Teaching journal 1/16 - 1/19

First semester in the books

Recap: I’m a teacher in San Diego. I teach English Language Development (ELD, the new term for ESL) to 9-12 grade newcomers to the country. On January 3, I was informed that my position would be eliminated next year. This journal is a chronicle of my current experience before it ends. Hope you enjoy. 

Tuesday, January 16, 2024

It’s the last week of the semester. Wednesday, Thursday and Friday are modified days this week, which means most of the periods are only 60 minutes instead of 90. When I was in middle school, we had seven 50-minute periods every day. Now, as a teacher, I don’t even know how you can teach anything in that amount of time. 

Don’t really have any finals for the ELD students. Just a little vocabulary quiz on Friday.

Today I did small reading groups at the beginning of class. I love small reading groups, and think it’s one of my strengths as a teacher. I think most kids like it too, even though they groan when I call out their names to join the group. They make a big show of it.

Today’s group was lower-proficiency students, so we read a short-story/paragraph from a book called Decodable Digest. The story is about an orange cat named Fluff who gets trapped in a picnic basket. Can’t tell you how many times I’ve read this little paragraph and I love it every time. Love making the kids say “Fluff.” It’s a fun word to say, and a beautiful word to hear. 

For the rest of class, I introduced the new unit in the book. I don’t know why I felt compelled to explain that it was a new unit. What kid is going to give a fuck if you start a new unit?

The unit’s called “Global Village.” It starts out with this non-fiction, data essay about a theoretical global village, where 100 people represent everybody in the world, and then breaks down how many out of 100 have clean air/water, access to education, enough food to eat, etc. 

This whole “slice of the world” concept is hard to teach to English learners. I think a lot of students thought that I was talking about an actual village (“village” is one of our vocabulary words by the way). The lesson consisted of an hour of me doing direct instruction, and having them take notes. I felt it was kind of payback Friday’s Station Rotation Day fiasco.  

Any teacher will tell you that direct instruction is not a great way to teach K-12 students. In the credential program, they always promote group work that emphasizes collaborative learning and meaning-making.  But for a lot of kids coming from cultures where direct instruction is the norm, this is their idea of education, and copying notes is one way they feel successful in the classroom, which kind of ruins my desire for revenge.

Despite its pedagogical drawbacks, I like doing direct instruction. It allows me to stand up and be loud in a room, pantomime, and make stupid faces. 

(Please don’t tell my bosses that I’m just here for stand-up comedy practice. And please, please don’t tell them that my stand-up routine is basically just Mr. Bean.) 

At the end of class, a group of four Haitian girls each said “Goodbye, prince!” as they passed. The last one said, “Goodbye, princess!” 

After the final period, I went to a professional development session on equity. We looked at the equity statement put out by San Diego Unified School District, which features this paragraph: 

“Working towards equity as a district requires proactive and continuous investment in historically marginalized groups who have endured centuries of systemic oppression. SDUSD is committed to transforming our system by hearing and elevating under-acknowledged, under-valued voices, sharing power, recognizing and eliminating bias, and distributing resources to provide equitable outcomes.”

It’s hard to read that since my role—a role that works directly with these “under-acknowledged, under-valued voices”—was eliminated by the school district. Hard not to see it as anything other than lip service. If they wanted to put students first and celebrate multiculturalism, then maybe not get rid of the teachers who have the most direct contact with multicultural students? But I’m new, so what do I know?

As I locked up for the day, I heard this immense, droning buzz. I walked down the hall and found a guitar club of about 20 students, everyone just strumming an A-chord. In a 100-year old room with high ceilings, it was one of the top-10 coolest sounds I’ve ever heard. 

Wednesday, January 17, 2024

Today, I started one-on-one reading assessments with the students. I gave these same assessments back in August, so these are just to see much progress they’ve made in the past four months. The assessments ask students to identify the names of the letters in the alphabet, read a list of sight words, read a narrative paragraph and answer questions at the end. 

Like Station Rotation Day, one-on-one conferencing with students is difficult to set up. You have to come up with something that the rest of the kids can do independently so you can give your full attention to the student you’re assessing. Today, I had the kids make flashcards for the upcoming vocab quiz. 

A funny thing about freshmen is they have absolutely no boundaries. By “funny”, I mean enraging. They expect you to be on-demand. It’s like they wait until the exact moment when I’m about to start an assessment to ask to go to the bathroom, or for help on their assignment. 

During one assessment, Quizizz Girl—who was sprawled out on a couch—kept shouting my name.

“Bradford!”

I tried to ignore her. “Okay, can you tell me the names of these letters?” I asked the student across from me. 

