What Matters

When my mother passed away in April of 2010, it fell up on my sister, my niece and myself to clean out her house. The task of undoing someone's life and deciding if their knickknacks are meaningless to you or not is extremely daunting. She had a house full of belongings she thought treasured. It was so packed with things that our shock and disbelief at her death turned into anger and rage as we discovered thing after thing that she had saved.

The more we cleaned, the more we found and the angrier we became. I believe we ended up getting rid of a lot of things that perhaps, now, I'd want but it is too late for that. As we emptied out my mother's life and pulled apart her existence, we found many things that were expected and many that were not. The numerous school projects and photos were lovely to find. However, the drawer of every pen or pencil we've ever owned was extreme. We found a bag of bags and a suitcase with another suitcase inside with another bag inside of that and smaller bags inside that with yet smaller bags inside them.

Being a Teacher

I visited Howe Caverns when I was five or six years old and I saw a book with a picture of a monster on it. The book was less than half a centimeter thick with a green border and I was fascinated. My mother purchased the book for me and I took it home to show my father. I sat with my father and we read the book together and I began learning all about dinosaurs. For about four years, I was obsessed with dinosaurs. My father took me on fossil hunts run through the state museum. My mother bought me every book she could find on dinosaurs. I amassed a bag of dinosaur figures, large and small. For about four years, my parents probably thought I would grow up to be a paleontologist.

I am not sure when that interest died out, perhaps when my friends started playing with Barbies or when I found Charmkins or She-RA. But when my students ask me why I wanted to be a teacher, I cannot say "I always wanted to be a teacher" because there were those four years when I dreamt of dinosaurs. However, I thoroughly remember enjoying telling everyone about dinosaurs. I knew all the different kinds and how big they were and what they ate. I loved telling my grandmother about them or talking about them at show and tell. So perhaps I really did always want to be a teacher.

The Sneetches

The most important thing I can do for my students is broaden their minds and their hearts. This has been apparent to me from the very beginning of my career. I remember it was my second year teaching when I had a Spanish One class third block which is when our lunch happens. Students would be with me an hour, go to lunch and come back for the last half an hour of class.

That day, our school newspaper had released an issue. They had printed an article written anonymously by someone about our school and how very divided it is with the haves and the have nots. My students walked into class that day and immediately said "did you read it?" because they were up in arms about the entire thing. I had a beautiful lesson planned that day to work on vocab and review for an upcoming test. But we did no Spanish that day. That day I allowed the students space to talk about the article and I was told to read it during my lunch so I knew more. The entire class was a conversation with twelve very upset students for different reasons. A couple were from the privileged end of the student spectrum and a couple were from the low end.

Station Day!

Every year, each class gets one or two Station Days a year. I enjoy Station Day a lot because it puts the onus of the learning on the students. For me, Station Day is usually spent running around because they have a dozen questions and one teacher and are constantly seeking approval before writing down an answer. But it's worthwhile time because I get to really answer their questions and see what problems the students still have. Every year on Station Day, I usually go home exhausted and tired but feeling pretty good about my students and my teaching.

Preparation is the key for a successful Station Day. You need to decide on how the students will work, create a filler for students who finish dramatically early, and create the stations. Each station needs directions the students can read independently and figure out as well as whatever necessary to complete the task.

I have created Station Days for the topics that I know cause students a lot of trouble because they need to be in the thick of it and muddle around with the complexity of the language. I suppose you could make stations for vocab practice but I prefer different cards games and activities for that. Station Day, for me, is a day when they can struggle and triumph. Topics that have lent themselves well to me are the preterit vs imperfect or subjunctive when the vocab of the unit drives the grammar points.

The Most Loathed Question of my Classroom

Being that I teach a "foreign" language in an ego-centric country that does not stress the importance of taking part in other cultures but boasts of being "the melting pot"- one would think that the most loathed question I could hear would be "does it have to be in Spanish?" I understand this question because it is steeped in the acculturation of "american" students growing up in the post 9-11 era.

No, the question I most loathe is: Is this going to be graded? Every time I hear it, it grates on my nerves. I've heard it at least once a week since I began teaching and I believe back in the early days of my career I was annoyed by it for very different reasons. There were many times I would bite back a sarcastic "what do you think, dummy? It's school." But other times,  I would answer "obviously" with an annoyed tone and an internal eye roll.

Every Page is an Adventure

Every day, I sit at my desk or in the library or at my table at home and I read. I read for an hour, sometimes more, sometimes less, but on average an hour a day. A lot of people do this. They read the paper. They read a book. They read online websites or journals or blogs or Facebook entries. Me? I read my students.

