Mrs. Ram's Jams

Category: teaching

• If Teachers Responded to Student Emails Honestly

  Posted at 9:43 am by Mrs. Ram Jam, on August 28, 2021

  

  Down here in south Louisiana, we’ve already finished our third week of school. I love the beginning of the school year (new kids! new ideas to try out! a fresh set of flair pens!), but I wasn’t expecting my email inbox to already be chockablock full of emails from students. (Mental note: teach students the art of a good subject line.)

  And I might be “that” teacher, but 95 percent of the time I don’t email my students back. Why, you ask? Because these are the types of emails I get and the way I would respond, indicated in brackets and italics, if I actually had time to respond and could be completely honest in my responses.

  1. You put my grade in wrong in PowerSchool.  [I, in fact, did not put the grade in incorrectly in PowerSchool. You very much made a 72 percent on the test that I JUST entered into the gradebook 60 seconds ago. Stop checking your grades and emailing me while you’re in Algebra.]
  2. Why did you give me an 80 on the writing assignment? [I didn’t GIVE you anything. I assessed you for mastery of the skills. I JUST entered grades into the gradebook 60 seconds ago. Don’t you think I’m going to explain scoring when I HAND THE ASSIGNMENTS BACK?]
  3. I submitted my late assignment from a week ago. Can you grade it right now so my mom will give me my phone back? [Oh sure, I’ll stop grading these 106 narrative retellings that are test grade assignments so you don’t have a zero for a participation assignment when you already have an A in participation.]
  4. This is the third email I’ve sent you telling you to grade my late assignment. [I’m sorry, but as per my syllabus that I read to you on the first day of school and made you sign, it says that I grade all late work after current work is graded. I’m knee deep in grading the Hero’s Journey test from yesterday, the rewrites from two days ago, and the complex character exit tickets that I forgot existed until 30 minutes ago. I’ve reiterated loudly at least three times this week that it can take me up to two weeks to get to any late work and that I won’t respond to emails like these. You’ll know it’s graded when it goes in PowerSchool. If you wanted your grade entered in a timely fashion, then maybe you should have turned it in on time? In fact, since you sent me this email, I’ll more than likely put off entering the grade for another three weeks because you keep spamming my inbox.]
  5. Can I have an extra day to do the assignment? I wasn’t feeling well yesterday. [No. The other kids ratted you out. You were all over everybody’s SnapChat last night being messy and not sick at all.]
  6. I’m going to be absent all of next week because we’re going to Disney World. Can you email me all of my assignments? [You and I both know that you will not complete any of this work while you’re on vacation. And I’m pretty sure you’re just emailing me this because your parents asked you to. But you probably weren’t supposed to tell me that you were going on vacation–because even though your parents asked you to email me for the work, they’re also going to try to get a doctor’s note to excuse your absences for your competitive cheer competition. And I can’t email you all of the assignments for next week because I haven’t made any of them yet, LOL. I’m not panicking at all about that. Not even a little bit. But you sending me this email did make me start panicking about it. And you and I both know that those assignments will be posted on Google Classroom on the day that we do them in class with full instructions on how to do the lesson on your own. Have a Dole Whip for me.]

   So I don’t respond because

  1. I like my job. And I’m pretty sure I’d get fired if I responded that way.
  2. Some of the student emails are pretty accusatory. “You didn’t do this” and “you did this wrong.” But I know that stems from students not understanding the tone behind these statements in email.
  3. I’ve answered these questions before in class or I’m going to explain those questions the next day.

  But I actually do respond. Just not in an email. I stop them in the hall or pull them aside for a quick chat about what they sent me–because talking and interacting with them is important and way easier. I can quickly address how their tone in the email made me feel and that they might want to choose better words. I can explain their question in person. And I can do all of this while not having to revise my emails for tone. And I don’t have to spell check/Grammarly/proofread my conversation with them either.

  And the emails that are important I do respond to, professionally. 

  Promise. 

  (Now all I want in life is a Dole Whip. Why did I even bring it up? Sigh.)
  Posted in education, teaching, Uncategorized | 2 Comments | Tagged education, teacher, teacher problems, teachers, teaching

• A Teacher Tale: How I Botched the First Full Week Back to School

  Posted at 10:46 am by Mrs. Ram Jam, on August 14, 2021

  

  To make you feel better about yourself, let me tell you about how I fucked up every single day during my first full week back to school.

