On Success, Part 5: Not Bringing Work Home

This is the final part of a two-week series on my five biggest successes and failures as a teacher this year. This week was focused solely on success.

There was a time early in my career when I brought almost all of my work home every day. I had an interactive student notebook system that required constant grading, and I still remember loading up 100 or so notebooks into my car and driving them home. I spent hours on those and every other student paper that came across my desk. It's no wonder I got a stomach ulcer my first year of teaching.

In my second teaching job, at an alternative school, I learned that it was possible to complete all of my work at school. I was always given more than enough time to do everything I needed, even with all of the additional responsibilities that come with working in a small school. I went from taking everything home to nothing at all.

When I returned to a traditional public school after that, I started to fall back into my old habits. I went back to hauling a cardboard filing box to and from school each day. What's worse is that I was increasingly bringing tons of stuff home only to bring it back the next day without ever having looked at it. I realized the insanity of the situation, and forced myself to stop.

I found ways to use my time in school more efficiently, and adopted grading methods and policies that would keep me sane while still insuring student achievement. This year is the culmination of years of effort and self-therapy: I am now able to do almost all of my work within the normal school day. I may carry the emotional burden of each day home with me, but my bag now carries only the weight of a notebook for ideas and some reading material for my commute.

I've even been able to cut down on going to work hours early or staying late. Admittedly, one reason is our longer school day, which has a lot of planning time built in. Yet even when I've had less planning time in the past, I would often invent ways to keep myself busy and spend so much time in my classroom that I might as well have brought in a cot. It's a huge personal victory to leave my work at work without constantly fretting over it and while still being (I'd like to think) a pretty darn good teacher.

Two years ago I wrote a series of how exactly to do this, inspired by the ideas from the book The 4-Hour Workweek. I think you'll find this helpful if you're in the same boat I was:

1. Lessons from The 4-Hour Workweek
2. The Low Information Diet
3. Outsourcing Your Life
   

In a Sentence
Achieving a work/life balance starts with not bringing your work home.

On Success, Part 4: I Still Want to Teach Forever

This is part of a two-week series on my five biggest successes and failures as a teacher this year. This week is focused solely on success.

This year has been a true test of faith. Teaching at a high school designed for young people who haven't been successful at their former schools for every reason you can think of (truancy, misbehavior, drugs, fighting, legal issues, no support at home) has been a challenge to say the least. While for the I've dealt with almost all of these issues amongst my students before, I guess I just wasn't fully prepared to face a population where everybody has serious issues.

It was stressful, but so has every year I have taught. It's the paradox I've wrestled with since I started in this profession: my passion is what makes me a good teacher, but it also leaves me completely frustrated when I feel things aren't working. It's my greatest strength, but also my greatest flaw.

Whether that is mostly to blame or not, I don't know, but I can say this: this is the first year I have ever seriously considered not wanting to teach the following year. If you had caught me at my lowest point, sometime during the first semester, I was not only done with this school, but school in general. It was painful to even think about, because teaching is all I know. It's all I've ever done. Could I really go work anywhere else without losing my mind?

Eventually, I talked myself out of it. For one thing, there were other problems that needed to be solved that were making things harder than they needed to be. A lot of it was completely outside of the classroom, and shouldn't have been allowed to creep inside it.

A recent project of looking through all of my teaching records and digitizing most of it also gave me quite a bit of perspective. I've been through much more bad times than I could remember, but I didn't let that stop me. I've kept meticulous records of everything from daily logs of student behavior to end of year survey results in order to help me keep some perspective. I knew after looking at everything that I had done too much good to let it all go so easily.

Secondly, as silly as it may seem to some of you, one of the things that turned me around was thinking about this blog. How could someone who had the audacity to declare "I want to teach forever," in a public space with hundreds of loyal readers just up and decide to quit? I'd be something I think most people fear becoming: a grade-A hypocrite. Worse yet, I would become just another statistic, lost among the 50% of teachers who leave the profession after five years. I take great pride in having proven that stereotype wrong, and here I was trying to make it true.

What would I say to the teachers who emailed me to tell me how my blog had inspired them? Or those who purchased my book and sent me their praise? What about all of my former students who shared the same sentiments? It was too much to give up. This is what I was born to do.

So not only have I survived yet another challenging year of teaching, I will continue to do so for as long as I can. That is as big a success as any I'll have this year.

In a Sentence
I still want to teach forever!

On Success, Part 3: Fostering Positive Change in Students

This is part of a two-week series on my five biggest successes and failures as a teacher this year. This week is focused solely on success.

Early in my career, as I struggled to learn my craft, I would often get down on myself (not surprising from someone who just published a week-long list of failures for the world to see). At the end of my first year of teaching, I forced myself to make a list of "Good Things I Accomplished" to remind myself of all the good things I was doing that I still have.

I included lists of students who made huge improvements, that I built strong relationships with, and even a group of students who didn't like history before taking my class. I was happy that I had pushed my students towards great success on our benchmarks and standardized test, but most importantly "my dedication to what's best for my students, not the administration".

The list of students in whom I helped facilitate a genuine positive change became a staple in each subsequent "good things" list I did. This year has been my most challenging, and I need to remind myself of the good I'm doing now in order to keep myself going.

I can't name names, of course, but I know I have students who...

• are brilliant and continue to excel in my class.
• have told me they didn't understand math much before my class.
• never passed math before taking my class.
• received their first A in math from me.
  
• have sincerely thanked me for helping them one-on-one or in general.
• came to school just because they didn't want to miss my class.
• call me their favorite teacher even though I don't have them in class!
• have failed or lost credit due to absences but are now passing.
• aren't satisfied even with a 98 average!
• told me I was responsible for teaching them what they needed to finally pass the MCAS.

