Happy Shakespeare's Birthday!

Happy Bard Day everyone!  I have responded to the call for a personal statement about what Shakespeare means to me....

To start with I inherited my love of Shakespeare from my parents. My mum, Prue, pulled a copy of As You Like It out of her dad's small bookcase when she was 11 or 12. She says that marvellous characters leapt out of the page at her and she was mesmerised. At her high school (Wellington East Girls' College) she was in the Classics stream which studied two Shakespeare plays every year, so by the time she left school (no 7th Form in those days) she had 9 plays under her belt and enjoyed every moment of them. She went on to become an English teacher and one of her proudest achievements was directing a full production of A Midsummer Night's Dream at Kerikeri High School.

My dad, Martin, was also hooked on Shakespeare. He did his Master of Arts thesis on Shakespeare's character additions - i.e. original characters Shakespeare added to his found plots. He had a prodigious memory and used to tell the story about how someone came over to him in the university common room one day and asked him to identify a quotation from one of the plays. He immediately gave the correct play, act, scene and character. His enquirer went back over to his companions and reported; money changed hands! Dad too went on to become an English teacher.

When I was born I was named after Jessica in The Merchant of Venice, with a nod to the Scottish family name of 'Jessie'.  I remember going to see dad as Baptista in The Taming of the Shrew done by the Hawera Repertory Society, and I remember mum and dad rehearsing students for the Sheilah Winn competition in the 70s in Hawera. Any Shakespeare production on TV or in a town near enough to travel to and great would be the excitement. Afterwards the production would be analyzed in the lounge over cups of tea, no aspect escaped discussion: the casting, the mise en scene, the costumes, the acting, the delivery of the text, etc, etc. Was the interpretation justified by the text? Bits we liked, bits we would have done differently: "I would have said/done it like this..."

My parents quoted Shakespeare in every day conversation so much that when I finally was old enough to begin reading the plays I kept recognizing family sayings.  My mother is given to muttering things like: "Marry, well bethought!" when someone has a good idea, or "A murrain on thee" when someone annoys her. My dad, who died quite young, over 30 years ago now, was quoting Hamlet on his deathbed!

My mum belonged to the Wellington Shakespeare Society for many years and was involved in judging their award at the Sheilah Winn National Festival a couple of times. The years she did this I went along too and sat through the whole weekend, which is just a delight - seeing hundreds of teenagers performing Shakespeare, loving it, having fun and thinking that it's cool!

All my siblings like Shakespeare too, but I guess I got the genetic double-whammy: after 40 years of doing other things I finally realized that I was fighting destiny and also became an English teacher. I get a special kick out of introducing my students to Shakespeare for the first time. I tell them that as far as I am concerned he is the greatest writer in the English language. His plays are still read and performed around the world every day, hundreds of years after his death.

He is a great writer because he understands people and can show their different motives and reactions. He is a fantastic poet and his language is intricate, clever, memorable, funny. His plays deal with issues and situations which are still fully relevant to human society today. He can wrench your heart or make you laugh. Above all, his plays are entertaining and thought-provoking.

As well as teaching the plays and sonnets in the classroom, I have been involved with preparing students for the SGCNZ University of Otago Sheilah Winn Festival of Shakespeare in Schools for some years now. I don't think I am the world's greatest director but I do my best. I love the plays and try to involve all the students that want to participate. I love seeing students who are tentative at the start grow in confidence and realize that Shakespeare can be a lot of fun.

One morning last term I met one of my Sheilah Winn cast in the staff carpark. She is a tiny year 7 student who spends her entire onstage time grinning (whether this is in character or not) because she is having so much fun. She called out, "When do we have Shakespeare, Miss?" When I replied that we were rehearsing at lunchtime that day, she cried, "Yay! I love Shakespeare!" in tones of rapture, and ran up and threw her arms around me in her enthusiasm!  It's moments like this that make all the effort that goes into a production worth going the extra mile.

Here are some of the Romeo and Juliet cast rehearsing during the school holidays last week. We are doing the prologue and first scene - the fight in the market place. The Regional Festival is coming up this Saturday 28 April so we are on the last lap.

Happy Birthday Shakespeare! - still alive and well and being performed in Otaki, New Zealand in 2012.

