curryed away Curryed Away: Carrying Curry Education Away and Into the Classroom

Posts Tagged ‘Wie geht’s?’

0 Comments

Wie geht’s? Teaching and Social Media

by Kristen

I’ve been having a problem with social media lately. Like most individuals in my age group, I have a facebook account. And like all good Curry grads, my settings are up so high that you can’t see anything about me unless you’re my friend. My students haven’t looked for me (to my knowledge) or tried to friend me, and I intend to keep it that way. My primary use for facebook is to post interesting articles that I’ve read, and to communicate with friends and family back in the States (for which it has been invaluable). However, I always find myself pausing whenever I want to post about work on facebook (and on this blog, for that matter).

Social media is an outlet for people to celebrate, publicize, and seek help for issues in their lives. My life is teaching, so naturally I want to post about my teaching, including both the ups and downs. But with recent incidences like an Ohio math teacher getting suspended for posting a picture of her kids with duct tape on their mouths and other stories I’ve heard of teachers getting fired over facebook posts, I’m loath to even post a comment seeking advice for how to get my kids to keep quiet and focus on a lesson! And unfortunately, this has got me feeling a bit confused as to what to do, but also very alone in my profession. Because unless I tell someone about my problem face-to-face (which implies that I can find a good confidant even though I’m an ocean away from all my Curry professors and friends), then I’d better keep my public, online mouth shut (so to speak).

And so this has all got me thinking: Where is the line between “productive sharing” and sharing too much? 

What do I mean by productive sharing? In my Curry class on Contemporary Issues in Education, we read a book called Teaching 2030 that suggested that teachers could use technology to build their professional learning networks or guilds in an effort to become “teacherpreneurs”. What I imagined, then, was being able to ask my network everything from how to effectively teach conjunctions to how to get a group of energetic sixth graders to buckle down and pay attention for 50 minutes.

However, I don’t foresee that happening when any relatively negative comment I have (like the Ohio teacher’s ”Finally found a way to get them to be quiet!!!”) could be used against me on any public, online platforms. I could keep my comments all positive, like “how great it is that Johnny finally learned the difference between an adverb and an adjective” or that “I shared a heart-warming moment with my homeroom over cookies”. Unfortunately, all of that just seems so false.

The truth of the matter is that teaching is hard, and if you’re lucky, you’ll have a few heartwarming moments in your day to balance out or (if you’re lucky) erase the frustrating, mind-boggling, and tear-your-hair-out moments. It also feels so incredibly false to only talk about the good stuff, as if I would be perpetuating every Hollywood myth that teaching is like Dead Poets Society and Stand and Deliver. Parents (and administrators) should know that teaching their children isn’t always a treat. I believe that suggestion cheapens both my job and shortchanges the child.

I suppose in this sense, it’s a bit like parenting these days. People always tell you to have children because the good moments outweigh the bad. They never talk about what happens when your child ends up less than perfect. I’m thinking here of We Need to Talk About Kevin — an excellent book that I actually got to read for fun (gasp!) over the winter holiday — and of the woman who got lambasted by social networking sites after she compared her son to Adam Lanza, the Newtown, CT shooter, in her blog. After all, children are innocence incarnate, according to those wonderful Romantic poets William Blake and William Wordsworth, and it seems to be an idea that we’ve held on to since then. To imply otherwise makes one cynical (as I might be) or a monster (as the post-CT blogger was called). Perhaps I’m taking this a bit too far, but it would be interesting to compare the number of positive media portrayals of children against the negatives, and see how this affects the attitude of the generation of parents-to-be.

What, then, is the real problem? Is the problem that some people (and teachers in particular) don’t know where to draw the line when it comes to sharing about their workplace? Or is the problem something deeper: that we don’t want to deal with the negative aspects of children, especially in school?

What do you think?

Tags: , , , , ,
Write a Comment
0 Comments

Wie geht’s? On Student Travel

by Kristen

One of the things that I feel my school does really well is student travel. It’s pretty much engrained in the curriculum.

For example, at the beginning of every year the 6, 7, and 8th graders go on a two day trip. The point as far as I can tell is to foster a community feeling about the teachers and students and to give them experiences outside of the classroom. They will take a longer trip at the end of the year as well, along with the 9, 10, 11, and 12th graders. This is in addition to the day trips that various teachers take them on, and trips they go on for sports.

I just got back from a four day trip with the 12th graders to Berlin. The purpose was for them to give their final class presentations and add a sense of weight to them by having the presentations done outside of school. Of course we got to tour the city, as well, which was great for the international kids (and me) who had never been to the country’s capital before.

