BALANCE

  Lately, I’ve been really struggling with how much time my work has been taking up.  I HATE it when someone says to me, “You teachers are SO lucky.  You have the summers off, Christmas break off, ect….”   First of all this is NOT true for me.  My wife and I made the choice to raise our four kids on one income, so I work summer school to bring in a little additional income.  Even if I did not do the summer school gig, a public school employee’s work load DURING the school year is so hectic that I believe it MORE than makes up for the time we receive off during the summer months.
    On top of the hectic nature of being a teacher, I also direct our school’s drama program (which involves three productions a school year), help with Student Government, serve on the school’s leadership committee, am heavily involved with my church, and occassionally I find myself taking an online class ….    (I know you all can relate to the crazy nature of the schedule.)
     I have publicly claimed that my family is my number one priority, but there are weeks where I barely see my kids for more than ninety minutes a night.  If I come home earlier, and neglect grading or prepping for class, then my classroom suffers.  You would think after a decade of teaching, I would have this all figured out, but as federal and state legislators add more and more responsiblities to those of us who work in public education, I find myself going a little bit insane.
    Now I don’t write this AT ALL for a pity party (again, you are all in the same boat I assume), but I liked some of the recent discussions on blog topics about stress and time.  So let me add some more work to your week with two questions I’d love to hear your thoughts on.

1) How do you ALL balance teaching, extra duties, family, and your own personal interests and hobbies?  Where do you draw the line between work and home?  School and Personal Life?

2) Somewhat connected, in the craziness of being a teacher, do you ever stop and ask yourself, “Why did I become a teacher?”  What do you do, in the crazy existence of working public education, to refresh your perspective and renew your attitude towards teaching?

P.S. Sorry about flaunting my family in this post, but they are the inspiration for writing about this topic.  They are the reasons I wake up and deal with the insanity of high school English and Theater each day.

That Was Really, Really…Weird. (Recording My Own Podcast.)

What is it about hearing the sound of your own voice that is just not that pleasant?  Tonight, I had the “pleasure” of hearing my rambling, “I sometimes sound like a 14 year old boy going through puberty” voice as I listened to several failed attempts at doing my own podcast.  Finally, I just said, “to heck with this,” and went for it despite any rambling or squeaky voice moments. 

   I used MyPodcast.com to record and publish my thoughts on using “better” podcasts (than mine) in the classroom.  I focused on using two podcasts I had been familiar with before in my Language Arts classroom. 

   I tried to upload the mp3 directly to WordPress but that involved a $20.00 space upgrade.  Let me tell you after spending 130.00 on technology for virus removal, my wallet is not relinquishing any more funds this week connected to my computer.  So here is the link to the page that features my “inspirational” and “motivating” podcast with a voice that will move you to tears….

                              The Write Moments Podcast ( Be sure to scroll to the bottom of the screen where you’ll find the podcast.)

Visual Prompts for Journaling and Creativity

Crayola Lincoln Logs from Chris Metcalf's Photostream

 I am a HUGE Flickr fan for several reasons.  The main reason is that I have found it so incredibly wonderful and easy to upload pictures from the school’s theater shows to a Flickr account. I had noticed other local schools uploading shots of their theater productions to various online archives, so after some quick investigating, I set up and paid for a Flickr account for our school’s theater program, Mariner Drama.  Now we have housed thousands and thousands of the nearly thirty past productions I have been blessed to direct over the past nine years.  I love hearing from current actors and crewmembers and from alumni as show pictures are uploaded to the Flickr account.
     A second reason that I love Flickr is the ability to find pictures online, with the photographer’s permission, and use some AMAZING images as journal prompts.  For the past eight years, I nearly always find a collection of abstract or surreal photos and display them, either by video projector or by printing and posting in the room.  Students are then challenged to look at the picture and then write about WHATEVER pops into their heads.  It is an excellent way to do a “creativity warm-up” and to make daily writing a little more interesting. 
     Students are just more VISUAL today, from video games to movies to television.  It is a no brainer to use both photo prompts and video prompts to get their minds focused.  In the upcoming unit on Romeo and Juliet, I like to display and discuss images connected to themes of love and romance, also violence and hate.  These are all strong themes in Shakespeare’s tragedy.  With images being the doorway to a discussion on themes and issues, I am glad to have online resources available to include within my teaching.
    

Postscript- Okay, I’m a little “geeked” about Flickr because not only are there thousands of pictures of theater productions I have directed there, but my kids have made occasional “cameos” onstage in some of the shows I have directed. Last May, my daughter, Scout, and oldest son, Logan,  were pirates along with me in my school’s production of Treasure Island.  My family IS the most important part of my life, so I couldn’t help but share a special picture from the drama club’s Flickr photostream.  (Now you can really wonder about the type of people in your online class. )

May 2009 Production of Treasure Island, James (me), Logan, and Scout McCulloch

 Image Citation: Metcalf, Chris. (2007, February 26). Crayola Lincoln Logs. Chris Metcalf’s Photostream. Retrieved February 15, 2010, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/laffy4k/404321726/

 Image Citation: McCulloch, James. (2010, January 29). IMG_0751. Mariner Drama’sPhotostream. Retrieved February 15, 2010, from http://www.flickr.com/photos/mariner_drama/4313402817/in/set-72157623307369498

