Bare Necessities

The longer I teach English, the more art supplies I accumulate. They're necessary I tell you! In addition to the expected unlimited supply of paper, pencils, and pens, I've discovered that my classroom cannot be considered complete without the following:

40+ boxes of crayons. Occasionally I have them draw symbolic representations of chapters, or go through essays and color the thesis statement a certain color, rhetorical questions another, etc.

15 pairs of scissors. I wish I had 40, but they're expensive, so every year I buy another five or ten. I had my creative writing students write snow poems and cut out snowflakes. I had my 8th graders cut different kinds of articles out of the newspaper and label them.

A large basket or box of miscellaneous colored pencils. I have my students make up mythologies fourth term, which means they make up imaginary countries, which means they draw maps. Which means they need lots and lots of colored pencils. Additionally, my creative writing students are using these all the time.

At least 5 glue sticks. Once again, I wish I had 40. The ones I do have are a few years old now and probably need to be replaced.

4 rulers. I'd love to have closer to 15 or 40, but they're not called for as often as the rest.

Paperclips. I've already gone through about 3 boxes this year.

A dozen or so sharpies, black and assorted colors. These are essential for when we make posters, label notebooks, or any of the other many uses we find for them.

Legos. Seriously. My first year of teaching I bought $25 worth of Legos so that I could have them to make a model of the 5 paragraph essay. I use if every year.

I'd love to keep a supply of construction paper and posterboard in my room as well, but I haven't gotten around to investing in it yet. Maybe next year. Other random things I have learned to keep with me in the classroom include:

My magic 8 ball.

A fake hand I confiscated from a student my first year of teaching.

Enough candy to pass out to all of my students if needed.

A mini library of books.

Bandaids. These kids seem to bleed a lot.

Post it notes, post it notes, post it notes. I go through them constantly.

Index cards, hundreds of them.

two staple removers

A halloween candy bucket

hand sanitizer

lotion

a tooth brush

a glue gun and glue sticks

Extra grocery bags

moving boxes

I opened my big mouth

Every Monday, school gets out an hour early. The students go home, and the teachers use this time to "collaborate," to meet together as "professional learning communities (PLCs)." Basically, we get together, work on department goals, common assessments, and maintaining our sanity. For instance, today we were looking at sections from the new national core standards that will be adopted in Utah next year. In case you don't happen to work as an English teacher, let me tell you that junior high school English has changed a lot since we took it. When I was in 8th grade, the big project I remember was writing one page descriptions or stories of different things in our lives (my parents, my room, my birthday, etc.) We had to do 8, or maybe 10, of them.

My 8th graders are preparing to do their newspaper portfolios, in which they will find and collect 20 different newspaper articles of different types, as well writing their own classified ad, an obituary of their favorite cartoon character, and a fully fledged essay posing as an editorial. The essay will have a thesis statement, topic sentences, and at least one counterargument. It will include at least one emotional appeal and one ethical appeal. This will be the second such essay they have written this year.

The new core will shift the emphasis from persuasive writing to argument. After reading three or four pages about what the writers of the core meant by "argument," we as a department concluded that they meant nearly the same things as persuasive writing, just without the ethos or pathos and with as much logos as we can get them to articulate.

As we talked about the changes that this would mean, I thought about how I had learned how to analyze and put together a good argument. Although I did some of it in my English classes, nothing could compare to the education that being in debate gave me. So then I said it. I opened my mouth and said, "Can we have a debate class? I'll teach it." I was half kidding, but then my department chair said she'd pitch the idea to the administration. I might teach a debate class next year instead of creative writing.

It'd be a lot of work, but man would it be fun, and I think I could help give the students enough practice with argument to help their writing. But most of all, I can't believe I just volunteered to teach a new class next year. Volunteered! To pioneer a class! I'm not sure what came over me. Only a few minutes before I had been thinking, "Thank heaven that next year I wont' have to teach anything new! I'll be able to just work on the refining what I've taught this year and implementing the new core." Then I opened my big mouth asked to have more work.

I'm a teacher, and I'm crazy.