There are two separate ideas here about student travel that I like. The first is using student travel to build experience and foster a community atmosphere. I loved being able to get to know my 8th graders outside of school. I think it reflects this idea that school is about learning both in- and outside of the classroom (though this theme could certainly be carried through the school year a bit better). It also reminds us of the importance of getting out, experiencing new things, and challenging our comfort zones (we went on a ropes course at the beginning of the year!).

The second idea is using student travel to add weight to assignments. Instead of presenting papers or debates in the school gym for the umpteenth time, how cool is it to get out of town and make your presentation in the nation’s capital? This purpose may be a bit of a stretch, but I think it’s worth exploring the way that travel can aid in the motivation that students have for learning.

Of course I say all this with the disclaimer that I work at a private school in Europe. Students pay a lot of money to go here, and that money funds the trips. I saw a similar phenomenon when I worked for a student travel company. The kids who got to go on our big, cross-country, educational trips were the ones with teachers who could organize the kids and who had enough money from their parents to go. It’s also somewhat easier to cross a border in Europe than it is in say mid-Western America. 

But I don’t think these students are the only ones who should have that opportunity. I’m thinking now about The Freedom Writers Diary. No matter what you think of the book (and I have a lot of mixed feelings about it), Erin Gruwell described the amazing effect travel had on her students by getting them out of their school and their neighborhoods and showing them another part of their world. She organized smaller “trips”, like dinners at nearby hotels, and longer trips to Washington, D.C. and NYC. These experiences helped to challenge their assumptions about their world and their school, which helped to broaden their horizons. I still remember my school trips to an old homestead/museum where we made butter ourselves, and to a French restaurant at which I got to practice my French and immerse myself in cuisine. These little trips helped to reinforce my learning, while the big ones to D.C., NYC, and even Paris showed me new ways of life that challenged my preconceived notions about people and nations.

I realize that in the grand scheme of education, student travel falls somewhere below the arts and languages on the priority scale. But if the benefits can be so great, then shouldn’t we make student travel a priority rather than a luxury in education?

Tags: , , , , ,
Write a Comment
0 Comments

Wie geht’s? How do we deal with the “kids who can’t learn”?

by Kristen

How do we deal with the “kids who can’t learn”? This is a question that I’ve been asking myself a lot lately.

In the States, I spent my student teaching in a “collaborative classroom”. This was where the school (or society?) put the kids with learning and behavioral disabilities who needed extra attention and remedial reading and writing instruction. At the time, I hated this form of “tracking”. However, now that I’ve started my first year of teaching, I can appreciate how hard it would be to try to deal with these students and with my “at-level” or even “gifted” kids all in the same room. Hard? Yes. Impossible? Certainly not (with support or changes to the way schools function).

At my current school we do things a little differently. Because of my experiences student teaching, I was handing one “SAP” class this year. SAP stands for Student Assistance Program (although my students fondly call it “Super Awesome People”). Because the school is so small, I only have a handful of students with minor problems (I say this in comparison to my kids last year) ranging from ADHD to mild Autism. We meet between two and four times a week, and I try to provide them with extra support on assignments and other “good student” skills.

However, something has been irking me about the way the class is set up. Usually I spend so much time trying to get them to sit still and work on assignments that were due three weeks ago, that I never get time to review the essay writing skills needed for the upcoming assignment or the organization and planning skills that they all so desperately lack. I also spend a good deal of my time supporting subjects like science and math, which, let’s face it, is not ideal coming from an English teacher. I really love my kids and I love helping them, but isn’t there a better way?

Here are a few of the questions that I’ve been struggling with:

  • Why does the education system feel the need to stick all the “struggling” kids in the same room, and tell one teacher to help them?
  • Why not give them extra tutoring time with their subject area teachers or even with their gifted peers?
  • What message do we send to these kids when we take them out of other subject classes and stick them all in a room together? And what affect does this have on their self-esteem and motivation after 1, 3, 5, even 10 years?
  • Are we really being responsible educators by pushing them to learn information exactly when and how we tell them to, always pushing them on to the next grade and through the assembly line, instead of making accommodations?

 
What have your experiences been? Or do you have any answers to these questions?

Tags: , , , ,
Write a Comment
1 Comment

Wie geht’s? Know your students

by Kristen

One of the first things Curry teaches us is to “know your students”. It’s a great philosophy, and one that I teach by. I know that it pertains to students as individuals, but I also found it true for students as a whole. And when I made the switch from my student teaching in Cville to my first year at an international school in Germany, I really had to readjust my expectations.

In Cville I had two sets of kids: the “honors” students who came from upper-middle class (mostly white) backgrounds, and the lower SES kids who were mostly mixed race. These kids were my biggest challenges, as they were coming from homes where there wasn’t a place for them to study, a healthy meal to keep them going, and sometimes even a stable parent to support them. For them, school was often just the thing they did during the day to see their friends, and they didn’t think it would take them anywhere.