Thoughts on Wikis

While there may be films like JULIE AND JULIA portraying the triumphs and tragedies of blogging, I do believe I am correct in assuming that there are NO films about the cultural impacts of wikis.  And while I was very knowledgeable of blogs before Meryl Streep became Julia Child, from my own personal endeavors and from reading the blogs of some of my personal heroes onlines, wikis were a brand new concept coming into my online course this month. 
     Not only were wikis new, with the exeption of the occassional “run-in” with Wikipedia due to teaching Research Process to 9th through 12th graders, but the whole idea of CREATING a wiki was very new to me.  As I mentioned in online discussions devoted to my online class, I am undecided and perhaps a little cynical about the use of wikis in the classroom.  I was glad to see a few of my online peers felt the same way, citing the fact that most classes has one, unfortunately, “bad apple.”
      Dealing with a student with a “bad apple” attitude on a blog is one thing, but on a wiki, tracking down this culprit could be difficult.  Here’s the dilemma in short.  A student that wants to blast the class, the assignment, a fellow student, the school dress code…whatever they don’t like can be easily tracked down on a blog.  If they want to suffer a poor grade with poor work or a poor attitude on their blog, a student, individiually, will suffer the consequences.  But even in my own participation in wiki, trying to figure out who stomped over my creative heart and deleted a few of the finest, crafted sentences ever written (I am joking about being crushed), it was difficult.  I actually half-jokingly posted to my group a question as to who might of taken words out my section.
     But taking words out of my section or ANY SECTION is part of the plan, part of the “deal” with wikis.  Also adding and “re-writing”, whether in good taste or bad, is part the gamble of a wiki being used in the classroom.  I think that wikis are certainly even more “collaborative” in nature than a blog.  A blog is slowed down by having to post a new entry for every part of a groups presentation, but a wiki is different.  A wiki allows the group the total team concept, where no one really stands out because everything is done by the group and for the group.  An outsider really could not tell who did what. 
    And that brings us back to my hesitation with wikis.  Unless I am the “Sherlock Holmes” of Web 2.0 /3.0, I am NOT going to be able to easily figure out if one group member was the reason a group wiki ended up being done poorly.  If a student felt like being malicious, how could I truly figure out, minus the school tattle tale, who really was telling the online world how he or she feels, complete with expletives, about my class?

A Plan for Social Bookmarking

I could approach my thoughts and plans for using a social bookmarking site, like Delicious, one of two ways, but I would like to address both.

Using Social Bookmarking in CREATIVE WRITING and NINTH GRADE E.L.A.

I recently had my students in my Creative Writing class create “Blogspot” accounts and blogs for my class.  My plan is to have students publish original works of poetry and short stories and have students comment on each other’s works.
    In the compostion and creative construction processes, it would be nice to have a public place I could post poems by published authors, creative writing websites and blog dealing with such topics as writer’s block and finding inspritation.  By creating a Delicious account dedicated to my Creative Writing classes, students would click a tag, such as Writer’s Block, and find online resources dedicated to moving ahead on a writing assignment.
   I am beginning a unit on William Shakespeare’s Romeo and Juliet.  Using the social bookmarking tool, I can post a series of links, with various tags, devoted to the author’s plays, his life, his sonnets, and specific topics within his play, Romeo and Juliet.  I would assign students a worksheet from which they would obtain information from these sites.  Better yet would be to have my students do either a blog or a multi-media project based on the sites and videos posted to a social bookmarking site dedicated to both William Shakespeare and his tragedy Romeo and Juliet.

Using Delicious for my own PROFESSIONAL DEVELOPMENT:

    In my brief moments fooling with the social bookmarking site, Delicious, I have already enjoyed noting the feature that shows how many other “Delicious users” have saved the same website to their own page.  For example, I saved a link to the ReadWriteThink website.  Once I posted it there, I saw that, at the time, nearly 9,800 other people had saved it.  When I clicked that number, it took me to a list of people that had saved that link.  From the list of people, I clicked on a “Kristina’s” link to see her specific social bookmarking page.  There I saw she had saved a “This Day In History…” site.     I am a History minor, so I added that page, via Delicious, to my own social bookmarking page. 

     It is this type of exchange that I see as being very useful.  Most teachers or general people that would save the Literature and Writing websites to their page will have their own pages that are linked to my area of teaching.  While a specific blog will have its own SMALL group, for the most part, of people discussing content specific topics.  A social bookmarking site allows me to connect to a series of blogs, a series of websites that can aid me in becoming a more effective and cutting edge teacher.
     My first plan is to see what resources exist for both teaching of creative writing and William Shakespeare.

Jay’s Pageflake’s Page

I recently constructed a Pageflake Page with several “flakes” focused on English topics (creative writing, poetry, and vocabularly).

http://www.pageflakes.com/quasicoolwriter/29059447.

RSS Feeds Are Going To Make Me Fat!

Honestly….honestly….I had to peek at a few other students’ blog reflections on RSS Feeds to see if my thoughts were overly simplistic.  It might have been fellow student, Willie, that commented on how technology is allowing us to get “lazier”.  I must admit that RSS, while really cool, seems to be kind of an “online Kindle” for collecting blogs.  Another fellow student commented that it was like a mailbox where you can actually “control” what goes in there. 
    I guest because I’m a Creative Writing teacher and still feel “relatively” young that I was hoping to have some profound and amazing reflection on the use of RSS feeds. 
     Don’t get me wrong.  I LOVE convenience, but I’m just still happy that I got a new blog up, have had my students do one (1) blog entry, and there is the promise of future blogging for use within my classroom.  With the many blogs in this online class and with the blogs that I will have through my Creative Writing “blog adventure”, it will be nice to have everything in the Google Reader.  I can bounce around and see content a little bit quicker than I could be clicking links or typing in web addresses.  RSS Feeds make the already quick internet processes….even quicker. 
    For some reason, I do feel a little bit lazy.