Countdown to Launch

Tomorrow I meet and greet the incoming freshmen and transfer students at La Grande High School. On Tuesday the regular schedule begins. I'm a little anxious, but in a pleasant anticipatory way. Let the good times roll. Here's how my past week has gone:

I met my cooperating teacher, Evonne Cranford, this past Tuesday. She sounds even more excited about the upcoming school year than me; I take this to be a good sign. Though I have not yet seen her perform in front of a class, she seems quite organized, energetic, and generally 'with it.' With any luck, some of those qualities will rub off on me over the next semester.

On Wednesday morning the school district met in the middle school commons to catch up on budgeting news, introduce new faces (including me and several other EOU student teachers -- hi guys!), and preview the differentiated instruction classes that district teachers will go through this year. I won't bore you with details -- if you're teaching this year, dear reader, then I'm sure you sat through something quite similar.

On Thursday morning the high school math teachers held a department meeting. Ms. Cranford happens to be the department head; lucky me. Most of the discussion went way over my pay-grade; the veterans kicked around ideas about how to reshuffle the class progression. Our comrade Leigh Collins was stuck in there with me: she had been assigned to Pat Desjardin, who teaches math and science. Later that day I learned that she had been reassigned to a different school. Poor Leigh! She sat through that meeting for nothing! If you're reading this, Leigh, I hope you have better luck at your new station.

That left me and Evonne Thursday afternoon, Friday, and tomorrow morning to make other preparations. I have my own desk already; it sits in the front of the class, just to the left of the whiteboard. (Yes, LHS uses dry-erase markers and whiteboards. No, I will not be changing the title of my blog to Marker Jockey.) I spent most of Friday wheeling textbooks into the classroom and making copies of the syllabus. That was fine by me, as I really didn't know how else I could help to prepare. Evonne's a busy lady: she's the math department head, the union rep for the high school, and I think she wears a few other hats too. Her phone rang at least once per hour on average.

Evonne recommended that I start out by teaching her Algebra Plus class first. (It's a transitional class between Algebra I and Geometry.) I have a few ideas for some lessons, but we haven't had time to discuss exactly when and how we're going to split up the teaching duties. That discussion will probably happen this week. I aim to get my feet wet during the week after; that should give me time to learn names and get a feel for her teaching style first. I will try to match and complement her style to the extent I feel comfortable doing so. With any luck this will make the transition from her teaching to my teaching less jarring for the students. Besides, I should learn to drive the car before I try to overhaul the engine.

Wish me luck, comrades. And be sure to tell me how your own classes go! When in doubt, err on the side of posting too much to your blogs (as long as you don't compromise student confidentiality, of course). I'm sure I'll have a lot to learn from everyone.

Highlights from My (Boring) Break

Yeah, so I have not exactly been keeping up with my blog. I doubt that I'm the only one in our cohort to neglect their writing. Who can blame us? There really hasn't been much to write about -- at least not much about our education as teachers. I have settled into a holding pattern while I wait to hear from my placement district. I should fire off an e-mail to them -- maybe tomorrow.

I suspect that most readers will find my break-week activities exceedingly dull. When given the opportunity, I can out-lazy most anyone. (It's a good thing I'm not teaching English composition. That last sentence would never pass scrutiny.) I've let my inner geek run wild, and spent most of the past few weeks surfing the internet, playing video games and watching movies. Surprise, surprise.

On the gaming front, I've started playing a free massively-multiplayer online role-playing game called Urban Dead. The game takes place in a fictitious cityscape that has been permanently quarantined after a zombie-virus outbreak. Many players take on the roles of survivors fighting to stay alive, while other people play the zombies and try to snack on the survivors. To make things more interesting, survivors that fall to zombies (or other survivors!) rise again as zombies, and zombies can receive treatment (voluntarily or not) for their "condition." This gives a character many opportunities to switch teams. The text-based interface is quite primitive by industry standards, but such minimalism has its charms. The flow of gameplay is entirely determined by the players themselves -- there are no computer-controlled characters or scripted objectives -- and Urban Dead boasts a rich metagame, with players on both sides coordinating raids on enemy territory and working out new zombie-warfare tactics. On a more practical note, players are limited to 50 actions per day, which makes Urban Dead much less of an addictive timesink than games like World of Warcraft. Enjoying this game will not cut into my schedule in any appreciable way as I start student-teaching.

Andrea and I have also watched a couple of good movies within the past couple of days. Yesterday we rented Role Models, the first half of which provides a hilarious comedic take on how not to interact with students, or children in general. (The second half is debatable -- the protaganists' hearts wind up in the right place, though their methods remain unorthodox at best.)

Today we went to see District 9 in the local cinema, which turned out to be the best sci-fi thriller I've seen in years. The premise is cool enough to start with: a space-alien mothership breaks down over Johannesburg, South Africa, and the surviving bipedal prawn-creatures have been herded into a squalorous refugee camp straight out of recent world news stories. All I can say without spoiling the plot is that the film holds a funhouse mirror up to the strained relationship between real African refugee camps and the nations that host them. It's a damn shame that no public-school social studies teacher will ever get away with showing District 9 to his or her students since the ultraviolence quotient gets jacked way up over the course of the film. But I would still heartily recommend it, along with Hotel Rwanda, to any student mature enough to cope with the grit and the gore.

