Walk to School
Teacher Lunch
Friday
Category Archives: Teaching 2024-2025
Tomorrow’s Reflections
We’re about halfway through Between the World and Me.
They read the escalator story for tomorrow.
We’re going to talk about situations where you’ve felt like you had no power.
Then we’re going to talk about the story Coates tells in Between the World and Me.
Then we’re going to look at this excerpt from Rebecca Solnit:
Democracy itself is based in trust in strangers and a sense of having something in common with them (which is part of why xenophobia and fear of crime serve fascist agendas so well). Circulating freely among them – especially in the diverse places most cities are – helps inculcate this feeling; it gives you a sense of confidence, of being able to coexist with difference. It orients you, literally, and it’s very useful knowledge in an emergency. That’s what’s celebrated in those old movies and shunned in the rhetoric and designs of the new technologies.
Then we’re going to look at an excerpt from Garnette Cadogan:
I realized that what I least liked about walking in New York City wasn’t merely having to learn new rules of navigation and socialization—every city has its own. It was the arbitrariness of the circumstances that required them, an arbitrariness that made me feel like a child again, that infantilized me. When we first learn to walk, the world around us threatens to crash into us. Every step is risky. We train ourselves to walk without crashing by being attentive to our movements, and extra-attentive to the world around us. As adults we walk without thinking, really. But as a black adult I am often returned to that moment in childhood when I’m just learning to walk. I am once again on high alert, vigilant. Some days, when I am fed up with being considered a troublemaker upon sight, I joke that the last time a cop was happy to see a black male walking was when that male was a baby taking his first steps.
Solnit, Rebecca. “Turns out the Zombie Apocalypse Isn’t as Fun as They Said It Would Be – Rebecca Solnit on Our Dangerously Disconnected World.” The Guardian, November 16, 2024, sec. Society. https://www.theguardian.com/society/2024/nov/16/zombie-apocalypse-dangerously-disconnected-world-rebecca-solnit.
Cadogan, Garnette. “Walking While Black.” Literary Hub (blog), July 8, 2016. https://lithub.com/walking-while-black/.
Email from one of my bosses
The email concludes with this phrase that I’m going to put on a bulletin board and use with my own students as often as possible:
Thank you for embracing these important learning opportunities.
Goals for 2024-2025 School Year
Goals for next year, in no real order.
- Two to three positive progress notes once a week. As you are going to end up writing between thirty and forty college letters each year, these PNs can become paragraphs in those documents. We don’t do narratives anymore, which is an absolute blessing, but I do think I need to do this at least once a year for each kid in the class. (Actually to do each kid once you’d have to do three per week.)
- Bi-weekly Friday summaries. Stagger so that English is one week and history is the next. My first year at SLA I did this religiously and I need to bring this back. The only additional wrinkle I want to add is a statement to parents that that Canvas is up to date (let’s eliminate the “I submitted things and he hasn’t graded them” smokescreen.) I should be able to get the SATs to help with this.
- Learn how to set Canvas up so that the gruntwork doesn’t take as long and where I get more of the details correct. I’m pretty sure that there’s no good way to simplify the last four clicks — different due dates and closing dates a week later.
- SATs + Notetaker + Facilitator = ensuring that each discussion is documented on Canvas. I would love to have enough of these discussions present on the discussion board so that they could be grounds for end of the year analysis.
- Work towards completing the benchmark assignments alongside the kids. These assignments are worth doing; they change enough such that you could actually do them each year and have a fair amount of variation. It will keep you intellectually sharp as well.
- Build coursepacks this summer. Print at 440. Make sure they are reading .pdfs as little as possible.
- Generating the general feedback sheet within forty eight hours of the benchmark submission. Have SATs edit and then publish for me.
- Making sure I don’t forget to update the portfolios at the end of second and third quarter. These were cool documents. More than a few kids did it at the end of the year — a heroic effort to be sure — but carve out time for this.
- Weekly: one day for me — direct instruction/lecture, one day for one-on-one meetings, and two days of cutting edge pedagogy. These one-on-ones should result in eight to ten conversations per kid, per year. Not enough, but better. (One thing I’d like to watch is to see which day works best. This year I’m going to do the last meeting of the week but I wonder if the first day might be better?)
- Not run out of gas midway through the third quarter.
- Each quarter, in each class, bring in guests. I need to do much more of this — much more of this — but let’s start this year with the aim to do it each quarter. Add this into the spreadsheet with all of the units in it.