  • I made 250 copies of our summer reading assignment to distribute to all 8th graders. While counting out the handouts to give to another teacher, I noticed I didn’t put the word “the” in a sentence. So into the trashcan all of those copies went. Giving up, I told my coworkers I wasn’t going to make fresh copies of the newly edited document, and I was just going to post the revised document to Google Classroom. (My reasoning here being that I forgot how much I hate making copies and the copy machine was already being an asshole—maybe because I only used him once last year and he was harboring feelings of neglect at me giving him the cold shoulder. He ran out of paper and jammed five different times when I was using him just to spite me.)
  • On the second day of virtual class (I already have three kids quarantined), I forgot to start my Google Meet during fourth block until 12 minutes into class. In my defense, I am used to having virtual class at third block, but considering I didn’t start a Google Meet during third block either, I really have no defense for this. (And y’all, I wasn’t prepared for the different Google Meet layout either, so I’m going to have to spend some time playing around with it, you know when I actually get time for that kind of thing. Who am I kidding? I’m never going to have time to do that.)
  • I walked out of my house yesterday morning in CLEAN jeans and a SPOTLESS t-shirt but somehow walked into the school building completely FILTHY. I had a ginormous brown stain on my left pant leg and what looked like deodorant on the bottom right corner of my Parish Champs basketball T. But I didn’t spill any coffee and it’s not like I rode to school with the bottom of my t-shirt tucked up and into my armpit for safekeeping or to air out my stomach because of the 99 percent humidity, so the cause of the stains remains hidden. So, I tried to make the stains go away by drenching a wad of paper towels with water and scrubbing the spots with enough gusto to make my arms hurt, and I ended up looking like I tossed my clothes into a puddle. I walked into the lounge to put my lunch in the fridge, and conversation stopped at the table, and one of my coworkers, I shit you not, pointed at me and said “HA HA! YOU LOOK LIKE YOU PEED YOUR PANTS.” And another coworker cackled about me for a solid three minutes. Another coworker thought I was just “mystery wet” (his words). THEN I HAD TO STAND OUTSIDE OF MY DOOR AND CHECK UNIFORMS LOOKING LIKE I’D HAD AN ACCIDENT AND FORGOT TO PUT ON MY DEPENDS ON THE FOURTH DAY OF SCHOOL. 
  • Speaking of uniforms, I’ve already messed it up forever with one of my blocks. I’m pretty sure they hate me because I have to be the uniform police and issue citations, and there’s only like 5 of them out of 26 who are following the school’s uniform policy. I’ve already had kids arguing with me about it, and all I’ve done is tell them which part of the policy they’re not following–I HAVEN’T EVEN STARTED GIVING THEM CITATIONS YET JUST WARNINGS. I can’t tell you how much I hate having to enforce dress code (for various reasons including how it unfairly targets girls and is just a relationship ruiner between teachers and students–this doesn’t happen with every student, but it does happen.) (I know this bullet is a stretch for “messing up,” but I needed to vent.)
  • Because apparently I can’t read, I created chaos and confusion for two other coworkers and sucked a collective thirty minutes away from their already hectic day yesterday. I apologized to them both profusely.
  • I posted a student survey for kids to work on the second day of school and was talking about it for a full five minutes before one kid was like “It’s not on Google Classroom.” And come to find out I had scheduled it to go live at 7:30 p.m. instead of 7:30 a.m. Whoops!
  • Pretty sure I was an asshole during a staff meeting too (and this might have happened the week before last), and I didn’t mean to be, I didn’t choose my words well and my tone came off a bit more passionate than I needed to be when discussing why kids shouldn’t be allowed to have AirPods in school. I forgot how to people well over the summer, and I’m going to keep working on that. 
  • I don’t handle small talk very well and overcompensate by trying to be funny and fail miserably at being funny most of the time and just look like a lunatic. Why say all of that? Because this was me all of prep day on Monday interacting with students and parents who I’ve never met before. (I’m not kidding here. For example—during my sophomore year of college I got pulled from talking to rushees during sorority rush because I barked like a dog, a really poor attempt at being funny, at a girl. To nobody’s surprise, she didn’t think it was funny. So during rush for the next two years, the only thing I had to do was stand, clap, and sing. I’m not even sure how I got into a sorority in the first place.)

  How did you mess up your first week, teacher friends? Or was it just me?

  Posted in education, teaching | 0 Comments | Tagged education, middle school teacher, teacher, teacher problems, teachers, teaching

• A Teacher’s Unpopular Opinions About Teaching

  Posted at 10:20 am by Mrs. Ram Jam, on August 7, 2021

  

  Happy back to school everyone! 

  I thought I’d start the school year off a bit differently this year by telling you some of my unpopular opinions about teaching.

  I’m going to call this my Teacher Karen post because absolutely nobody has asked for my opinion on these topics, and I’m bound to make myself even more unpopular in this process, but here goes nothing.

