I don't have much to say, but I have a little bit of "free" (stalling) time now so I'm going to seize it to update. Who know when I'll find the time to do so again.
Tuesday, my homeroom came in to see their mural on the wall. The girls who did most of the work seemed almost embarassed they were so quiet. The boys on the other hand, when I asked them how they liked their mural, replied, "That's gangsta! That's gangsta!" So, they were thrilled.
I briefly went to the Anacostia Watershed Society homepage to look for teaching resources and it looks like I've missed all the teacher trainings and stuff. I haven't contacted them or anything yet - I want to research a bit more, first - but I may have to do this on my own.
My 8th graders were horrible on Tuesday. Absolutely horrible. They would not be quiet! I know, this is the same problem I talk about all the time. Believe me, I'm even saying to myself that this is getting boring. But every time I think I've got the problem licked, it starts again. Yelling doesn't work. Nice only works sometimes. I try to do fun stuff, but they are usually so bad right from the start of class I can't do the fun things.
So I'm yelling at the class about how I'm not going to shout over them and how if they missed my explanation of density the first three times, I'm not going to go over it again. One girl in the back says quietly to herself, "Cuz you don't care". Oh that touched a nerve. I really actually got mad then. I immediately tore into this angry emotional speech about how I spend every minute I am awake from 5:30 in the morning to 11:00 at night grading and planning and worrying about whether or not I am ready for my classes the next day. I was shouting stuff like, "I take that as a personal insult" and, "Don't you dare say I don't care" and bla bla bla for a couple minutes. Finally the girl says, "I didn't it mean it that way, Ms. Newbie". "Are you apologizing?" "Yes" "Alright, thank you, apology accepted" and I moved on for about 30 more seconds before the class acted up again.
I went home that night hating my job. Hating kids and hating my job. And with this job which takes up every minute of every day, hating my job is equivalent to hating my life.
Finally, after dinner, some Seinfeld, and a beer, I was ready to get back to work and plan for Wednesday. Since the cell city posted went so well, I decided to give my 7th graders a cut-and-paste activity about the photosynthesis/respiration cycle. My homeroom did that today and it went great! I need to find things like this for my 8th graders to do.
My bad 7th grade class never had a chance to start because their was an assembly - once again a total surprise to me. It was this whole thing about peer pressure put on by Kaiser Permanente. It was really well done and entertaining, but I'm sure had no lasting impression on them. But, it is really nice to see these corporations and non-profits paying for these assemblies and field trips, because even if the kids can afford to go, they won't pay a dollar if they have to. Seven students refused to even go on the free field trip.
And then I left early to come wait for the cable guy. So today was great! After I grade all this work I have to give back tomorrow, I'll have to think of some kind of lab to do with my 8th graders tomorrow or I might just have to bang my head into a wall during class.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Sunday, October 08, 2006
I'm Back on the Internet!
Hey Hey! My internet randomly started working in my apartment so now I can get on and gush about everything in my life again. But don't tell my school that - I still want to take off early on Wednesday to take care of the television cable. Otherwise it'll be like two weeks before they can come out. Plus, I won't be missing any of my classes because my last period on Wednesday is set aside for me to sub other classes. So all I'm missing is the chance to cover a class.
So I'm sitting here with my grade book/lesson plan book so I can remember what happened the last three weeks. I'm going to try and keep each point I make very short. Let's see how this goes. This is going to be a very random collection of facts.
My homeroom is great. I only have 19 kids and only 2 of them are bad. One of them has only been to my class three times she is such a truant so she doesn't even really count. I really know nothing about here except she can be a real brat when she's in a bad mood and lies all the time. I caught her in the hall with a cell phone which is not permitted. She lied and said she had permission to have it. I asked her to return to my class after school for detention since she ran out of the room for detention the day before (I was subbing my homeroom as they were in another class). She told me to go ahead and write a referral because she already told the assistant principal to "Kiss My" butt (in harsher words). Again, not true.
The other kid who is bad is really more of a class clown. It's nothing I can't handle given he's the only one. Plus, he has started dating the smartest girl in the room so he's doing a LOT more work than he used to. It's fantastic. They goof around a flirt a lot which is annoying, but it's better than him not doing any work. I just hope his girlfriend's acting all goofy and ghetto is a temporary thing to try and impress him. A few weeks ago she was proper and sweet. Now she comes to class late a lot and is wailing in the hallway in that high-pitched whining scream thing these ghetto girls do.
