thesavvyurbaneducator

[thesavvyurbaneducator]

KD article for Teach.org

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I was able to attend the Families in Schools Conference in LA that discussed how to engage as a village in schools at the historic Biltmore hotel. I even rolled past the LA Times!

For more info, check out https://www.familiesinschools.org/

[thesavvyurbaneducator]

This week, I visited the highest performing middle school in Denver, DSST: Noel and saw three things I think are critical in teacher education:

1) Immediste student feedback

2) word wall to give repeated exposures to academic terms. Students do not learn new terms without repeated exposures.

3) Classroom annotation plans to guide students through reading to learn

[thesavvyurbaneducator]

I got an opportunity to visit the USC prep school in South Central LA, located right outside the USC football stadium! The day I visited with Moonshot EdVentures, the students and faculty were celebrating early college acceptances. A few highlights included a nursing station for staff and students and that all classrooms were in glass that can be observed from the outside and students did study hall in collaborative groups in the hallway! It was an interesting structure.

[thesavvyurbaneducator]

#literacycoachingresources

This book pairs perfectly with the #commoncorecompanion in that it gives specific standard aligned strategies that are broken down and suggested in the common core companion. You can’t be a literacy coach and NOT have this book in my opinion!

[thesavvyurbaneducator]

I was introduced as a new member of the Poetry Society of Colorado! Not only am I a published and performing poet, but I’ve coached former students to perform poetry for Poetry Out Loud and many different Black History concerts and Shakespeare competitions. This was an immense honor and I’m excited to be in the company of talented poets across Colorado!

[thesavvyurbaneducator]

I looooobe my book purse! ❤️

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One of the joys I have in my career is getting to visit schools across the country to check out or give feedback on teaching practices! Here’s my visit to The Da Vinci School in LA with Moonshot EdVentures! There was a morphology wall which I absolutely loved and a destressor virtual reality machine donated by Belkin Technologies. If I had a dream school I could teach in, this was it!

[thesavvyurbaneducator]

When I was a teacher, I had thousands of books I bought, had donated from librarians and retired teachers, collected from discarded from libraries and receiving from trainings I attended. As a teacher hoarder, these thousands of books go with me wherever I go. Now that I don’t have a classroom, I generally donate these books when I find good owners. These Little Libraries have helped me across Denver and Aurora give my books to beloved homes. Now if only I could find a place for my books on CD 🥴

[thesavvyurbaneducator]

I will be one of the MCs for the evening! Come out and celebrate educational innovation! 

[thesavvyurbaneducator]

The Death of Innocence: For DP

I lost a student I really loved today. As I sit here, finally able to compose myself enough to write my thinking, and to rebuke the anger I have for the cowards who murdered her, I can't help but think about the larger issue at hand: how her death casts a glaring bright light on this generation of cowardly men the black community is raising. Although all the facts haven't emerged, I do know she was senselessly killed and the killers are still on the run. More than likely in Memphis, still able to live their meaningless lives, eat turkey, live merrily..... and I know the adage that says what goes around comes around (which I call an adage and not a cliche simply because I know this is true), that still does not heal our hearts or ease our minds, because as cold-blooded as her murder was, these monsters still live among us. It is quite sickening to say the least. The real question at hand that I am grappling with is this: What kind of man are we raising? How in the world is it manly to get into an argument and then retaliate the argument by shooting up a car on the expressway? How could you, on Christmas mind you, form your mind to make the decision to execute people in that fashion? How can you have no conscience or second thoughts about possibly ending someone's life? As we all wait for the dust to settle, we (as an urban community) must question the future of our people and the cities we live in. When innocent bystanders are killed due to unmerciful ignorance, we have to question where the heck we went wrong? I listen to the radio, and you hear more and more songs that glorify not having commitments, but instead "just calling her boo". We are telling young men it is ok to run a muck and make babies, and not care for them, and in essence be womanizers. We are allowing boys to shoot rather than think or walk away from, or hell even use your damn fist rather than ending a promising life. We are letting cowards roam among us when we don't tell who we see committing these heinous acts. We are raising a generation of weak men. I think about the young men at my school. They wear skinny jeans that sag, yet get "attitudes" with us when we ask them to pull them up. Let's not even begin to talk about the sagging in the first place which is clearly jail culture anyway. They video tape fights. The hit their girlfriends. They release videos of inappropriate activities with these girls. They curse the women teachers. If they get in a fight, it is never one-on-one; it is always 30 against 1, which spirals to 30 against 30. They brag on the robberies or deaths that occurred over the weekend as one discusses the weather. This generation of men is so weak mentally. And there is no deference to human life whatsoever. This is a huge problem. It is an issue that their fathers are not around (boy there is a huge difference in the ones that do have dads at home). It is an issue that they have no feelings- none for the women who teach them, raise them or love them. How have we raised these boys who are so cold to emotions? The oxymoron is that in the ghettos, emotive men are weak, when in fact, killing a person over an argument is the thing that is weak. What happened to our culture of men? More importantly, is this situation too far gone where there is nothing we can do except wonder which innocent bystander is next? I have lived through so much young death, I have become immune to it. I have had many friends killed. And over and over again, we get ourselves together and say nothing. But this one stings for me the most. She was going somewhere, and there is no doubt about that. She was a talent mentally and physically and extremely mature. She had her ticket out of this life to break those oppressive chains that hold our community back in poverty.  And in a blinking of an eye, that whole life is vanquished. And here we sit, red eyed not sure what to do and missing her like crazy. All I wonder is when will the revolution on our own parenting skills and our own men be televised? Echoing Sojourner Truth, if it took Eve to cast us all into eternal sin, clearly women will have to be the ones to right the wrongs of our sons. It will take us to lay down responsibly when conceiving these children; it will take raising them with a man around; it will take us to teach right from wrong; it will take us teaching them when it is appropriate to stand up for themselves with dignity and not cowardice; it will take us exposing them to the fact that life is a gift and you never have that right to take anybody's life. It will take us all. Her death casts this ugly shadow in the urban community on how our boys are slowly extinguishing our race. And the white bigots and Willie Lynch Jrs are just laughing at us as it happens. The rate we are going, our race won't be a problem much longer. ---to DP with all my love and respect.