I admit that I don't feel like I've made a difference to as many students as I believe I did in years past, but I would be lying to myself if I didn't also admit some success this year.

In a Sentence
Take stock of all the good things you've accomplished this year--it will be a longer list than you think!

On Success, Part 2: New Games & Projects

This is part of a two-week series on my five biggest successes and failures as a teacher this year. This week is focused solely on success.

I'll be the first to admit that I abandoned many successful elements of my past classrooms this year. I also didn't have much experience teaching Algebra II beyond a stint at an alternative school, so I didn't have the wealth of resources as I did for Algebra I. Yet despite these setbacks, I've created a number of new lesson ideas, games and projects this year in both courses.

Algebra I
I'm a near-perfectionist. That is, I am rarely satisfied with my ideas and tweak them every year, no matter how successful they might have been before. Of course, I still go forward and use my unfinished strategies to teach out of necessity. I'm happy that not only did I improve many good lessons, I created new ones to cover a wide range of topics:

1. New Version of "Students Become The Teacher", 9/27/08 (Idea #8 in my book Ten Cheap Lessons)
2. How to Improve the Combining Like Terms Game, 9/27/08
3. 2008 version of the Math in the Real World project, 10/9/08 (Idea #4 from TCL)
4. Basic Geometry Formula Book project, 10/26/08
5. Coordinate Plane Battleship Game: 2008 edition, 11/21/08
6. Linear Functions Mini-Poster project, 12/14/08 (Remix of Idea #1 from TCL)
   
7. Linear Equations Formula Book project, 1/12/09
   
8. Multiplying Polynomials and FOIL review games, 3/4/09

Algebra II
I had a much harder time coming up with ideas for Algebra II, as I have not deconstructed and planned out the clearest explanations for the much more complex concepts I have to teach. I'm starting to feel comfortable in breaking things down now, and building interesting projects and games around the topics.

1. See #1 & #3 above.
2. Transformations of Exponential and Logarithmic Functions project, 1/27/09
3. Transforming Logarithmic Functions Bingo, 2/8/09
4. Straightforward Example Posters, 3/10/09

There's still much more to come in both subjects, as I feel my creative juices are flowing quite well these days. I get so much satisfaction when I hear from readers that they used my idea in class or that it inspired them to create something.

In a Sentence
Keep improving your teaching, no matter how long you've been doing it.

On Success, Part 1: Reaching My Goals

Last week, I discussed my five biggest failures this year. This week, I will strike a balance by focusing on my successes. Starting today and ending Saturday, I will share my five greatest successes as a teacher this year.

Of my many life goals, there were two I wanted to accomplish sooner rather than later:

1. Live and work in a city
2. Teach in a charter school

I tried and failed to do both three years ago, enduring a seemingly endless string of interviews and sample lessons at charter schools in cities up and down the East Coast. It was extremely disconcerting to make it through the initial interviews, be invited to visit and perform a sample lesson, and not be offered a single job over the course of about six months. I had thought I was a good teacher, but the process left me doubting myself like never before. In the end, I stayed in the Rio Grande Valley and had no regrets.

When the opportunity to accomplish these goals came last year, I jumped at the chance.

Living in the city, for all its financial challenges, was exactly what I had hoped. I can tell you I don't miss the stress of driving. As slow and unreliable as the MBTA is, I have thoroughly enjoyed being able to read and relax while someone else takes me to and from work. My health has benefited from walking everywhere. Most importantly, I'm learned to live with less and tons of new ways to save money (out of necessity).

Working at a charter school has afforded me a genuine freedom I could never have in a traditional public school. Our extended school day and year has allowed me to cover more topics in a much greater depth, and in general I think my students have done very well. I've been free of the pressure of testing madness and had hours of uninterrupted planning time each day.

Besides my core classes, I've been able to design and teach three elective courses: SAT Math Prep, Sports Statistics, and now Web Design & Content. Needless to say, this was an impossibility at my old public school.

These two goals are things I'm glad I got to do now, while I had the flexibility to move without any major restrictions. I know that they would have tortured me had I put them off any longer. That alone is a major success.

In a Sentence
Be specific about your goals, then do what you gotta do to make them happen!

Special Series: "On Failure" and "On Success"

Over the next two weeks, I'm going to try something a little different in an attempt to help other teachers. I spend a lot of time reflecting on what I do in order to become a better teacher, and I'm launching a special series where I will look closely at both the positives and negatives of my school year so far.

This week, starting on Tuesday and ending Saturday, I'll be detailing my five biggest failures as a teacher this year. I made a lot of mistakes that made this year harder than it should have been, and it will help me (and hopefully others) to reflect upon what I could have done differently.

Of course, I wouldn't be doing myself any favors if I was to dwell only on what I did wrong and not on the good things as well. So from Tuesday through Saturday next week, I'll balance the negative with my five greatest successes as a teacher this year.

I can tell you that it was much easier to come up with five ways I've failed (I actually came up with so many more that I had to stop myself) than to come up with five successes. I'm my own worst critic, so of course I tend to think things are much worse than they actually are, but that forces me to constantly strive to improve. In the end, I think my students benefit from that.

Here's all of the entries from both series:

On Failure:

1. Systems and Procedures
2. Student-Teacher Relationships
3. Teaching a New Subject
4. Stressing Out
5. It's Not About You

On Success:

1. Reaching My Goals
2. New Games & Projects
3. Fostering Positive Change in Students
4. I Still Want to Teach Forever
5. Not Bringing Work Home