Teaching journal 1/3 - 1/15

2024 not off to a great start

Hi all, happy New Year. How’s your 2024 going?

Me? Not a fan. 

On Monday, January 3—the day I returned from winter break—I received an ominous email from my boss, the director of the San Diego Unified’s Multilingual Education Department: 

Mandatory meeting for all in-school and Central Office Resource Teachers. Friday, January 5th, 2024. 3:00 p.m. 

Wu-oh, I thought. This can’t be good. 

Friday came and I found myself in a room with about 30 other teachers. 

“If you are sitting in this room, it means that your position is going to be eliminated next year.” 

It’s called being excessed—not laid off or fired. When school sites no longer have the funds (which are based on enrollment) to support staff, positions are eliminated and the teachers who occupied them are moved to a different role elsewhere in the district.

Before winter break, my supervisor had warned me that there were going to be major cuts coming, so the news wasn’t a complete surprise, but it was still a gut-punch. As the director tried to ease the news by suggesting that this could be an opportunity for us to seek other areas of interest, I just looked down at my shoes, fixating on the sweat stains in the canvas. 

Recreation of that moment

The news means that next year, I’ll be teaching somewhere else. It means I’ll have to interview. It means I probably won’t be able to walk to school anymore. It means I’ll no longer be working with my friends. I won’t be able to see any of my students next year. Or the year after that. I won’t be able to have better conversations with them as their English improves. I won’t see them graduate. 

Seeing that I only have about six more months in this role, I decided to start journaling the experience. 

Hope you enjoy.

Monday, Jan. 8, 2024 

Started class with a Quizizz. Most kids love Quizizz because it’s like a computer game, and I give stickers to the three winners. I use the program to review new vocabulary words. 

But there’s one girl in my third period who absolutely loves Quizizz. She doesn’t like anything else, but Quizizz? Hell yes. When she saw the agenda for the day, she shouted “Quizizz!” 

I also introduced the new karaoke song, Soft Cell’s “Tainted Love.” I try to have the kids learn a new song every month, and then on karaoke day, I sit one-on-one with them and they read the song to me like an oral reading test.

When I played the “Tainted Love” music video, some kids said “Oh, Mr. Bradford!” because it had some seductive dancing in it. 

One student said the song was “so good”. 

The Quizizz girl said, “I don’t like karaoke.”

“Yeah, you do,” I insisted. 

Had a Zoom meeting with my supervisor and three other teachers who were also laid off. It was strange, sad. I feel like the other three teachers and I just wanted to have someone to be mad at, but being mad at the district just seemed redundant. I feel like we were all just sort of wallowing, wishing for something different, but knowing ultimately how futile it all is.

Tuesday, Jan. 8, 2024

Took the kids on a field trip to Balboa Park. 100+ students that you need to take *and* bring back. Alive (???)

When we got off the bus, Mr. P took us through a canyon trail that culminated in a steep forest climb. He explained that it’d be a good way for the students to “get out the wiggles” before we went into any museums.

For a lot of kids, hiking seemed novel, like they had never been on a trail before. I’m not the most athletic person, but I was nowhere near as tired as some of the students. And, like, yes, I know that’s nothing to celebrate and we shouldn’t be happy about any student deficit, but I’m a 40 year-old soon-to-be-excised teacher. Gotta take the wins when I can. 

We separated into smaller groups. I had 15 students in my group, including two from last year that were just kind of awful. 

We walked through the Comic-Con museum. Some of the kids loved it, others said it was boring. Everyone was stoked to see a life-size Delorean. There was a classic Donkey Kong arcade game, and I saw two kids playing it. I walked up and said “Donkey Kong, huh?” 

After lunch, I told my group that they were free to do whatever they wanted, just to meet back at the fountain in an hour. The moment those words left my mouth, I felt like I’d made a mistake. Just imagined kids running away, getting lost, hurt, never seen again. 

After they scattered, I walked to the Old Globe Theater to say hi to my friend and former editor Nina Garin, who works there. Can’t help but feel there was a mutual pride in seeing each other in our post-journalism careers. 

Went back to the fountain and drank a scalding Americano. I felt a rush of relief when all the students returned at the time I told them to. As we waited for the rest of the groups, my students went and got iced coffees of their own. One kid accidentally put salt in his, thinking it was sugar. We all had a good laugh.

One of my asshole students from last year sat next to me on a bench. “Mr. Bradford,” he said. “System 44!” System 44 was a computer program I had the students use almost every day, and I don’t think this particular kid used it once. But I laughed when he said it. I was glad he felt comfortable enough to sit by me and make jokes.

On the bus ride home, one of the students started playing Haitian Creole trap music from their phone, and the back half of the bus started singing along. 