  1. Teachers don’t have to spend their own money for their classroom.
  2. Teacher Amazon Wish Lists are well-intentioned but often cringey. (I said it. Don’t hate me.)
  3. Candy shouldn’t be given as incentives/rewards. (This goes hand in hand with number one.)
  4. Teachers don’t have to come to work when they’re sick.
  5. Teachers need to stop judging other teachers who don’t come to work when they’re sick.
  6. If teachers have a sub and have to take a sick day, teachers don’t have to teach from home while taking that sick day.
  7. Teachers don’t have to be available to their students after the school day ends.
  8. The Remind app is overkill.
  9. Teachers don’t have to hold their bladders all day. 
  10. Teacher-made assignments don’t have to look fancy.
  11. Teachers can get their union involved.
  12. Teachers should be grading everything based on performance bands not based on outdated percentage grading scales. 
  13. Teachers can make mistakes and still be PHENOMENAL teachers.

  Why start the school year off with this kind of post? Because maybe you needed to be reminded about just one of them. Because maybe we need to rethink why we’re doing things the way we’ve been doing them. 

  I’ve done the exact opposite of most of the things on my list, and that doesn’t make me a hypocrite but a human who is questioning how capitalism and teacher tropes and toxic groupthink have infiltrated education. 

  I also understand why my fellow teachers spend their own money for their classrooms. If it brings you joy to decorate your classroom with self-purchased decor, go for it! If you’re buying pre-sharpened Ticonderogas for kids who don’t have pencils, I totally get it. If you’re bringing food from home to give to students who need it, I totally get it. 

  I understand why teachers come to school when they’re sick.

  I understand why teachers make their assignments and their rooms fancy. But I also understand that makes more work and might be taking time away from more meaningful work. I also understand that often it is us, ourselves, who make our already complicated job even more complicated. 

  And if you do any of those things on this list, I am not judging you. At all. I’m just out here, thinking differently and exposing my inner Teacher Karen sans judgement.

  Okay, I might be judging you for number 5 and seriously be questioning how often you get a UTI if you frequently do number 9, but other than that, you do you teacher friends.

  (I’d love to hear which one on the list you’d like to see as a full-blown post. I have lots of feelings about number 2 and number 3. Also teacher friends, I’d love to hear your unpopular opinions about teaching too!)

  Bring on the 2021-2022 school year! 

  Posted in education, teaching, Uncategorized | 7 Comments | Tagged teaching

• A Teacher’s Opinion: Why I’m Concerned About the 2021-2022 School Year

  Posted at 10:37 am by Mrs. Ram Jam, on July 25, 2021

  

  On Friday, Louisiana’s governor recommended that all individuals, vaccinated or unvaccinated, mask up indoors due to the surge of COVID 19 cases caused by the Delta variant in our state. Two-thirds of people from the state are unvaccinated. 

  And as of right now, there is no mask mandate for schools. 

  This vaccinated teacher is tired. This vaccinated teacher is terrified of what’s going to start happening in classrooms if the state doesn’t require students and staff to mask up.

  I say this for selfish and unselfish reasons. But isn’t it ridiculous that saying it’s for selfish reasons directly relates to my own health? How can making sure that I do everything to prevent serious illness for myself be considered selfish? That’s some bullshit that society is feeding you and me both, sis.

  I’m going to be walking into a middle school classroom in two weeks and asked to teach in a room full of children who are vaccine-eligible who are more than likely unvaccinated. Only 25 percent of kids ages 12-15 are fully vaccinated in the U.S. (I couldn’t find any specific info about that rate in Louisiana.). I’m on a biologic called Entyvio that makes me more likely to catch contagious diseases. It also reduces my ability to fight infections. I need this medicine (though I wish I could get off it) to control my ulcerative colitis, which made me lose so much blood last year that I had to have a blood transfusion. I also have a few other autoimmune conditions. I refuse to apologize for being concerned about my safety in the classroom with this more contagious variant that’s rampaging across our state right now. 

  Sidebar: And before you say you can just quit your job if you feel unsafe, just because a person has chronic illness doesn’t mean that person should have to give up their job. That’s ableism, sis. Straight up ableism. According to the CDC, “In 2018, 51.8% of US adults had at least 1 chronic condition, and 27.2% had multiple chronic conditions.” I’m not one for widespread generalizations usually, but I’m pretty sure a lot of you would have a lot to say if 52 percent of Americans were unemployed because of chronic illness during a pandemic because a lot of you already have a lot to say about the labor shortage. End sidebar.

