Mrs. Ram's Jams

Tag: students

• A Reflection on Distance Learning: How I Jinxed the 2019-2020 School Year

  Posted at 10:49 am by Mrs. Ram Jam, on April 18, 2020

  

   

  I jinxed the 2019-2020 school year. For myself. For my students. For you. For your students. For everyone.

  Just kidding. While it’s intoxicating to believe I possess such powers, I know it’s due to the upending coronavirus pandemic. 

  But why make this claim? To build an argument against myself, I’ll examine my posts since the end of last school year (although not in chronological order). 

  1. Last month I wrote about the importance of student attendance, how students need to be physically present at school and miss no more than 10 days a year. Now, just a few weeks later, nobody has to physically attend school. Even though students are distance learning, it’s not the same as walking into a tangible building bustling with students, teachers, routine, and structure. My heart breaks because I miss seeing students’ faces every day and helping them grow, but it also breaks my heart because they miss going to school too. 
  2. At the end of last school year, I penned a post discussing how my classroom was ditching technology and picking up paper and pen instead, helping with retention and engagement and reducing digital distractions. Oh, how the copy machine and I reacquainted ourselves for three grading periods! Now, because of distance learning, everything is digital. EVERYTHING. Ugh. (I even miss the cantankerous copy machine in the teacher’s lounge. I bet she’s lonely.) Can you imagine being a teenager, having your entire school year reduced to a screen, and completing work daily on a device that screams at you to play games or watch Kylie Jenner makeup tutorials on Youtube instead of completing assignments? It’s a wonder students get anything done. Let’s not forget they’ve got their phone beside them, and they’re getting distracted by SnapChats, TikToks, and text messages that wouldn’t even be a distraction if they were sitting in a classroom. I could have my students read a novel for the rest of the year, but I don’t want to have them read a 330-page book on a screen. I actually had a student tell me that they missed doing work and reading things on paper. Insert crying face emoji here. And the sad thing is, I don’t know if I’ll have the guts to go back to paper once all of this, gestures vaguely with her hands, is over. The thought of physically collecting paper from 95 different kids and handling it without touching my face while grading scares the shit out of me. Middle schoolers suck at washing their hands and aren’t well known for fantastic hygiene practices in general. (I love them despite their sketchy hygiene.)  
  3. I also wrote a post about late work policies and changed mine considerably. I went from accepting late test grade assignments at a 10 point deduction and late participation work at half credit to handing out one late pass for test grade assignments for full credit and two late homework passes for full credit. Once those passes were used, grades went in as zeros unless students were in danger of failing. Now with distance learning, I’ve got to accept all late work for full credit, and while I understand this policy’s leniency and necessity, it nevertheless irks me. I’m also expected to post answers to assignments, so I’ve got kids who wait until after the answers are posted to complete the assignments. Do they really deserve full credit? Particularly if it’s just a participation grade? Furthermore, the rigor and frequency of my assignments have decreased because we were told to give students about a third of what we would normally teach and not make them too hard otherwise students wouldn’t complete assignments. Lots of the grades I’m giving, even for test grade assignments, are hey-do-this-work-and-follow-the-directions assessments. I have a hard time giving students full credit on glorified completion grades that they’ve turned in late. Now don’t get me wrong, I know some students are watching their siblings, might not be living at home, have a parent who is sick, etc., and I am completely sympathetic to those students, but there are some who are abusing the system. I caught a lot of pushback from parents for giving a participation grade for just checking into Google Classroom daily (could there be an easier assignment to get credit for????)  and ended up deleting it because dealing with the fallout for two days left me sleepless and a tad indignant. Does everyone deserve an A in an honors class because of this crappy situation? The grades don’t even count this last quarter. Ugh. So why do I even care so much? Also, don’t even get me started on the obvious cheating on true tests taken at home. 
  4. I also wrote a post about my love/hate relationship with Romeo and Juliet, and I was still in the middle of teaching it when school was suddenly shuttered. The kids finished reading it on their own because I couldn’t have them NOT finish reading it. They didn’t get to choose and scene and act it out, which is one of my favorite activities of the year. I wanted to have them perform outside this year because Shakespeare’s plays were performed outside too. 
  5. And last, but not least, I wrote something about how grading at home never works, and now it’s the ONLY option. Ack. 

  So see, my words have come back and bitten me in the booty!

  Distance learning has been an adjustment and has humbled me. Now don’t get me wrong, I’m not a perfect teacher. I am a reflective practitioner, and this situation has turned my entire profession on its head. Maybe I needed to be knocked back a few notches because I’d forgotten, albeit momentarily, that teaching is NEVER predictable, but this predicament is unprecedented. We all need to cut ourselves some slack.

