Why I Left The Classroom: Part 2

This is a Teaching Post. It is likely to be my last, since I have left the classroom after - well, after a good long while. I was good at my job, but I left.

Part One was about why I became a teacher in the first place.

And here are the reasons why I decided to call it quits:

1) Writing is my first love, and I came to California to write screenplays. Teaching was always temporary. I felt like this next year could be huge for me and I don't want to have to quit in the middle of the school year and leave the kids with a string of subs, which is just about the worst thing that can happen to a class.

But that alone wouldn't have been enough, because that's really risky and there was a lot about teaching I loved.

2) I was displaced this year. See, most school systems operate on a "last hired, first fired basis" they call "seniority". The newest teachers get fired first. The less-new teachers don't get fired, but they get moved to another school. They call that "displacement." When the economic crisis started, I was smack in the middle at my school as far as seniority. About three years ago they started to lay off and displace teachers, and eventually I dropped to dead last. Think about that. That means HALF of our English department was removed from our school. This was going to be my year, and that means that after several years working to build a school that, quite frankly, was a disaster when it opened my first year here, I was forced to go elsewhere. I don't want to go elsewhere. I love my little ghetto school. I love that student population. Not every teacher can handle a school like that, but for me, it was the perfect place. I would have died in Malibu, not that those schools had openings. It's the poor schools that lose all their teachers.


Why do the poor schools lose their teachers more? Because those are the schools that got the newest teachers. I was more experienced than most other teachers when I came to this school, but I was out of state, so I had no seniority, and that meant I got placed at a school nobody wanted. So the teachers who stick it out, who work hard in those less desirable schools, they get kicked to the curb while the older teachers stay with the rich kids. We also lost almost all of our arts programs because once our band/choral/dance/art teachers get laid off or displaced, they don't usually get replaced. So once again, rich kids get the arts programs and the poor kids get... I don't know. I know they still have the yearbook because my replacement adviser was willing to give up a planning period to teach it.


3) I don't like the direction we're headed. My methods are a little unconventional. I do what I want most of the year, and then two weeks before the state test, I cram the kids with test taking skills, and show them how to answer multiple choice questions. This is something I'm exceptionally good at - figuring out what sounds like the best answer when I have no idea what it is - so I spend two weeks showing the kids how to do that. If you check my test scores, you'll see that my kids fare as well on the test as most kids who spend all year prepping. But my kids also know how to think for themselves and didn't die from boredom.


It's obvious to me, however, that I won't be able to get away with that anymore. The district brought in this guy last year -  I'll call him Data Guy. Data Guy spent ONE YEAR as a math teacher, so naturally he knows all about our jobs. For some reason he was put in charge of the English department, where his job became fixing our test scores. His idea? Get rid of novels completely and replace them with short pieces followed by multiple choice questions. No more abstract thought.  What purpose do novels serve if you can't easily break them down to A-E answers? You can't quantify a novel, so we don't want to waste our time on them.


Right before the state tests, we were all given a series of lessons to give. As in, Data Guy guy sent us our lesson plan for the day and we were supposed to follow it, then test the kids, then send him the tests so he could see how we did. I didn't follow his lessons. I did the test the first two weeks, and when my kids did better than most of the other classes, I decided this was stupid. I threw the rest of the lessons and tests in the recycling.


But that's where we're headed. The end game is for every single teacher to teach the exact same lesson on the exact same day so that a kid can go from one class to the other and not experience anything different.


Data Guy explained it to me this way: If one teacher is better than the other, then the kid with the bad teacher has an unfair disadvantage. If every teacher covers the exact same material the exact same way, the kids are all on equal footing.


I am not kidding you right now. This is his reason for making us all follow the same lesson plans day after day.


I can't do that. I refuse to do that, and if I had stayed in the classroom I would have been fired. I might have punched someone in the face by the end of the year. But there was no way in hell I was going to follow an English lesson plan designed by a Data Guy who spent one year teaching math in some other school. He, of course, told us we'd all come up with our ideas together. He said this right before he came up with all the ideas.