[thesavvyurbaneducator]

Those Who Can Do; Those Who Can't......Can't

The old adage, "Those who can do; those who can't teach" was the way society lumped all of us teachers into one big, stereotypical pile. Clearly some type of logical explanation was needed for the country to understand why a person who had attained in many cases several degrees from a College or University, to opt into being a poorly paid babysitter, counselor, and confidante who, if that person was lucky, might get the students in his/her care to retain anything he/she spent 180 days pouring into the skulls of the newest generation. I mean, clearly these people wanted to be other things- lawyers, doctors, engineers, nurses, authors, journalists, dentists, business owners- and just didn't finish said program. Or didn't have the grades. They had to fail and opted to teach, right? For the longest time, I would have been a very outspoken dissenter to this sentiment and sentiments like these: "You teachers make TOO MUCH MONEY to not work 8 hours a day" or "2 months paid vacations?" or my favorite, "You get every holiday off." This might be true; but ask the teacher who only holds a Bachelor's degree whether they still worry if they can keep the lights on. Or the teachers such as myself who have children at home whom they know less than the children they spend the majority of their days with. Ask me if two full months is enough time for me to spend with my children who sacrifice the relationship with mommy they so deserve because her hours are spent planning for 4-5 preparations daily, for ten months a year and into the summer. And in order to pay for that cherished time off with my babies, my ten month pay is spread among twelve months of pay. But, I digress. The real question lies in why people think so lowly of teachers. After all, I have probably the same amount of education as all of my lawyer friends and doctor friends. I went to school 6 years and received two degrees. Soon, I plan to finish what I started and dedicate another 2 years to receiving the Ph.D. I have long deserved. That will amount to the same if not more. Yet, I drive the Subaru and they drive the Benz. Why? Teachers probably have the most important job on the planet. We are who prepare the doctors, lawyers and writers who will be. Why didn't we become it ourselves? As an English teacher, why am I not a writer? Did I fail, and because of my failure, opted to become a teacher?  I can answer this question with a robust and emphatic "NO"! I am a teacher because I want to be. Because I love teaching. Because it IS my destiny. I have been teaching since I was 8 years old: I would line up my stuffed animals, and teach. There. I said it.  I plan 7 days a week. I collaborate with teachers. Teachers are some of my closest friends. I am married to a fabulous band director who performs miracles everyday in his band room. I spend hours reading, trying to become a better teacher. I steal from other teachers. My life can be summed up in one way, and one way only: I teach, therefore I am.   And, for the longest time, I thought this was the way of life for most "teachers". Recently, my students have begun to prove to me that my thoughts about my "colleagues" were probably false. On my students' blogs, they began being very vocal about the dissatisfaction with their classes. Several wished to graduate early in order to escape "wasting their time". Several contemplated transferring in order to seek a better education, but questioned whether that would be worth leaving me. During one class session, they lamented about teachers not checking their work, teachers letting videos do the teaching. About teachers lecturing daily. Even some from their desks. As I rubbed my swollen feet that evening from being on my feet 9 hours, I began to question myself: do I take this too seriously? Because of this new information, I began to be more observant of what was going on around me. I noticed the alarming number of teachers who wear jeans. More than on just on Friday. Who showed up to parent teacher conferences with jump suits, as if they were meeting the parents in the gym to shoot hoops, rather than meet about somebody's kid they were probably failing. Who were late getting to those meetings. Who come to work late because they want to. Who admittedly don't plan. Was I the crazy one for refusing to wear jeans to work at all? Or wearing two-piece suits to class weekly? For having my degrees on my walls in plain view? Perhaps teachers have become their