Sub Plan

After missing a week and a half of school due to an unexpected case of pneumonia, (it would have been two and half weeks if Spring Break hadn't cushioned the experience), I have been forced to come face to face with a truth I have long been avoiding due to my usual good health. I don't have a solid emergency sub plan in place, and though the old fall back "show a movie" works for a few days, when unexpectedly absent for a week and a half, "show a movie" doesn't cut it. I know that there are teachers out there who have their entire semester, maybe ever their entire year, mapped out in advance. I, however, am not one of those teachers. I like to go with the flow of my inspiration and imagination, and I never know what I might decide to read, explore, or assign until a week, or sometimes a weekend in advance.

Partially this is due to my student population. At continuation high, students come and go. Classroom makeup is constantly changing. I have combined grade levels, 10th-12th in every class, and for every student that breezes in and then breezes back out again, there are those that feel at home and don't leave until they graduate (sometimes as 5th year seniors). This means that I may have the same students three years in a row, and though they may seem as though they aren't paying attention, pull out a story we read two years ago and they are deeply offended, as if I am clearly not doing my job.

Much of my curriculum I glean from current events. What's going on in the world right now? What articles are in the news? What ballots are on the initiative? What natural disasters are giving us new perspectives on the world? Where are we bombing now? And these items quickly lose their pertinence. Topics that come up in class may drive our next essay assignment, and I may never use this particular topic, along with accompanying readings, again. This sort of fluidity in the classroom means a constant stream of successes and failures. The poems written from the perspective of people's dogs, for instance, fell flat. I'll never use those again, and am still recovering from the failure, (I thought they were really funny). The prison project, on the other hand, was widely well received, but now I can't do it for another two years, at least, at which point my statistical handouts will be out of date and I will have to assemble all new materials.

This is one way I keep class interesting -- by making sure the kids never know what to expect next. This also means if I am suddenly laid out on the couch and have a last minute sub showing up, I don't have anything for them to do. If the timing is right, the kids might be in the middle of a project. They know what they need to work on, so all the sub had to worry about is making sure no one smokes pot in the back room or starts a fight. But if we are between projects, I have nothing to offer the sub besides my emergency movie which, oh yah, half the kids saw last year, and if I show it again, you can bet I'm going to hear about it.

To deal with this problem I have decided to purchase a book of "never fail" language arts assignments that come on neat little ditto sheets with a line for the student's name, and easily understood instructions. Each ditto sheet has "fun" but "instructional" activities like "rewrite this four sentence story being more specific, and using lots of details", or "write a paragraph using only one syllable words", or "rewrite these sentences using hyperbole". The worksheets are simple, perhaps instructive in a vague, banal, and somewhat meaningless way, and they remind me of two things.

One, my job would be so much easier, I would sleep so much better at night, and I would have a huge weight of responsibility lifted from my shoulders if I stopped coming up with all of my own material. If I just bought a daily curriculum, copied worksheets, used the text book, and relied entirely on other people's ideas, I would be freed from the pressure of having to be endlessly creative, and having to beat myself up every time a lesson went sour, (think dog poems). I wouldn't have to worry that the story I am bringing in contains the word "cunt", because all of the stories we read in class would be conveniently pre-censored, and so tried and true, (as in, students have been reading these same stories for the last thirty years), there would be no risk involved whatsoever.

Two, maybe I am a flawed teacher in some way, because I find the text books available in all subjects, the prescribed worksheets and "creative" projects, and the "tried and true" materials to be so boring, so dull, so insipid I feel guilty participating in their dissemination. Not like everything I bring in is top notch, (think dog poems), but at least I am always striving to find things that are actually meaningful in some bigger sense of the word. Still, with this effort comes great responsibility, and I am never entirely sure if I am successful or not. Maybe I am blinded by my own agenda. Maybe my students would improve their skills at a higher rate if I stopped focusing so much on critical thinking, and spent more time doing skill building activities, boring or not.

I try to reach every one of my students -- and as chronic ditchers, school haters, drug takers, and English loathers, this is perhaps an impossible task. Still, I can tell you exactly which students, in any given quarter, I have been as yet unable to reach, and each one, in their own separate way, haunts me. For the most part, the students who I can't reach want exactly the type of materials I will be photocopying and leaving out for the sub should I ever get pneumonia again. They are annoyed by my contemporary fiction, by my persistent agenda to force them to think bigger thoughts. They just want a worksheet that has a little line for their name, a straight set of easy to understand instructions, and an assignment that involves no deep thought, that they can finish quickly and then forget about.

On my bad days, I wonder if maybe I should just give them what they want -- formulaic assignments designed to improve a very specific, easily testable skill set. On my good days, I swear, I'll quit before I'll give in. On my mediocre days, I can't decide if I'm right or if I'm wrong. But maybe that's what teaching is all about -- discovery, uncertainty, exploration, failure, and success. In the mean time, my new sub plan will be laid out, and hopefully, with any luck, it will gather dust. As well it should.

Youth Speaks Poetry Slam

Last night I attended the 14th annual Youth Speaks Grand Slam poetry competition at the Warfield Theater, in San Francisco. The event was exciting, inspiring, and, on more than one occasion, moved me to tears. I am currently trying to recover my voice which I believe I lost towards the end of the three and a half hour show, due to a righteous amount of screaming -- I always try and do my part.

The young poets who performed awed me with their talent, their courage, and their stories. Though any young adult can compete, many of those in the grand finals had participated in a Youth Speaks workshop -- free, after school, spoken word workshops that are offered at various locations across the Bay Area.

I brought with me five teenage boys, ranging in age from 13-16. I also had eight student attendees, scattered about the auditorium -- lured there by a promise of a generous dose of extra credit, should they attend and write about their experience afterward. Of the boys in my attendance, none of them are currently writers, or poets, nor would I consider them to be of an "artistic" or "poetic" temperament. One of my sons, in fact, had threatened me repeatedly before the show with some form of bodily harm should he become bored during the performance.

Luckily for the state of my forearm, no one was bored. Boredom, in fact, would have been nearly impossible. The performance pieces were mind blowing, the DJ was rocking the house, the MC, at four foot nine, was somehow epic in proportions, and I was reminded, for three and half hours straight, what education is supposed to be like.

Teaching is a dichotomous profession. On one hand, it's about the students and meeting their needs, and on the other, there are the very real policy decisions that keep the job forever political. But watching these young people perform last night, brought me back for a moment -- away from the budget cuts, the No Child Left Behind debacle, the upcoming STAR tests, and the President's loathsome Race to the Top. It brought me back from my fears and doubts in the classroom, to a place of remembrance.

Imagine if every public school had creative writing and spoken word built into their curriculum -- if instead of forcing elementary school students to craft five paragraph essays, we taught them how to tell their stories, and perhaps even more importantly, how to value each others stories. How to truly listen.

Not everyone is a writer, just as not everyone is a painter, or an illustrator, or gardener, or a cook. But until we begin to integrate the arts into our schools as thoroughly and as adamantly as we have integrated US History, English Literature, and Math, our children will lose, and we, as a culture, will continue to be negatively impacted by our collective ignorance.