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.