own worst enemies. Perhaps we are the people who have made this job not have the rank to be considered a profession. I mean, how would you feel if your doctor wore jeans to your appointment with a Cowboys t-shirt? Or didn't have his degrees on the wall to show that he was, in fact, proud of those degrees and thus a proven professional. Teachers downgrade the teaching profession. I am a teacher. I love what I do. I did not get into the business of teaching because I sucked at being a writer (because I do not). I did not get into teaching because I was upset with the job I had out of college; teaching WAS the job I had right out of college. Teaching was never an afterthought for me, even after my mother forced me to engineering because she was afraid I wouldn't be well off as a teacher. I just changed my major freshman year and told her a few months shy of graduation 4 years later. I plan to teach for the duration of my adulthood because it is the career path I have chosen. There are many teachers like me, and we cannot let those who do not exemplify these standards water down our status as professionals, because in all honesty WE are the professional's professional; after all, would there be any doctors without doctors who taught them? Would there be any engineers without a physics teacher or calculus teacher who showed them the foundations they needed to be engineers? Would there be anything, job, careers or otherwise without a teacher? No. It is my hope and desire, that more people who take this job as seriously as it is will outweigh the dead-weight that exist in any profession. Hopefully, more people will embrace being a professional who is a teacher and not do this because they had no other way to make a living. In addition, it is my hope principals will demand more of their teachers in terms of grooming and attire. One dresses for success, and I do not see much success in wearing jeans every Friday- As Harry Wong says, jeans are made for leisure. To add to that, in a culture where students are expected to wear uniforms, how appropriate is it for you to wear "jeggings" and your students cannot? Who is the role model? In some classrooms, it has become harder to tell.  Lastly, it is my wish that teachers truly understand this glaring fact: we hold these students' futures in our delicate hands. We predict, based on how well we engage their minds, who they will become: how eloquent they will be, how thoughtful they should become. Lesson planning is the single most beneficial way you can impact your students. No one learns nothing from a teacher who teaches on the whim. Planning before hand enables creativity, balance, equity, and structure. Have I always been good at lesson planning? Absolutely not. In fact, in 9 years of being in a classroom, this might be the first year I've gotten great at it. Do we take breaks? Yes. Is it often? NO. And when a lesson plan is altered or flat out doesn't work, I've learned to be quick on my feet about changing direction. I can tell when it doesn't work by reading my students. I will never dismiss the importance of lesson planning because one or two plans didn't work out as I planned or the principal sprung a homeroom day instead of my 1st period. Lesson planning is NOT an exercise of futility, and in today's high stakes testing and teacher evaluations, you'd better get reacquainted with it. If you are not creative, there are so many lesson plans online that you could ever dream of having access to. Submit and share your lesson plans that do work. Write for journals in your area of expertise. Join your professional content area organization to collaborate with fellow teachers like you. Be the professional! This is what professionals do. And never, ever stop learning. The best analogy I can think of to illustrate the everlasting need for teachers to be avid learners is this: If a new cancer is discovered (say cancer of the nostrils perhaps), and my doctor has done no reading on it whatsoever, he is no longer qualified to be my doctor. If I have this new disease, he knows not how it looks, the symptoms, or what it could do to me. Why am I paying him then??? In teaching, you have never "arrived". Instead, you should constantly be "arriving", staying on top of everything that is new about how students learn best.  Complacency has no place in education. A complacent teacher- in mind, body, work ethic, and appearance- is an ineffective teacher.  And teachers like the aforementioned, make things harder for professionals like me.

