marmor infidum

Holding

I hate holding. It is the worst thing that can happen to a school. It is dishonest, demeaning, and draining. One would think that every teacher's dream is to sit around with kids and not plan lessons or collect papers to grade. Quite the opposite! This is what most teachers think about holding:

 

 

 

It's not a thrilling experience. It's generally full of students eating in the classroom, listening to iPods, and breaking every school rule that makes a distinction between home and school.

The most important question every teacher has is singular, narrow, and petty: How can I get a working projector by 7:42?

Everything revolves around this. Otherwise, children are bored out of their minds:

Holding isn't so bad for me. I happen to have absolutely no students during the holding pattern:

This makes my planning time for the week, very enjoyable.

Comments on Portfolios from Last Year

Looking through the portfolios, I tended toward those of English teachers, especially English II teachers. I was drawn in by Elise’s, Jen’s, and Stacy’s.

Elise’s strongest points, I think, are in her description of her community and in her teaching strategies. She has excellent documentation of her SATP cards and the method of measuring student achievement on State Test objectives. The layout of those pages is a little odd, but it is smooth enough to figure out what is going on. She used arrows with captions for just about every photograph, so it was easy enough to interpret everything she put up. Also, everything she had on her pages was meaningful; there was no fluff and filler.

Jen’s strength is in her student evaluations, which are largely based on student video responses. I am definitely going to record my kids for my portfolio page. I already have in mind some of the kids I want to hear from last year’s class. Jen does a better job at putting in an appropriate amount of filler to make her pages a little more aesthetically appealing.

Stacy’s teaching strategies page is well organized. She has several photos labeled 1 through 8 at the top of the page, with no captions. Down in the body of the page she gives a detailed description of whatever is displayed in the photograph. Also, maybe winning the aware for “most inspiring,” I liked her account of getting students more confident with writing at the bottom of the page. It was all about high expectations. I would have liked a little more description of how she conveyed or displayed her high expectations, but I think I can guess.

A few others’ portfolios—I won’t name names—were just too skimpy with useful information. There were nifty graphics, some decent advice, and good “teachery” maxims, but no concrete examples of practices, successes, or failures. The portfolio, in my mind, is for the sake of the reader. A teacher knows what has worked and what has not, but it takes time and care to be able to convey that built knowledge to the next generation of teachers.

(One thing that I do not like about the portfolio project is just the fact that there are twenty-some projects every year, but no digested form. A new teacher has to read through all twenty-some to get anything out of it, and it might be better if there were a “best of” page that synthesized or highlighted some of the best examples of the portfolios.)