WITNESSING FAHRENHEIT 451 ON A DAILY BASIS

~ kristin green

I’d love for this blog to be all about giving advice and telling stories based on my lengthy, and still continuing, career as a high school English teacher but right now, I’m flummoxed. I am attempting to teach Bradbury’s classic Fahrenheit 451 to several classes of juniors. It should be unfortunately obvious that I’m used to kids not being enthusiastic nor paying attention to what they should be doing but it never gets easier to deal with.

Every day, they prove this book right! They completely fail to make the connection that their inability to read a book in favor of looking at their phone screen is a problem. No matter what I say or try to emphasize, they just don’t get it. I’ve gotten to the point where I’m telling them that every time they choose not to pay attention in class, they are allowing other people to be smarter than them. They don’t care.

Every teacher I know feels the same way. The apathy is so pervasive and so detrimental, it’s scary. Kids have always thought they know more than anyone else but this level of not caring is the worst I’ve seen in 30 years. I love my kids this year. They are personable yet immature. They are entertaining but lack impulse control. They have the world at their fingertips but are hyper fixated on their friends and themselves. Writing an essay takes a week, with constant reassurance needed. Reading a book is unheard of. They can’t even watch a ten minute video without picking up their phones. I don’t know what’s going to become of this generation, and I’ve never felt that way before. I’ve taught both the Millennials and the Gen Z’ers but these Alphas are weak. I can only hope that the world they will be going out to will be so different, they’ll fit in and find their way.

I’m not usually negative or a complainer but, man, I’m glad I’m almost retired. I signed on to be a teacher, not an entertainer and that seems to be the main job of teachers today.

English Teacher/Author!

~ kristin green

I’m an author! 3 books and counting and it has been so easy!

Oh, how I wish that last part were true, but let me tell you, it’s been a process with a huge learning curve!

At some point in my career as an English teacher, I started feeling like a hypocrite. Here I was, every day, teaching kids how to write, but I was never doing any writing myself. It just didn’t sit right with me so, when I saw an ad for a reporter at my local, small town newspaper, I applied. I don’t know if anyone else did, but I got the job and began attending village board meetings and writing articles about what was discussed. I lasted a few months because I absolutely hated every minute of it! The meetings were boring, some of the spectators were obnoxious beyond belief, and I felt a ton of pressure to be perfect because most of the readers knew I was an English teacher.

I never did quite get over my feeling of hypocrisy so I moved on. For a long stretch, I taught seniors and saw where they were unprepared to go out into the world. Over the course of months, I created a list of 40 different activities that every senior should do before they graduate. I designed the whole project as a set of cards, set up so a student could pick one every week (school years are typically 40 weeks long). I listed them on Etsy and…crickets. It’s one thing to create a product and whole other to market it. I shared the digital copy with my seniors so I felt good about that even if it wasn’t selling.

Time went on and I started hearing about Amazon’s Kindle Direct Publishing (KDP). I watched a bunch of YouTube videos about it and completely rewrote the entire thing to fit Amazon’s requirements. I struggled. The formatting just wouldn’t work right. I finally had to accept that it couldn’t look exactly like I had first created. That opened up options and I finally got it to work. Therefore, my first book, The Senior Challenge: 40 things every high school senior should do before graduation, was born. It was quickly followed with The College Freshman Challenge: 50 things every college freshman should do in their first year and The Baseball Lover’s Bucket List.

Writing the books and designing them in the appropriate format was the easier part. Marketing, getting the word out that they exist, is the hard part. A few supportive friends bought the first one but that’s been about it. Amazon is saturated, people are more and more immune to ads, especially from small businesses with no track record. Pair that with my desire to live under the radar most of the time and it’s so hard to promote the books!

I know that many books come from blogs. I’m thinking of doing the reverse here. I’m going to take one aspect at a time from the two school-related books and go in depth on them. Tell the stories about how each suggestion came about. Maybe I can get my messages to kids out that way.

No matter what happens, I can finally say to my students that I have three books on Amazon. It gives me some credibility when it comes to writing and has taken away the feeling of being a hypocrite.

The Fleeting Nature of Teenage Friendships…and the Opposite

~ kristin green

Navigating the friendships of your students is something your college education classes will never prepare you for. If you are the type of teacher the kids feel comfortable with, they will tell you everything, whether you want to know or not. Tread lightly, be a good listener, and don’t take on their drama!

