The Teacher Voice

I've started videotaping some of my classes. It's less scary than it sounds!

Everyone I know who has gotten their National Board Certification has touted the benefits of watching yourself teach, so I set up 2 cameras on opposite end of my classroom.

The first thing I notice is that my saddlebags are a bit larger than I thought. That shirt and those shorts need to separate and never see each other again. And my room is bland. Granted, the camera is facing the area that's most difficult to decorate, but poor kids who have to face that way!

After I get over my body issues and classroom aesthetics, I start to notice the kids. Most of them truly are hanging on my every word, but when I'm teaching, the only ones I notice are the ones who goof around. On the whole, the kids deserve more credit, and their teacher needs to chill out a bit.

The surprise at the kids' real behavior wanes quickly when my voice breaks through the rustle of papers. Okay, and I realize that my computer volume is almost zero. I seem to have two distinct voices: a "whole class" voice and a "real" voice. The whole class voice is obnoxious, piercing, makes me want to claw my eyes out. It's all fake and careful and kindergartenish. If a teacher talked to me that way when I was 10, I would have laughed in her face. Oh, wait, I did...only time I ever got in trouble in class.

Redemption comes when I start talking to the small groups and switch back to a normal voice.

Why do I have these two voices? I've noticed that some kids don't seem to hear me when I'm giving instructions. Whether it's the result of laziness or being an English learner, the blank stares I receive when I give instructions in a normal voice make me wonder if I'm declaiming in mermish.

How do I temper this ridiculous "whole class" voice while still making instructions clear to my English learners?

Went to my classroom today!

Neighbor teacher texted to say she was working in her classroom, so I decided to unload the bazillion boxes of donated USB drives that have been overwhelming my miniscule dining room.

It smells funny.

Not the dining room, or the neighbor teacher. No, my classroom smells funny. My nose was itching within a few minutes of pretend-work-but-really-gossipping, and the trip into my closets to find the elusive but completely worthless grammar teacher's edition made me almost die.

Next time, remind me to go in early, open the windows wide, turn on the fan, and go revisit the In'n'Out that I've missed so much this summer. While I'm at it, I should recruit some kids to come and move desks for me...

As we pretended that we were going to do some real work, neighbor teacher and I discussed the following:

• Summer school.
• How happy we were to be rid of our principal.
• How the former principal darkened our souls.
• How low our test scores were going to be this year because teaching quality went down and nobody really did any extra interventions because we so hated former principal.
• Our readiness to move on from the horribleness that was the former principal.
• Ideas for staff collaboration which is guaranteed to be incredibly amazing because everyone loves each other like the kids on Barney.
• My need for help in figuring out how to improve class, learning, and life for my English Learners.
• My need for help standing up to my teaching team. Wonderful people, but they don't always listen.
• Our frustration with the new 7th grade students' general misbehavior and how it's all the former principal's fault (wait, we weren't going to talk about her again).
• Classroom configurations.
• Sleeping in 4 hours later than normal.
• Summer plans.
• Summer reading.
• Books that have been turned into movies.
• Harry Potter and the Half-Blood Prince and how cool it was when the memories kinda dropped like water into ink in the pensieve.
• and other random frivolity.

Seem like a long conversation? That's what happens when you take two people who are accustomed to talking all day, every day, and give them 3 months without students! Really, I should get a job as a telemarketer or something.

Meanwhile, my classroom looks exactly as it did before my arrival, with the addition of several boxes of USB drives and the removal of the remains of the potting soil that we used for an experiment at the end of the year before last and that I now need to repot my basil plants.

Guess I'll have to go back next week. I wonder if neighbor teacher will be there...