  I was so looking forward to not being held captive by my desk and to handing out paper-based assignments this year, but I hate to break it to you and to me that that’s not going to happen.

  I will be teaching from my desk again. 

  My students will be doing everything on their devices again.

  I will not be walking around the classroom.

  I will not sit down with a small group of kids or individual students who are unmasked to help them work. I’ll have to do it digitally again or stand six feet away from them and shout instructions, I guess? I’ll make whatever work, but it won’t be as effective as one on one. 

  I will ask unmasked students who stand too close to me to back up.

  I will ask unmasked colleagues who stand too close to me to back up.

  I will not eat in the teacher’s lounge.

  In the past two weeks, I’ve known four fully vaccinated people test positive for coronavirus. 

  I hate to break it to you again, sis, that this will not be a normal school year even if the kids are maskless.

  There will still be contact tracing (from what I understand), sis.

  Your child will be quarantined (from what I understand), sis.

  Your child will have to learn from home again if that happens (from what I understand), sis.

  Your children’s teachers might miss school for weeks because they and their families are sick. That teacher might be so sick that they can’t even teach from home, sis. (And heaven knows that some will try even when they’re super sick because of teacher guilt and ridiculous expectations for teachers.)

  But I really hope that the governor puts the mandate back in place before school starts because just recommending it isn’t going to cut it.

  I’m sick of masking too, but if it means that it keeps more people safe and keeps kids in school instead of at home and helps prevent illness, I just don’t understand why you’re so against it, sis. 

  And I’m going to take one for the team and say it, sis, and believe me, I know an argument has never been won by insulting the other person, and I’m going to say this in the kindest way I know how to, but you can say you’re for an individual’s rights but to my ears that sounds like being selfish when we should all be more selfless when the entire world is facing a public health crisis.

  So, I’m going to wear my mask to school, sis, and I hope you make the decision to send your kids to school in masks too. Because there’s no “I” or “me” in together. 

  Posted in education, teaching, ulcerative colitis | 0 Comments | Tagged chronic illness, education, masks, teacher, teaching during a pandemic, teaching middle school

• A Teacher Tale: Why Students Might Dislike Me

  Posted at 10:46 am by Mrs. Ram Jam, on June 27, 2021

  

  Earlier this week, a colleague of mine, whose son I taught, Facebook messaged me about a TikTok of my cat that I posted to my story. She said that my TikTok account horrified her son (because old people can’t be on trendy apps?). But that’s not the real reason I’m explaining this. She also said in the message that her son liked me as a teacher and that he said he couldn’t understand why so many people in the class that I had him in didn’t. 

  Did this revelation sting my teacher pride? Just enough for me to say “ouch” and move on. It didn’t even leave a tiny welt, but it left me thinking about why students may dislike me.

  1. This is just a personal observation, but some students equate subjects they dislike with disliking the person who’s teaching it. It’s flawed logic, but have you met middle schoolers? I ask them to do hard things like write essays and make them read difficult texts on their own (and so many of them despise reading and writing). Then, I have high expectations and ask them to rewrite and rewrite again. In some of their minds I don’t like to read and write and redo assignments I’ve already done adds up to I don’t like the teacher who makes me do it. 
  2. I hold them accountable for the school rules and their behavior in my classroom. I try to be consistent, and I know I don’t catch everything, but I will not let them just “do what they want,” particularly when it prevents them from getting their work done, inhibits others from getting work done, or makes for an uncomfortable learning environment because of racist/sexist/anti-LGBTQ+ comments. They’re middle schoolers. Of course they dislike being fussed at and written up, and guess what—they’re going to dislike the person who does it too.
  3. I make them uncomfortable—Part A: I am not a Southerner’s glass of sweet tea. I’m from Illinois where we drink our tea unsweetened. I do not lay on an outer layer of charm. I’m blunt and logical and do not hide behind layers of fluff. You cannot butter me up like a delicious cast iron-made, golden biscuit. This can be shocking to my Louisiana students if they’ve never had a teacher from somewhere else. Parents called me “That Damn Yankee Teacher” at my first teaching job in rural Louisiana. It’s good for the students to be exposed to people from different areas than their own. I’ll forever be offered as tribute and be disliked for this very reason because I’m not going anywhere anytime soon. This Midwesterner can handle your child’s dislike of me just because I’m different from what they know. (Sidebar: I know I’m not alone in this. I know several teachers who have moved from other places to teach in Louisiana, and they’ve told me the same thing.)
  4. I make them uncomfortable—Part B: We also talk about difficult topics in class, and that makes them uncomfortable. It’s not just diagramming sentences and asking comprehension questions about Romeo and Juliet in English class anymore. Heck, the canon is no longer comprised of only dead white guys. If you haven’t been in a middle school or an English classroom in a decade or two, it looks completely different, and we barely teach what teachers taught twenty years ago. We talk about questioning traditions and gender roles throughout history. We talk about racism and the Holocaust. We talk about suicide. We talk about war. We talk about religion. And then I ask them to write about those topics through the lens of literature. They might balk against these topics because they’re exposed to different ways of thinking and different cultures and that makes them uncomfortable. And guess what, them being uncomfortable in my classroom might translate into them disliking me.
  5. I’m a woman. There. I said it. You might be thinking, she can’t possibly be serious when most teachers are female. But, y’all. It’s real. It’s a thing. Some students yeet dislike my way simply because I exist as a woman in a classroom, a woman who doesn’t fit into this nicely-shaped-ridiculously-tiny-preconceived-notion box of what a female teacher should be. 