  Thanks for letting me vent my uglies. I cannot wait to walk back into my classroom in August. 

  (Gosh, I hope that doesn’t come back and bite me in the booty too. Let’s think happy thoughts that schools will be open in August.)

  

  Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com
  Posted in teaching, Uncategorized | 2 Comments | Tagged distance learning, english teacher, school, students, teaching

• PSA About Student Attendance

  Posted at 9:54 am by Mrs. Ram Jam, on March 7, 2020

  

  Friendly (Albeit Possibly Unpopular Opinion) Parent Reminder PSA from Mrs. Ram Jam:

  Please send your kids to school. 

  Your kids have one job–it’s called school. Please send them to school. Unless they’re sick, there’s a death in the family, they’ve recently broken a bone, or they have lice.

  For the most part, your kids are not professional athletes, actors, reality stars, or gamers. They should not miss multiple days a school year for travel soccer, baseball, cheer, badminton, Fortnite competitions, Scrabble tournaments, or auditions. 

  Please send your kids to school. Unless they’re sick, there’s a death in the family, they’ve recently broken a bone, or they have lice.

  There are multiple opportunities for extended holidays throughout the year–like summer vacation, Christmas vacation, Thanksgiving vacation, spring break, fall break, and various three day weekends. Check the school’s calendar before you schedule a vacation during the school year. A two-week European tour, ten-day Walt Disney World excursion, or seven-day Caribbean cruise while school is in session is detrimental to your child’s academic well-being. 

  Please send your kids to school. Unless they’re sick, there’s a death in the family, they’ve recently broken a bone, or they have lice.

  Furthermore, it’s unethical to get doctor’s excuses for athletic competitions, auditions, and vacations. Your children tell us where they were or their classmates do. Your Instagram story even tells us where they’ve been. Also your actions, if you’ve partaken in these instances and even gotten a doctor to write you excuses for them, scream privilege.

  Please send your kids to school. Unless they’re sick, there’s a death in the family, they’ve recently broken a bone, or they have lice.

  Also, try to schedule doctor, dental, orthodontal, and therapy appointments for after the school day or during elective classes. When you schedule a biweekly appointment to get your child’s braces adjusted on Mondays at 8:00 A.M., your child is missing the same class or classes each time, which is detrimental to your child’s academic well-being. 

  Please send your kids to school. Unless they’re sick, there’s a death in the family, they’ve recently broken a bone, or they have lice.

  Please send your kids to school on time. If your child checks in late two or three days a week, they are missing the same class each time, which is detrimental to your child’s academic well-being.

  Please send your kids to school. Unless they’re sick, there’s a death in the family, they’ve recently broken a bone, or they have lice.

  Why do I care so much?

  1. Absences add up. Kids get sick. Family members pass away. Kids break bones. Kids get lice. Say your kid gets the flu and misses five days of school, but then you turn around and take them to Disney two weeks later for four days during the school week. Then your kid misses five more days because of travel soccer. Then your kid gets food poisoning in March and misses three days. That’s 17 absences for the school year. 17. 17. 17. That’s more than three weeks of school.
  2. An excused absence is still an absence. 
  3. It sends the wrong message to your kid and their classmates. Is your child more important than the other students? Why does your kid get to miss so much when the other students don’t? The students notice, and they talk about it. 
  4. It hurts your child academically. They have a ton of work to make up, and they miss the benefit of actually being taught the material and classroom discussions. According to attendanceworks.org, “research shows that missing 10 percent of the school, or about 18 days in most school districts, negatively affects a student’s academic performance. That’s just two days a month.”
  5. It hurts their teachers and their schools. There. I said it. I’m being selfish. For once. If you don’t send your kid to school, and your kid doesn’t grow the way the state expects him/her to grow by the end of the year, it affects my scores, my evaluation, and my paycheck. It affects the school’s scores and bottom line too. Your actions affect the community at large. 

  I’m not trying to be all sanctimonious here. Have I pulled Little Thing out of school to go on vacation before? Yes. For one day. One day. Not five in a row. Are two days acceptable? Sure! Let your kids play travel ball and go on auditions and miss a Friday or two during deer season. But more than two days? Multiple times a year? That’s sketchy. 

  Strive for no more than ten absences. The fewer the absences the better. 

  Please send your kids to school. Unless they’re sick, there’s a death in the family, they’ve recently broken a bone, or they have lice. 

   

  Posted in kids, teaching, Uncategorized | 9 Comments | Tagged blogs, school, schools, student attendance, students, teaching

• A Mrs. Ram’s Jams Guide to Grading Papers at Home

  Posted at 2:16 pm by Mrs. Ram Jam, on October 19, 2019

  

  Although I manage to grade most student-written essays during school hours, inevitably home grading transpires from time to time. Here’s what my grading process looks like when I do lug home heaps of papers.

