Thanksgiving Reflection: (removed).

This blog post has been moved to my emotional dumpster personal blog (tumblr)

I apologize for breaking character with this blog. Hence, I have moved it to a more appropriate setting - my personal tumblr. The content was certainly related to my education experiences. However, it was not a creative or thoughtful post nor was it designed to be of any use or insight into the educational field. From here on out, I will attempt to focus my posts to be related to education, educational news, and my personal journey through education. I once again apologize and hope I have not left a sour image with my readers.

~Ryan

Happy Veteran's Day: The Pen and The Sword

Some say that "the pen is mightier than the sword". This is an old saying that states that the ability of thinking and writing have a much more profound influence on people than violence. Many times I do agree with this statement, and I hold by it as a teacher. However, perhaps in a different light one should consider the weight of the sword.

I might be stretching my argument here but, when our nation was founded, it did take the pen to unite the minds and hearts of a people who would then become Americans. What started as an idea became a movement and eventually into action. However, it definitely took more than a bunch of smart policy makers armed with pen and paper to defend the ideas they had. It required the sword to stand by those words of freedom and defend them against any who would take those ideas away.

Today we honor our veterans, soldiers who have fought and sacrificed for many rights and privileges that we might take for granted. For example, I recently participated in the mid-term elections, voicing my opinion on some hot topics of governance in Nevada, in particular about the proposed Margin Tax. Of course, the right to vote is the first thought we Americans probably think of when we consider everything our soldiers have fought for.

I've always wanted to serve our country, but I could never wield the sword. I can't fight on the front-lines like many of our bravest do. However, what I can do is serve at home, as a teacher, and help our youth learn to use the pen. It was what our veterans fought for - the freedom to have an education and a chance to use what many claim is stronger than the sword. Today, we remember that without the sword, the pen wouldn't have a fighting chance. Thank you to all our veterans and soldiers still fighting today.


If you would like to have an activity for your students to help support our troops, I suggest having them write a letter. Soldiers away from home deserve not just a bit of home, but also our gratitude. My class was studying Arthurian legends, and the topic of chivalry would always come up. When I asked them who in our modern day are chivalrous knights, many responded with soldiers. Take the time to find a local or national organization who will help you send your messages of love to our soldiers on the field. I recommend www.amillionthanks.org as a way to send your letters.

A potential teacher’s math homework

"Yes...yes I do." 

http://zenpencils.com/comic/124-taylor-mali-what-teachers-make/

Here’s a math word problem to consider:

“ A teacher makes x amount of money. If rent is $600 a month, car payment and maintenance $250 a month, food and gas $500 a month, student loan payments $300 a month, phone bill $150 a month, cable and internet $100 a month, and insurances $400 a month, how much would a teacher need to make to put away a solid $8,000 a year for miscellaneous expenses and savings?”

Answer: $35,000

As a potential English teacher, please don’t hate on the hastily created word problem and budget. I’m not great at math nor am I great at budgeting my life yet (but it certainly got me seriously thinking about my expenses)

As a new teacher, that figure above is about what I’ll make for my first few years of teaching. I’m not at that point in my life where that number actually makes sense so I have to break this down into the value I’m most accustomed to: dollars/hour.

(The following calculations get confusing so bear with me on my rationale here)

A typical person earning this wage works 40 hours a week for 52 weeks a year. That means 40 hours times 52 weeks or 2080 work hours. If during that year this person earns $35,000 for 2080 work hours, that equates to $16.82 per hour.

(40 x 52 = 2080)

($35,000/2080 = 16.82)

To be fair, teachers work about 180 school days a year. Readjusting our calculations, this means teachers make about $24.30 an hour, albeit the pay is spread to cover the entire year (woo, paid summers off?).

Now that seems like a nice sum considering minimum wage is $8.25 and I am currently earning $11.00 at my part time hospitality job on the Strip (visit me at Margaritaville anytime, folks). However, I clocked myself grading essays at about 2 minutes a paper. (Here it  comes! More math!) 

This means…

For a typical class of 30, there are 30 essays to grade. However, I will have about 5 classes so (30 x 5) I will have 150 essays to grade. At 2 minutes an essay, that’s (150 x 2) or 300 minutes of work AFTER CLASS or (300/60) 5 hours of extra work. On the list of things teachers do outside of the 8 hour class day include: lesson prep, grading papers, extracurricular activities, parent-teacher conferences, professional development, etc.