  Is the takeaway from this that your child would walk into my classroom and hate me? No. As far as I know, I haven’t heard that the 8th grade tea’s flavor is that all-students-hate-Mrs.-Ram-Jam. I’ve heard mostly positive feedback about myself from students and their parents, but I’ve never won and will probably never win any popularity contests.

  I think the takeaway from this is that when your student tells you they don’t like a teacher, don’t just take it at face value. Ask them to vocalize why they don’t like a particular teacher and try to get them to elaborate. That dislike might just be flawed reasoning, unwillingness to take responsibility for their own actions, discomfort, or society talking. 

  Posted in teaching | 4 Comments | Tagged middle school teacher, teacher, teacher problems, teaching

• A Teacher Tale: Summer Break Goals

  Posted at 7:05 am by Mrs. Ram Jam, on May 30, 2021

  

  Happy summer break fellow educators!

  We made it! May your summer break be full of:

  • sleeping in!
  • endless cups of home-percolated coffee or your favorite Starbies concoction!
  • trips to the beach and/or camping!
  • books!
  • playing with your children! (if you have them!)
  • soaking up the sunshine!
  • soaking up the twilight while avoiding mosquitos!
  • hazy craft IPAs, Trulys, and/or chilled glasses of Sauvignon blanc!
  • NOT TEACHING DURING A PANDEMIC!

  I’m a week into summer break, and guess what? I’VE BEEN USELESS. Like literally the wastiest of spaciest possible. And I’m to the zillionth power okay with it because 1. This past school year was a doozy and 2. I’m two days away from a quarterly iron infusion (no iron equals being exhausted). 

  But despite my uselessness, I do have goals. I think? These are goals, right? 

  1. Continue my wastiest of spaciest mindset.
  2. Lounge by the community pool and control the urge to fuss at the unsupervised-middle-school-aged children (who, when they aren’t diving in the five feet, are trying their best to drown one another).
  3. Succumb to the urge to fuss at the unsupervised-middle-school-aged children (because it’s my job to fuss at other people’s children) at the community pool and in my scariest teacher voice tell them I’m writing them up! I mean, reporting them to the HOA!
  4. Read. Read. Read. I want to eat books for breakfast, lunch, and dinner.
  5. Convince my husband that since I’ve only been eating books, he needs to take me for tacos and happy hour margaritas every Friday night. And Tuesday night. Because Tuesdays are for tacos. And books aren’t technically sustenance. So summer sustenance looks a lot like Taco Tuesday.
  6. Not think about school.
  7. Take Little Thing on adventures. We’ve got Illinois and Florida on our July docket.
  8. While being the wastiest of spaciest, also try to be active which gets hard because–fibromyalgia. (Here’s an example of why fibromyalgia sucks: I did a ten minute arm workout with weights two days ago. Bad idea. Very very bad idea. I’m unsure how the arm workout made my legs stop working correctly, but that’s the fibromyalgia magic for ya!).
  9. I’d put “write more” on here, but I’ve felt so uninspired lately. Maybe as the previous school year leaks out of my pores and my iron infusion kicks in, wording will get easier again.
  10. Force Little Thing to read everyday by blackmailing her with popsicles and pool time.
  11. Figure out how to convince the cat to stop bullying my two-houses-down-terrified-of-cats neighbor. Currently, the two-houses-down-terrified-of-cats neighbor is attempting to fend the cat off with garage and windowsill mothballs. And I’m pretty sure mothballs are terrible for cats. But the cat needs to know that it’s not polite to stand in a little old lady’s garage, hiss at her, and hold her captive in her home. How do I get my cat to stop performing acts of domestic feline terrorism? How???????
  12. Not freak out that I’m going back to two preps next year.
  13. Get the best tan I’ve had in a decade. But responsibly. With hourly sunscreen reapplication.
  14. Pass all my blood tests. Wow. That sounds bad. But like from a medical standpoint? Not a drug standpoint? That didn’t sound reassuring either. Like fibromyalgia? Ulcerative colitis? Anemia? That kind of thing. Like a normal level of ferritin! And a normal level of hemoglobin! And a normal ANA reading! Not a Mrs. Ram Jam is opioid–free kind of test! Oh, god. I’m not on drugs. I’ll stop typing now.
  15. Figure out how to get the cat to stop terrorizing me.

