On Monday we had a department-wide staff meeting in my room and I felt the need to apologize to everyone. Why? Because the week prior I was feeling salty and frustrated and aggravated at having been asked by our administration to lead our ELA department out of the bowels of NCLB hell (I’m not even the Department Chair) and during the course of doing some internal, department wide PD I was doing, I was kinda blunt.

I was brusque.

Indeed, I was chippy.

And usually, that’s not me. But damn, my buttons were pushed.

I should know better though. I mean face it, in a way, teachers can be the absolute WORST audience for other teachers to teach. Every rule they have in their own room is a room is a rule they feel they can break when someone else is at the front board. They talk when they feel like it, take phone calls when they feel like it, and already know the answers to all the questions even before the questions are asked.

Forget about the tardiness factor. Sheesh… just show up whenever the heck you want, why don’t you?

And when you dare to suggest that they might in some, slight way be acting hypocritical for this behavior — even if you are right, you are wrong. Ya can’t win for losing.

Like I said… Sheesh!

This is why I have no real ambition to be an administrator. Wrangling teachers is like herding cats and sometimes, when the screws of NCLB are being turned and the district offices (and front offices) are looking to you to make academic magic occur on a data-driven level, it becomes exhaustive.

Give me kids any day of the week. I mean I do PD because 1) I can and 2) because I believe I have something worth offering. No magic bullets, but some good, sound tools that can help classroom teachers improve their own classroom practice while simultaneously taking more joy and positive, fulfilling, meaningful efficacy from the work of being a teacher. I do PD with a win/win mentality in mind.

But I work with kids because I love it. That’s where the soulful stuff is for me… and that makes all the difference between this being a job and this being my life’s work.

Working with adults in a school system — sometimes it’ll drive ya bonkers. I just don’t know why I can’t seem to remember that more often.

Yep, gimme kids any day of the week.

As we enter Thanksgiving week it really is a time for me to recognize how much my students mean to me. I truly am a better human being because they are in my life.

They make me smile, laugh, hurt, angry, and tear up. They also make me proud, ashamed, hopeful and fearful.

And sometimes they do this back to back to back as if it’s all happening in the same day.

But without a doubt, the kids in my classroom make me remember what it’s like to be a kid… and no matter how old you are, you never want to forget that.

If being a teenager in this world is often a journey of better discovering your own inner identity then being a person that works with teens for a living is often a journey of getting to remember the things that are both so awesome and so terrifying about life.

This Thanksgiving I am thankful for the hundreds of teens with which I work every day. They may be bonkers — and they certainly drive me bonkers at different times — but top to bottom, I adore them.

Teaching teens is good stuff… and people with “real” jobs… well, they don’t know what they are missing.

I wrote thousands of words this week and read thousands and thousands more on this series about “best” teachers and where they ought to teach.

Gonna come back on Monday after digesting all of the ideas — and all of the Halloween candy — and try to see what’s to be taken from the series.

Certainly had me thinkin’ tons… and it feels like my brain, like my stomach, is pretty full right now.

Trick or treat and HAPPY HALLOWEEN!!

T.S. Eliot was wrong — October is the cruelest month, not April — which he should have known because at one point he was a schoolteacher. And not too be too critical of a Nobel Prize winning poet, but I think if he would have really considered the plight of educators in the month of October, The Waste Land might have gone in a slightly different direction.

As almost all teachers know, October is the part of the marathon race that is every school year whereby the end is so far out of sight it’s not even worth looking out on the horizon for it. Yet, the bloom is completely off the rose in terms of the freshness of a new year having started so that any sense of a “honeymoon with the new kids” is long since blam-o! And any re-charging or the batteries that was done over the summer has long since seen its reserves tapped, as well.

There’s no holidays. There are no breaks. The days get shorter and cooler and wetter. (I mean I love the Fall, don’t get me wrong, but even the weather conspires against us a wee little bit.)

October is a long stretch of road.

