I'm feeling old

Two of my students from last year got married yesterday. Technically they were Linda's students, but they were regular participants of my writing club, so they count us both as their English teachers. They never met in person until Graduation. By the summer, he was going to her church. By the fall, she had moved out of her parents' home and in with his family. They are expecting a daughter in June. I am easily old enough to be a mother to either of them. While I have plenty of students with children, this one seems to be affecting me more because of my deep affection for both of them. I'm worried for them but am hoping for nothing but the best. His family is providing a ton of love and support. They will need it but I think they'll be okay. I hope.

It's official

My class count for the upcoming semester is down to 154. Considering I still have the DEC students who will be working in self-contained classes (I'm just recording their grades), I suddenly have the promise of more time to give attention to each student. Frankly, I've never had this before. My class count has never been below 180! Considering one of the reasons I created this blog was to journal how an online teacher can form bonds with students who are distance learners, this creates a whole new window of opportunities. Well, at least until more students enroll and I'm flooded again.

SAVED!

This is still technically unofficial, but my class size is about to drop significantly. I had written earlier that our administration was trying to add another English teacher to my grade level to help with our swelling numbers. Linda yanked Keith and me into a conference call to inform us that TWO new teachers have been hired and will be joining us by Wednesday! Linda, Keith and I will have one new teacher on our team while the other one will work with the three teachers on the other English 12 team. Unfortunately, we are not adding any new DEC teachers, so Sharon will still be up to her eyeballs with our special needs students.

Most of me is thrilled. A tiny part of me is wondering what interactions I'll miss because that student will have someone else to guide them through the class. Ah well, this means I'll have more time to have meaningful interactions with the students I'll keep.

My first standout in the crowd

It's still six days until the new semester starts on the 17th, but I've already seen a flood of activity from one particular student. Janet is a returning student who "dropped out" last spring. In this particular case, she stopped logging in for 30 straight days and was withdrawn by our truancy department after several attempts to bring her back into the school fold. She didn't go anywhere else from here, unlike other students who stop logging in because they've gone to another school without informing us.

Janet, it seems, is back with a mission. She is technically in my upcoming class, which is down to 226 students (funny, it was 224 this morning). However, because she reenrolled within the last two weeks of this semester, she was placed in my current class just to hold her spot as a student. She decided to get a head start on the material by tearing straight through the first five weeks of my class, leaving only the major writing assignments to be completed later. She's done more in two days than some of my current students have in two months.

I had to call her and beg her to stand down for a few days. My teaching team is redoing a lot of the curriculum and some of what she's done may not make the cut for her actual classwork. She seemed frustrated that she couldn't finish the whole class at once and get on with her life. I think her year away from school taught her how much she wanted to be back in it, if only to finish.

Thank you, U.S. Government!

This news came in yesterday and is a big honking deal for the future aspirations of a lot of my kids:

"Graduates of all online charter schools... who plan to enter the military have historically been classified as “second tier” graduates in the eyes of the United States Military. Many... e-schools and advocacy organizations, have been fighting for our graduates on this issue since the very beginning of the school. We’ve had many graduates make the decision to enter the military after their time with us only to learn that they would be on the same level as a G.E.D. with less pay and, in many cases, unable to join. On December 31, after passing in Congress, the FY12 National Defense Authorization Bill (HR 1540) was signed into law by President Obama. The bill includes language to resolve this inequitable recruitment issue."

In the past few years, one of the reasons my class count dropped at the end of the year was that students who wanted to join the Marines or Air Force found their schooling choice to be a problem. They left my school and went back to their home school just in time to earn their diploma from, in the eyes of the military, a more legitimate institution. That always made me feel like my work was considered a sham. I work hard to educate my students!

Thank you, U.S. Government, for getting your collective tushes in alignment on this issue.

Looking ahead - some basic stats

There are two weeks before the next semester starts, but here is how my class stats are:

• I currently have a total of 238 students. There is hope that we will add another teacher to our team before the new semester starts, but that will probably still leave me with over 200 students. At this time, there are 6 English IV teachers.
  
• The birth dates of the students range from October of 1989 to November of 1996. I'm guessing that youngest one was put in my class by accident, but the guidance counselors, like me, are still out on Winter Break. Yes, my oldest students are 22. As long as they are 21 when the school year starts, they have one final year to graduate high school with a diploma. If they are 22 at the beginning of the school year, they are not admitted.
  