I still remember what he said when I asked him if he was serious about ditching novels, because that would mean a kid could get to college without ever having read one. "I had never read a novel when I got to UCLA," he said. Then he thought for a minute and added, "Although I did have a lot of trouble in English that first year."

Why I Left the Classroom - Part One

This is not a post about screenwriting, other than to mention that it was inspired by a really good documentary I just watched called American Teacher.

This is a post about teaching. More specifically, about why I'm not anymore. And this post turned out to be super long, so I split it into parts. I'm just warning you so you can bow out now.

First of all, this was a really great documentary. It gives a good glimpse of what teaching is really like from the perspective of teachers who are dedicated to the profession. There is a section where some who have quit gave up their reasons for leaving, and it made me want to share mine. I have this forum here, so...

My mom was a teacher and she always told me I'd be a teacher too, so naturally I wanted to do everything except teach. Wait, I should amend that. My mom wasn't just a teacher, my mom was THE teacher. At my class reunion, half my former classmates asked how she was doing. Everybody loved my mom, and I mean EVERYBODY. She was the kind of teacher you remember forever, the one who inspires you to do better with your life. At my last game as a member of the school's marching band, when I was supposed to be getting cheered from the crowd because I was a senior, your parents came down to stand next to you and share the honor. There was no sharing. Everybody in the crowd was so happy to see my mom, I don't think they noticed I was there.

The thing is, I never minded. It was actually a great way to make friends. I'm her daughter, which automatically made me interesting and sometimes cool.

I'm telling you, she was that good. It's been a lot for me to live up to.

I say "was" not because she's dead, but because she retired. She probably would have kept going, but she saw the same things I see in the system. We both left for many of the same reasons.

I was going to be a reporter, except it turns out that I hated being a reporter, so I started teaching because it was a job I could do and not hate, and it would give me an income while I figured out a new plan. I never intended to be a lifelong teacher. When I found screenwriting the next year, I was absolutely sure I would leave this horrible profession I'd chosen as soon as I could.

Because there is one truth every teacher will agree on: Your first year as a teacher will be the worst damn year of your life.

These kids like to test you, and you don't know what the hell you're doing, so they win all the time. My very first day - I looked like I was about 12 at the time - a girl who was now taking freshman English for the third time gave me attitude. I asked her if she wanted to take the class for a third time.

"You ain't gotta be sharing my business like that!" she said.

I told her if she was ashamed of failing classes, she should stop failing classes. And for some reason, she decided she liked me after that. She ended up passing English that year.

That's how I roll, kids. No crap in my classroom. You meet my expectations or you don't get the grade.

But I still remember that first year with horror. I bribed them with playtime on the football field.

That was in North Carolina, which is a non-union state. Now, people have different feelings about unions, but I'll tell you what I know. In North Carolina I had to pay extra for dental and vision insurance, and I made a starting salary of $24,000 a year. In California I made well over twice that much (which comes to proportionately more even when you add in standard of living)  and my benefits were terrific. So, you can rag on unions all you want, but I appreciate being able to get contact lenses so I can actually see the board. Also, eating is nice.

Anyway, time rolls on. I took over the school's yearbook and I loved it. Then I moved to California and took over that school's yearbook too.

American Teacher makes a big deal about how much time teachers spend working, and that's certainly true, but it doesn't have to be as bad as the film makes out. I certainly graded papers at home and stayed after a lot, especially in the early yearbook years, but by my fourth or fifth year I learned how to get things done so most days I could walk out the door at the bell. I loved teaching yearbook, I loved teaching English, I loved my boss, I loved my room, I loved my kids. It was fun - talking about my favorite subject every day with these really wonderful teenagers. I have a picture over my desk even now of my favorite group of seniors crushing me at the senior picnic, all drenched from a water balloon fight. I loved every class I've ever taught. The kids are amazing.

So why did I quit? That's part two, which I will post tomorrow.

Time for change

....And I'm back.. I slept for NINE HOURS last night. That's like the most hours I've slept in a year. I would have slept even longer, but the dogs woke me up with a squirrel alert. That's how tired I was.