  1. Sit at the kitchen table, and empty llama tote bag of dreaded essays.
  2. Shuffle all essays into groups of five, piling them into one tower by alternating stacks perpendicularly.
  3. Grab blue Uniball pen. Fancy pens make grading tolerable. Giggle because the word “Uniball” is funny.
  4. Snap a picture of grading setup, witty teacher caption included, and post it to Insta and Facebook stories.
  5. Realize fifteen minutes has passed. Pick up Uniball. Bust into laughter again. Little Thing hollers, “What’s so funny? Can I see?”
  6. Skim first paper while chuckling. Chuckles dissolve into whimpers of distress because the first essay is ghastly, soul-crushing.
  7. Shuffle the broken paper to stack’s end.
  8. Scan the next five essays without connecting pen to paper, and hyperventilating starts. HOW CAN ALL OF THEM BE PIECES OF POO ON A STICK?????? Question career path and meaning of life. Become convinced of worst teacher on the planet status. Stash those five essays to the back of the pile.
  9. Search for best student writer’s essay. Read it. Faith in humanity is restored.
  10. Glance up and around. Am horrified by the dishes mounded in the sink and clutter-strewn house. Decide to tidy up, clean the toilets, and scrub the master bathroom’s floor with a toothbrush.
  11. Register it’s dinner time, have wasted an entire Saturday afternoon, and cook dinner.
  12. Make husband do dishes in order to get back to grading.
  13. Scroll through Facebook on the ChromeBook for an hour instead with the stack of papers as an audience. Their collective judgment is palpable.
  14. Pick up Uniball. Smirk. 
  15. Trudge through five essays, finally giving feedback.
  16. Decide grading is more fun with wine. Pour a glass.
  17. Down the glass swiftly like a college student shooting a lemon drop.
  18. Grade five more essays in half the time, because wine. Uniball has the time of his life.
  19. Pour another glass, and lose steam quickly after, only grading two more essays. 
  20. Call it a night, and resolve to spend Sunday afternoon at the library grading because Grading. At. Home. Doesn’t. Work.
  21. Tuck a wilted and defeated Uniball into bed, errrr, back into his llama tote bag house.
  22. Decide a blue felt pen is more appropriate for library essay grading. It would be mildly embarrassing to get kicked out for hysterical laughter.

  

  Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

   

  Posted in teaching, Uncategorized, writing | 1 Comment | Tagged blogging, blogs, english teacher, funny, grading essays, humor, middle school teacher, students, teaching, writing

• A Mrs. Ram’s Jams Teaching Tale: Reading Comprehension Fails in The Odyssey

  Posted at 12:23 am by Mrs. Ram Jam, on September 15, 2019

  

  Currently, I am teaching The Odyssey for the first time in my career (I think. I might have blocked out teaching it like a bad memory; it’s not my favorite text.) As per my curriculum’s instructions, I’ve been working on summarizing, characterization, and conflict with the kids while reading Book One, and this week I assessed those skills using a passage they hadn’t read before. 

  And while most students rocked the summarizing skill portion of the task, some epically misunderstood these lines from the text: 

  But all of the suitors broke into uproar through the shadowed halls,
  all of them lifting prayers to lie beside [Penelope], share her bed,
  until discreet Telemachus took command:

  (A little context might be helpful as well:  Odysseus, the king of Ithaka, is taking an eternity to get home from the Trojan War and people fear him dead. His wife Penelope, a snack, is bedeviled by suitors who have taken up residence in her own home.) 

  Now think like an 8th grader. How would you interpret this with your nearly teenage brain? Let’s look at some student responses. 

  1. “Penelope dies, which leaves the suitors devastated.”
  2. “Penelope’s suitors hope to follow her into her room, but Telemachus does not allow it.”
  3. “The suitors are outraged that Penelope has gone back to her room without them.”
  4. “The suitors are entering Penelope’s room as Telemachus yells at them for destroying his house.”
  5. “The suitors come to ask Penelope if they can sleep next to her . . .”
  6. “The suitors try to get into Penelope’s bed and cause an uproar, but Telemachus stops them.”
  7. “The suitors bombarded Telemachus’s mom by going beside her in her own bed.”

  Y’all. I giggled uncontrollably while grading. Handling questions about why students missed points for these interpretations is going to be brutal. I don’t think a comment like Well, Kayla, you insinuate salacious behavior occurred instead of explaining that individually the suitors wish to marry Penelope will go over well. So please think happy thoughts for me and my sanity when I hand these assignments back. 