• 9 students have yet to officially enroll and are listed as "admitted". Once they log in for the first time, I will have to get them to hit the ground running wherever we are in the class.
• Unless something drastic happens, 4 will be expelled due to truancy before the new semester begins. My school tries to intervene and get them back on track for 30 days. After that, they are expelled and the courts are notified. If they log back in on Day 29, the clock is completely reset and there are no disciplinary consequences.
• 40 of these students have an IEP. Before your head starts to spin, let me explain a couple of things. I am the teacher who carries the responsibility of entering English grades for all of the senior students who are in the self-contained or Multiple Handicapped (MH) classes. I do not teach them directly and have actually been told to minimize contact with them so I don't confuse them too much. My hope is to figure out which of those students these are before I start sending out early emails. As for the others with IEPs, we have a great system in my department. Our Department of Exceptional Children (DEC) teachers are embedded, for all intents and purposes, in our classrooms. One DEC teacher is primarily responsible for handling the grading and accommodations for three of the six classes while another DEC teacher handles the other three classes. We work as a team to educate the students in live sessions online and through phone calls. My partner in my class is Sharon, who has been with my school for 8 years. She is one of the most knowledgeable resource teachers I have ever met. This is her first non-administrative position in a long time, but she has adjusted to being back in a teaching setting like the pro she is.
• Because Sharon handles 2 other teachers' DEC students, the 4 of us work as a team in our live teaching sessions. Linda is the team leader and has been in the classroom longer than I've been alive. Keith is a second year teacher who originally worked at our schools technical help desk while finishing his certification. I'm in such good company! The other 4 teachers work together in a similar fashion, but there's been some rollover on that team. A new teacher was added in November, taking pressure off our increasing student load. Another teacher gave notice and quit as of New Year's Eve. Unfortunately, her replacement won't start until after January 13th. We may have to split the resigned teacher's students and grade their remaining work while finishing our own work. I will know more about this tomorrow.

I think that's enough background for now! Please note that all names are and will be changed or at least obscured.

More background info

Aside from teaching 12th grade English, I also run one of the few student clubs the school offers. I wrote about it last year when it first started and am reposting it here for your enjoyment:

We were given a challenge to create student activities and clubs while remaining in an online environment. My brain spun figuring out how to have our kids do something together but while remaining physically separate. It quickly occurred to me that we have a chat room / classroom program, Elluminate, where students could chat together. However, just sitting around and typing back and forth is not an activity.

Finally, my brain latched on to the last online class I took as a student. It was a creative writing class where students commented on each other’s work but never met in person. The only time I ever met my teacher was when I was required to attend an open mic reading night on the physical campus. At the time, I wanted to complain that we could have had our own reading circle if we had used microphones…

“Our students have microphones! They could have a virtual open mic reading group!” I immediately called my principal with this idea. In his quiet but affirming way, he urged me to iron out any details and write a formal proposal. My mentor teacher proofed it and suggested the name “Writers Read”. The proposal was submitted… and approved. Now what was I supposed to do? I had never sponsored a club before. My school had never run clubs before. I was stepping into complete foreign territory.

I created a PowerPoint presentation for the English department to send out to their students, asking for their participation. Over the next few weeks, the trickle of student interest turned into a dozen confirmed readers. I started to get even more nervous because they were actually enthusiastic. What if the microphones didn’t work? What if they forgot to show? What if they wanted to show and we had a technical issue with Elluminate?

The day of the meeting, students started calling me to make sure Writers Read was still happening. I assured them if they had signed up and cleared their writing with me (no profanity, no over the top violence), all they needed was their microphone. About 20 minutes before the meeting started, I logged in to prep the Elluminate room. There were already a dozen students waiting for me! My jaw dropped so hard it almost took the microphone off my own headset. I clicked on my mic, thanked them for showing up so early and asked for them to be patient while I got settled. Thankfully, my mentor teacher arrived online soon after me and started turning on chat privileges and chatting with the students while I loaded the club graphics.

The Elluminate room started to swell with students and curious faculty. By the appointed time to start the meeting hit, we were at 28 people logged in. Considering only half the student population was currently enrolled in an English class to even hear about this, and considering most Elluminate sessions only have ten attendees at the most, I was hopping up and down in my chair. I explained to the group that we had a list of students ready to read and turned on the microphone of the student who was listed to go first. We heard a sharp intake of breath before he burst out a rhythmic poem called “Love Strong”. The wave of applause icons flooded the chat room and the compliments poured in before I could ask for feedback.

This continued for an hour. One girl rapped about her running ability. Another read the first chapter of a novel she has written. We closed with a haunting poem of a young man with a deep voice, imploring his friend to not attempt suicide. He let us know the poem worked, which I believed with that amount of eloquence.

I started to wind down the meeting, asking for suggestions. As a unit, they all roared demand more meetings than the monthly ones I had scheduled. They wanted more time to talk with each other and to share their writing. They told me this first meeting was what made their school experience feel perfect because they knew they weren’t alone in a virtual vacuum. I made promises to change the meeting schedule after the next one in February and let them chat with each other for a while longer. They had, within a little over an hour, formed a community.