I am no longer a teacher. It's weird. I was sad walking out of my classroom for the last time, but I know it was the right call. Morale at our school is in the toilet because next year we'll have a new boss, and the people who get to choose that boss are not trustworthy. They're in with the latest trend to make everything in education about tests. The guy who's been angling for the principal's spot thinks we shouldn't even teach novels anymore; just test prep all year. Imagine turning English into year-round test prep. No thank you. I weep for what's coming.

I'll miss the kids. I'll miss creating the yearbook. On the way out I'm sure my replacement was getting irritated with all the things I was telling him - "The door sticks, so you have to slam into it sometimes to get it open, and the computer doesn't read flash drives but it does print, and I left you a scanner/printer but it's out of ink, and I think you should get a wireless router...." I loved that classroom, and I loved yearbook, and I want to make sure they're okay.

And now I transition into writer first, educator second.

I think it helps that I'm still really busy. I've got meetings like gangbusters right now, and in between I still have wedding planning and several screenplay projects to work on. I haven't felt the loss of my job because I've got a new one. I have a few more things to say about meetings, but that can wait for another day because I have to go get ready to drive to the next one.

Watching the kids in action

Last year I gave my students an assignment to write short film scripts as their final project. It went so well that this year I decided to expand it. Not only are they writing scripts, but they're filming them.

It's the greatest thing I've ever done, and I wish I'd thought of this years ago. The kids are really getting into it.

I'm going to focus on one group in particular. All names are fake.

So Julie has told me numerous times that she wants to be a director some day, and she definitely has the personality for it. She's bossy, opinionated, but well liked. Right now I'm watching her sit on a table, surrounded by her groupmates, as she lists the changes they will be making to the script after I gave them notes.

Annie, the script writer, is off in the corner, waiting to be told what changes to make.

Dariah, who was supposed to be the co-director, is so obviously the producer. She came to me for the notes on the script, she's planning all the locations, and when Julie got off topic, Dariah reminded everyone to focus on the material. She's taking money from the group to pay for props they want to use. (I do not require them to spend money, but they really want to.) And she has an assistant.

Kris, who is the star of this particular horror film, wanders around the room, occasionally cracking jokes, checking his cell phone, not able to focus on anything for more than five minutes.

The rest of the kids chime in with suggestions on how their characters should die.

Whitney, the DP, only cares about where they want her to put the camera.

I gave them notes to make the characters more developed because in their first draft people just go to a party and die and don't really exist outside that event, so now they're discussing how they can expand their scenes to create more conflict between the characters.

It's beautiful to watch.

Time to evolve

I have officially decided to quit my day job.

Well, not exactly "quit". More like modify.

Today was a good day, but I am circling toward burnout. The accumulation of kids who have set out to make my life hell over the years has finally gotten to me, and I no longer feel enthusiastic about going to work every day.

Funny thing is, today has been so good that I'm rethinking my position.

But I can't. I must steel myself and move forward. It doesn't matter how awesome their Great Gatsby projects are. In fact, The Great Gatsby projects are a sign. My first year teaching, I saw another teacher's projects. Her kids had made 3-D models of New York and Long Island with all of the locations on from the novel on it, and I just thought that was the coolest project. I promised that some day I would teach Gatsby and I would do that project. And now, I am. My dream has been realized.

Among others, I've taught Hamlet, Animal Farm, Siddhartha, and The Joy Luck Club, all books I just wanted to share with the kids. I've done screenwriting and poetry and essay writing and short stories. I've taught almost every thing I ever wanted to teach.

And like today, I still have really great days. I'd rather quit while I still remember really great days.

But it's not totally up to me. Our enrollment is shrinking, so again in June teachers will be displaced from this school. Every year since the economy crashed, teachers have been forced to find new jobs. I've always avoided the chopping block because I've been here long enough, and last year I was skipped because I do yearbook. Teachers who'd been here longer were displaced over me, for which I was grateful. But it caused such a fuss that the principal has already said he won't do that again. This year, seniority is the only factor, and I'm second from the bottom. I don't want another school. I've put too much into this one.

My boss is retiring. I love my boss. I hate all other bosses.