Cohort members, I look forward to hearing about how your breaks went. Surely most of your stories can top this post.

Thoughts on Teachers Who Wear Religious Articles of Clothing

In an earlier post I asked for you to vote on whether Oregon teachers should be allowed to wear articles of religious clothing in the classroom. As I write this, Oregon is one of only two states that forbids public schoolteachers from wearing such garb through a statewide law, though many states give individual districts the option of banning religious articles in their local dress codes.

My informal survey is now closed; five readers voted against allowing religious clothing, and two voted in favor. As an erstwhile statistics tutor, I am contractually obligated to point out that the results of this poll may not be truly representative of the opinions held by the larger student-teaching community. The sample was small but more importantly it was self-selected; people who abstain from voluntary questionnaires tend to hold different viewpoints from those who choose to respond. (Those in the polling business refer to this phenomenon as non-response bias. Keep that in mind the next time your local TV news or Cosmopolitan-knockoff rag posts the results of a viewer/reader survey.) For all I know, the larger teaching community may only oppose classroom religious garb by a 4:3 ratio, or may even favor lifting the ban by a 51:49 ratio. My surveys are strictly for fun, dear readers; don't read too much into their results.

Enough stalling; the time has come for me to lay my cards on the table as promised. Yes, I strongly favor the separation of church and state, and not just because I am an atheist. (Believers have an equally good reason to keep religion out of government. Separation cuts both ways: not only does it protect government policy from religious dogmatism, it also protects the faithful from the corrupting influence of political ambition and power. So argued Roger Williams, the extremely religious founder of Rhode Island and an early proponent of church-state separation.) Since public education is currently the province of the state, any line drawn between church and state must pass through our schools. It may then surprise you to learn that I do not feel that the issue of religious garb on teachers marks a good place to draw this line.

That's right; I may well be the only atheist to favor lifting the ban. Here's why. In spite of our nation's claims of religious pluralism, Christianity is often perceived as the default spiritual inclination for any American who does not make other beliefs known to their acquaintances. I would like to undermine this assumption, especially among our schoolchildren. Part of receiving a well-rounded education is learning that there exist a staggering variety of viewpoints on any topic you care to name. Some viewpoints may be more useful than others (see the evolution-versus-intelligent-creation debate), but any teacher who only exposes students to one way of looking at anything dishonors their profession. Lifting the ban on religious garb may open the public teaching profession to good people who hold more exotic faiths, which could make our students more comfortable with the idea that the spiritual beliefs they were taught as children are not the only valid ones for a role model to hold. On a more practical note, our schools are chronically understaffed -- we need all the good teachers we can hire, and religious affiliation is a piss-poor reason for discouraging highly qualified applicants. If the best algebra teacher we can find is a Muslim woman who wears the traditional head scarf, then I want to see her working a public classroom. And I would pay good money to watch the druid blogger and historian John Michael Greer (a fellow Oregonian from Ashland) teach social studies next door.

My astute readers will no doubt raise a cogent objection: what effect would lifting the ban have on conservative rural districts? We may find great diversity in the more populous regions of the state, but removing a check on the more strident elements of rural American Christianity could make these districts even greater pits of intolerance -- right? It could work out that way, but I am willing to take that risk. Quite frankly, I don't see how conditions could grow that much worse than they already are. If teachers have the freedom to wear a tasteful crucifix in class (tasteful is a relative term here of course), then maybe a few of the more open-minded and liberal Christian teachers will wear them as well. This could show students that Christianity need not be coterminous with right-wing politics, an important lesson to learn in the post-Bush era. And if I ever find myself teaching in a district that heavily agitates for intelligent design propaganda in biology (sociological discussions are fine), I would like to have the legal right to wear some Pastafarian gear in class to get my epic counter-protest lulz. Yeah, I teach math, but that's no reason not to get involved -- especially if lulz are at stake.

My last comment does lead to a greater concern that must still be addressed, however. How do we keep openly-worn religious iconography from derailing the instruction of our regularly-scheduled curriculum? This is a very serious constitutional question; we flirt now with the finer edge of the First Amendment's establishment clause. I would argue that teachers who make the conscientious decision to wear their religious accessories to class have an obligation to briefly answer any questions about their gear while deflecting any attempts by students to open an in-class theological debate. Kids are curious -- that's perfectly natural and should even be encouraged -- but they also need to learn that there's a proper time and place for every discussion. Any teacher who cannot balance these considerations has no business flashing his or her gear, and might not be well-suited for teaching at all.

With that, I surrender the floor to my fellow CJs once again. Agree with me, disagree with me, but never let it be said that I fear to tap-dance on the electrified third rail.