  Posted in teaching, Uncategorized, writing | 1 Comment | Tagged blogging, blogs, funny, humor, reading, reading comprehension, students, teaching, writing

• How I Build Relationships with Students on the First Day of School

  Posted at 2:11 pm by Mrs. Ram Jam, on August 17, 2019

  

  On the first day of school, I memorize each of my new students’ names by the time they exit my classroom. Yes, you read that sentence correctly. Let me reiterate:  Mrs. Ram Jam, a walking disaster who can’t even remember her own telephone number or her husband’s real name 80 percent of the time (In my defense, he goes by his nickname. If you know my husband, do you even know his real name????), matches every single kid’s countenance to their name correctly within a 75 minute class period on the first day, retaining a 98 percent accuracy the next day–and I teach 90 kids, every day.

  You might be flabbergasted, flummoxed, or impressed by my powers of memorization, but here are three reasons why I make committing their names to mind a priority:

  1. I’m trying to build relationships. It shows the students I care–from day one. It says I don’t know YOU as a person, but I value YOU, even though I don’t know YOU yet. It says I’m here for YOU and I see YOU and I recognize how YOU are an individual, separate from the sea of other faces in this classroom. 
  2. It makes me look like a badass. (Just kidding!) 
  3. I lied. There are no other reasons. See bullet one. 

  Now for the how I do it:

  1. I handwrite all students’ names, emblazing them on my mush-for-brain, and tape their names to their assigned desks.
  2. On the first day, I stand outside my door, student roster clipped to a clipboard, and look at students’ faces while saying their names out loud, confirming their pronunciation.
  3. I call students by name anytime I address them in class.
  4. While students do an icebreaker that requires them to meet everyone, I’m up and talking to them, ensuring I match each name to each face several times. 
  5. Right before class’s end and without looking at their names, I stand in front of the class, go around the room, and say every student’s name correctly–like a badass.
  6. During my off period, I click through our online grading/attendance program, looking at their names and their pictures to reinforce name-to-brain imprinting.

  (Sidebar:  THIS ONLY APPLIES TO STUDENTS’ FIRST NAMES. LAST NAMES TAKE ME WEEKS. BABY STEPS, Y’ALL. BABY. STEPS.)

  While memorizing students’ names on the first day might not be how you start building relationships, I’d love to hear your beginning of the year methods that make you look like the badass teacher that you are.  

  And for those of you who struggle with memorizing students’ names, here’s an oldie but a goodie that I wrote last year:  A Poem (Plus Stage Directions): Why Teachers Can’t Remember Names at the Beginning of the Year.

  Happy new school year!

  

  Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

  Posted in teaching, Uncategorized, writing | 6 Comments | Tagged blogging, blogs, buildingrelationships, students, teaching, writing

• A Teacher Tale: What’s Your Late Work Policy?

  Posted at 8:45 pm by Mrs. Ram Jam, on July 26, 2019

  

  As I sit here staring at my syllabus for next year in denial that I’m embarking upon my 14th year of teaching, I grapple with changing my late work policy for the upcoming school year.

  Last year during the first semester, I accepted late participation work for half credit and any late test grade assignments for a letter grade off until the grading period’s end, resulting in a bejeebus load of poo-on-a-stick late work to assess right before grades were due. Post Christmas, I didn’t accept any late participation work and issued one late pass per nine weeks for test grade tasks, allowing students 24 hours to turn in a late assignment for full credit. Once that pass was cashed in though, I didn’t accept work period–unless the student was in danger of failing. 

  If you’re reading this with a parental or administrative eye, you might cringe at my former policy’s harshness, but . . . 

  1. In my classroom, there are nine grades per nine weeks. Typically, students take two tests. I’ll assess them through writing and projects for the other grades. Unfortunately, a hefty number of 8th graders avoid completing complex assessments because it’s time-consuming, hard, and, let’s face it, boring. 
  2. You might decry my policy for admitting my assessments are time-consuming, frustrated with your middle schooler’s homework workload. However, if students are bringing work home from my class, they aren’t using the time that I give them in class wisely. Ninety-five percent of the time they are provided AMPLE time to complete work in class. 
  3. If students hand in an essay or project four weeks after it’s due, we’ve moved on. The material that was covered isn’t freshly emblazoned in their brain juices. More than likely what they end up handing in doesn’t follow directions, demonstrate mastery, or is low caliber work. 
  4. Keeping track of late work and grading it makes Mrs. Ram Jam even more insane than she already is. My brain has a hard time reshifting to grading assignments from weeks ago, compounding a near palpable increase in my own time anxiety. My students’ lack of time management makes my own time anxiety worse–crazy, right? 
  5. Kids need to be taught accountability and time management skills. Unfinished work needs a consequence. 