I don't have a screenwriting career yet, but I am taking meetings. Eventually I will have scripts passed around town. I am focusing more on writing, and there is a possibility I will be able to launch a career within the next year. If I start a new year at a new school, I can't leave in the middle of it, and I don't want to take a million days off, because then the kids would suffer.

So for all these reasons I've decided to become a substitute teacher. I can stay at my school, only working when requested by teachers who know me. I won't have papers to grade or lessons to plan, and if I need to walk away in the middle of the year I can. I can still teach lessons whenever a teacher leaves me nothing to do, and if I hate it, and somehow I sabotage my screenwriting chances, I can always go back into the classroom. In the meantime, I keep my benefits and a full time job. Even though I will take a pay cut, I can still pay the bills.

It's time for me to shift priorities. Writing will come first now.

A day with Cinemagic and 007

Yesterday I took 13 kids on a field trip to visit Pepperdine University, where the Cinemagic folks put together a cool presentation for young filmmakers. Cinemagic is an Irish group that started as a film festival and has grown to be an educational powerhouse for young filmmakers in the UK. Now they make regular trips to the US to do presentations.

So naturally, when I heard about the opportunity, I jumped on. I will be assigning short film scripts later this year, and hopefully following that up with mini films, so I chose the kids who went by who wanted to be project leaders on the assignment.

We saw three short films - one from a Pepperdine film student and two from teenagers in the Cinemagic group. That was some really impressive filmmaking from high-school age kids. The college kid's film was fun, and he followed up with a Q&A, which I know did my kids some good. They learned a lot. I did chuckle a bit when the director talked about how this 10-minute film took him an incredibly long time to write - two weeks.

At one point the presenters asked how many of us want to make films. I raised my hand, as did most of the kids in the room. How many want to be writers? Of course I raised my hand. How many of you want to make comedies? I raised my hand. One of my students said "Put your hand down, Miss, you don't do comedy." So much they don't know.

We got to sit in the control room while a group of college kids put together a show called Buenos Noches, Pepperdine. That was cool. Never been in a control room before.

But then came the kicker. The one and only Pierce Motherfucking Brosnan showed up and sat right fucking in front of me to do a Q&A. They showed some clips from Manions of America, Mrs. Doubtfire, The Ghost Writer, and Goldeneye. During the scene from Mrs. Doubtfire, during which he stood in all his hottest glory, tight chest exposed on a diving board for all to see, the older Pierce called out: "I'm still the same!"

Here he is right in front of me, talking on the phone to Joe Sargent, getting permission to show Manions to the kiddies. I did not take this picture, but the student who did was kind enough to send it to me:

He's still so damn cool. 


He really pushed the kids to stay in school because he wishes he had, and he talked about the process of working with a great director. He said the best thing a director can do is leave him alone and let him do his thing.

So it was a nifty experience. The kids seem to have gotten a lot out of it.

An incest joke

The other day I was teaching Irony, which I always do by first explaining why Alanis was wrong, although now kids don't even know that song anymore. Then I tell them the story of Oedipus. Then we read something ironic, in this case Kate Chopin's "Story of an Hour."

Irony is a tough concept to grasp for a lot of people, so you've got to triple the explanation. I'll probably have to explain it a few more times to really get it to sink in. But so far they seem to be following along okay. When I asked them why the ending of "Story of an Hour" is ironic, most of the kids got it.

I love teaching that story because it is two pages long, but it teaches about so very many literary concepts. Plus feminism. After the lesson we had a discussion about the purpose of marriage, and I thought the boys and girls were going to start a gender riot. They were seriously pissed off. Kids these days are jaded.

But that's not what this post is about.

While I was telling the story of Oedipus, I got to the part where he goes in and finds Jocasta hanging from the ceiling. I said "And then Oedipus found her dead. And he was distraught. He slapped himself and yelled MY MOTHER! (slap) MY WIFE!  (slap) MY MOTHER! (slap) MY WIFE!"

Although they enjoyed watching me slap myself, they did not get my Chinatown joke. And I thought, if one of you guys was there, you'd have laughed.

So often my brilliant comedy is lost on 16-year-olds.