I also found in the bathroom outside my room that someone had scratched my homeroom's number (each class has a number) into a bunch of the stall doors. So of course I do not condone graffiti, but I was actually kind of pleased that my homeroom was showing signs of pride and identity. So I am now trying to direct this pride to a more productive cause. A few days ago I had them brainstorm ways to revise the school motto to reflect something about science (since we are in the science hallway). They came up with "Working Together to Save the Environment: A Sense of Community". Isn't that great? We've got science, civic pride, building community which is like social studies. The next day they colored in a mural that I hung in the hallway Friday night. I'm really looking forward to seeing their reactions on Tuesday when they see their mural hanging proudly in our hallway.
This is all winding up to what I realized our theme for the rest of the year will be: Cleaning up the Anacostia River. The whole point of homeroom is to be interdisciplinary and to build study skills, especially in math and reading, and also to build citizenship or something like that. So I've got citizenship with us working together to improve our community. I've got literacy with us reading newspaper articles related to our theme and writing a monthly newsletter to the rest of the school informing them of our progress and our mission. We can bring in social studies by talking about how this relates to our community and science with the actual cleaning and improving of water quality. We can make graphs of how financial savings by switching to energy saving lightbulbs and stuff. We got it all!
I already have a bit of a relationship with the Anacostia Watershed Society since I wrote a large research paper on how to clean up the Anacostia River. I'm hoping I can rekindle this relationship and have my students volunteer for clean-up projects and take field trips touring the River. Basically, I don't know exactly what we're going to do, but there are so many possibilities, I think this could be really great and exciting. Plus, it'll make me look a lot better to my administration because I've been really wearing them thin lately.
The week before last was just terrible all around. I kept screwing up. I think this is how it went: On Monday, my car got something stuck in the wheel well and was making a horrific noise. I'm going to skip the whole dramatic story of me freaking out and nearly crying in the ghetto and sum it up by saying I had to have my car towed and spend the night at my boyfriend's without ever going home. I was wearing the same clothes I had on the day before on Tuesday. Then, Tuesday night, I was up until 1:30 planning. On Wednesday, I went to school, but forgot all the paperwork I had at home, so I had to leave school during my planning period and drive all the way back into Maryland to get my stuff before my next class. Then, I was covering for the art teacher and the class was out of control. Oh right! On top of all this I was very sick and praactically lost my voice. I couldn't raise my voice about normal talking level. So as all these kids I don't know are screaming out the window and walking out of class and throwing papers, I couldn't get any of their attention because I couldn't do more than whisper. Several administrators came by bringing back students I gave passes to go to the bathroom 20 minutes earlier and trying to figure out who was screaming out the window because the neighbors complained. At the staff meeting after school, I was anonymously called out for letting students go to the bathroom in groups. Thursday was back to school night, and I was all ready to stay afer school until it was over, but then I learned I had to drive to Adams Morgan to sign my lease. Not only did I get lost and stuck in regular rush-hour traffic, but there was also a torrential rainstorm, so I ended up being 30 minutes late to back-to school night. Now, it wasn't that big a deal because all the parents (all 50 or so of them) were still in the auditorium, but it looks bad none-the-less. Only about 4 or 5 parents of my students came to back-to-school night. How sad is that? Then finally, on Friday, I was covering again and it was chaos again. This time I was in the room next to the front office so the principal could see even more how little control I had. Even worse, the students noticed, too. During this time, I took an ipod from a student promising to return it to him after class. Then later, the principal came in and was checking this same student's pockets on suspicions he may have stolen money from someone else, so I handed him the ipod. Now this student has a personal vendetta against me, because as he sees it, I'm a snitch. I was afraid this would mean the kid would vandalize my room and such, but instead he's decided to lash out by hollering down the hallways whenever he sees me, "You're Hot! You're Hot! Hot like a firecracker!" So, I guess he's trying to make me feel violated or something, but he's overestimating how much I care. He may look mature, but he's still an 8th grader. I'm just glad he isn't breaking into my room and stealing stuff.
So after that week, I spent the whole weekend furniture shopping and such and got barely any work done. For those two weeks, I was practically winging it in every class because I had no time to plan meaningful lessons. Then I had another terrible Monday with my kicking and screaming 7th graders followed by moving boxes into my apartment until 2:00 am.