  Sounds doable, right? Except for 6,11, 12, and 15. But a teacher/cat owner can dream. 

  What are your goals this summer, teacher friends?

  Posted in education, teaching | 0 Comments | Tagged education, invisibly ill teacher, summer break, teacher, teachers on break

• An Apology Letter to My Students

  Posted at 10:21 am by Mrs. Ram Jam, on May 22, 2021

  

  Dear Students,

  I owe you an apology.

  I’m sorry you didn’t get the best version of me this year. I wasn’t the best teacher I could be. Normally I’m vibrant, goofy, and scatterbrained. But my vibrant dulled to lackluster. I lost the goof in goofy and all that was left was “why?” The scatter of my brain didn’t matter because it was scrambled. By the pandemic. By the daunting task of being expected to do everything that I normally do but with less time. By the daunting task of being expected to do everything that I normally do but teach virtually at the same time. By the daunting task of digitizing every single lesson. 

  I’m so sorry I was terrified of going back into the classroom because I have autoimmune diseases and am on medicine that makes me more likely to contract contagious diseases.

  So I’m sorry I kept my distance. Keeping my distance goes against the very nature of my classroom during a regular year. It’s already hard work to differentiate and pull students out for small groups. It’s nearly impossible to do when I wasn’t supposed to be near you. 

  And to my home-based learners, a special apology goes out to you. Sometimes I had to ignore you in order to get through lessons. Sometimes you were an open tab while I worked in other tabs trying to grade or make the next day’s lesson. So I apologize from the bottom of my heart for not giving you 100 percent all of the time. 

  I’m so sorry that I asked so much from all of you, but you’ve got to understand that so much was asked of me, was asked of all your teachers. Some handled it better than others, and I’m still not quite sure which side I’ve landed on. 

  I’m so sorry that you were expected to grow when your world was turned upside down last year, and instead of making sure that you were right side up, that you were whole and nurtured, we had to pretend that it was a normal year.

  I’m so sorry that I had to pretend it was a normal year. 

  I’m so sorry that the state decided that you still had to take end of the year tests. In a year that started late, you still had to sit through three weeks of testing. Three weeks of testing is ridiculous in a normal year, but the higher-ups were so good at pretending that everything was normal this year, that I’m not really sure why I’m so surprised that they made you take those tests. And even though it didn’t count for most students, it ended up counting for you, my eighth-graders taking a high school English class, because you had to pass the test to pass the course. 

  I’m so sorry for so many more things, but I’m end-of-the-year teacher tired. 

  I’m sorry that you didn’t get the best version of me, but I gave what I could–and that’s all that I could give. 

  Please forgive me.

  I’m done pretending it was a normal year.

  I’m done pretending, period.

  But you know what’s real? You. You all were phenomenal despite it all. And I’m so very proud of you and all you accomplished throughout the year. That’s real, and that’s what matters. 

  Love,

  Mrs. Ram Jam

  Posted in education, teaching | 2 Comments | Tagged education, middle school, teach, teacher

• A Teacher Tale: Ways My 8th Graders Horrified Me Recently

  Posted at 11:44 am by Mrs. Ram Jam, on March 13, 2021

  

  Some classroom snapshots that demonstrate why I love and hate teaching middle schoolers, who I refer to with equal parts affection and exasperation as goofbuckets: 

  ---

  Goofbucket #1: If I have a red-headed baby can I just throw it out the window? [Having temporarily forgotten that he sits next to a blatantly ginger (sweet sweet sweet) girl.]

  Ginger-Haired-Shoulder-Partner Goofbucket: [Shoots him with an eat-poo-and-die look that I thought she was incapable of making.]

  Me: There’s a word for that: defenestrate. And no. And I’m pretty sure you just hurt Ginger-Haired-Shoulder-Partner Goofbucket’s feelings.

  ---

  Goofbucket #2: Hand sanitizer low-key tastes good.