I hope it is obvious that you should rarely tell a student that they shouldn’t be friends with someone else. Anticipate a phone call from a very angry parent if you do. I say rarely because I am immediately reminded of a situation a few years ago when I faced the most abusive relationship among kids that I had ever seen. An obsessive, possessive, controlling boyfriend making one young lady’s life miserable. Her friends and I were constantly telling her to dump him. Unfortunately, she was equally dysfunctional and has still not made the break, even now, a few years later. Full-day counseling with the social worker, psychologist, school principal, parents, and kids worked for about 24 hours. I anticipate tragic news at some point in their adult future. I don’t say that dismissively but with the sad knowledge that you can’t save them all, and that home and friends carry more weight than you do.

Getting away from extremes like that, student friendships can be challenging to navigate in several, more ordinary, ways. The first is a situation I have encountered several notable times in my career – the ‘we’ve all grown up together’ friendships. These are the ones that make you want to tear your hair out. The ones that make classroom management so difficult. You have a group of students who have been together since they were in elementary school and quite likely live in the same neighborhood. They are like family – the good and the bad. They have inside jokes that you’ll never know; inside jokes you wish you never knew. Their parents are all friends and they often travel together. They fight with no boundaries and the next day all is forgotten. Getting groups like this to stop talking in class is a nightmare. You mention it at open house and the parents just laugh and say, “Yeah, we know.”

I used to hate those classes. They were disruptive and exclusionary. But then I thought of my brother. He’s one of those kids. His best friends in adulthood are his childhood friends. They’ve all known each other since kindergarten and drove their teachers crazy. But as time went on, they were in each other’s weddings, supported each other through deaths of parents, had kids all the same age who are also friends. All of that has been far more valuable to my brother than whatever he should have been doing in classes at the time. I share that perspective with my students and it usually has a positive impact. They are a little more thoughtful about their behavior in class and save their chaos for another time.

The other side is where you find the broken friendships and the grief kids carry because of them. We make the mistake, as adults, of forgetting that the dissolution of a friendship during the teen years is devastating. It happened to me when I was in tenth grade. I got angry with a friend, every one took her side (without ever asking for mine), and I was set adrift to find new friends. I did, eventually, but my mid-teen years were pretty lonely.

Just yesterday, I had a junior ask to sit with me during our study hall. I knew she was looking for a comfortable place to sit in order to protect herself from a certain boy. I had experienced this with her for the first time a few weeks ago but we hadn’t been in a position to discuss any of it. This time, however, I broached the subject and she was surprisingly receptive. I asked first if the school was aware there was a problem, thinking perhaps this was a case of abuse or stalking. She assured me that the right people were aware. Fortunately, the situation was not as dire as I anticipated, but still extremely upsetting for her. She gave me the basics (boy/girl break up, boy tells lies about girl, other kids take his side, she loses all her friends) and follows it up with how unfair it is. I said, you’re right. It’s never fair. At that point, the tears start to flow. We talked some more and I reminded her how she recently found a passion for photography and is working on the yearbook committee with some genuinely nice kids. That brought a smile. I also shared knowledge that I think every kid needs to hear. When we are really young, our friendships are often based on proximity. You’re friends with the kids who live or sit near you. Kids you already spend a lot of time with. It’s usually in the mid-teen years when you start making friends based on shared values and interests. This is when friends drift apart. And it sucks, especially if you’re not the one moving on.

Today, I sat with her again. I shared the Instagram account of a former student who I hope will be inspirational. She is a professional photographer who goes on the road with different bands as their official tour photographer. Her work is impressive, her star is rising rapidly, and she’s super cool. I know it can’t replace the friends she has lost, but I hope it’s a light at the end of the tunnel for her. Since I know all of the kids involved in this situation, I’d say that this student is going to come out far, far better than the others will . The boy and her former friends look to be going down roads that aren’t so healthy. This sad girl is on an uplifting, positive path and I hope she sees that soon. I can’t exactly tell her that I suspect her former friends are making some pretty poor life choices these days but I think she knows.

Friendships can be tough at any age but when you’re a teenager, they are the world. Teachers must navigate them carefully, understanding how significant social lives are to teens.

ONE YEAR UNTIL RETIREMENT

black and red typewriter
~ kristin green

My main motivation for writing here is my impending retirement. One year from now, hopefully, I’ll be relaxing and looking back upon a rewarding career. I say hopefully because my beginning was nontraditional in that I started in November when another teacher left suddenly. A call soon to the state ed. department should clarify everything. I’m sure I’ll write about it in the hopes of helping someone else.

But for now, I have stories to tell. Stay tuned.