But then the light came back out! I assigned a cell city project to my 7th graders (where they make a poster of a city where the mayor's office is the nucleus and so forth) and it went really really well. Almost every student was working and learning. I had been practicing these vocabulary words with them for days and they still weren't remembering any of it. Then all of a sudden with making this poster, they were actually using names of cell structures in conversation with each other! Learning! And also in my 8th grade classes they were learning! I remembered what teaching is supposed to be - I'm supposed to teach and they are supposed to learn. Oh man I can just keep doing that and they can keep learning. Because being one of those police officers in charge of restoring order to an angry mob is an entirely different job.
I also changed my whole behavior plan, again. Remember how excited I was about teaching my kids manners and having like 25 rules? Yea... that didn't work. I know, I know. You told me so. I remember. You all told me before I started that that was a bad idea. You were right. I only see these kids every other day for 90 minutes. Maybe if they were younger and I had them all day, I'd have them time to teach manners. Instead, I need to focus on science. Here's what I've been doing lately. Every time a student breaks one of my "Big Six" rules, they get a check on my clipboard. If they get four checks, they have to complete a behavior journal which is basically a letter of apology to me already formatted for them. They just fill in spaces where they explain what they were doing, why it was wrong, what they need to do from now on, how they'll do that, and how I can help them. I like this plan better because it keeps problem students quiet for 10 minutes while they finish the letter (they can't leave my room until they do, so they finish it fast), it is more immediate than detention, so the students respond more to my warnings, and it means I'm only after class a couple minutes with kids instead of 15 minutes every day. Those lunch and after-school detentions were only punishing me before. The kids barely cared. My Big Six Rules are:
1. Always come to class fully prepared
2. Always work diligently on the task at hand
3. Always raise your hand quietly and wait for permission to speak or leave your seat for any reason
4. Always keep your hands and materials to yourself - no throwing stuff!
5. Always listen carefully when I am talking
6. Never argue with my over classroom procedures
Parent-teacher conferences - only 7 parents came. So there's really nothing to say except that I spent those full 7 hours grading and I still have more to do. Thank goodness I've got Monday off.
I mentioned I found the fathers of two of my students on the sex-offender registry. Both of the offenses were from the 80's so the kids weren't even born. And both sounded mostly like taking advantage of women who were intoxicated. Deplorable, but not outright violent. Though, both of these clearly have problems at home or emotional issues. One is the boy I named Sleepy-Head and the other is a boy who throws full out temper tantrums in my class when I ask him to move to his assigned seat so he'll quit fighting with another boy.
I moved myself into my new amazing apartment and Friday and we basically finished making the place look like a home last night. Not to brag, but it really is the best apartment ever. Adam's Morgan is so cool, the apartment is completely noise-free, our decorating job is super-cool, the rent is controlled, it's just great all around. You should come visit!
How about "The Wire", huh? Fantastic television. You should all be watching it. My review is that my kids are not nearly as hard-core as the kids in that show, but mine are much more playful/disruptive. Raising my voice once has never gotten them to be quiet. One student yelling, "Shut Up!" has never worked either (10 other kids just yell the same thing back). Also, the principal never magically appears when my class is rowdy. He has come by conveniently before, but not every single time, of course. But, if you watch the show, you know when I mean be hard-core. My kids, though more bratty, are far less scary.
And "Lost"? Great! You should all watch that, too. Not that it is related to my job or anything. It's just good.
And one final question to the public: has anyone seen "Half Nelson" with Ryan Gosling? I need to catch that. He's a teacher addicted to cocaine in Harlem. Looks really well-done.
I guess I should be grade or lesson plan now. Ugh. I really miss having a life. I think I'm seeing "The Departed" tonight, so that's something. I hope you all have a fantastic Columbus Day. Byebye!
So I'm sitting here with my grade book/lesson plan book so I can remember what happened the last three weeks. I'm going to try and keep each point I make very short. Let's see how this goes. This is going to be a very random collection of facts.
My homeroom is great. I only have 19 kids and only 2 of them are bad. One of them has only been to my class three times she is such a truant so she doesn't even really count. I really know nothing about here except she can be a real brat when she's in a bad mood and lies all the time. I caught her in the hall with a cell phone which is not permitted. She lied and said she had permission to have it. I asked her to return to my class after school for detention since she ran out of the room for detention the day before (I was subbing my homeroom as they were in another class). She told me to go ahead and write a referral because she already told the assistant principal to "Kiss My" butt (in harsher words). Again, not true.