At this point, I’m pretty much burned out of numbers and figuring things out for now. All this began because I was curious about what my friends were making with their post-grad careers. Ranging from IT to Non-Profit organizational work, I wanted to know how the numbers fit in with my teaching career. I’m hoping the above thought process broke it down, but really it all boils down to this comic. I highly suggest reading this while listening to the original poem being recited as it displays some powerful emotions behind the passions of teaching which I hope to address in a future post. 

I think all the numbers are just getting to me. If you have any thoughts on what you or I make, please leave a comment!

Teaching Techniques: Five quick ways to engage

Teaching Techniques: Five quick ways to engage

Within the first week of observation, I picked up on a couple of tips to engage students in the classroom that were different from the traditional model. This is the first of a long series of teaching technique lists I will create based off what I see in the classroom and learn from other sources. I hope that they can be of use to you in your classrooms as well.

1. Attendance question

High school students in Clark County are expected to be awake and alert for learning as early as 7am. In order to engage their minds slightly before actual instruction and get them to speak, my mentor teacher posts an "attendance question" on the board. As students walk in, they read the question and think of an answer. The question is typically simple such as "what is your favorite food" or "what do you want to be when you grow up". The students then give their short answer when called on for roll instead of the typical uninterested "here". This gives the teacher an opportunity to learn about their students while taking role. This can also be a great transition into the lesson if the question pertains to an idea to be brought up later.

2. Polling the class: Individual whiteboards

Want to get immediate feedback while engaging students who need to move and be active? Sometimes asking kids to raise their hands gets chaotic when they vie for attention. It also excludes the quiet and shy students or the ones who need a second to respond. One way you can resolve this issue if you give each student a small whiteboard to use during class. When you ask a question, instead of everyone raising their hands, give them a minute to write their answers on the boards then hold them up. This will give you immediate feedback on all the students, keep them active (because who doesn't like to write on white boards?), and if everyone is looking forward, keep answers anonymous. Think a whiteboard for each student isn't cheap? Check out the prices on Amazon for an affordable investment.

3. The leader of the group

Don't want to get too intricate or spend too much time having kids choose who will do what in a group? Try this. Once students are broken up in groups of 3-5, get everyone's attention and tell them that on the count of three they have to silently point to someone in the group to be a leader. One. Two. Three. All groups should have someone singled out. That person typically is a natural leader or has a quality that the other group members don't mind following. However, to give them the chance to choose instead of just being thrown out there, explain that the chosen leaders have great responsibility, and that one of those responsibilities is the power of delegation. If they are confident that someone else in the group is more qualified to lead, then they can delegate the role of leader to that individual. This stresses the importance of the position and gives the groups some flexibility. This should keep group leader selection pretty simple.

4. Class Differentiation

This technique is often tricky because of its controversial nature. Looking at the name itself, you can tell that it could spell trouble if it ends up looking like you are splitting the class unfairly based off of visual biases. However, the true nature of this technique is to split the class up based on skill and ability, interest, etc. I'm not an expert (check out this blog post on "defining differentiated instruction" here) so I will mention only what I saw. My mentor teacher broke the class up into two parts - those who passed the proficiency exam and those who didn't. I was in charge of lecturing the students who passed. The assignments were slightly different but the concept was the same. Non-proficient students received in-depth lecturing on how to structure an essay based off of a sample writing proficiency prompt. Proficient students were given guided practice on writing an essay for a college entrance exam. The rationale behind this was to target the area of need for the students in one lesson.

5. Flipped Classroom

The typical classroom sees a teacher lecturing on new concepts and ideas, then group work or activities to enforce those ideas. However, studies have shown that students are better off the more face time they have with their instructor. In short, too much time is wasted on lecturing on new information in the class and homework that is typically the time when students work on applying that information is not getting done at home. In this digital information age, students are learning at younger ages how to access the limitless amount of info via technology. The Flipped Classroom proposes that educators take advantage of that mentality and begin posting lectures as homework and doing synthesis and application more in classrooms. This can be done in the form of videos and online lectures to be accessed from the internet outside of class.

I actually picked this up when I attended a workshop hosted by Downtown Las Vegas' Learning Village. I highly suggest looking at Jonathan Bergmann's website to learn more.

I hope that these first few techniques will be useful to you if you are a potential teacher like myself. If not, then maybe it was an interesting peek into what I have been seeing as a student teacher. Please leave a comment below if you like what you see or want me to try any of your techniques in the classroom!