Student Said What? (part 1)

~ kristin green

One of the usual activities I do the day after the Super Bowl is discuss and analyze the commercials. For years, I taught a senior Communications class which had a big unit on advertising. I still enjoy this particular lesson.

One of the commercials we discussed was the Dunkin ad with Ben Affleck (among others). While explaining the Boston aspect to them – we have tons of Dunkins in NY but the kids didn’t realize how heavily New England a company it is – I pointed out former Patriots coach Bill Belichick and his significantly younger girlfriend.

Me: He’s 72. She is 24.

Student #1: Her frontal lobe isn’t fully developed yet!

Student #2: Nope, but the rest of her is!

(No shade intended. Love who you love. If everyone involved is safe and happy, more power to ya!)

30 Years of Teaching, 30 Years of Tutoring

This is an ad for a text message based SAT tutoring program I have developed.
~ kristin green

The old saying “The days are long but the years are short” is so incredibly true. When I actually sit down and think about it, I can’t believe I’ve been teaching for almost 30 years. Same school, same subject, same classroom! Then I realize I have also been tutoring for the same amount of time!

I have had several very different tutoring experiences. I spent many years doing tutoring through my school, going to homes to help kids out of school due to illness or injury. Some of those were good and some not so good, usually depending on the environment the students lived in. My school also had an alternative high school program at night for suspended kids where I worked for 28 years. That job alone could provide innumerable stories to post here and I’ll share some eventually.

The third type of tutoring I have done is for the SAT English exam. I have sat at many kitchen tables in my county, going over practice exam after practice exam with a wide variety of kids. I got so busy in 2015, I opened a brick-and-mortar tutoring center in my town. Successful from the start, I hired many of my colleagues and we helped dozens of local, and sometimes not so local, students with a wide variety of subjects. After a few years, however, we burned out. Teaching from 7-3 and then tutoring from 3-8 five days a week was unsustainable, even though it was both emotionally and financially rewarding. As it turns out, I am so grateful we all threw in the towel when we did – December 1, 2019. We got out three months before we would have been forced to shut down (but still have to pay rent).

Since the Covid days, my enthusiasm for tutoring waned. I went back and worked with a young man I had been tutoring since he was in 6th grade (and whose mother I worked with) but that was it. I missed it but not enough to have it take over hours of my life again. During that time, I took a free, non-education course offered by one of my favorite podcasters. All of the material was delivered via text message. A lightbulb moment for me! I could compile all of the best tips and information I found myself repeating frequently during the SAT tutoring sessions and send them out to students everywhere at a much lower cost that traditional hourly tutoring sessions. It takes less time for everyone, it’s less expensive for the students/parents, but it contains the best of my 30 years experience. It’s a win-win!

I am super excited about this project. Students and a parent/guardian sign up, a group chat is created including the three of us (I think it’s important and wise for the parent to see the conversation between me, a potential stranger, and their child), and starting 30 days prior to the test the student is scheduled to take, I send a tip every day. There are apps that do something similar but they don’t provide potential interactivity where the student can ask for clarification, or I can even push the student to complete a short exercise involving the SAT tip. My own students, especially juniors, are so busy with their coursework, athletics, clubs, jobs, and social life, that this can fit right in easily. Putting aside an hour or two a week for traditional tutoring often doesn’t fit their lifestyles.

If this could be useful for you or someone you know, please email me at [email protected] I am excited to help kids prepare for this exam again!! (I hate the SAT; my goal is to teach the kids not just English vocab and grammar but also ways to beat the test!!)

HEAVY START BUT A VALUABLE LESSON

~ kristin green

I’ve been wanting/needing to tell this story for a while but just haven’t had the emotional strength to tell it until now. I’m still not sure I could do it orally without crying so for now, writing will have to suffice.

My dad passed away suddenly in February 2024. He hadn’t been in great health but was home, functioning normally until suddenly he wasn’t. My mom found him already passed on that Sunday morning and the following week was a mix of sorrow and boredom. I didn’t go to work for the week. I had a mild case of Covid at the time as well so I couldn’t have gone even if I wanted to. Between Sunday and Friday, we made the arrangements, ordered the flowers, spent time with family and friends, and waited. We weren’t able to have the visitation at the funeral home until Friday evening and the funeral Saturday morning.

My dad had been a high school physical education teacher for 30 years He also coached boys varsity soccer and wrestling for his entire career. Many of the people who stopped by the house that week were his former athletes. For those unfamiliar with that lifestyle, bonds are strong and lasting. Teachers have an impact for sure but coaches take it to a whole other level. As the only daughter, I spent my life in rarified air, having dozens of big brothers over the years, always being looked out for and protected. Those lifetime bonds extended to me, my younger brother and my mom as well.