  ---

  *****In my school district, students have to wear uniforms. And. It’s. A. Battle. Every. Single. Day. To. Get. Middle. Schoolers. To. Follow. The. Policy. (Do I agree with public school uniform policy? No. But I enforce it because it’s part of my job.)

  We always have a few who try to get away with not wearing uniform shirts by just wearing a school-approved sweatshirt or hoodie instead with whatever t-shirt underneath. 

  Well, a couple of weeks ago, one of my students rolled into first block wearing a black hoodie, which they’re not allowed to wear. *****

  Me: [Stopping him at the door.] Hey, you know you can’t wear black hoodies in the classroom. I’m just going to need you to take it off.

  Goofbucket #3: I can’t.

  Me: Why not?

  Goofbucket #3: I don’t have a shirt on.

  Me: [Startled.] You don’t have on any shirt underneath your hoodie????

  Goofbucket #3: No, ma’am.

  Me: [Aghast.] Who wears a hoodie without wearing ANY shirt underneath it?????

  Goofbucket #3: [Hangs head in shame.]

  Me: Go downstairs and get a shirt from ISSP. 

  [Goofbucket #3 comes back 15 minutes later wearing a very wrinkly school-approved anorak that’s a tad too small. His midriff is visible when he raises his arms slightly.]

  Me: What are you wearing????

  Goofbucket #3: Coach was out of uniform shirts so he sent me to the locker room to find something to wear. All I could find was this jacket.

  Me: So you just took some random jacket???? 

  [Both of us hang our heads in defeat.]

  (Sidebar: A few years ago, a similar situation transpired, but it was with a girl, and she couldn’t take her sweatshirt off because she wasn’t wearing a bra. Like, I get you girl, #freethetatas all the way, and whew, you’re brave, but you can’t do that here!!!)

  ---

  *****I’m not quite sure how we arrived at this conversation, but this transpired during my advisory.*****

  Me: Teaching is like performing, and y’all are my audience.

  Confused Goofbucket: We’re your audience?

  Me: Yeah, and if this were back in Shakespeare’s day and I were performing on stage at the Globe Theater and the audience didn’t like my performance, what would the audience have thrown at me? You should be far enough into your Shakespeare WebQuest to answer that.

  Goofbucket #5:  BEER!!!!!!!

  [The whole room gets silent.]

  Me: [Deadpans.] Wrong answer. Also, you better believe that I’m telling your mother you said that.

  Goofbucket #5: [Cowers in fear.]

  Me: [Behind a hardened stare, delights in his fright. Takes a silent curtain call.]

  ---

  *****In the middle of class, I watched a student, Goofbucket #1 who’ve you already met, drink water through his mask. (I honestly think he forgot he was wearing one.)*****

  Me: [Stops going over intro to Romeo and Juliet slides.] Did you just drink water through your mask?

  Goofbucket #1: [Puts the water bottle down and closes his eyes because he knows the class will never let him live it down. Starts laughing.] Yes.

  Me: When’s the last time you washed your mask????? [Asks because obviously 8th graders are gross and some of them wear the same mask every single day.]

  Goofbucket #1: Yesterday.

  Me: Thank god. [Finds my own mask getting wet from the laughing-so-hard-I’m-crying tears.]

  *****I watched the wet circle on his mask slowly dry the rest of the block.*****

  ---

  Posted in education, teaching, Uncategorized | 0 Comments | Tagged comedy, middle school teacher, teaching

• Teaching Fail: When Acronyms Backfire

  Posted at 9:32 am by Mrs. Ram Jam, on February 20, 2021

  

  My students and I have been working on argumentative texts, and I swore on Facebook not too long ago that I would ensure my students would never forget how to evaluate an argument and a source.

  So I turned to Google while lesson planning and discovered the CRAAP method for examining sources. All you have to do is ask yourself is this source CRAAP to analyze for currency, relevance, authority, accuracy, and purpose–and voila, the children remember how to evaluate a source! And they get to say CRAAP in the classroom, so it makes them feel like they can cuss but actually aren’t! Students love that cusp of danger feeling! 

  And my teacher soul radiated warm fuzzies every time I heard them say CRAAP while discussing texts about failure.

  CRAAP never sounded so good! CRAAP was magic! They were learning! They would know forever how to evaluate a resource!

  Well.

  It backfired.

  While my students did test corrections yesterday, I examined exit tickets that analyzed if a failure fluff piece from Medium.com was a compelling argument.

  What did my students do in their formal writing???

  Used the word CRAAP–EVERYWHERE.

  I audibly groaned everytime I came across a sentence that said “this source isn’t CRAAP.”