  

  Photo by Pixabay on Pexels.com

  With all that being said, I’m leaning towards enacting my second-semester policy for the entire school year.

  Please feel free to share your late work policies or what your district/school suggests to do and the reasoning behind it. I’m always up for suggestions. And enjoy your last week or two of summer, teachers!  

   

  Posted in teaching, Uncategorized, writing | 5 Comments | Tagged blogging, blogs, english teacher, late work, students, teacher, teaching, writing

• An English Teacher Tale: Guess What? Cold Read Tests Don’t Work and How I’ve Gotten It So Wrong

  Posted at 3:38 pm by Mrs. Ram Jam, on June 29, 2019

  

  Invigorated and overwhelmed, I’m freshly nestled home post three day teacher leader conference in New Orleans. While attending, I listened to 2018 National Teacher of the Year Mandy Manning discuss teaching fearLESS (teaching with less fear). I learned more about growth mindset, the importance of recruiting teachers, and cultural competency. But mostly my chosen sessions focused on ELA curriculum shifts, particularly text complexity. 

  By midafternoon on conference day two, two things became glaringly clear: 

  1. The New Orleans Convention Center is a dementor; it sucked my soul arid. (I’m not knocking the conference AT ALL; it rocked. The convention center itself is cavernous and scary, all dim backlighting and conference tables billowing in death-black robe tablecloths. The stale air permeating the facility was akin to a dementor’s dreaded kiss, leaving me dehydrated and lifeless by day’s end.)
  2. According to experts, I’ve been testing and teaching my subject matter the wrong way for at least 8 years; if I’ve been doing it wrong, chances are you’ve been doing it wrong too. And I’m a great teacher–and chances are you are too. (I’m not saying I’m doing everything wrong.)

  About 8 years ago, Louisiana ELA educators started making the shift to assessing kids with “cold read” (readings that kids hadn’t seen before) tests, the idea being that kids should be able to use the standards that are being taught in the classroom and apply them to any text that’s given to them, essentially moving away from testing kids on the content that we’ve taught them and focusing on mastery of standards. This is more reflective of the way our end of the year state tests work too (Students are given multiple pieces of complex text they’ve never encountered before, answer multiple choice questions about those texts, and then write essays about those texts–all strictly timed.). Disclaimer–this is a MAJOR oversimplification of the process, and I may have botched it. Please bear in mind my recently escaped dementor’s kiss. I’m awaiting Dumbledore to appear with some chocolate for me, and then I’ll be back hunting horcruxes, errrrrr, I mean existing like a rational muggle in no time. 

  For a few years now, I’ve been lamenting to my fellow coworkers, my mom, willing ears:

  1. How can you give “cold” literature to kids, timed no less, and expect them to comprehend and analyze it? They could be given anything on those tests! For example, I could be teaching To Kill a Mockingbird and focusing on the Civil Rights Movement and the Great Depression. How does that content help them read a cold read task about the Cold War on a benchmark or standardized test? It doesn’t. I can’t prepare kids’ background knowledge on every single topic/culture/time period/etc. that they encounter. 
  2. Vocabulary is my biggest battle. How can I prepare my kids for every single word that they encounter on a cold read test? Yeah, context clues might help, and they know how to use context clues, but YOU CAN’T FIGURE OUT EVERY SINGLE WORD FROM CONTEXT. And yeah there are roots, prefixes, affixes and other tricks, but again, it’s no panacea. Furthermore, what about the words they encounter in test questions and answer choices where there’s virtually no context? It’s mind-boggling, disorienting even, to think about how limiting this can be for a child to be successful when it comes to reading comprehension, and if they don’t understand what they read, they sure as heck can’t analyze it.

  So why highlight these two points and how does it relate to me teaching and testing the wrong way (and quite possibly you too)? Louisiana is currently piloting a program where . . . wait for it  . . . the state test aligns to English teachers’ actual content in their classroom . . . because research shows that:

  1. Teaching solely standard based for ELA doesn’t work. How many of you have been told to develop your lessons around a standard and subsequently gone scrambling around for content that lends itself to teaching said standard while trying to find interrelated texts? [Mrs. Ram raises her hand.] Sidebar–I do rely heavily on my district’s curriculum, but I supplement.
  2. Giving struggling students texts to read on their “reading level” actually does more harm than good because they’re not grappling with more complicated syntax and vocabulary. Say you’re teaching about the Holocaust at the 8th grade level and decide to give your struggling readers Number the Stars while handing out The Boy in the Striped Pajamas to your more accelerated readers, focusing on teaching the same standards in both texts over the course of reading. I’m going to go out on a limb here and say that most English teachers have done this, myself included, but I have moved away from doing this–whether in relation to big pieces of literature or different leveled exit tickets. But look at this chart using ACT data:(image credit) What can you surmise? Hey, how well people do on the ACT has to do with their ability to read complex texts. Also, I learned that it doesn’t matter if students have mastery of skills necessarily. I know if my students have mastered a standard, but if students can’t read a specific complex text independently they’re unable to answer test questions correctly. (Both bullet points 1 and 2’s ideas were discussed in Tim Shanahan’s Ed Talk: “Educational Equity and the Importance of Complex Text.”) This ties in directly with my next bullet.
  3. Background knowledge is key for success on tackling complex texts. So Recht and Leslie, researchers, did this study known as the baseball experiment. Over-simplistic premise: Let’s give kids a comprehension test about baseball. Look at this:(image credit) Guess what? The kids, no matter their reading ability, who had little prior knowledge of baseball did way worse on the test than kids of any reading ability who were more familiar with baseball. Earth shattering, isn’t it? P.S. this study has been around since 1988, and this is my first time seeing it. I have a master’s degree in curriculum–WHY HAVEN’T I SEEN IT BEFORE? If we learned about it in grad school, I don’t remember it.

  Y’all might have been privy to this info before, and while my biggest struggles as a teacher are directly reflected in my main takeaways from the conference, I feel validated in my criticisms of the way we test children, but heartbrokenly irate that we’ve gotten some teaching and testing methods so wrong for almost a decade. For at least this next year, if not two or three, my students are still going to take standardized tests with cold read passages that are not reflective of what my students, your children, are capable of achieving. 

  But change is on the horizon. Thank goodness. To read more about Louisiana’s Innovative Assessment pilot click here.  

  Teachable Moment: While I know this post is rambly, all over the place, full of glue words and not written on a particularly high reading level, keep in mind what I’ve been I’ve been telling you. How many of you aren’t teachers who read this post? What teacher jargon did you struggle with? Did you know what a “cold read” task was before reading this? Or even what mastery of a standard entails? Do you know what the standards are? Do you know how to determine what makes a complex text? Do you know what ELA stands for? Chances are if you aren’t an English teacher or even a teacher in general you had to struggle to make meaning with what I was talking about. Then on top of that I made Harry Potter allusions throughout this post. If you’ve never read Harry Potter or seen the movies, are you going to get all of those references? Or is it going to go right over your head? An allusion missed means there’s missing meaning in a text. On that note, do you know what allusion means? Did you figure out what it means based on the context? Or did you just fly by it and register it as a word you don’t know? Think about all the different ways you had to make meaning behind my thoughts, my word choice, the way I built my sentences, the way I structured this post. How many different ways can understanding be hindered? (This idea is taken from Natalie Wexler’s Ed Talk: “The Importance of Background Knowledge” and applied to my own writing.)

  And that friends is what our children are trying to do every single day when they’re in my classroom with readings they encounter and why it’s a shame to ask them on a standardized test to read texts they’re completely unfamiliar with. 

   

  Posted in teaching, Uncategorized | 4 Comments | Tagged blogging, cold read tests, standardized tests, students, teaching

• A Reflection on My Thirteenth Year of Teaching

  Posted at 1:44 pm by Mrs. Ram Jam, on June 15, 2019

  

  In May, I finished my thirteenth year of teaching. (How in the French toast did that happen?) Here are my key takeaways from this school year. (Please excuse the formatting issues. I CANNOT figure out how to fix them.)

  1. Sayonara(ish) technology. My district is fortunate enough to provide devices to every single student in the parish, but this teacher is going back to making the copy machine my long lost paramour. I know paper isn’t sexy and students need digital literacy skills but . . .

  • Technology is the biggest behavior problem in my classroom. Micromanaging 20-25 students with screens for faces is damn near impossible. For starters the kids don’t recognize checking their grades, googling random pieces of information, skimming their inboxes, etc. as off-task behavior. Then there are the students who email back and forth with their friends, play games, or watch YouTube videos. Technology makes classroom management harder, and a student who isn’t paying attention isn’t mastering content. (On a side note: while technology exists that teachers can control what students access during a lesson, our district doesn’t own it on a wide scale yet. I’m hoping to pilot software that combats this issue next year.)
  • Troubleshooting technology problems wastes valuable instructional minutes. Technology doesn’t always work. Sometimes it’s a school wide issue or district issue, but sometimes the students’ individual technology just refuses to behave. Multiple times daily I stop lessons for individual students’ internet connectivity problems, device and website login problems, and the list goes on and on. While teaching troubleshooting techniques and offering my own help remains integral in a digital classroom, sometimes the ONLY solution is sending them to the library for help. And again, this detracts from the lesson. Heck, the student isn’t present for part of it.
  • Research shows that students retain information more when taking notes by hand. Paper engages students more.They can quickly annotate and highlight instead of navigating through cumbersome technology equivalents–that you have to teach them how to use, which takes even more time and varies from program to program (Drummond).