[thesavvyurbaneducator]

Internet Killed the Literature Class

Back when I was in high school, the Internet was a new thing. Only the very privileged had access to it. In addition, when we were given papers to write or literature to read, the only source of information we could rely on was whatever was placed in our brains. If you knew about it, you could get your hands on a copy of Cliffsnotes (the book version) or the Bloom's analysis books. If you were really stupid (or had your back against the wall in dire fashion), you might get the movie version and think you had a one up on your teacher until you realized (either by verbal embarrassment or on the exam) that usually the book version was not exactly the same as the text. In other words, there wasn't a damned talking dog in Animal Farm. The moral of the story ultimately was if you didn't read, you failed. Those were the golden days of literature courses. You read, you became enlightened, you gained vocabulary. Not in this age of the Internet; in the best old folks rhetoric I can muster up, "these new whippersnappers" have the world now at their finger tips. For the new-aged literature student, if you forgot to read, don't fret: you have Pinkmonkey, Cliffnotes, Sparknotes, and everything else. Oh and you have a paper to write on the text? Just search for the paper you need and either cut and paste or BUY a paper online (the devil in tangible form to a literature teacher). All is right with the world to these new millennium literature students.  What a travesty! The authors widely included in the literary canon are no doubt spinning in their graves and cursing the internet. This situation gets worse and worse yearly. According to the Plough Library, "In 2001, Donald L. McCabe of Rutgers University performed a study of 4,500 high school students that found that, '74 percent of students admitted to cheating seriously on an exam one or more times; 15 percent admitted to turning in a paper largely taken from a Web site or a paper mill; and approximately 51 percent admitted to not citing the source from a Web site when using a few of its sentences in their papers'" (1). Now, I've been around the block in the teaching game: I've taught grades 6-12 and college composition courses and Technical Writing. I'm also young enough to have known what life was like before the internet, but have also had to be a college student with internet at my disposal. Fortunately, I know what is on Sparksnotes and all the "study guide" sites so I can tell when students relied on the study guide rather than the text itself. In fact, I design tests with these sites in mind so that the kid will automatically fail if they didn't read the text by adding those small details that only a reader caught onto. I also use cheat sites like turnitin.com so that students can upload the text to the website and both the student and I can see where citations need to take place. When money is short for fancy technology devices, I rely on good ol' Google and cut and paste parts I think are stolen. Cheating can be combated, but unfortunately will never be stopped. As students become more and more technologically advanced, and teachers get older and older, technology will eventually win. I see it as the teachers like me winning the battle, but technology ultimately wins the war. The problem with technology winning the war is that students become worse at critical reading, and literary analysis, merely comprehending only what the cheat sites tell them to comprehend, never checking what is written against the actual text. We have students less able to articulate themselves in polysyllabic terms because we all know personal vocabulary is only built by reading and listening.  The damning effect: inevitably literature is forgotten in the technological abyss and the classics will be banished in the depths of lost lore similar to the way the poor contraptions Kris Kringle found that nobody wanted, were sent to the isle of misfit toys.  A person who loves literature the way I do find this disheartening. How can a student not want to explore the love of Elizabeth Barrett Browning, or the dark thoughts of Edgar Allan Poe? Who doesn't want to visit Eatonville with Zora Neale Hurston, or understand the true satire behind Mark Twain's Huck Finn? And the complexities of J. Alfred Prufrock? Or read the Canterbury Tales and wonder what could have happened had Chaucer completed his stories?? Or fall in love with the poetry of Langston Hughes and contrast it with Walt Wittman? Or really figure out what happened to that Last Duchess by Browning? Or dissect the rhetoric that is the Narrative of Frederick Douglass. Or be wondering where the hell Thoreau is going with his seclusion in Walden. Most importantly, never, ever be proud of the accomplishment of understanding the archaic and stylistic Renaissance vernacular that is Shakespeare? The internet is destroying, single-handedly, literacy. The small sliver of hope is that Kindle and e-books might make reading enticing, but one can only hope.  How can we literarians (a new word I've devised if you will) arm ourselves against this onslaught in the age of student plagiarism? First of all, teachers need the best tools available to tell if students plagiarize. Schools must get tougher on the consequences for plagiarizing and enforce them. Teachers should also know why students plagiarize and teach out of it, literally rebuking the bad habit in the name of Jesus. Some students don't understand the difference between plagiarism, summarizing and paraphrasing. Others haven't been taught how to cite properly. These skills must be taught step by step. Evaluate what skills your students need and teach and model explicitly. Lastly, teachers should just understand that students will use these tools, but teach students that it is ok to use them after they have read to ensure they understood fully. In that context, it could do more help than harm, since it's going to happen anyway.  Yes, in the same way videos killed radio in the 80s, internet is killing literature in the 21st century. Teachers, stay informed. Teach students time management and definitely discourage these students from cheating themselves out of a literary education.   1. "To Catch a Thief: Plagiarism Resources for CBU Faculty." Plough Library: Christian Brothers University.  http://www.cbu.edu/library/faculty/plagiarism/. 3 Sept 2011.  