“Bradford! Bradford! Bradford!

“All right, how about these sight words...” 

“MISTER BRADFOOOOOOORD!”

Oh my god.

“What is it?! Can’t you see I’m busy?” I yelled.

“What’s that?” she asked, pointing at the ceiling. 

Stuck in the ceiling was like this little purple bird eraser? 

My supervisor from the Multilingual Education Department came to help administer the assessments. Afterwards, she asked how I was feeling with everything, “with everything” meaning the loss of my job. I think I got weirdly existential in my response. “It seems like fate is out of my control,” I said. 

“Fate is out of my control,” I kept thinking for the rest of the day, with the words echoing cinematically—and therefore, awesomely—in my mind.

There was a union meeting to discuss the foreseeable cuts. I didn’t think there was anything they could do to save my job, but I went nonetheless. Sometimes it’s just nice to be around disgruntled people, and there has never been a union meeting that hasn’t devolved into an airing of grievances.  

And just like clockwork, the discussion veered from the collective concern into personal issues. You get enough teachers together, and this is how it goes. The topics included how the library space is used, and why admin isn’t doing anything about students who just wander campus during class. That turned into a heated conversation about student notebooks. Good god, why was nobody going over the handbook rules? 

I’m losing my job next year, so it was kind of hard to care about fucking notebooks. 

Thursday, January 18, 2024

Today was not so much different than yesterday. More one-on-one reading assessments. I made a Google Jamboard assignment for the other kids—a risk because I knew that students would want me to check their work when they’re finished, so I put instructions on the screen. “I DO NOT NEED TO SEE YOUR WORK WHEN YOU ARE FINISHED. I WILL GRADE IT AFTER CLASS, AND WE WILL REVIEW IT TOMORROW.”

But some kids just want constant validation, and my directions were ignored. 

I tested some kids who scored very low last August, and was glad to see that they had made progress. One girl refused to read four months ago, but today she was able to sound out nearly every word. She also allowed herself to struggle through the words that she was having trouble with. A lot of kids, when they have difficulty sounding out a word, they usually just skip it.

When we were finished, she showed me a picture on her phone, taken at the beginning of the year. She zoomed in and you could see me in the background. It was one of those totally unflattering photos, like triple-chin monstrosities—one of those photos that make you realize just how exactly you look to other people, and you do not like it at all. 

The student was like, “Mira, Mr. Bradford!”

“Que bueno,” I said. 

I ate a very tasty apple today. It was a Honeycrisp but not one of those huge Honeycrisps. We all know Honeycrisp are the money apples, but come on—I don’t want to eat one the size of a fucking gourd.  

But by lunch time, the apple was causing havoc in my stomach. I was in Mr. P’s class, chatting with him and Mr. M, and I could just feel my stomach just churning. At one point I had to excuse myself. I told him that I needed to write my vocabulary quiz, but really I just needed to go back to my classroom to fart in private.  

I created two versions of the vocabulary quiz because a lot of students come from collectivistic cultures (as opposed to individualistic) and it’s in their natures to help their friends who need it. On one hand, I hate to discourage them from this compassion, but I also need to see what they know. I think for those who come from collectivist cultures, cheating is more like a little act of mischief than a serious educational transgression. At some point, one of their other teachers has referred to cheating as “copy copy,” and the kids all seem to love it. “No copy copy,” I will tell them.

I printed out the quizzes and made copies at the ned of the day. If I have any sound advice for new teachers, get all your shit copied in the afternoon. The moment you’re in a time crunch (i.e. before class) that’s when the machines aren’t gonna work or there’s a line at the copier. 

As the machine spit the papers out, I sang a little jingle: “Mmm mmm mmm that’s some good copying.” 

Yep, I’m really a fan of myself, either. 

Friday, January 19, 2024

I went swimming at the YMCA before school, and I forgot to bring my belt with my change of clothes. I spent the entire day holding my pants up by the waist, walking like I had been riding a horse for days. By the end of the day, it kept getting harder and harder to keep the pants up, and I was like, “Are they just getting stretched out by the second?” Then I got home and realized the top button was undone. 

For the most part, kids did pretty well on the vocab quiz. Some did copy copy though, even after I specifically said “no copy copy.” Guess who’ll be laughing when I make them “retake retake” it.

Starting to sound like the Little Caeser’s guy.

Pizza pizza.

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Got a tip or wanna say hi? Email me at ryancraigbradford@gmail.com, or follow me on Twitter @theryanbradford. And if you like what you’ve just read, please hit that little heart icon at the end of the post.