Making Curriculum Pop

Ellie Herman became a teacher after working for for decades as a writer/producer for television shows such as “Desperate Housewives,” “Chicago Hope,” “Newhart,” etc., and as an author whose fiction has appeared in literary journals, among them The Massachusetts Review, The Missouri Review and the O.Henry Awards Collection. In 2007, she decided, “on an impulse,” she wrote, to become an English teacher and got a job at a South Los Angeles charter school that was 97 percent Latino and where 96 percent of the students lived below the poverty line. She taught drama, creative writing, English 11 and 9th grade Composition at a charter high school in South Los Angeles until 2013,  when she decided to stop teaching — a decision explained in the following post — and spend a year visiting classrooms and learning from other teachers. She has chronicled the lessons she has learned on her blog, Gatsby in L.A., as well as on LA School report, a website that covers the intersection of politics and education in Los Angeles, where this piece first appeared in November 2013. I am republishing it, with permission from Herman and LA School Report, because it is as relevant today as it was when it was written.

By Ellie Herman

I burned out after teaching for five years at a high school in a very low-income neighborhood. What made me burn out was not that so many of my students came in with reading skills several years behind their grade level. Nor was it that many of them also came in with a history of negative experiences in school.

No, my work in the classroom didn’t burn me out. Classroom work was always engaging and sometimes unbelievably rewarding.

What finally pushed me out the door was a monster we called La Bestia — “The Beast.”

***

My fav paragraphs:

Here in the United States, we continually examine teaching data to understand why other countries are doing better than we are. One thing nobody ever talks about is that teachers in the U.S. have a larger workload than teachers in almost any other country. According to the Organization for Economic Co-Operation and Development, the average secondary school teacher in the U.S. puts in 1,051 instructional hours per year. Instructional hours are the hours spent actually in front of kids—in other words, about half of the job, the other half being time spent planning, grading and collaborating with other teachers. In Finland, the average teacher teaches 553 instructional hours per year. In Korea, 609 hours. In England, 695. In Japan, 510.

***

Neuroscientists have identified a condition they call executive function overload, during which your brain, over-stimulated from continual crisis management, becomes unable to think clearly or feel emotions. I can see now that this happened to me. By the end of each day, I was numb. At night, I’d dream I was suffocating. I could not remember what joy felt like.

Read the whole blog HERE.

Views: 6

Events

© 2024   Created by Ryan Goble.   Powered by

Badges  |  Report an Issue  |  Terms of Service