[thesavvyurbaneducator]

The Invisible Kids

Throughout my entire career, I have been asked to cater to the most underserved in our schools; by underserved, I mean the students who haven't been taught to read properly; the students who have unstable households; the students who would pass the state tests by a wing and a prayer. And each year, I took those students and performed the miracle of teaching them. I have ALWAYS had that knack. Maybe from being a student who had friends just like them, who lived on my block and played basketball in my backyard. You deal with them with a sympathetic touch, not feeling sorry for them, but making them aspire for more than what they are at this current time. But what happens is that these students end up running the school. All teachers go at their pace and stay on their level. Those kids get the interventions, those kids get the tutoring. To accomodate, teachers dumb down what they are doing and teach to the test. This is the manner of education. In the era of "No child left behind", many of those have in fact been forgotten. The invisible students- our advanced population. In today's classroom, every effort is being made to get kids to pass these state mandated tests, and help low-performing schools achieve. By any means necessary. And by necessary, I mean teaching from old tests, textbooks, coach books and berating those students to death with practice tests. However, students who generally are proficient or advanced tend to have low engagement in school because expectations are so low that things are easy for them. And as long as they know how to read, they will pass the test, with bad teching or not. Schools depend on these proficient and advanced kids to score well and pull their scores up, yet do barely nothing to make school rigorous for them. The biggest faux pas is that kids who score proficient automatically are placed in advanced classes, whether that kid is advanced or not. Which holds truly advanced students back as well. My biggest fear is that students at low performing schools are considered "advanced" but in the real world outside of the city limits, these kids in some cases would be considered barely proficient.  Are we preparing these semi-advanced students to be able to compete with the students from rich households, at magnet schools, at private schools, who will be entering college classrooms with them? In order to provide an equitable education for advanced students, we need to accelerate them to the level of their academic abilities, not to the level of their chronological peers. As a teacher, it will be my job to ensure that my course work is rigorous for all students. It is also imperative to make sure my expectations are higher and hold those students to those higher standards and support them in achieving those standards. I have to ensure these invisible, misused students are taught and will take something away from me. It is my job to push myself to be better for those kids. And when I feel myself becoming complacent, I have to continue to press. When administrators attempt to make me "blitz" students with standards, it is my job to demand differently, since research tells us that "blitz" never works. It is my job to be the voice for these invisible kids. 

[thesavvyurbaneducator]

What Students Don't Know Won't Hurt Them

I have always been a staunch realist. I have NEVER been a person to see a glass half-full. Even though I won't necessarily consider it half-empty (a pessimist? me?), I have always thought of it as just a glass with not enough water in it to fully quince my thirst. In layman's terms, things are as they appear. It is what it is. Straight, no chaser. You get the cliches.

I have also been a person who has been an expert at my craft. In this profession, you could say that I "have arrived". Prior to this past year, I only served as a classroom teacher for 3 years. The principal I worked for then called me, in all my 24 years of wisdom, a "veteran teacher". I was very surprised at this assessment during my tenure moment: that term was always reserved for teachers who had spent many, many moons in hallowed halls and had many, many stories to tell you-the novice teacher- chronicling their adventures in teaching. In my 3 years of teaching, I was considered a darn good teacher.

In my fourth year as an educator, my district propelled me to the top of the literacy totem pole as a literacy coach. My task- avoiding becoming the "reading Nazi" and truly mentor teachers and lead my school into AYP success. That I did for 3 years and was successful in making AYP all 3 years. I was, at 25 years old, giving professional development for English teachers throughout the district, running departmental meetings, shaping curriculum, mentoring first year teachers...living the LIFE. I think what added to my reputation was the fact that I was a realistic expert. I knew what I was talking about and the research behind it and was frank with them about the expectation of them getting the job done. Yeah everybody didn't like me, but they respected me. This whole idea of "I love you but this is business" really sums up my attitude about work. And I was good at it. I helped in the making of 14 excellent teachers during my time as a specialist.