  Disclaimer:  I’m not fully eschewing technology, but I’m cutting back big time next year.

  

  Photo by Craig Adderley on Pexels.com

  2. An endless combination of nicknames exist with my last name. My personal favorite from this year? Mrs. Ramengobble. I’m also enamoured with Mrs. Ma’am-a-gost (albeit seemingly redundant). Am I insulted? No. I will respond to anything students call me, unless it’s mean. I feel honored every time a new nickname is bestowed upon me. It fits in with my next bullet point.
  3. Have fun. Let’s be honest, English class content can be disinteresting for the average eighth grader. I recognize my subject’s limitations and balance it by building student relationships and cracking jokes. And whether students like English class or not, they’ll leave my room at the end of year loving me (or convinced that I’m a psychopath), dammit.
  4. Refrain from telling students they’re smart. I don’t think I’ve ever really done this in the first place, but I sure won’t be doing it from now on. At our eighth grade awards night every year, each teacher hands out an outstanding student award and gives a little speech. In almost all of those speeches, every teacher used the term “hard-working” to describe their chosen student. The terms smart and intelligent weren’t used once. Teachers are in the business of growth. We value students who take feedback and run with it. Every single student I taught last year was smart. But not everyone was a hard worker. Or an active participant in their own education. Praising students’ intelligence pigeonholes them. Sometimes they think they deserve an A without working towards it and then lash at you for their earned “B” or “C.” And sometimes it manifests in anxiety where they believe they can’t live up to a perceived expectation (“Should We Stop Telling Kids They’re Smart?”). I will be making more of an effort next year to praise growth daily with my students.
     

     Photo by Giftpundits.com on Pexels.com

  Bring on year 14! (Gulp!)

  Works Cited:

  Drummond, Steve. “In The Age Of Screen Time, Is Paper Dead?” NPR, NPR, 10 Sept. 2017, http://www.npr.org/sections/ed/2017/09/10/544546911/in-the-age-of-screen-time-is-paper- dead.

  “Should We Stop Telling Kids They’re Smart?” NPR, NPR, 24 June 2016,                              http://www.npr.org/templates/transcript/transcript.php?storyId=483126798.

   

  Posted in teaching, Uncategorized, writing | 5 Comments | Tagged blogging, blogs, reflection, students, teaching, writing

• A Poem: Books Are Babies

  Posted at 10:04 pm by Mrs. Ram Jam, on January 17, 2019

  

  I tell a version of this to my students the first time I hand out school-owned novels to them to read for class. Because. Middle. Schoolers. Destroy. All. Of. The. Things.

  ---

  Books are babies.
  If you wouldn’t do it to a baby, then you shouldn’t do it to a book.

  Would you
  throw a baby to another person?
  bend a baby backwards?
  leave a baby in the classroom or on the bus by itself for the night?
  step on a baby?
  smack your friend with a baby?
  shove a baby spine side up in the bottom of a backpack and then put books on top of him?
  balance a baby on your head?
  drop a baby?

  Books are babies.
  If you wouldn’t do it to a baby, then you shouldn’t do it to a book.

  You should
  read to your baby.
  talk to your friends about your baby.
  laugh at your baby when it says something funny.
  cry when your baby breaks your heart.
  cheer your baby on.
  learn from your baby.
  love your baby.

  Because books are babies.

  Posted in books, poems, poetry, reading, teaching, Uncategorized | 2 Comments | Tagged blogging, blogs, books, poems, poetry, reading, students, teaching, writing

• A Mrs. Ram’s Jams Tale: A Teaching Fail and Student Cheating

  Posted at 9:10 pm by Mrs. Ram Jam, on December 8, 2018

  

  I’m not a perfect teacher.

  Earlier this week, I gave a two day test to my English I Honors students, giving them extra time for the assessment’s writing component. Instead of having them pause the test to continue the next day (to try to discourage cheating), I had them submit their test digitally at class’s end and reopened it the following morning. However, I forgot when they submit their answers through our online testing platform it automatically tells them which multiple choice questions they answered incorrectly. [insert Mrs. Ram Jam whacking her head repeatedly against a cinder block wall]  

  So what happened in first block when I reopened the test? Remembering the question numbers marked incorrect, quite a few of them changed those wrong answers to correct ones.  

  Instead of squashing cheating, I inadvertently allowed it to run rampant. I suspect at least 65 percent committed academic dishonesty–with no way to prove who did or didn’t change their answers.

