Developing Professionally

I just found out I’m teaching World History, and the past week has been an orgy of planning. My sister thinks TFA brings out all my worst qualities and that my overboard OCD is dangerous, but at the moment it’s providing me with the strongest pleasure as I decide how to teach three thousand years of human history with accompanying social studies skills in one semester. It was while I was gleefully explaining to her how TFA has me mapping out objectives in several areas for my students and how I’m then plotting my actions and student actions to arrive at them, and then deciding how to measure them, that she hung up on me. So I’ll tell you (don’t worry, only a little) instead.

Students will be Socrates

My vision for my students ranges from academic goals (broken down specifically into reading, writing, research skills, social studies analysis skills, and social studies content) to the professional intangibles that will help them succeed in future (organization, self-advocacy skills, etc). I’m also planning long-term for the unit, and glorying in filling in slots on the calendar. Luckily the focus is overwhelmingly on skill-building instead of content, because then students can take their inspired passion, research, and analysis skills to study whatever they want outside of class.

I have so many ambitions! A semester-long research project that carefully builds up their skills one by one, Socratic Seminars and daily current event prompts and fictional narratives and personalized research into educational opportunities… there’s no way to squeeze it all in, so careful pruning will have to follow.

  

I am struggling to keep World History, world history. From what I’ve learned, I think the tests for the year will focus on Greece and Rome, medieval feudalism, the Renaissance and Reformation, absolutism and revolution, and nationalism. There’s no “world” in that history, except in the section “Exploration and Expansion,” which from another perspective could be called “Devastation and Decimation.” The problem is, there’s no way to cover all of world history in one semester, so picking and choosing has to happen, and it has to benefit our students in our society. I mean, how do you choose between the things that are going to be considered cultural competency requirements, and the things that get left out of curriculums time and time again? 

My MTLD (sorry, I appear to have deep-dived straight into TFA’s acronymorrhea; MTLD stands for my Manager of Teacher Leadership & Development—you can call her my advisor) suggested making that the central question around which I teach. I LOVE that idea, and my syllabus now has a dominant and suppressed section for each unit. The students’ research projects will each have some form of that question about stories that are suppressed. I am so excited to get this going! I’m now deep inside NC’s Essential Standards, thrashing around with CORE and the textbook and previous AP test questions as I try to form a coherent plan out of the mess of resources. But still finding it difficult to do “ancient civilizations” and figure out either how to leave out or encompass all of Rome, Inca, Aztec, Han, Qin, Mauryan, Gupta, Ethiopia, Ghana, and Mali in my empire section. 

Thursday a previous TFAer at my school who is going to mentor myself and the other history TFAer took us on a tour. As first-year teachers, we’re incredibly lucky and promised classrooms of our own (to share with the unlucky rovers, of course). Both of us will be out in the trailers, a couple doors away from each other, for which we’re very thankful—our management plans involve sending students to each other to cool off for ten minutes. We got to meet some of the guidance staff and administration as well, in a welter of names that I’m afraid I’ve forgotten already. I did wish, as I shook the principal’s hand, that it hadn’t been raining as we walked around outside—somehow meeting her while damp seemed a bad impression, but she didn’t seem to mind at all. Is it terrible that I’m excited that the principal is female? I suppose school administrations have become more gender-diverse over the years since I was in high school and it’s not exciting at all, but I can’t help enjoying having that role model for the female students, and it reminds me of my reaction in Denmark to a student who casually said “yeah, our prime minister, she—“ –electrified approval.

The past week has been spent in professional development with TFA. We’re back at Johnson C Smith University, all super-excited to see each other again and relieved to be out of Institute and back on our home ground with our own staff. The Charlotte corps has a good vibe; it’s full of down-to-earth, cheerful people with a solid sense of responsibility to their work and a nicely flippant attitude towards the more jargon-y educational gobbledygook.

At the start of the week we did a poverty simulation, in which a crisis ministry came in, organized us into faux families with characters and family situations for each, and ran 15-minute weeks in which we had to live. My fake wife got incredibly flustered the first “week” when, due to the bank saying we had extra money owing and not taking my check, we couldn’t feed the family. I was surprised she took it so seriously, when our fake kids looked pretty equable about it. Partially it was that I knew this was meant to be hard, partially that I felt we just needed more practice at what felt like a game. Of course, in real life we’d probably be close to dead—there was no way this simulation was going to really give us a clue. Sure enough, the next few “weeks” we fed the family, but didn’t manage to get the youngest kid glasses or fix a broken window, and were momentarily evicted before I managed to pay rent (to the applause of the line behind me, also waiting to pay rent or argue evictions).

During the debriefing afterwards everyone spoke about how rushed they’d felt, how completely desperate and like giving up the “game” of life. Interestingly, the “kids” in the simulation spoke of how ignored and helpless they’d felt. It’s true: as a “father,” I hadn’t had a chance to ask my kids what they did in school or spend a minute with them beyond snatching the requests they gave me for glasses or valentine’s day money out of their hands. Another friend made the point that we’d all been so stressed, but been using competency that we’d been taken for granted such as demanding receipts, counting change, and speaking English. The only way I can really make sense of it is to use it to inform my classroom, to create a safe caring space focused entirely on students. Getting a glimpse of the obstacles some of my students may face won’t mean lowering the standards, but it may mean getting creative about how they rise to them.

As I do whenever I move into a new city, I’ve established routines here in Charlotte that make me feel at home. Every morning I sit on my mirpeset to breakfast and read while the sun rises. Every evening once my work is done, I jog in a different direction wearing my Norwegian light reflectors, learning the neighborhoods around me through the twilight. Then I loaf in the pool for a quarter hour, reading under the stars.