Kids need good TV

The other day I was sitting in my classroom during my planning time, making the most out of my opportunity by grading papers watching Farscape on my laptop. A couple of girls who love me asked if they could use my room to work on their sewing assignment, and since they promised not to get in the way of my vital TV watching, I agreed.

Before you get all "Teachers don't do shit and get paid too much" rant, you should know that it was a Friday.

Anyhow, when I told the girls I was watching episodes of an old show, they rolled their eyes. I tried to explain by asking them what was their favorite fictional show. The plan was to tell them that one day they'd enjoy watching old episodes of that show to reminisce about how awesome it was.

Know what shows they immediately named? A bunch of reality shit. The first show one girl mentioned was Fact or Fiction, so I said No, girls, and actual fiction show, with a story. What shows do you watch with a story?

Know what one girl immediately said? Jersey Shore. Dammit to hell.

Eventually I got her to mention The Office, but then she confessed that she doesn't actually like The Office.

People, something has got to be done. This is just wrong.

So as they cut the shapes out of their pattern or whatever they were doing, I continued to watch Farscape. Then one of the girls asked what I was watching. "It sounds interesting," she said. "I want to watch that."

So I told them the premise of the show and that it was made by the Jim Henson company and included puppets and crazy creatures, and they both looked like they wanted to check it out. "That sounds cool," they said.

I don't know if they'll go home and watch Farscape today, but at the very least I planted a seed.

Work work work

School started today. I'm tired.

One of my classes has 46 students. I'm short two chairs, but had one absence, so one girl literally sat in another girl's lap today. I hope I have more chairs tomorrow. Or fewer students. Fewer students would be nice.

When school's in session I usually write only on weekends. I probably have about 18 pages or so left on the first draft, so it will be at least two more weekends before I'll be ready to move on to notes.

I wish I had been able to finish it before last week. Now I've got lesson plans to create and papers to grade. Work always gets in the way of all the cool stuff.

Looking for reading suggestions

Unfortunately my vacation nears its end this week. Next week I have to go back to school. That means today, instead of writing, I worked on a pacing plan for the school year. It's actually shaping into a beautiful pacing plan.

As I went through our American lit book to determine which stories I want to cover this year, I noticed we are seriously lacking in two things: Civil War and Slavery. I checked our novel list - same thing. It's like we're intentionally ignoring stuff that makes us uncomfortable. How can you read about American lit and ignore the Civil War?

Yet last year I'm pretty sure I did exactly that. I usually don't do chronological order when planning, but this year we're linking English classes to science and history classes. In other words, I will have the same set of 11th graders as a specific history teacher and a specific science teacher. It's called a Cohort, and I am soooo happy we are doing this.

But history teachers usually work in chronological order, so I decided to plan my readings the same way this year.

So long story short, I need some recommendations. I can't teach Roots - way too long. I have a selection from Frederick Douglass and one brief and somewhat boring slave narrative in the book, but that's it. I'm looking for some good slave stories. The kids need to learn about this and they never really do. A lot of you guys are really well read. Anybody got any good suggestions?

And then there's the Civil War. I may anger some people with this confession, but I am not a fan of Stephen Crane. I'm already reading The Things They Carried for a war novel, so I'm looking more for short stories and poems and non-boring essays about The Civil War. Any suggestions for that?

This all needs to be 11th grade appropriate, so nothing as complex as something like a Lolita or a Catch 22.

I figured it can't hurt to get some input from the group.

Update on the great class zombie project

Since it became clear we had neither the resources nor the time to make a solid short film out of any of the scripts the kids wrote for their screenplay projects, I assigned it to them as a final exam. Each group was to take their script and somehow present their story to the class. They could make a video or a play or a comic book or a puppet show or anything in between.

First of all, the screenplay have been great. This started as a zombie project, so most of the kids did exactly that, although there were a couple of exceptions. So you'd think, given how many zombie stories are out there, that I'd see pretty much the same shit over and over. Not so. Sure, some of them went the traditional route of people being chased across the city. Some of those were well done, some not so much. But some totally surprised me. I had zombie love stories, intelligent zombie comedies, and one story that was supposed to be serious but the kid who wrote it was so unintentionally funny I laughed my way through the damn thing.