  Not only did they come up with incorrect answers (sigh, only like five kids said the source and the argument itself was crappy), they actually thought saying CRAAP in their writing was a brilliant idea!!!

  After having done a badass job of teaching how to evaluate sources and arguments using articles about failure, I WAS AND AM THE FAILURE AND IT MADE ME FEEL CRAPPY.

  Crap. Crap. Crap. Extra Crap.

  What if they do that on their benchmark???? Or god forbid the LEAP test????

  How do I get the CRAAP out of them?

  Well, that sounded terrible, but you know what I mean!

  Looks like they’re in for a crappy Tuesday because they’re going to be rewriting those exit tickets. 

  (Sidebar:  When I looked at these same exit tickets, so many students kept referring to the author by his first name. I asked my fourth block why–because they fully know to use the author’s last name. Their response? His last name was too hard to spell so it was easier to use his first name.)

  Posted in education, teaching, Uncategorized | 2 Comments | Tagged education, funny, teacher, teacher problems, teaching

• A Teacher Tale: A Rant About Cheating in Digital Classrooms

  Posted at 9:36 am by Mrs. Ram Jam, on February 13, 2021

  

  Now that I’m an in-person and at-home synchronous teaching master–HA–I forget to start my Google Meet at third block about half the time and occasionally talk while my microphone is on mute–I need help mastering ALL THE STUDENT CHEATING THAT IS HAPPENING ALL THE TIME BECAUSE THEY ARE ALWAYS ON THEIR DEVICES.

  I miss paper. And pencils. And pens. And THINKING instead of Google searching and regurgitating whatever Spark Notes is telling them about symbolism in Shirley Jackson’s The Lottery.

  I’m starting to wish that Google was never invented.

  I’m so frustrated because some students’ grades are complete shams. Their grades aren’t reflective of their knowledge and ability. The grades are reflective of cheating and getting away with it.

  It seems like all my digital resources have been compromised. 

  All of the answers to CommonLit assessments are readily available to students on Quizlet.

  The state curriculum that we’re using is web-based. Want to guess how secure it is? Not very. Our unit test answers are plastered all over the internet.

  I can’t lock a Google Form anymore because my 8th graders don’t have Chromebooks.

  I gave the kids To Kill a Mockingbird before Christmas break to read on their own and a banana-ton of questions to answer as a test grade. It’s due in two weeks. Guess what some kids are doing? Googling the answers instead of reading the book. (In hindsight, this was a terrible assignment to give them.)

  And now that I’m teaching at home virtual learners who are, for the most part, unsupervised while they’re at home all day, cheating is even more of an issue. And I could be mistaken, but I think some of my in-person learners are staying home on days when they have lots of tests and logging in virtually to class so they can cheat more easily. 

  And while we do have Impero as monitoring software, it’s only on school devices. Some of my students use two different devices, one for the Google Meet, and one for classwork, which is fine, but I can’t see what they’re doing on the other device. This also becomes problematic when I do give locked tests through Illuminate. (Also no lesson planning or grading gets done when the students are testing anymore because I have to watch what they’re doing like a hawk.)

  End rambly semi-coherent rant.

  Do y’all have any teacher hacks to help prevent cheating, especially during testing, in this digital classroom era? This teacher needs help! 

  Here are some of the things I already do:

  1. Their cameras must be on and their faces must be fully visible. Most of the time, my rule is eyebrows and up, but this doesn’t work during testing. No blurred backgrounds are allowed either.
  2. I make all students push their sleeves up and show me their wrists to see if they have smart watches on. If they’re wearing one, I make the kids at home stand up and go put their watches on the other side of the room and the kids at school put their watches in their backpacks. (I personally don’t think kids should wear smart watches at school, period.)
  3. I make the kids at home show me their phones and have them put their phones on the other side of the room too. I don’t think this actually works. Lots of them tell me that their phones are already in another room. Yeah right.
  4. I make them have their microphones on the whole time they’re testing.
  5. Tests have to be taken on the school-issued device. 
  6. I give tests in a locked browser if at all possible. I wish I could lock students into a Google Form or CommonLit. UGHHH.
  7. I stalk them on Impero when I give them unsecure assessments.

  Is it terrible that I delight in their looks of misery when they realize I’ve thwarted most of their reliable cheating methods? Give me more ideas so I can get my schadenfreude on! 

  But in all seriousness, I can’t believe that parents of in-person learners aren’t making more of a stink about how easy it is for at-home learners to cheat and ultimately get better grades. 

  Is there anything that parents and students hate more than grades not being fair?

  Posted in teaching | 0 Comments | Tagged digital classrooms, education, student cheating, teaching, teaching during a pandemic

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