First year AP teacher comes up for air: DELIBERATE PRACTICE

I have not posted much this year because I am busy with two new classes and a senior seminar. But this week, I am getting close to the zone finally, and had a chance to reflect, albeit for about 10 minutes, on what I have been doing in my stream-of-consciousness teaching this fall.

All my students have been doing DELIBERATE PRACTICE this week. My honors juniors practiced interactive note taking, my AP juniors worked on sonnet annotations from three different poets, and my AP Lit class addressed reader response in their practice essays. To be honest, I think this perfect storm of parallel lessons happened because I have been embroiled in deliberate practice as a learner myself: I am teaching Macbeth, King Lear and Hamlet simultaneously in all of my classes. It may never happen this way again, but it has been a wonder-full month of thoughtful rereading, focused research and reflection on the essentials for me. I believe that my first year of AP Lit is reminding me what it means to be a good teacher this year: I must also keep that learner cap firmly on my head.

I had been ready, I thought, to teach AP Lit for a couple of years. It would be easy to teach students with a love of reading, good study skills and commitment to school. And it is. But the best part of this has been the ability to let my mind race ahead, to respond to their ideas as they happen, to consider every day if Shakespeare really is as relevant as I always say that he is. In other words, I am returning to my student days just as I am approaching teaching with new focus and delight. I must be a better learner in all my classes if I am to meet my own expectations as a teacher.

And I am also feel vindicated as a teacher in this first year in AP. Three years ago, when I started a Masters in Secondary Teaching to complement my MA in English Lit, I realized that I was not perhaps going to enjoy this second degree as much as the first. My prof announced the first night that he hated high school teachers because all they cared about was content! And here I was thinking the stories I loved were what inspired me to start my (third) career as a teacher. Now I stand in the center of a room with young people-my seniors, and all my juniors too-who are as genuine in their experience of reading as I still am. I am practicing my reading and my writing every single day. Healigan the teacher is loving being Healigan the learner as well. Well, done, my young friends. Once again I am in your debt.

CAREFUL: STUDENTS IN CHARGE!

   I  have felt choked lately: so  much to say, no place to say it. So much rising up in my throat that maybe should not be said, if only because the emphasis that blogging would give it is not useful. Partly this is because I am not at NCTE right now. I stopped looking at Twitter yesterday, cause I just feel left out, like I did in middle school. I am left out, but just accidentally: not that big a deal. There is always another conference, and it is not like I have nothing to fill my time. Another part of my frustration leads back to my isolation. I just taught The Allegory of the Cave to the seniors, and I feel that same confusion and pain when confronted with a new world...we want what we had,  and are afraid of losing the old in favor of the new. Can't forget what you know, though, so I  am back to what I can write...what I am finding exciting these days. How can I  use my altered sense of my purpose with the tools at hand? Does it really matter that I can't talk about new ideas with my colleagues? No, it doesn't change a thing about what I will do with my kids.
   Once again,  I find myself torn between the plans I have made for my classes, and the plans that arise when I let myself relinquish control to my students. It requires so much more time and confidence...but I am discovering that I cannot just do things the same ways I used to, when confronted with the power and purity of their ideas, their youth, their openness. So when I tossed off a quick extra credit blog entry about music, I did not think through what I would do with their responses.....and they gift me with a list of songs that speaks eloquently in its simplicity to their beliefs, hopes, ambitions and anxieties.  So I posted their self-created, self-creating playlist, and there must be a second chapter! It has to fit into something we're doing in class, so Macbeth it is. Could they compose a playlist for Macbeth? What would he play to get pumped to murder his friend and lord? What would Banquo's playlist sound like after that first meeting with the witches? I do not WANT to imagine Lady Macbeth's playlist once the murder is done.......Gotta go. Let's put their plan into place.
UPDATE: lesson plan for Macbeth's playlist
UPDATE: blog post with all the students' choices