At the international school, most of my students have a loving family and a large bank account, and they value the education that they’re receiving. Clearly I had to readjust my way of thinking. Oddly, some of their behaviors are the same. I still don’t always get their homework, but instead of the reason being that they just didn’t care to do it or never have a materials, it’s because they had soccer and after-school music lessons and couldn’t fit it in. Or perhaps they already had 3 hours of homework in science and math and had to prioritize.

I think the biggest difference is that while my students all have physical homes, they don’t really have one place that they can call “home”. Many of them have lived in multiple countries over the years, and don’t identify strongly with one over another. Or they may have one parents from one country and another parent from a different country, but may never have lived in either. The best example I can give you is this: A student* at our school is ethnically Japanese. However, she was adopted by one parent who is German and another who is American, and spent the majority of her young life in India. She speaks Hindi, German, Italian, English, and Japanese. So what culture does she identify with the most? She’s trying very hard to make friends with the Indian girls at school, as she identified with that culture the most. Unfortunately, those girls don’t seem to like having her around or really see her as “Indian”.

Like this young girl, my students are privileged in a way that most of us will never know, and yet they can be so lonely. And like most middle schoolers, they are wacky, but also so shy when they have to make the switch to a new school for the umpteenth time. And most of my older kids can be slightly clueless about the problems of poverty, classism, and intolerance that exist outside of their bubble. Still, they can be entirely too serious about their academic life. They are all these things at once, and I continue to find out more as I scratch further and further beneath the surface.

I’ll leave you with this final example and question that I had the other day.

In my quest to “know my students”, I discovered that the reason why one of my students* didn’t turn his essay in on time (it was 5 days late) was because his weekends and after-school time are taken up by drama. Not only that, but his family returned to their home country and he remains here because the drama school that he was admitted to is very prestigious. Nevertheless, I was annoyed that he didn’t send me an email asking for an extension (which I would have gladly granted regardless of his situation). Someone even told me, “Don’t be too upset with him; his life is very hard”. I ended up accepting his paper, though I couldn’t help but feeling that I’d somehow “cheapened” what it means to have a deadline.

I imagine it is very hard indeed to be an ocean away from your parents and to be either studying or practicing non-stop. Still, something irked me about the situation. After all, some of my kids in the States didn’t have parents or even homes to go home to, or they were too busy worrying over younger siblings or after-school jobs to turn assignments in on time. Their lives were just as hard. Should deadlines not have applied to them either?

And so yes, we all have to know our students and make exceptions when they’re needed. But where do we draw the line? Does my talented, lonely international student deserve a break anymore than my underprivileged, worried students from the States? Somehow I suspect that “knowing your students” has as much to do with knowing yourself and knowing society as it does your students.

What do you think?

(*Note that some details have been changed to protect my students’ identities.)

Tags: , , , , , , ,
Write a Comment
0 Comments

Wie geht’s? Teaching at an International School

by Kristen

Whew, it’s been a busy first quarter!! I wish I could have updated you all sooner, but starting my first year of teaching at a new school with a new (international!) approach to learning and getting hired the week before school started has kept me very busy up until now. :)

Where to start? I suppose I’ll begin at the beginning, of sorts. If you’ll remember, I moved to Germany after graduating from Curry without a job lined up, but with the intent of subbing at my new home’s nearest international school with the hopes that an English teaching position would open up in the next year or two. I felt this was a good plan especially after networking with a former alumnus who’s been at the school for over a decade. She introduced me to the middle school principal and took me on a tour around the building. As the school year was quickly approaching, I felt confident that I would have enough work between subbing and some curriculum development that I was still completing remotely for a student travel company with which I worked over the summer.

Then, less than two weeks before the start of school, I got a phone call from the high school principal. She wanted a second interview with me, as it seemed a position had opened up after all. The interview went extremely well, and within four hours I received a phone call with a job offer! The very next day my contract was signed, and the day after that I was sitting at a Biergarten enjoying a Hefeweizen with my new coworkers. (Yes, this was part of our new teacher orientation schedule set by the administration.)

Since then, it’s been a rather whirlwind quarter, to say the least.

I started off being given three sections of English Language B (i.e. strict English language courses) at the 6th, 7th, and 8th grade levels, one EAL support course, one Advisory (i.e. homeroom) group, one SAP (i.e. students with learning disabilities) group, and one “Theory of Knowledge” course. This came to somewhere around four full preps and three half-ish preps with no overlap. (I say half-ish because I was given EAL, SAP, and Advisory as a first year teacher because they’re thought by some people not to have any prep work, but I’m still always prepping for them, just to a lesser extent that my English classes.) The best (or worst) part about the load was that English Language B is a new course offering for this year, and so I was given it without any prior curriculum to work from. I do have two coworkers in the department with whom to plan. However, they weren’t much help after day two for a variety of reasons.