On one hand though, October is a great month for me though because I get a heck of a lot of uniterrupted teaching time in. It’s where the path of the year gets deeply plowed. On the other hand, teachers like me endure small little things like incapacitating throat infections which would sideline most mere mortals and yet, since I barely have enough time to accomplish all the things I plan to tackle even when I’m healthy, I certainly do not feel I have the time to call in sick — and so, inevitably during the month of October, I trudge on in, up before the sun, looking like a teacher that should really be spending their day in bed with a bowl of chicken noodle soup, and I suck it up and work through the themes of Frost, figurative language of Maya Angelou or the mood of Poe knowing that the weekend is only another 5 days and 188 essays away.

And this week, for the extra added bonus, we have Halloween in the air. Now, personally, I simply LOVE Halloween. One of the most fun times of the year for me. However, just the idea of it being in the air makes the kids both restless and mischievous. And for the students on campus who are not the most “academically oriented kids in the first place” Halloween week is almost a green light for them to cause trouble.

Ask anyone on campus this week and what you’ll find is people who are feeling stretched, tired, and over-worked. Now personally, I am a fan of these things because education is like muscle building and sometimes you have to do the sweaty, hard, strenuous work that stretches all the sinews in order to make productive gains. On the other hand, it’s easy to advocate for this type of workout but hard to actually get in the gym and be the weightlifter who has to pull it off.

October challenges me as a teacher. It makes me reach down, it makes me work hard and it forces me to keep my eyes on the prize and not become distraught over the insane amount of work which needs to be done in an almost un-doable amount of time under quite unreasonable circumstances.

Yet, like the Maya Angelou I am teaching this week, Still I Rise.

So how did I become a published author? I think the first answer I’d offer is, “mathematically”.

Here’s how I do it nowadays.

I am a full time high school teacher. This means I am up really early and am perpetually over-worked by the demands I face at school. But still, as we all know, so, so many teachers have 2nd jobs to make ends meet. I am no different. My school salary is not nearly enough to meet the financial demands of modern day life — especially in Southern California — so I, too, have a 2nd career.

That of an author. And to be an author, I have to write. Time (thus) becomes a professional tool which I must value and utilize well.

Here’s how it breaks down for me during the school year. (Note: this is a rough sketch, actual numbers

Monday through Thursday I make sure to put in at least 2.5 hours per night writing. Usually, my 3 year old daughter is in bed by 7:30 so between the school day ending for me a bout 3:45 p.m. and me allowing some time to get home, have dinner with my little “boo”, read her books, kiss my wife, exercise if I can squeeze it in and so on, I am usually “in the chair” by about 8:30. And I’ll go til 11. (Though I’ve been known to go to almost 1 on school nights which is nuts when you are up at 5:30 every morning but that’s another story.

All told, this makes for a minimum of 10 hours per week. (Friday nights are optional for seat time. Sometimes I work, sometimes I go out on “date night” sometimes I’ll rent a movie… but yeah, I’m a bit of an addict so probably twice a month I’ll do some stuff.)

Saturdays are 6 hours of writing time for me. Gotta do it. I need long stretches of uninterrupted time and the way I look at it, who doesn’t work 6 days a week. (Paper grading is the beast for me — avoiding it, that is. I bust my butt to get it done in the M-F wndow though, of course, some Sunday afternoons are spent with student compositions in hand.)

However, Sundays are also family day. I mean no writing at all. No computer, no email, no blogging. I will read some newspapers online if the moment allows but family day is family day. For example, this Sunday we’re all going to a pumpkin patch to prep for Halloween.

Add it all up and I do an average of 16 hours per week which equals 64 hours per month… and if you multiply that by a 9 1/2 month school year that’s 608 hours of writing time per school year.

But I get holidays, Spring Break and X-Mas, and summer. Let’s call it an 7 week “working summer” for me of a 35 hour per week writing week. (I work harder but it’s summer so let’s pretend I chill out more than I do.

That’s 245 more hours of writing. Add it all up and we are at 853 hours per year.

Now let’s imagine I am only good for 1/2 a page per hour of writing time. (Trust me, I am way better than that but I also put in a lot of “think time” for my books — despite what my critics may say… LOL! — which doesn’t translate into actual page production yet counts as “writing time”. So 1/2 a page per hour seems fair.)

Do all this math and you are talking about 426.5 pages of production each year from me.