The other kid who is bad is really more of a class clown. It's nothing I can't handle given he's the only one. Plus, he has started dating the smartest girl in the room so he's doing a LOT more work than he used to. It's fantastic. They goof around a flirt a lot which is annoying, but it's better than him not doing any work. I just hope his girlfriend's acting all goofy and ghetto is a temporary thing to try and impress him. A few weeks ago she was proper and sweet. Now she comes to class late a lot and is wailing in the hallway in that high-pitched whining scream thing these ghetto girls do.
I also found in the bathroom outside my room that someone had scratched my homeroom's number (each class has a number) into a bunch of the stall doors. So of course I do not condone graffiti, but I was actually kind of pleased that my homeroom was showing signs of pride and identity. So I am now trying to direct this pride to a more productive cause. A few days ago I had them brainstorm ways to revise the school motto to reflect something about science (since we are in the science hallway). They came up with "Working Together to Save the Environment: A Sense of Community". Isn't that great? We've got science, civic pride, building community which is like social studies. The next day they colored in a mural that I hung in the hallway Friday night. I'm really looking forward to seeing their reactions on Tuesday when they see their mural hanging proudly in our hallway.
This is all winding up to what I realized our theme for the rest of the year will be: Cleaning up the Anacostia River. The whole point of homeroom is to be interdisciplinary and to build study skills, especially in math and reading, and also to build citizenship or something like that. So I've got citizenship with us working together to improve our community. I've got literacy with us reading newspaper articles related to our theme and writing a monthly newsletter to the rest of the school informing them of our progress and our mission. We can bring in social studies by talking about how this relates to our community and science with the actual cleaning and improving of water quality. We can make graphs of how financial savings by switching to energy saving lightbulbs and stuff. We got it all!
I already have a bit of a relationship with the Anacostia Watershed Society since I wrote a large research paper on how to clean up the Anacostia River. I'm hoping I can rekindle this relationship and have my students volunteer for clean-up projects and take field trips touring the River. Basically, I don't know exactly what we're going to do, but there are so many possibilities, I think this could be really great and exciting. Plus, it'll make me look a lot better to my administration because I've been really wearing them thin lately.
The week before last was just terrible all around. I kept screwing up. I think this is how it went: On Monday, my car got something stuck in the wheel well and was making a horrific noise. I'm going to skip the whole dramatic story of me freaking out and nearly crying in the ghetto and sum it up by saying I had to have my car towed and spend the night at my boyfriend's without ever going home. I was wearing the same clothes I had on the day before on Tuesday. Then, Tuesday night, I was up until 1:30 planning. On Wednesday, I went to school, but forgot all the paperwork I had at home, so I had to leave school during my planning period and drive all the way back into Maryland to get my stuff before my next class. Then, I was covering for the art teacher and the class was out of control. Oh right! On top of all this I was very sick and praactically lost my voice. I couldn't raise my voice about normal talking level. So as all these kids I don't know are screaming out the window and walking out of class and throwing papers, I couldn't get any of their attention because I couldn't do more than whisper. Several administrators came by bringing back students I gave passes to go to the bathroom 20 minutes earlier and trying to figure out who was screaming out the window because the neighbors complained. At the staff meeting after school, I was anonymously called out for letting students go to the bathroom in groups. Thursday was back to school night, and I was all ready to stay afer school until it was over, but then I learned I had to drive to Adams Morgan to sign my lease. Not only did I get lost and stuck in regular rush-hour traffic, but there was also a torrential rainstorm, so I ended up being 30 minutes late to back-to school night. Now, it wasn't that big a deal because all the parents (all 50 or so of them) were still in the auditorium, but it looks bad none-the-less. Only about 4 or 5 parents of my students came to back-to-school night. How sad is that? Then finally, on Friday, I was covering again and it was chaos again. This time I was in the room next to the front office so the principal could see even more how little control I had. Even worse, the students noticed, too. During this time, I took an ipod from a student promising to return it to him after class. Then later, the principal came in and was checking this same student's pockets on suspicions he may have stolen money from someone else, so I handed him the ipod. Now this student has a personal vendetta against me, because as he sees it, I'm a snitch. I was afraid this would mean the kid would vandalize my room and such, but instead he's decided to lash out by hollering down the hallways whenever he sees me, "You're Hot! You're Hot! Hot like a firecracker!" So, I guess he's trying to make me feel violated or something, but he's overestimating how much I care. He may look mature, but he's still an 8th grader. I'm just glad he isn't breaking into my room and stealing stuff.