My favorite line: "Guy bites her skin off, which appears to have caught her off guard." Always a joyous surprise to laugh that hard when you're grading papers. She did not understand what I thought was so goddamn funny.

Anyway, today they started presenting their projects. One group used Photoshop to turn pictures they took into a comic book that they then showed in a PowerPoint presentation. That was super cool.

The best part of all this is how some of the kids who did the most amazing work on this thing were some of my laziest kids. It's like they came alive as soon as I showed them the literary value of film. Hopefully that will carry over into their classes next year and they'll realize that what they learned applies to all the stories, not matter what the genre.

I'm definitely doing this next year.

The Matrix lesson plan

We spend a good part of our year at school preparing for standardized tests, so once the tests are over we get to do fun stuff. Since the kids have been working on screenplays, which turned out to be pretty awesome so far, I figured this week I'd show some clips from some of my favorite movies and talk about why they work.

The best lesson ended up revolving around The Matrix. I showed the subway battle with Agent Smith from the first film and explained why it works. Then I showed the playground fight with the billion Agent Smiths in the second movie and explained why it doesn't work.

In a nutshell, the first one has a plot. Neo doesn't believe he is special, but at the beginning of the fight he starts to wonder if he might be. Then he actually hurts Agent Smith and it pisses him off, so Agent Smith kicks his ass. And when you think Neo is about to give up, he stands and signals to Smith to bring it on, he's ready. But Smith is still stronger. And just when you think all is lost, Neo says he knows who he is. And he wins.

The fight in the playground Agent Smith talks and talks and talks and talks, then finally they fight. And Neo is never not winning. And then he beats them all up and flies away. It takes five whole minutes, which is super long in fight time. And no plot happens, just fighting.

If the first movie is about Neo accepting that he is special, that fight is very much about that. If the second movie is about Neo's fear that he can never live up to that image people have of him as a messiah, I guess the fight proves.... he is a messiah?

The kids all agreed completely. They found the second fight boring.

Then one kid goes "Miss, you're going to make us think when we go to the movies, aren't you?"

I nodded and smiled.

"But then we won't like the same movies anymore."

I laughed maniacally.

Stuff from this week

I was wondering where the week went when I remembered where the week went: yearbooks and Fable.

Yearbooks came out this week, and the senior class has been a real asshole about it. This is the coolest book we've ever done and it looks great even though we had extra work to do this year and less time in which to do it. I had no seniors on my yearbook staff. Actually, scratch that - I had one senior who was responsible for the senior section who just disappeared along with the pictures halfway through the year. So the senior section is thin. I begged and pleaded with the senior class to give me some photos and they shrugged their shoulders. So now they're all pissy and spreading bad press about the book, which is making it difficult to sell.

So get ready. Class of 2011 seems to want a whole lot for nothing.

Anyhow, I also got a new XBox. Ours was stolen over a year ago, but we finally got a new one last weekend so I could start over with my character on Fable 2. This time I'm doing all the side shit and dyeing my hair and stuff, and I'm taking the relationship shit seriously. Like, sure, I could go buy a shitty house and marry the first villager who demands a ring, but fuck that. I want a guy who's going places like Sam the alchemist or Greg the bookseller: upstanding citizens of Albion. And I will buy a nice house in a nice part of town with my earnings. No sleeping in the Gypsy caravan for me.

I love games like Fable because you control the story. The first time through this game I married a nerdy dude, but he seemed unhappy, so I took him to his favorite place to try to cheer him up with a picnic. We were attacked by bandits, and while I ran off to kill them all he was stabbed to death. That was really sad. Like for a minute I was really broken up about that. I just wanted him to be happy, and I got him killed instead.

So I'm waiting a while before I get married this time. I want to be a responsible ass kicking wife and homeowner. Sure I like to raise the dead to slaughter my enemies, but that doesn't mean I don't have love to give.

I still can't be a bad guy, though. No matter how many of these role playing games I get into, I still can't be bad.