  Repeat–I’m not a perfect teacher.  

  I’m mad at myself for my screw-up and disappointed with my students.

  But if I hadn’t caught myself after first block, would the same thing have happened all day?  

  Hopefully I’m wrong, and this is pure speculation, but yes. In subsequent blocks when I informed kids they couldn’t change their previously chosen answers, I saw open hostility, embarrassment, and shame on more than a few faces. (I also witnessed cluelessness. It hadn’t crossed some of their minds.)

  Newsflash!

  Students aren’t perfect, even the high-achieving ones.

  They turn things in late.  

  They lie about having their homework done.

  They try to figure out how to do the least amount of work possible and still get high grades.

  They’re children.

  They attempt to manipulate adults to their own advantage and pander to their own desires in oft convincing self-righteousness.

  And also, most students at some point, again even high-achieving, good kids, cheat.

  Look at the numbers.

  In Andrew Simmons’s Edutopia article “Why Students Cheat—and What to Do About,” he uses a bar graph to illustrate  “95 percent” of students in secondary schools “admitted to any form of cheating, 64 percent committed plagiarism, and 58 percent cheated on a test.”

  

  Now granted, I teach 8th grade, but I teach a high school credit honors course to middle schoolers. My class is HARD. Kids, used to getting easy A’s, struggle and make C’s and B’s on tests and writing assignments. They’re desperate for an A, even if comes down to achieving one through unethical methods.

  I am not excusing their behavior or my own teaching faux pas, but through self-reflection, I’ve garnered a few valuable insights.  

  1. I don’t know if all students initially recognized that their behavior was unethical. They’re smart. They saw their incorrect answers and changed them before resubmitting and didn’t think twice about it. But some had to realize their actions were disreputable. Thursday, we had a serious conversation about what happened and what the term “ethics” means. Not one student could define it when I asked them what it meant, but they know its definition now. That entire class faces consequences, including a brand new replacement test. I made them feel guilty as hell about their actions. I pulled a Danny Tanner and flipped their transgressions into a teachable moment.  
  2. I need to stop being so nice. I gave them too much time to complete the test, and if I give them an inch, they take a mile. The test should have taken them 60 minutes tops. They had to read three passages, answer 18 multiple choice questions, and write a paragraph. For benchmark, they’re expected to do the same thing but write an essay instead in 90 minutes. My reasoning behind giving them extra time was to allow them to focus in on the writing component so we could work through any constructed response issues they had before benchmark. I wanted them to do well on the test, thinking the extra time would help my struggling writers. But some students were not honest with actually being done when they fully were.  
  3. My expectations were unclear. This one hurts. I should have told them that the twenty minute window on day two was only for the writing component and the multiple choice needed to be finalized on day one. Hindsight sucks.
  4. I admitted my own mistake to them, and I’m admitting it to you. Yes, I did. I told them I screwed up. I think it’s important for students to see their teachers admit when they are incorrect, acknowledge their own mess-ups, and examine their imperfections. Again, I’m not perfect. No teacher is. Sometimes my lessons bomb. Sometimes, God forbid, my self-made materials have editing errors. Sometimes, I don’t pronounce words correctly and accidentally say things like “more better.” I haven’t read everything under the sun, I don’t have all of the answers, and I am not always right–but I admit when I’m wrong, I’ve messed up openly, or I could have done something better. They’re under so much pressure to be perfect, and the adults in their lives need to show them that perfection doesn’t exist and is an unattainable ideal.

  Now I have to ask  . . . if you were put in their situation as a middle schooler, would you have cheated?

  Because I sure of hell would have. [Loud gasp! How dare you, Mrs. Ram Jam!]  In middle school and high school, I copied my peer’s homework or let them copy off me. Senior year, I plagiarized a Spanish IV paper the week before graduation, submitted it, and got caught, justifying my behavior because I felt wronged by my teacher. (If you’re reading this Señora Blakenship, I am sorry from the bottom of my heart.)

  If you’re judging me for my confession, look at the statistics above. Chances are, you cheated at least once in some capacity yourself, whether you’re willing to confess it publicly or not.

  And your child will probably, too.

  It’s an epidemic, and I have no idea how to battle it. (Besides not releasing answers BEFORE a test is over. I will FOREVER be kicking my own ass over this one.)

   

  Works Cited:

  Simmons, Andrew. “Why Students Cheat-and What to Do About It.” Edutopia, George Lucas Educational Foundation, http://www.edutopia.org/article/why-students-cheat-and-what-do-about-it.

   

  Posted in kids, teaching, Uncategorized, writing | 4 Comments | Tagged academic dishonesty, blogging, blogs, student cheating, students, teacher fail, teaching, teaching fail, writing

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