The visitation at the funeral home was well attended, so much so the local police had to put an officer outside to help direct traffic. It didn’t hurt that some of the police officers had been my students over the years as well. Soccer players and wrestlers came from all over, some traveling from other states just to attend for a few minutes.

The next morning as my immediate family arrived for the service, a man was waiting. When I was introduced, I was dumbstruck. This man was like a celebrity to me as I had grown up with his pictures on my dad’s trophy wall. He had wrestled for my dad in the early 1970s and had flown in from Michigan for the service. My entire family was in awe that my dad had meant that much to him. He came back to the house for the repast afterwards and regaled everyone with stories of my dad back then. Many laughs were shared, as well as tears. Totally appropriate as my dad was known for his sense of humor.

But that wasn’t what I’ll remember most about that day. When we got up from the service at the funeral home that morning to walk across the street to the columbarium for the interment of my dad’s ashes, there was a homeless man lingering outside. I was a little curious but we proceeded over, as did he. The service was short and I watched as the man walked to the ashes, stood for a minute, then wandered off. He never spoke to anyone.

When we all went back to my childhood home for some food, I asked my dad’s former athletes if they knew who he was. They did. He had been a troubled student back in the 1970s that my dad tried to help. Tried to encourage him to play a sport. Was nice to him. But it never quite worked and the man has lived a difficult life. The guys said he lives somewhere in the woods outside of town. How this man knew that my dad had passed is a mystery to me. But somehow he knew and was drawn to pay his respects. A few days later when my mom was looking through the guest sign in book, the very last name was his.

If you are a teacher or coach and ever doubt your impact on students, don’t. While my dad will never know that this man found a way to say goodbye to him, my family knows and it meant the world. I always knew my dad was a father figure for many of his athletes but I never knew how deeply it affected some. Hang in there. I know our jobs of teaching and coaching are challenging and sometimes you wonder if you are doing any good. You are and you have to understand that you might never know how much.

Well, I couldn’t get through writing this without crying either.

Welcome to Lessons From Room 110!

~ kristin green

If you are new here, welcome! If you’re returning, you’re probably wondering why things look different.

Either way, I am very glad you are here. I have tried a few times to launch this blog and each time, I have been derailed by life. My original plan was to write in order to help new teachers. That was in February 2020. A month in, suddenly we were ALL new teachers in a way, and just about everything I had done in my 25 year career was turned upside down. Any advice I may have had was instantly outdated and it was all I could do to stay afloat at my job. You can all relate, I know.

I tried again and life happened again. And again. And again. My students actually have a phrase for this now. Whenever something ridiculous, tragic, or unexpected happens, it is now known as a “Ms. Green moment”. On any given day, a student will come into the classroom, plop themselves down into the chair next to my desk, and say, “I had a Ms. Green moment this weekend,” and proceed to tell me the wackiest story of something they experienced. They tell me they think of me whenever something weird happens. I’m not exactly sure how I feel about that. I suppose at the least it makes them feel not alone during a crazy moment.

Anyway, I’m back and excited to be writing again. My focus, obviously, is education, but since humans are multi-dimensional, I will write about more than that. My biggest priority right now, aside from the day to day teaching of 5 classes of sophomores and juniors, is looking ahead to that magical ‘R’ word, RETIREMENT!! I have a year to go. January 2026 is the target date right now. I started, way back when, as a leave replacement in November so that’s why it’s a non-traditional retirement time. More about that as time goes on.

I have gotten very into creating downloadable, printable products and listing them on both Etsy and Teachers Pay Teachers. I have had some success, which has been a lot of fun. I am hoping to make that my retirement job. I mostly create games and classroom extras for most grade levels. If you’d like to see what I make, check out lessonsfromroom.etsy.com and teacherspayteachers.com/store/lessons-from-room-110 . I’m considering a Patreon account as well. It’s been a long time since I found something so fun to do, so while some income would be great, I just really enjoy the creative aspect of it all.

In the meantime, please follow me on Instagram @lessons110. I’m posting some fun, interactive stories, giving some insights into my daily life, and showing some sneak peeks at new products! I am a big believer in the “work hard, play hard” mentality and I think I’ve failed at this writing thing in the past because I was limiting myself too much, wanting to solely focus on school. I’m opening up a little this time around so overall, it should be more real and more fun.

Stop by frequently for more!!