Just for a change, a poem

Good Friday 2012

He is sitting 

on the other side of the church

staunch, stoic

When he comes forward in line

I see him in a series of flashback camera stills

11 years old and half his current size

circling on his bike by the cricket net

I don’t feel like coming to practice today, Miss

on Saturday morning whacking it for six

in flapping board shorts and the biggest pads

15 years old 

flipping paper balls in my classroom

doodling elaborate tattoos

I watch him now 

this young man

step forward and

hongi the cross

breathing deeply, eyes closed

sharing his ihi with the tree of life

and the God who died on it

my heart catches

tears well up

and I smile

this is the pride of a parent

from one who is childless

Secret Santa

Last week was essentially the final week of the school year for us, since in week 7 we have Activities Week rather than the normal timetable.

It was somewhat frenetic. My Y10s were finishing NCEA Level 1 static images. Note to self: do this earlier next year! I do not want to be assessing anything for the Y10s in term four except for possibly wide reading. Actually I don't want to be doing any internal assessments at all for anyone, but I'm allowed to dream.

Senior signout day on Wednesday was disappointing. It had not been well advertised and the turn out was extremely low. This leaves me a big headache in terms of worrying about how many of the English texts will eventually come back and how many will be lost forever as Y12s and Y13s leave without signing out. The deans will now have to phone the Y12s and Y13s who didn't turn up, and inevitably I will end up phoning parents of non-returners at the start of next year, sigh.

Enough complaining! The highlight of the week for me was getting my last two Y12s through their final Level 1 assessment to get their literacy. There was a sense of urgency about this (for me, not them!) given their existing credits were all old standards and they needed to complete within the transition year. I felt a huge sense of relief when they both finally passed what they needed to pass :-)

Junior Prizegiving on Thursday afternoon went really well and students and parents seemed to enjoy it. There were some great music performances to enliven the proceedings, including Maddy from my form class, who won the local talent quest earlier this year. Unfortunately, I wasn't feeling well later on Thursday afternoon and did not make it to the Y13 Leavers' Dinner. Apparently it was a really great evening.

My Year 10s insisted on having a Christmas tree in our form room, and we did secret Santa on Friday for our last form class meeting, which was lots of fun. Santa gave me a new mug, which is very cool. Thank you, Santa!

Not waving but drowning

I just edited last week's post to embed the video in it, which I didn't have the patience to figure out how to do at the time. Now last week's post has today's date on it, rats. This week's post is 24 hours late but it's been that kind of a week.

Year 10 marking done; English and form class reports gone. I would have liked to get students to write their own suggested report comments, as one of my colleagues did, but there just wasn't time. This wasn't only because my reports were up against the deadline, but also because the Year 10s were finishing their NCEA static images assessment last week, and I really needed them to concentrate on that. Well - that was what should have been happening - as it was they seemed to be more focussed on the lunchtime touch tournament, could we have secret Santa, could we have a Christmas tree in the classroom and could they make decorations please? (yes, yes, and only if the assessment was finished).

I've had a few senior assessments handed in over the last few days, and am frenetically trying to mark these before the 1 December data export. Very few of the Year 10 extension class look like finishing their wide reading in time (they've had 3 terms to do it....).

On the personal front I went down to Wellington at the weekend. Amongst other things I collected some boxes of books I bought from another school, shopped, had a haircut, and stayed overnight with my mum. We watched the election coverage on TV on Saturday night - extremely depressing. Even the fact that the referendum supported retaining MMP didn't cheer me up given how low the support was compared to when MMP was first voted in, and the hugh informal vote on the second question, which seemed to indicate widespread apathy and ignorance, guaranteed to make any political animal depressed.

On the positive side, I have next year's Year 11 programme all typed up and finalised, and the Year 12 programmed finalised - I only need to finish typing it up. Yeeha! We had some great discussions in the department last week about possible themes and texts for the year 11 and 12 classes next year. We are all reading various books at the moment so that we can discuss possible purchases further, although with the Y12 classes so dependent on option lines and option changes after the results come out in January, it is hard to plan ahead - things may change when we see the actual make up of the individual classes, so I probably won't be ordering new books until early next year.

This week: finishing off final marking and getting results tidy for export; senior sign out on Wednesday (pray for optimal text book return), Y9/10 Prizegiving on Thursday afternoon, Y13 Leavers' Dinner on Thursday night, marking AsTTle writing on Friday. Not to mention the M word - magazine proofing. Thank goodness I am not marking NCEA this year. Breathe... 10 days to go. :-)

Chasing my tail: occupational hazard

It's been one of those weeks where I felt like I was running to catch up the entire time. I was only off sick for 2 and a half days last week (four and a half if you count the fact that I did no work in the weekend), but it has meant that so many things were slipping.