I sit for an hour a day and read their journals. I have had students journaling for two years and two months and never have I enjoyed reading them more than I do now. I sit and open my Chromebook. I open my journal spreadsheet and scroll down to the lines of the students I'm reading that night. I pick up a journal and open it to the correct place. I scroll through their line in my spreadsheet to see what comments I've made in the past and to remind myself of their writing goal. Each of them chose a writing goal a few weeks back. Common goals are: add more details, expand my vocab, write more or organize my thoughts. I review their goal so I know what I'm looking for and then I push the Chromebook aside and read. I flip the pages and check to make sure all the entries are there but I read.

I'm surprised.

Journaling Year Three

There are many things that I considered over the summer for how to improve my journaling system now that we are into year three.

HANDWRITTEN VS DIGITAL

The first thing I wrestled with over the summer was how I wanted my students to be writing. I had to decide whether I still wanted to keep to hand written composition notebook journals or if I wanted to go digital with them. I knew I'd have the Chromebooks in my classroom and wasn't sure if I wanted to move them digitally as well. It took nearly all summer for me to really decide. In the end, I still feel there is something very valuable about the process of physically writing. This is a hilarious notion since I'd much rather type than write but there are sometimes when I'm journaling or writing that I prefer handwriting. It's almost cathartic or hypnotic to put pen to paper. Additionally, I think if they were digital the temptation of Google Translate would be even greater than when they are writing "old school". So I asked my students to get a composition notebook. This differed because the previous year I'd let my students find any type of journal they wanted. Some had very pretty books or "diary" type books which I liked because it was personal to them. However the reality is that if they are uniform in shape and size, it's easier to transport them when I need to take them home. So I asked for composition notebooks only. However there are several students who purchased flashier composition notebooks with designs so they can still be personal.

Validation through Writing

This week, we had meeting two of Pens to Paper, the student writing group of which I am now advisor. In true CDWP fashion, we began with snacks! The two girls, we’ll call K & E, brought snacks and an agenda that would make any CDWP teacher proud. The agenda started us with a writing prompt: Behind her, the noise escalated…

 Together, with a group of young writers, I put pen to paper (figuratively of course since I was typing) and wrote something of my own creation: a short story of 117 words. I have not written original fiction in over five years and it felt amazing to be sharing the collective experience of creation with a group of ten young writers. This is my creation:

 Behind her, the noise escalated from soft murmurs to the dull roar of stampeding elephants. She’d never been so scared in her life. She was certain they were coming for her and coming fast. Could she ran fast enough? Far enough away to escape? Her legs pounded on the pavement, her blood pounding in her ears as she ran as fast as her body was willing to go. The street was dark, eerily silent, but all she heard was their never ending persistence at her back.

 Suddenly a crack echoed through her mind and a shriek was ripped from her soul.

 She looked back to see if they were gaining on her.

 There was nothing but silence.

Goobric Schmoobric

So as with any technology, some things are good and some are bad and some are simply not as functional as you'd like them to be.


For example the Doctopus script has an additional feature you can activate called Goobric, which is a google rubric. You define what the categories are and how many points it is worth and it will create a fill in rubric that will pop up when you are at a document that requires the goobric you assigned it previously. It's a great in theory but I spent more time grading using goobric than I did when I just used my own excel chart.


The problem with Goobric, and that I wish they would fix, is that you can open the rubric and fill in the grades but if you click out of it to back to the document, you lose whatever you've filled in. I like to grade for one thing at a time and this will not allow you do that. Furthermore, I unclicked the "email grade to student" and it still sent the email to the student. I also discovered that if you have more than one file open, sometimes it assigns the rubric to the wrong assignment so students received grades that weren't even theirs. So that was the end of goobric for me! It was irritating.


I wanted something that would help speed up my grading process, not annoy me whilst doing it. That brings me to my other issue with technology: because they can produce so much more while typing, I find I have way more to read/correct/comment on. It's quicker because I can type comments much faster (and neater) than I could ever write comments, but the volume of grading I have to do is so much more than years past. It's crazy!

one of the best!

So there are probably many times when I've had this thought, but every time it occurs to me, it's like it's the first time: MY JOB ROCKS. I love my job. Today was probably one of the best days I've had this year, I think.


 It was really an ordinary day by all accounts. No student who normally gets 50s suddenly had an epiphany and now is a genius. No student who usually misbehaves finally purchased a halo. But every so often, a class just goes well or you have an interaction with a student that just makes you proud to be an educator. Today, I had a million of those moments.