Today in school we learned about zombies

Last week the eleventh grade English students all finished the same novel, and I was in charge of organizing the whole thing, including a culminating event where we screened the movie in the theater and ate Chinese food and whatnot, so I am tired.

I was so busy working on this that I failed to plan for the future, so Friday I told my kids "Now that we're done with this, I have no idea what we're doing on Monday."

And one of my kids says "Talk about zombies."

They know how much I love zombies. That class has thoroughly discussed our plan of action should the school be swarmed with zombies at any moment. We know where all the weapons and exits are.

So the kid says "Talk about zombies," and I say sure. Why not?

I brought in all my zombie books and asked the class why zombies are so popular. We discussed how they are empty vessels for metaphor, and how they represent so easily who we could be if we made poor decisions. Then I showed parts of Bella Lugosi's White Zombie, the first zombie film, and parts of Night of the Living Dead to show the evolution of zombies as a film creature. They're all mad today because they want to keep watching Night of the Living Dead. We talked about Fido and 28 Days Later and Shaun of the Dead and Zombieland and Zombie Strippers and Dead Snow. I told them about Maggie and Zombie Baby. I showed them World War Z and The Zombie Survival Guide and Zombie Haiku.

So now their assignment is to get into groups and write a script for a zombie short film. Today they're just brainstorming, but tomorrow I'm going to show them how to write a script. One group doesn't like zombies, so I'm allowing them to write about werewolves. One group immediately wanted to write about Jacob from Twilight but I nixed that because then they're not inventing anything. Then they wanted to write about Zombie Osama bin Laden but I nixed that too because it would just be a series of Osama jokes. Now they're getting more creative.

In addition to being a story that includes a protagonist and antagonist and rising action and all that, they must have some kind of metaphor. The zombies must symbolize some issue in our world. One kid came up with the idea of using them to symbolize our obsession with texting. One group wants to use them to represent what it's like to go to high school.

They are all over this thing. I've never seen kids so stoked about a project before. Clearly this was an excellent idea. Right now I'm just getting them to write the script, but if they're up to it I might get them to make the movies. Some days my job is really fun.

Don't take our soap

A brief political interlude as I link you to a well-said rant about school budgets.

The legislature in this state has a choice to make about how much we want to invest in our education. Right now they are dead set on the wrong path.

Please vote for kids when the time comes

I don't talk politics often, but I can't let this one go without a word.

This is for California residents, but anybody else is free to read as they desire.

In a few months you will be asked to vote on our tax rate. This vote is a simple choice. If we vote to keep up our taxes, our school system will only be half as in the red as we will be if we decide to lower our taxes we will cripple our school system. It is that simple.

We have had an outbreak lately of kids getting high and dealing drugs on campus because we had to layoff half our security guards. If a computer breaks, we don't have anyone to fix it. I paid $100 a couple of weeks ago to repair a school computer. Some of my friends are sending me boxes of Post-its because I ran out and the school has no more to give me.

Don't get me wrong, I like my job. I love these kids and I will teach them what they need to know if I have to paint on the white board in ink made from my own blood. But every year since these layoffs started it's gotten more and more difficult to get by.

This time our losses will come mostly from elementary schools. Thirty-one kids per teacher, is what we will have. In ELEMENTARY school. Imagine how much less education they're getting. I cringe to think of how far behind those kids will be by the time they get to us.

We're not allowed to order new textbooks. Summer school has been canceled for anyone but seniors and juniors. We may have to close down our school library for most of the week. I have no idea what will happen to our arts programs, because thus far we've been lucky enough to still have music and art and drama, but electives are no doubt on the chopping block. We already lost all of our health classes.

I'm going to post this again when the time comes to vote, but I just want to give you guys a heads up. I know we all want more money these days. We don't want to pay any more taxes. But the truth is, if we don't agree to this tax increase our kids WILL suffer.

This isn't about my salary or my job. I'm not going to be laid off and I'm not losing money no matter what happens. This isn't about unions or politicians or NCLB or whatever red herring people want to throw out there. This is about our kids. Please do not let them down for a few extra bucks.

Talk to me. I will recommend you something.