Wednesday, Jan. 10, 2024

Today, I introduced object pronouns. Or, I tried to. Even as an English major, I don’t really know shit about proper grammar. Ask me about a participle or a split infinitive or whatever and I’ll be like ¯\_(ツ)_/¯. So me explaining grammar concepts is like being in the saddest game of charades. 

The way I explained it—which I’m sure is incorrect—is that in English ”we don’t like repetition in our sentences.” 

“You wouldn’t say, ‘I love my father, and I honor my father.’” I said. “You’d say, I love my father and I honor him.” I have no idea why this is the example I used. My examples are usually way less biblical.

One of the good things about teaching ELD, is the kids don’t yet fully understand you, so as long as you’re constantly talking, you kind of look like you know what you’re doing. Teaching this class is an anxious person’s dream: gain experience talking in front of people who don’t know what you’re saying and therefore aren’t going to know how stupid you are. 

At end of the day, our department had a meeting with the principal and the assistant principal to discuss the future of the program for next year. Since hearing about my job, I’ve held the faint hope that even though my position could no longer be funded by the district, maybe the school site could hire me. 

But lo, those dreams were quickly dashed. The principal said the school would also be working at a deficit and so there would be absolutely no way they had it in their budget to keep me.

I’ll ever get used to conversations surrounding the funding of public education. To hear students quantified into dollars and cents feels so...evil. It makes me sad that in the era of individualism, helicopter parents, and alternate schools that we’ve divested so much from the uniquely-American institution of public education. 

I’ve had a few friends—young parents—ask me my opinions on private vs. public vs. charter. I’ll always bat for public school, but I think the question should force us to rethink what a “good” education looks like. What do you remember from school? Do you think you got a “good” education?

For those who consider their education “good”, I’ll wager you don’t remember what you learned, but more how you were treated. You remember which of your teachers cared. You remember who showed you compassion. You remember projects and the cool shit you did with your friends. And all of these elements can be found in public, charter, and private schools, so I guess it depends on whether you want to pay for them or navigate waitlists and politics. In my opinion (which, we must remember, is very correct) school is important for teaching us how to in the real world, and if you send your kids to a racially, culturally, and academically homogenous environment, you’re setting them up for a lot of fear and frustration down the road. 

Thursday, Jan. 11, 2024

I was walking through the quad today and nearly killed myself. It had rained the night before and I almost ate shit by slipping on a wet metal plate. I did a full-on Three Stooges act trying not to fall. Arms flailing, legs bicycling. It was such an adrenaline rush that I saw stars.

I regained balance and quickly looked around, only spotted a few students looking at their phones.

Phew, I thought.

But the first student to arrive in class came in laughing. She tried telling me something in Spanish and I was like, “What? What?” And then she said “agua,” and I was like oh shit. 

She stood up and did an impression of Mr. Bradford slipping. 

For both first and third period, we did more practice with object and subject pronouns. I apologized to them for teaching it so badly the day prior. 

At the end of third period, one kid balled up a Kleenix and soaked it with hand sanitizer, and a group of them started whipping it at each other. Always good to know that teens are still MacGyvers at creating tools to annoy. Cut to a cinematic slow zoom on my face, my eyes full of proud tears, and my voiceover saying, “The kids are all right.” 

Friday, Jan. 12, 2024

We did a Learning Station Rotation Day today, which is where I set the desks into four clusters with a different activity at each group. Kids do 10 minutes at each station before rotating to the next. The activities were: karaoke practice, vocabulary Jeopardy, IXL, and Gimkit (IXL and Gimkit are learning platforms). 

I wouldn’t say it was an absolute shit show but at one point I did feel a little like walking into the ocean, Virginia Woolf-style.

Afterward, I went through the IXL analytics and looked at student usage for the past two weeks. Some of the kids had not even opened the program. That threw me into a nice little downward spiral. Lectures about responsibility, working independently, and self-sufficiency slithered through my mind.

Then I remembered it was Friday and who the fuck cares. 

Whenever I’m feeling punitive, I wait two days. If I still feel adamant about whatever the students did that bothers me, I’ll let them know, but it’s never a good idea to invest much emotion into correcting kids’ behavior when only 10%- 20% of it’s gonna stick. It’s just the way kids are. 

Once there was a translator in my class, and she said something like “I don’t know how you do it, Mr. Bradford.” Lots of patience and Zoloft, dear readers. That’s how I do it.  

By the way, have you ever stopped and considered how much time your teachers would put into their lesson plans? Learning Station Rotation Day might seem like an easy thing to put together when you don’t want to do direct instruction, but it’s actually sort of like making four separate lesson plans that need to be easy enough for students to engage in without constant supervision. It’s a lot of work. And perhaps that is why I feel higher emotions when it doesn’t go as I imagined it.

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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.