All in all, writing a book is like eating an elephant; there’s only one way to do it.

Bite by bite.

If you want to be a writer, you have got to find the time. Writers, as I have said before, write.

Meeting all my students is always a great thing. I truly enjoy it every year. But there’s a part of me that knows deep down that if I had looped and stayed with my kids from last year for a back-to-back year of teaching the same kids for another academic turn, I would be spectacularly more efficient to start the school year.

I’d know names, proclivities, dispositions and so on. And they’d know me. We’d cut so much of the “learning curve” out — the one that took me many months to really get my hands around in order to feel really good about ALL of my kids. It actually seems as if it would be a keen move to have more teachers loop to ensure that that by week 2 of school, things are roaring at a high level and classes are well beyond the “tell me your name again” type of barriers that are inevitable every new school year.

Plus, there’d be fantastically greater accountability for summer reading and projects. (i.e. I assigned it last June, it’s due the first week of September, don’t pull any of that “My teacher never told me,” nonsense out the excuse bucket.)

On one hand, I like getting new kids. I like the new faces, I like the fresh energy and I like the new smiles. (Plus, I like the fact that I get to see the new smiles after having cracked some of the same jokes I’ve cracked in years prior — but hey, if the textbook companies can recycle short stories and lesson plans year after year, I can certainly plagiarize my own corny back-toschool comedy, right?)

Looping just seems like it would be so much more efficient. I mean it’s not like I didn’t end last year without wishing I could get to more things. And it’s not like the “data” about student performance wouldn’t be more meaningful considering I spent a year helping to generate it. The connections I made with parents, the kids learning my style, my tolerance for shenanigans, the way I expect their to be FUN as well as RIGOR in the classroom (cause the 2 are most definitely not mutually exclusive.)

I mean I spent a year with a bunch of students that, in a way, might best be considered groundwork, preparing them to be really successful this year.

They ar the seeds I planted for another teacher to harvest, I guess. But there’s a part of me that feels like I might be the best farmer for last year’s kids.

Yep, they may get sick of me — and I, them — but I do think I’d wring a heck of lot out of ‘em. And I do think that looping would save a lot of teachers valuable time in the classroom.

Am I loopy for thinking looping is a good idea?

Today I was mandated to participate in an hour and 15 minute “training session” designed to teach me how to administer the 25 hours worth of state tests next week I’ll be proctoring.

Mind you, I have been through this training many, many times in years past, but still, if I don’t get my name on the little “sign in sheet” and sit through a bore-me-to-tears power point presentation by a person who has already done 5 of these prior to my arrival (you can just tell she is juiced to do it again — actually, she is, because I am in the last group of the day and if you think I am watching the clock waiting for the dreariness to end, you should see the non-verbal clues being given off by the person leading this charge into the land of nonsense — she is dying to go home already) there will be bureaucratic hell to pay.

I want to be fair to the training session though. There were 4 minutes of total value embedded into the presentation. I learned the schedule for the week. I learned about the statistical value of breakfast before a big exam. (Apparently, there’s data on eggs.) I learned that Paris Hilton might be launching a new line of mascara. (Okay, sometimes we drift off topic.)

I also was informed that seniors, since they do not take these state tests, do not have to come to school. Yep, all seniors pretty much get the week off but teachers are supposed to have given them “assignments”. However, if we let them on campus during state testing we risk turning the quad into a social hour for hundreds of kids so the policy is, let’s just give them some take-home work and have them enrich their minds from home.

As I am sure you can imagine, the seniors really hate this. I can just see them now, a bowl of Fruit Loops in their hand, Judge Judy on the TV, and milk dripping down their chin repeating to themselves our educational mantra, “Must become a critical thinker. Must become a critical thinker.”

State tests have some benefits, though. For example, they are good for the economy (because when I see the truckload of materials that got hauled into our campus, I know someone is getting paid — and paid quite well — for this extravaganza). They are good for property values on the right side of the track (because real estate agents can tout those high API scores.) And they are good for the Christmas tree industry (because even though it’s only May, lots and lots of teens across the state are not only thinking about Christmas trees, they are applying their design to the test’s answer sheet).

I wonder which is more squandered this time of year, our funds or our time?