One of the great joys of my job is introducing kids to new stories. The major assignment for my juniors this semester was to read a novel of their choosing by an American author and write an essay then do a presentation about a book by that author.

One of my kids really really wanted I Am Legend but another kid got to it first. He was all pouty about it, so I had to quickly come up with another book he would love even more. I thought and decided to recommend Ender's Game.

At first he was all "I don't like sci-fi. This book looks stupid." Then he read the first chapter. He was still kind of grumpy. Then a day later he started telling me how much he enjoyed reading about Ender beating the crap out of his bully. We talked about how Ender's experience has some similarities to the way Einstein's theory of relativity led to the atomic bomb and he jumped on that. He was fascinated by the idea of that, as if he'd never realized books could be compared to real life issues.

But when he was done with Ender's Game he read I Am Legend for fun. Then he got so used to reading every day that he went back to the library and checked out something else. He's a total book worm now, always asking me if I've read whatever book he's into now. The other day he got all mad because there is not yet a sequel to the last book he enjoyed.

Every now and then I'll talk about a book or a movie and kids will ask me to write the title down. I look around and there are kids copying it so they can go get it somewhere. These kids NEVER take notes, so I'm just glad they heard something I said and cared enough to copy it. That's how I introduced these kids to films with subtitles.

I consider that whole recommendation thing a key part of my job. It's up to me to convince some of these kids they like to read when they think they don't. "You need a book, eh? Well let's see. What do you like?" Then I have to figure out how to give them a book they love so much they'll want to try reading something else when they're done.

It's pretty cool.

Kids say the most nonsensical things

There is a student in my tenth grade class who speaks a different language. He knows how to speak English, but in the interests of keeping up his street rep he chooses to speak in some kind of bizarre slang I've never before heard.

For example, to "murk" is to kill. "Getting swole up" means to put on weight and get buff. These are new to me. So like the suburban white child of two suburban white people that I am, I have started a list of interesting things this boy says next to their definitions. Every time he says something I don't understand I ask him to define it, then add it to my list. The whole class loves this and he is proud of his unique contribution to my creative endeavors.

I figure I have a choice: pretend to understand and seem cool and probably fail, or admit to my extreme white suburbanness and treat it like a foreign language that I find fascinating.

One day I'll be in dire need of a really interesting character, and there he will be, a whole list of slang terms I can use to make him feel as real as the real kid he's based on.

Youth of America - comme ci comme ca

One of my classes just loves to talk about movies, and they have discovered that if they ask the right questions about movies I will keep talking, thus avoiding them having to do any work.

Today they wanted to explain why Last House on the Left is a great movie. Basically it boils down to a guy's head exploding in a microwave.

"What makes an action movie good or bad, miss?" one of my brighter boys asked.

I told them that in a good action movie, the story doesn't stop for the action scenes. We discussed District 9, and how as the fight scenes progress the character ALSO progresses, so that we don't see two stories - the special effects story and the plot story.

One of my kids said "Like Transformers! There's plot and then there's action scenes and they don't really go together."

I agreed emphatically, then ranted a second about how much Transformers sucks, thinking they'd all yell protests at me.

Instead, most of the kids in the room admitted they think Transformers sucks too. One kid said he only saw half of it then turned it off because he didn't care.

There is hope for these little buggers yet.

Homework

I like the research part of writing. I'm currently working on a historical project again, but this time the story totally writes itself. As I'm reading a biography I'm highlighting like gangbusters because the character I've chosen to write about just happens to be naturally PERFECT for the story I want to tell.

I'm going to have to devote a lot of time to reading over the next few weeks because aside from reading two biographies of this person, I also now have given myself job-related homework.

I just assigned my 11th graders to choose a novel from a list of American authors, and by the time they were done selecting they had all convinced me to do the assignment with them, and somehow they convinced me to do a different book in the two classes, and of course I had to choose books I haven't read before, since I'm making them do the same.

So now I will be reading Their Eyes Were Watching God AND Gone With the Wind and doing presentations on both authors in January.

I tried to be all "But that's two books" and they all held up their copies of A Tale of Two Cities they've been assigned in history class and said they also have to read two books.

It's hard to argue with that logic.