Final+Depressing+Thoughts

= **What Have I Done?** = or   Can’t I just play Word Whomp for a little while? What are the reasons that people can’t say “no?” Are they unwilling to admit that they cannot or will not do something? Is it because they don’t want to seem lazy or uncaring? Maybe they can’t take the look on someone else’s face when they hear it? Maybe all they can do is think of the work others will have to do if they don’t do it and can’t stand to see that happen? Or maybe, like me, they’ve always been able to get it all done and done well, so why not? What’s there a reason to say no for? I have always been a good student. My transcripts from my first four years of college might say differently, but I know in my heart I am good student. In fact, the reason I quit after the first four years was because I knew that I wasn’t yet capable of filling the minds of students, and I was terrified that my college thought I might be ready. I quit (partially) because of a decent conscience. When I returned several years later, I became the student that I knew I was, and always had been, and even could have been in high school if I’d cared more about being better than everyone else. Sitting at the ENG 697 meetings, my mind was filled with doubt and fear. I couldn’t possibly turn down three free credits, not when I was already so in debt from undergraduate work (and a teacher! Not a doctor, but a teacher!) that I HAD to make this work no matter what. When was I ever incapable of doing whatever I wanted anyway? Marriage and kids hadn’t slowed me down yet. My first year of teaching had gone pretty well, not to mention the combination of consistent hard work and luck that landed me a job less than two weeks after graduating. But my mind was racing, trying to figure out exactly what was being asked of me for this graduate research class. I couldn’t really make heads nor tails of my research proposal or how to go about writing it. I didn’t have any idea what to put on paper until I saw someone else’s draft, and then I based mine on that style, still not knowing exactly what I was getting into. What I didn’t realize at the time was that I simply was not ready to take on this kind of project, at least not at the level I was about to try. Coming up with a research proposal was a very difficult thing for me to do, especially since I originally misunderstood research from an educator’s point of view. Even once I started to understand the difference between a scientific research project and an educational one, I still wasn’t fully aware of what I was getting into. And who’s to say a second-year teacher has much to research anyway? I had barely gotten used to my personal style in the classroom, let alone made myself ready to study it and make judgments. I was attempting to implement a writers workshop style for the first time, after spending my first year plodding through in a more traditional style of units and worksheets. Add to that my confusion at being thrown a class I didn’t feel qualified or knowledgeable about teaching (yet I was going to research it?) and THEN throwing the final curveball days before the class was to start, informing me that the class I thought I was teaching (writing) was going to be reading instead. Still no curriculum was given to me by the district, but since the Writing Project was funding my research, it kind of required me to study writing in a reading class. Not impossible, but one more difficulty thrown into the chaos. And now, when I’m finally mentally prepared (or under the crunch of time and deadlines, to be more accurate) to finish up the writing pieces for this class, I discover that I am not going to be teaching this class again next year, nor are the other two teachers for whom I was designing these projects, so any motivation is gone. Next year we’re hiring a “real” literacy coach for these students, and my research will no longer apply to anyone in our school. Sure, in a general sense it will, because everything I have learned will surely apply to my general education students and even more so since I studied technology and our school is implementing a 1-to-1 laptop initiative, but an extremely large piece of my motivation is missing. Digging through my files from last summer, in response to a prompt during the National Writing Project I wrote: “I am a writer. I’ve always written, but I wasn’t always a writer. I wrote for a specific purpose that was not chosen by me, and I didn’t write for fun. I was not a writer; I was someone who was told to write. Now I am a writer, and I can never go back to seeing the world the way I did before I became one.” Right now that doesn’t feel like it applies, and that’s why this class has become so hard for me to work on. I am no longer writing something that I have chosen (although I am choosing my genre and I did choose my project!) but this has become a project for a grade only. It no longer matters to anyone except to my transcripts, and that’s why it’s so difficult to work on. It feels like those undergraduate classes I hated, the ones before I got into my cohorts, and even then the occasional cohort that I just knew didn’t apply to what I was going to do in my career. Like that last science paper that was 15 pages long with graphs and charts...or that awful geography paper I spent so much time on and did so well on only to lose a full grade because I couldn’t get to campus to turn it in physically and the teacher wouldn’t accept it electronically even though it was time stamped...grrrr. My mind was changed so many times during the research phase of this class that it was also another major problem. I tried using some of the reading strategies, and those went fairly well, but then I tried to focus on throwing some writing projects into the mix. I first tried the “SSR with RSS” project. I thought it would work out really well, and the students seemed pretty enthusiastic about it when I was explaining it. We brainstormed using a bubble map to get ideas about the kinds of sites they would subscribe to, and the students were thrilled to be able to choose their subjects. I had a lot of car enthusiasts and a few girls interested in horses and the latest teen idol, someone I hadn’t yet heard of (yet now know all too well.) I was also curious to see what kinds of sites and blogs were out there, and what we would end up choosing to keep the students updated. It was shaping up to be an interesting project for everyone. It took many more days than I had planned to get all the students on task with the RSS feeds. Almost every one of my 18 students needed constant personal attention to get everything accomplished. There simply wasn’t much more I could do than keep trying to get to each student and help him/her at each step along the way. Because of what we were doing, each student was on a unique path to the finish line, so I wasn’t able to just project the instructions or lead all the students through at the same time. Even if I could have done this with everyone one time, most of the students would still have needed the extra attention for the entire rest of the set up. It was just the nature of the class and the students in it that this was bound to happen. Although the students were excited about the project and eager to use the computers to search and use any new programs I could help them set up, like Ning and the RSS feeder, when it came to actually beginning the “work” portion of the project I realized we’d hit a wall. The students were excited to see the feeds that popped up, whizzes at navigating through the sites to find links and information, and eager to share with buddies, but not thrilled to do more with the information but look for cool pictures about their chosen topics. Repeatedly I would ask the students who had their feeds set up to go through their lists and search for something interesting to //read//. And repeatedly I’d wander around a few minutes later to see them ogling more pictures of deer with giant racks, the latest fatal car crashes, or the latest paint job on a chosen racecar. Even this narrative of my thoughts relating to the project and the reason I’ve been putting it off for months is a rambling piece of nonsense. Nothing I’ve done makes sense. I repeatedly changed my focus and the research goals without forming real objectives and sticking to them. I keep waiting for it to fall into place and make sense, and meanwhile am unwilling to ask for help. I think it’s because I don’t even know what to ask for! I don’t know where to even start asking questions, because my original proposal is pretty useless and I don’t know where to go from there. Four books: £ The Digital Writing Workshop (Troy – has actual chapters on digital stories and SSR with RSS, both of which we did) £ What Works? (The research book that I never really read all of or in order) £ I Read It But I Don’t Get It ( awesome, but doesn’t relate to writing or the rest of my project) £ Teaching the New Writing (already read it, but can’t use the old paper – loved some of these projects and intended to try them, but never did – still hope to with next year’s students) Four papers: £ Research proposal – in need of some major restructuring, goals, etc.? £ Blogging on how it all went – done as I went along, and very helpful to me even at the time I was teaching £ Power Point on Tovani book – very cool...will probably keep and use this myself at least if I ever have a chance to teach a class like this again. Everything applies to regular ed, too. £ Research results? – no idea where to even begin. I have three students’ permission (almost) and can get interviews from them if I want to. But what to talk about? How everything DIDN’T help? That they’re no better even after (two of them) got a chance to try the projects again?