But I survived, as all good Curry grads do. I drafted my curriculum for the year to the best of my ability, wrote as much of my first couple of units as I could, and read through the 3-foot high stack of IB curriculum manuals given to me in my various departments. Things were stable for about a week.

Then, my EAL course was taken away from me and combined with another teacher’s section so that mid-October I could get a 9th grade English Literature course. Luckily, I walked into a department that had a fully prepared curriculum and began with a book that I had experience teaching last year as a student teacher (To Kill a Mockingbird). I like to tell myself that I wouldn’t have accepted such a major shift had the conditions been otherwise, but let’s face it: New teachers sometimes get a lot of crap and often get the rug pulled out from under them at one point or another. It just happens. And so I probably would have been forced to take the course one way or another. :) On the other hand, I really, really wanted English lit — so I took the course of my own volition no matter the cost.

And luckily, I have the best set of new teaching friends from around the world who have supported me and with whom I can commiserate. This great group of people started their first year at the international school with me, and hail from Germany, the U.K., Australia, and the U.S. They’ve helped keep me sane through the stress of it all, and they give me the intellectual support I need to challenge my practice. I would have most certainly had an emotional breakdown or two by now had it not been for them.

And of course, having amazing kids to teach has helped, too. My kids are all over the place, from rowdy 6th graders to 11th graders who think they’re too cool for school. They are all brilliant (mostly over-achievers) from Germany, Japan, India, China, South Korea, Poland, the U.K., the U.S., Russia, Turkey, and dozens of other countries all around the world. I want to tell you all about them, but I think that will have to wait for some additional posts. I actually have a lot of topics that I want to cover, including assessment, student travel, learning disabilities, language and literature, and so much more! But at the risk of making this post too fiendishly long, I’m going to leave off here and pick up again with another post. (I promise it won’t take me so long next time!)

If you have any suggestions for topics or questions, leave them in the comments.

And to celebrate this fine Halloween season, please enjoy this lovely Alphorn player made out of pumpkins from the Ludwigsburg pumpkin festival. :)

Pumpkin Alphorn

Tags: , , ,
Write a Comment
1 Comment

Wie geht’s? Learning German

by Kristen

Prior to moving, neither my husband nor I could speak German. I’d taken roughly 8 years of French in high school and college, and he’d just taken a year of German in community college and another two years of Japanese. Given our experience studying languages and our deep-seated belief that you should speak the language of the country in which you live, we committed ourselves to learning German about as soon as we landed. Read More

Tags: , , ,
Write a Comment
3 Comments

Wie geht’s? Welcome to School

by Kristen

It’s been almost two months since I’ve moved to Germany, so I thought I should write an update on my job search and what I’ve learned about the schools here so far. As I said in my last post, I found a Curry alum who works in the international school that I’m interested in. While there currently aren’t any openings for an English teaching position, she suggested I start by subbing and doing other work to get myself known in the school. That way when a position opens up, I’ll more than likely to be the first candidate since I’ll already be familiar with the students, staff, and parents (this is what she did 20 years ago when she first moved here in much the same situation as me — small world!). Read More

Tags: , , ,
Write a Comment
0 Comments

Wie geht’s? Stumbling on the Past

by Kristen

While taking a walk through our new neighborhood in Stuttgart (Germany) yesterday, my husband and I came across this:

stumbling stones Read More

Tags: , , , , , , , , , ,
Write a Comment
0 Comments

Wie geht’s? My Foreign Job Search

by Kristen

For my next post, I figured I should talk a bit about my job search in case any of you are planning on going the international route, like me. As I said in my last post, the decision to move to Germany was pretty much entirely motivated by my husband’s job. Before the offer, I had been looking and applying both in the Charlottesville area (we’re we’d both worked since 2008) and in San Francisco (my husband was also in the process of applying for a job there). I followed the same process as every other Curry student: find a school district, research it, apply online and/or visit them at the big Curry job fair, and cross your fingers. When we decided to take the plunge and move to Germany, the game changed completely. Read More

Tags: , ,
Write a Comment
0 Comments

Wie geht’s? My teaching adventure in Germany

by Kristen

So what do you do after you’ve spent two years of your life and $60k+ on a master’s in teaching when your significant other tells you that he/she has been offered a job in Germany?

You drop everything and move, of course!

All romantic notions of Europe aside, though, it’s kind of a terrifying — and exhilarating — decision. After all, it’s not like moving to a different state where that teaching license you’ve been working so hard for will *hopefully* transfer. It’s a whole OTHER COUNTRY with different rules…and students…and do they even have jobs there for American English teachers?

In fact, they do. Which is probably why I was able to justify the move so easily. Read More

Tags: ,
Write a Comment