Freeky Friday: Teach the Children

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Welcome to another great summer of Freeky Friday! We're kicking off this year with this lovely topic:

What's the best thing that's happened to you over the last year? Get creative with your answer! It can be something you experienced, something you witnessed, something you participated in, something you realized...the possibilities are endless!

Well, Freeks, it's been a hell of a year! A lot of amazing things happened around me, but I think I can sum it all up in one sentence: In 2012, I learned how to be a teacher.

It all started with my student teaching placement at a public school in Manhattan. This school is unlike any other I've ever seen - it brings together students who are Deaf, hard-of-hearing, CODAs (hearing students whose parents are Deaf), "SODAs" (the school's nickname for hearing students who have a Deaf sibling), and hearing in one learning environment. We also have a high population of students with disabilities. Keep in mind that it's still a New York City public school, so these kids don't come from the same happy pre-fab suburban upbringing that I came from. They are typically lower on the socioeconomic spectrum, come from historically disadvantaged minority groups, and may not have a solid educational background either from their previous schooling or their parents.

It has been the hardest job of my life - a diverse population leads to a greater challenge of differentiating every activity and providing equal access to everyone, regardless of age, ethnicity, hearing status, language modality, IEP status, etc. On top of that, my cooperating teacher is one of the most difficult people on the planet (I say that with nothing but admiration). From my first day there, I was writing lesson plans, planning the curriculum, organizing powerpoints, working with the kids, and teaching. Now, I've lectured before. But until I got to this school and met my CT, I didn't know just how little I knew about TEACHING. I thought it was all about being an expert in the field - I didn't know how little my own knowledge or skills with the language mattered. A wise man once told me that master teachers do 25-35% of the actual work; the rest, they turn onto the students. In addition to student-centering everything from vocabulary practice to in-depth critical thinking projects, I also learned just how involved in these students lives a great teacher needs to be. During parent teacher conferences, I watched my CT ask about parents' health, students' performance in other classes, and siblings I had never met. The standard was set. From basketball games to school trips, I embraced the school culture and committed to these kids. And they embraced me back. I love my students. I am genuinely invested in their lives. And along the way, I've done a pretty bang up job teaching them ASL.

The conclusion to one of my favorite observation lessons - captioned for your convenience.

In the midst of working my ass off, I managed to write a nearly 70-page thesis about foreign language anxiety, finish a full course load of classes, and graduate from Teachers College, Columbia University. Again, none of this would have been possible without the continued ass-kicking encouragement provided by my CT and my program director. There were a few other people to blame for my success, too. My cohort was tight knit, and we made it through together.

So of course, this all leads to one more thing - after student teaching for a year, writing a thesis, and graduating, I have accepted an offer to teach full-time at a private school in Brooklyn! The school caters exclusively to students with learning disabilities, and I'm really excited to continue my efforts towards creating a fully-accessible classroom. The faculty seems so nurturing and supportive, the kids seem just as crazy as my public school students, and the school really believes in their ASL program! I know I couldn't have made it this far without the support of my cohort, mentors, family, and friends, and I am eternally grateful to the people who have been here for me the past two years! Celebrating my successes with you has been some of the best few weeks of my life. Thanks to you all, I am going to be a teacher. How could that NOT be the best thing that's happened to me all year?!

But special credit needs to be given to one person in particular: my cooperating teacher. So Anthony, if for some crazy reason, you ever end up reading this, thank you, from the bottom of my heart, for making me who I am today. You tested my limits, drove me crazy, and caused me a nervous breakdown or two, but you taught me just what I am capable of: editing iMovie projects while lesson planning for the entire week, with some kind of baked good in the works and a craft beer in my hand. Under your guidance, I have learned how to be a teacher. Thank you.

What's the best thing that happened to you this year?

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Come on back next Friday, June 15, for and answer this prompt:

What's the best thing about summer in your neck of the woods? Any fun local activities or traditions?

Hooray for School! Part I

There are a few reasons I haven't talked about my classes yet. First, I had yet to have all of my classes. Well, we're a week in, so that one is taken care of.

Second, I wasn't sure how personal I wanted this blog to be. It was originally just going to be about New York City in general, no thoughts or anecdotes about my education at all. Recently I've decided that I'd rather use it to keep up with everyone that's far away than try to be Carrie Bradshaw and create a publishable character (a girl can dream). I don't want to feel like I can't say something on here because it doesn't fit with the "theme" of my blog. So basically, screw it, I'm going to write about school. I didn't move to New York to be a writer. I moved to New York to be a student, and eventually a teacher. School is my life. My life is school.

SO without further ado, thoughts after my first week of classes:

Designing Curriculum & Instruction
The first thing I learned in this class is that my professor is a Gator, so that was pretty awesome. Apart from that, this class freekin terrifies me. There's an unwritten prerequisite (Principles of Teaching & Learning), which is also on my program's course of study. Unfortunately, that class wasn't offered this semester, so we plunged head first into this class. Almost everyone else in the class is a second year student and/or has teaching experience. I'm bound and determined to do my damnedest in this class, but that 200-page curriculum project at the end of the semester is pretty daunting. Luckily the other people in my program are all in my section, so we should be able to form a group and create an actual ASL curriculum, which will basically be the coolest thing in the world, assuming we decode the language of our crazy textbooks and actually figure out how this curriculum design stuff works.

Intellectual History of the Deaf
This class is listed on my course of study as "Psychosocial Aspects of the Deaf and Hard of Hearing, Part I." Needless to say, I was overjoyed when I showed up and SURPRISE it's a history class. If you haven't noticed already, I'm a total history geek. I really liked learning Deaf culture in sign language classes because I enjoyed the historical aspect of it. On our first day, we learned about references to deaf people in the Torah and Talmud, so I was basically overjoyed. Let's just combine everything I love learning about into one class. I actually liked doing the reading for this class today. I'm sure my fellow teaching assistants down in the Swamp can understand how excited I was to read about Clerc, Gallaudet, Stoeke, Public Law 94-142 and the IDEA (bonus points if you all just did the signs for those things/heard Tuccelli in your head while reading this).

We're combined with the Deaf Education students for this class, and not everyone understands ASL. My program coordinator, who is Deaf, teaches the class entirely in sign, so we have a pair of voice interpreters. They are amazingly talented interpreters, and it was cool for me to actually see a pair working together, taking turns and feeding each other things that the one currently voicing might have missed. The professor's fingerspelling is INSANELY fast, and it's usually crazy words like "epistemes," so the fact that they were catching everything is pretty darn cool.

However, as my friend Gator B over at The Boston Buzz pointed out, hearing a voice interpreter say something when you're trying to focus on the signs that you've already seen and could probably comprehend is REALLY DIFFICULT. For me, it's easy to fall back into depending on my ears to receive the information instead of my eyes, which is really bad since it's my receptive signing skills that need the most work. Unlike Gator B's ASL class, the voice interpreter will NOT be going away since some people in the Deaf Ed program here don't know a single sign. I'm seriously considering ear plugs for tomorrow's class.

Lots of words and no pictures? Sounds like a two-part post to me.