So after that week, I spent the whole weekend furniture shopping and such and got barely any work done. For those two weeks, I was practically winging it in every class because I had no time to plan meaningful lessons. Then I had another terrible Monday with my kicking and screaming 7th graders followed by moving boxes into my apartment until 2:00 am.
But then the light came back out! I assigned a cell city project to my 7th graders (where they make a poster of a city where the mayor's office is the nucleus and so forth) and it went really really well. Almost every student was working and learning. I had been practicing these vocabulary words with them for days and they still weren't remembering any of it. Then all of a sudden with making this poster, they were actually using names of cell structures in conversation with each other! Learning! And also in my 8th grade classes they were learning! I remembered what teaching is supposed to be - I'm supposed to teach and they are supposed to learn. Oh man I can just keep doing that and they can keep learning. Because being one of those police officers in charge of restoring order to an angry mob is an entirely different job.
I also changed my whole behavior plan, again. Remember how excited I was about teaching my kids manners and having like 25 rules? Yea... that didn't work. I know, I know. You told me so. I remember. You all told me before I started that that was a bad idea. You were right. I only see these kids every other day for 90 minutes. Maybe if they were younger and I had them all day, I'd have them time to teach manners. Instead, I need to focus on science. Here's what I've been doing lately. Every time a student breaks one of my "Big Six" rules, they get a check on my clipboard. If they get four checks, they have to complete a behavior journal which is basically a letter of apology to me already formatted for them. They just fill in spaces where they explain what they were doing, why it was wrong, what they need to do from now on, how they'll do that, and how I can help them. I like this plan better because it keeps problem students quiet for 10 minutes while they finish the letter (they can't leave my room until they do, so they finish it fast), it is more immediate than detention, so the students respond more to my warnings, and it means I'm only after class a couple minutes with kids instead of 15 minutes every day. Those lunch and after-school detentions were only punishing me before. The kids barely cared. My Big Six Rules are:
1. Always come to class fully prepared
2. Always work diligently on the task at hand
3. Always raise your hand quietly and wait for permission to speak or leave your seat for any reason
4. Always keep your hands and materials to yourself - no throwing stuff!
5. Always listen carefully when I am talking
6. Never argue with my over classroom procedures
Parent-teacher conferences - only 7 parents came. So there's really nothing to say except that I spent those full 7 hours grading and I still have more to do. Thank goodness I've got Monday off.
I mentioned I found the fathers of two of my students on the sex-offender registry. Both of the offenses were from the 80's so the kids weren't even born. And both sounded mostly like taking advantage of women who were intoxicated. Deplorable, but not outright violent. Though, both of these clearly have problems at home or emotional issues. One is the boy I named Sleepy-Head and the other is a boy who throws full out temper tantrums in my class when I ask him to move to his assigned seat so he'll quit fighting with another boy.
I moved myself into my new amazing apartment and Friday and we basically finished making the place look like a home last night. Not to brag, but it really is the best apartment ever. Adam's Morgan is so cool, the apartment is completely noise-free, our decorating job is super-cool, the rent is controlled, it's just great all around. You should come visit!
How about "The Wire", huh? Fantastic television. You should all be watching it. My review is that my kids are not nearly as hard-core as the kids in that show, but mine are much more playful/disruptive. Raising my voice once has never gotten them to be quiet. One student yelling, "Shut Up!" has never worked either (10 other kids just yell the same thing back). Also, the principal never magically appears when my class is rowdy. He has come by conveniently before, but not every single time, of course. But, if you watch the show, you know when I mean be hard-core. My kids, though more bratty, are far less scary.
And "Lost"? Great! You should all watch that, too. Not that it is related to my job or anything. It's just good.
And one final question to the public: has anyone seen "Half Nelson" with Ryan Gosling? I need to catch that. He's a teacher addicted to cocaine in Harlem. Looks really well-done.
I guess I should be grade or lesson plan now. Ugh. I really miss having a life. I think I'm seeing "The Departed" tonight, so that's something. I hope you all have a fantastic Columbus Day. Byebye!
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