Jeffery E. Frieden Classroom Culture, Uncategorized

In Her Words

A couple of months ago, I wrote about the week I sat down with all of my students to conference about their letter grades. It was eye-opening! Like, in a career altering change my life kind of way, eye-opening. I don’t know any other way to describe it.

I held about a dozen conversations that week that I will never forget for as long as I teach. Four of the conversations were really striking because the students were all facing similar experiences, thoughts, and emotions even though none of them had talked to one another, and as far as each student knew, they were the only ones who were thinking that way. Of those four conversations, one went so well that this student claims it changed her whole outlook on her place in school.

That got me thinking. What if you could hear her words in her own voice? Well, keep reading. And get ready to listen up because she let me record our conversation.

Continue reading “In Her Words” →

Jeffery E. Frieden Dear Teacher, Don't Give Up!

More Encouragement, Less Judgment

One thing that always seems to surprise young teachers when they are starting out is just how much time they give to the work. It’s tough. Being a teacher requires grit, the capability to hang in there and stick to it. And the less experience one has on the job, the more time, thought, and energy must go into the effort of preparing and delivering quality instruction.

When I entered the profession, the implementation of the No Child Left Behind Act was in full swing. That meant there were student proficiency targets, and if schools, departments, and teachers weren’t achieving those targets, something was wrong and some aspect(s) of what you were doing in the classroom was going to go through an uncomfortable change. Teaching without these extra layers of accountability is already dynamic and complex enough as it is, so you can imagine that those early years for me involved long nights of reflecting, assessing student work, and planning instruction. Continue reading “More Encouragement, Less Judgment” →

Jeffery E. Frieden Assessment, Grades, Make Them, Writing

Why I Almost Quit

In my seventh year of teaching, when I was really hitting my stride as a classroom instructor, I was ready to quit. I didn’t want to. I loved teaching. The best way to put it is that I had hit a crisis. In plainest terms, people experience crisis when their behavior and choice patterns no longer work work for them, requiring some kind of change. Another way to put it is, “What has ‘worked’ up until this point WILL NOT work from here on out.” That was me. I felt stuck in an endless loop that was wearing me down more and more each day.

My crisis centered around guilt. And this was no ordinary guilt, where I found myself going between two sides. This guilt loop had three elements, one for each of my main roles at the time: teacher, spouse, and parent. I had responsibilities for each role, and I wasn’t handling any of them well. Maybe I had people fooled, or maybe they were just being kind to me, but inside I was all tangled up in knots. I didn’t know what I was supposed to do next for any of those roles, and felt like I was frantically running from one to the other. That caused a lot of stress, and I was exhausted. I was at quit point. Continue reading “Why I Almost Quit” →