Talk is cheap, but at least we're talking

I have been having a lot of conversations lately - with fellow teachers, ex-teachers, concerned citizens, friends - about the state of education in this country right now. So many people have so many suggestions about what could fix the education system, but what is the right thing to do? How can we make up for years of doing it wrong? And No Child Left Behind? And standardized testing? Will it really take, as one fellow teacher suggested, twenty years for the pendulum to swing back to a place where creativity and passion for learning reigns supreme again? I'm worried we are creating passionless, robotic students that have no internal motivation for anything. Is it the parents, the schools, our society in general? Most of the teachers I know work damn hard, and try the best they can to do a good job in a system that is often thwarting them at every turn. By the high school level, we are not going to be able to make up for bad parenting, education failures in their past, etc. We do what we can. I do what I can on a daily basis, but teachers are so overworked as it is, how can we have the time to fight for the changes that need to happen. I don't know if I want to be a teacher forever, but I can tell you one thing: I can see myself trying to fight for policy changes and trying to fix this broken system. Our kids deserve better. Even when they make us want to tear our hair out. Which is almost every day for me. But I still want them to succeed.

Herding Cats

Long time, no post. Very long story short - I got a job! I have a Masters degree and a job. Does this mean I have any clue what I'm doing, in regards to my career as a teacher? No. But anyways, I found a mid-year teaching job at Peoria High School. Which is totally amazing and I am super lucky to have found a teaching job mid-year. But it is like nothing I've ever done. Ever. Exhausting and overwhelming are good adjectives. Asking me how it is going really just depends on the day.

For example, today was rough. At times, I feel like I'm an elementary school teacher, which is not what I wanted to do. This is why I obtained my degree in Secondary Education. It's just very different from what I experienced last semester in my student teaching with honors Sophomores. With my new job, I have low-level Freshmen (well and some Sophomores and Juniors) who don't exactly love school (mostly because it is hard for them and they've probably struggled for awhile) - so sometimes it's akin to herding or wrangling cats just to get them to pay attention long enough to listen to instructions, or stay quiet during independent work. Oddly, the only thing that seems to keep them paying attention is when I have them take notes. Notes. The most boring part of school. I will never understand teenagers. Okay, this is my rant and also my way of avoiding the lesson planning I'm supposed to be doing.