and despair. Next, I learned to widen my repertoire of authors of color and to spread into other genres. As a profession, I really thought we had this figured out. Whether you want to call it representation or culturally relevant teaching or whatever, I thought we’d accepted the point that giving students stories that featured people like them was a good thing. Though the selection process can never be perfect, we seemed to understand the need to have that particular conversation on a regular basis. I’ve been excited at times to dabble my intellectual toes into other aspects of what it means to teach (to borrow a phrase) other people’s children. Could we finally move past what we teach and begin to think about how we teach?
But now this. 126 pages. There has been a story about a British mother and child going on a beach vacation, an argument that everyone should learn basic first-aid, and a Japanese story about a surreal experience the narrator had during a typhoon. I am skipping an essay on “The Moral Logic of Survivor Guilt,” as its references to Spinoza, Aristotle, etc. seem a bit much for 9th grade. I have a strange fascination with the adventures of Sir Ernest Shackleton, but the narrative, the 13-page narrative, left me cold. I’ll find a video. I kept turning pages. 125 of them. Then finally, Lucille Clifton.
I haven’t turned any more pages; it’s too discouraging.
after25yearsblog 