The highlight of the week was definitely the film making day I ran with a colleague for our international students who are not sitting external exams.  We gave them the challenge of creating a short video to go on the school website giving a student point of view about coming from overseas to study at our college. They divided into three groups: all managed to complete filming and download their footage to Macbooks kindly loaned by other staff (thank you!), but only one of the groups succeeding in editing their video and completing it in time for us to copy it to flashdrives or burn it to disks for them to take home.  The completed video is up on Youtube and you can see it by clicking on this YouTube link or click below:



Year 10 reports are nearing completion; my class is still working on a static image task that will be assessed against the NCEA Level 1 criteria. Their progress is glacially slow compared to the time it usually takes the Year 11s, but there is some good work coming.  It hasn't helped that those in the extension group have been on exam leave for part of the week. I was hoping this would mean that the others would be more focussed but sadly, not!

There have been a few seniors in every day, seeking revision advice and copies of past unfamiliar text papers, or completing assessments or re-submissions. I have chased a few whom I know are close to passing Level 1 Literacy and just needed some encouragement to come in and do it.  I even 'friended' a student on Facebook out of desperation for a method of contacting her when the phone numbers we had were not getting results (this broke my usual policy of not sending friend requests to students - I will confirm requests from students but don't initiate them as a rule). As an experiment it was successful: the student eventually responded to my direct Facebook message and came in to school several times, completing six credits.

Exam feedback from the Year 11s and 13s was largely positive: those who had done the preparation thought the papers fair and had found questions they could attempt with some confidence. It was disappointing again to find that many of the Y13s, in particular, only attempted some of the standards; some are very strategic about it, only having prepared for one or two, others fail to manage their time effectively and decide to do two standards thoroughly rather than three superficially.  I still find this hard to understand, having successfully faced a lot of university exams where I had to write four essays in the three hours.  I do think today's students have a lot less practice at exams than we did, and they actually are less habituated to writing by hand.  Many of them complain of sore hands after a three hour exam. I have a feeling not many take my advice to do timed practice essays.

Looking forward to this week: tomorrow is our Ministry-funded teacher only day for preparation for the realigned NCEA Level 2 standards.  We have a full day planned in the department: reviewing how the Year 11 implementation went this year, deciding if we want to make any changes for next year in the Level 1 programme, and then moving on into reviewing our plans for Level 2 next year and seeing if we want to revise the plan we came up with earlier this year. I hope to come out of the day with confirmed course outlines for all the senior programmes for 2012.  We also need to consider our external moderation report which came back this week.

I still have a pile of Year 10 marking that must be done urgently for their reports and haven't revised the stationery list for next year let alone finished proofing the magazine. AsTTle writing tests need to be photocopied and the testing and marking dates confirmed.  And a lot of this was on the to do list a week ago when I wrote...


Wait, I see a tail...

Writer's Blo(g)ck

There has been a long hiatus on this blog.  I think I have been suffering from the "I have nothing valuable to say" syndrome.  While I'm sure this prevents many a boring blog from seeing the light of day, it has also had its paralysing effect on what is supposed to be a personal reflection on professional practice. So I am resolved to make a fresh start at my teaching blog, remembering that its main audience is me, first and foremost, then hoping that my personal reflections may be helpful to others.

This week has been mainly noteworthy as the farewell of the seniors off onto exam leave.  We had them at school on Monday and Tuesday, and the level of engagement was varied.  A number didn't bother to show up to classes: clearly they had given up already.  My non-exam class was split between those frantically finishing the internal assessment and those who had, again, given up hope. Of those in the exam classes who attended, most were attentive and on task, a few seemed to be oblivious of any sense of time pressure or need to focus. Like most of my colleagues, I focussed my help and advice on the former, and tried to minimise the disruption caused by the latter.  This included those who felt their last days of high school might be best spent running around out of class involved in "egging" and waterfights.  In these moments I feel a deep nostalgia for the days of 100% external examinations, where students actually took the externals seriously, rather than wandering around muttering: "I don't need to pass this, Miss, I've already got my Level 1 [or 2, 3, or UE as the case may be]."

The rigours of Monday and Tuesday were followed by senior prizegiving on Tuesday night. Just before 7pm while the staff were lining up to process in, I got a text from one of my Year 11s, one who had been doing his best for the two weeks and two days of this term to do no work, talk through everything I said, and stare out the window and giggle a lot... His text: "Hey ms wot r same key points i should foces on to study" [sic]  I laughed, because this had to be better than crying.  I also turned off my phone without answering as I thought this was one of those situations where a response in the heat of the moment could be... unwise.