Then all of a sudden, reality came crashing down, as my husband (who was hired in Memphis and commuted 6 hours on weekends to be with me and our sons) put his foot down and told me I had to move to Memphis.

Here I was, 7 years into my career, starting over. Almost instantaneously, all of my storied career was reduced to a resume.

So being the realistic expert I am, I started over, and that was one of the most difficult things I've ever had to do. Take it from me- it is not easy to close your eyes to craziness and unprofessionalism running a muck all around you when you know you have the wisdom to possibly suggest better. Envision the Titanic- you are in the band, and even though the damned boat is sinking, you are being paid to do your job, and thus sink with the boat. That sums up my first year.

But, I made a little of a splash. My scores were not hardly as disappointing as much of the STATE of TENNESSEE, so that says a lot. If that makes any sense.

My principal, who believes in my ability, decided in this second year, to really push me (whether he knows it or not). I was chosen to teach some upper level courses. In my mind, being the realist I am, decided that I could use this as an opportunity to pull out some college stuff and try to force the kids to be mature learners. Yeah, it could be a daunting task, but clearly I had the ability and the background knowledge to get this done...............

However, shortly into planning, I realized, I was out of my comfort zone. Being in the Middle School for 6 years and teaching 10th grade in my 7th, has really removed me from English Literature and rhetoric exponentially. I am no longer the Shakespeare buff; no longer the quoter of Langston Hughes and Robert Frost. No longer the lover of Chaucer's Canterbury Tales, the reader of critical analysis or the intellectual who could allude in and out of literature. No longer the admirer of the dark charm of J. Alfred Prufrock. No longer the MLA and APA whiz. Not even the scholar who would have realized the last 5 sentences constituted an aphorism! I realized, in essence, that I have either dumbed myself down or let myself go. I received my M.A. a little over 5 years ago now, and I am certainly convinced that furthering my education is an action that is well overdue. I have to find that 24 year old English student and merge her with this now almost 30 year old woman who has matured pedagogically. Thanks to this, I now consider myself having moonlighted as a M.A. in the past 5 years, because I certainly didn't use ANYTHING I learned in school during my teaching career. What and how I had been teaching was merely what I had learned as a teacher! Which was really not the teaching of literature, but clearly teaching students how to read and comprehend, and Lord knows I definitely did NOT learn that skill in school.

That realization angered me: what was the point of going to school to be a teacher, if most of what you used was on the job training skills rather than what you amassed serious debt TRYING to learn? Secondary education is clearly for people who are going straight to high school to teach because my matriculation at the school of education did not teach me what I needed to know as a middle school and early high school teacher.

The way I came to this realization was unnerving: I was in a training with higher level English teachers recently, and found it difficult to converse about syllogisms and enthymemes and troupes and schemes with them. Those terms were interred in the land of "lost vocabulary". I also attempted to attend a William Faulkner convention and when I got a whiff of the conversations those people were having, I turned tail out of there before they began asking who the hell gave me a graduate degree.

I guess that is essentially what happens to Middle School and 9th and 10th grade teachers who are trained as secondary teacers: removed from the canon and the likes of Poe and Hawthorne to trade them in for Walter Dean Myers, Gary Soto and Ann M. Martin.

Nothing wrong with adolescent literature- except that unless you actively continue with your "English buff" status by being a part of literature groups or in school, you lose it. The issue I am tackling with bothers me because I have ALWAYS been the expert; in this case, I still have quite a bit to re-learn. Experts don't believe in this: that there are ideas you don't know or can't remember in your area of expertise. In a little over a month, I have to reprogram my mind to the world of American Literature and rhetoric and teach my hungry students how to write and think by any means necessary. The realist in me understands that I AM an expert and a heavily proactive person, and that I have a lot to do to design this course AND make it rigorous.

They don't know how much work that is. How many late nights that will be. How much dedication it takes on my part. I told my students last year, when they asked me to move with them to eleventh grade, that I had taught them everything in my brain. What I should have said is I had taught them everything I had taught recently, which was what the average middle or high-schooler was supposed to know. Now, in 11th grade AP, we have a whole world of challenge that we all are about to encounter, which really starts with me excavating the lost lore within my head. I swear, it is there. I just have to go into seclusion and find the M.A. that resides inside of me.

And as the addict goes to rehab to learn how to be the person they were before the addiction, so will my journey back to being the English Literature teacher I was when I completed graduate school 5 years ago.

Boy, I feel so sorry for the AP students who will follow this group of juniors.