Blue-Sky Teaching

 I've been thinking a lot about joy in the classroom this break. Right now education feels like we're not supposed to have joy in our classrooms, and if we do, we're probably not being rigorous enough.  It's funny, but when I'm happy as a teacher, I do my best teaching.  When I feel trusted and free and like I have enough time to think, I love being a teacher.  And when I really know my students and can do what I feel is best for them at that time, there's a lot of joy in the classroom. One particularly joyous day last semester jumps out.  It was a Tuesday morning in November, a few weeks after my class's obsession with Nic Stone's Dear Martin started.  The day before, I had put the final touches on a surprise Skype conversation with Nic, and now I was nervous that we'd have technical difficulties, or some of her biggest fans would be absent that day, or that we wouldn't have enough to talk about and Nic would think it was a waste of time. 

Walk into my classroom during the first twenty minutes each day and I love what you’ll see.  Students are sprawled around the room reading, some in desks, some on shaggy carpets, and even one on his stomach draped over an exercise ball. It’s quiet except for pages turning and me wandering around with my notebook, or sometimes not.  Because I believe strongly in choice, independent reading and in having a classroom library plentifully stocked with books that real kids want to read, reading time is beautiful at this point in the year. Our end of the semester celebration letters left me smiling with the number of pages read, the favorite books found, the authors my students want to meet.   Despite all of this good, there is more work to do.  Always, right?   For close to fifteen years, I taught a middle school language arts class and worked hard to integrate choice reading and writing. Students were always reading an independent book, and were always writing about their own top

If you read my last post, you know that I was inspired to have my students end this semester by focusing on successes instead of doing a final assessment that highlighted all the skills they still don't do well.  I wanted to give students a chance to explore and tell about the ways they had grown as readers, writers, speakers, listeners or learners. I would like to be one of those teachers I read about in books, who thoughtfully plans and implements lessons and then shares the beautiful, breath-taking results with you. You know, the kind of thing we all gush over, but secretly hate just a little? In my world, life seldom goes like that. Learning in my classroom and for me as a teacher looks more like a scene from Vacation with Chevy Chase driving the family station wagon while dead Aunt Edna is strapped to the roof. We keep it real in J207. This project was a stellar example of that kind of chaos. With one exception: it didn't look that way from the outside. 

It's December and that means the end of the semester is rushing at us, faster than Joe Rantz's boat in the 1936 Olympics in Berlin (sorry, just reading The Boys in the Boat ...fabulous, by the way). Despite the fact that I allow retakes on every assignment all semester, somehow the realization that it's December wakes up many of my students, and now the work pours in.  There are also final projects, conferences, revisions, book groups, portfolios, grading (and more grading), study sessions, finals ... and stress. DID I MENTION STRESS?! Students are stressed. Teachers are stressed. And parents are definitely stressed. This is the time of the year when I wonder why I didn't take a sabbatical this year. I could be in the English country side, curled up next to 17th century stone fireplace that's hung with fresh pine boughs and ribbon, sipping a steaming mug of coffee, the snow softly falling outside the window, all while writing that book I've talked about for