Prizegiving proved to be a wonderful evening of celebrating the successes of those who had actually made the best of their time at school. (Probably those same students who were aware that I had spent the last two weeks and two days giving them advice on what they should focus on to study for exams!) There were great speakers, great entertainers, and I felt a real sense of pride in those I have seen grow from Year 7s through to confident young men and women about to leave after a successful Year 13.  The speech from the outgoing heads of school made me choke up, and the haka to tautoko the new Head Boy sent shivers down my spine. By the end of the evening I went home with a real sense of affirmation that I love my job, and that I do something worthwhile.

By midday Wednesday I had succumbed to the sinus and throat infection I'd been fighting and went home to bed for the rest of the week.  While work followed me, in the form of texts and calls from students and parents, I have mostly spent the last few days asleep or reading trashy novels.  By Saturday I had enough voice back to go to the dress rehearsal for my choir concert, and today I was able to sing in the performance.  Throat still a bit sore, but the antibiotics are kicking in and I'm feeling a lot better.

The week ahead: exams for my Year 11s and 13s, finishing off the last of marking internal NCEA assessments, organising AsTTle writing tests for the Year 9 and 10s, proof-reading the magazine, junior reports... olay!

Envoi

Go wayward students, hopeful sent
to your exams, with best intent;
May commonsense serve
Where memory wavers,
And learning preserve
Whom the question favours. 

Time out to reflect on school leadership

Today I've been at a middle managers' professional development day, focussing on building a supportive learning culture. 


The highlight today was definitely Bruce Murray, a consultant and retired principal, who spoke about his experience as a school leader and shared his educational philosophy. It's so refreshing to hear an education professional openly sharing that his educational philosophy is grounded in his Christian faith. It all begins with believing that every individual has value.


Teaching and learning has to be paramount in our management and leadership within the school.  Murray says schools which do this will advance and see improvements. This means that professional development of teachers has to be a priority.


Encouragement of teachers pays huge dividends and costs zero dollars. We all want to be loved, whether we are snotty-nosed third formers or gnarled old HODs.


As leaders we have to walk the talk - we have to show moral leadership. Moral authority can be lost or withdrawn. Maintain high standards of fairness and honesty, in small things as well as big. Allocate classes fairly. Make decisions openly.  Be circumspect about who you confide in, and be the best teacher you can be. Maintaining your moral authority comes at a cost to you, you have to curtail your freedoms. As an HOD you are not free to do what you want. You have to maintain trust from the community.


In summary, Bruce's advice:


- develop your own educational philosophy;
- teaching and learning are the key issues;
- leadership involves a strong moral dimension which you ignore at your peril.


To finish, Bruce talked about how our ancestors mostly emigrated to NZ because they were at the bottom of the economic heap back in Scotland or wherever (I'm summarising freely here). We have different lives from them because we have benefitted from state early childhood, primary, intermediate and secondary schools, and state universities. As teachers and educational managers, we are privileged to help our students break the cycle through education.


Great stuff! Thanks, Bruce - a truly inspirational session.


Other things for me to reflect on from the day:


- using a personal ePortfolio to store evidence for registration attestation - maybe we can model to our students how we are reflecting on our learning/practice
- delegate more: stop worrying that I should have to do everything myself and be prepared to ask for help to get jobs done. I worry that if I ask other staff to do things they are going to be thinking, "Why isn't she doing this? She's the HOD!" I guess this is the curse of a small department - there aren't so many people to delegate to!
- my leadership enquiry project has been in stasis and I really need to dust it off and get it back up and running, since I have to report on it at the beginning of September.


In one of the afternoon sessions I spent some time looking at the report: "What ERO knows about effective schools." You can find this on the NZ Education Review Office website here: http://www.ero.govt.nz/National-Reports/Evaluation-at-a-Glance-What-ERO-Knows-About-Effective-Schools   The report is a meta-analysis of characteristics of effective schools based on over 30 ERO reports on schools and school-related issues, published between 2007 and 2010.

"The five characteristics that crossed the boundaries of school type, location, decile rating and philosophy were:

– a focus on the learner 

– inclusive leadership 

– effective teaching 

– engaged communities 

– coherent policies and practice as part of continuous self review.

Of course these five characteristics do not exist in isolation from each other but play out in an interconnected web that is the complexity of everyday activity in a school setting."

An interconnected web, that's us... and now, back to school to finish my reports!