Out of DC - and on to a brighter future!

What's this? I'm blogging again? My last post was November 3rd of 2006. It is now September 4th of 2007. Why now? Allow me to first summarize what happened to me over the past almost-year. My first year teaching remained a terrible nightmare and I was so depressed all the time I couldn't ever blog. Then I resigned from that school and things started to get a little better. Then school ended and I was practically born again over the summer. Today I just wrapped up the first day of school at my new, wonderful, not DC Public School and want to share with the world!

I just spent a little bit re-reading what I wrote at the beginning of last year and my last few posts. It's kind of funny and tragic at the same time. It's funny to read what I was thinking about at the beginning of last year and tragic how I was feeling in November of last year. Since I know this year is going to be a hundred times better, I thought it might be interesting to start the blog up again with the purpose of comparing a second year in a great school to a first year in a horrific school.

I may need to hit the highlights of how my first year teaching in DC went in order to put all of this into context. I noticed in October I wrote something along the lines of, "I almost had a nervous breakdown but I didn't". Well, looking back, I actually can remember more than one Sunday when I broke into tears at the prospect of having to go to school on Monday. In retrospect, this seems to resemble a nervous breakdown. Except instead of losing my mind, I lost my personality and happiness. After my last blog, things just continued to get worse and worse for me. The kids were terrible to me, I was overwhelmed, and they weren't learning anything. Meanwhile, I entered a stage of true depression/anxiety disorder - something that was very new and scary to me. Don't worry! I'm totally OK now! I just feel like I can be honest about this only now since it is all over with. Last school was the worst time of my life, and I've dealt with tragedies you'd think were more important before. I am also fairly certain last year will always be the worst year of my life because I will never be depressed or anxious like that again. This explains why I never blogged again.

As for what happened in school, some interesting things did happen that I now wish I had recorded here so I had a better sense of them now. Science Fair turned out not to be so bad after all. Not to say it was fun or anything, but I wasn't up all night grading papers or anything. This is because only half the students actually turned it in, and all of those were under three pages, including titles in 72 point font. But man, we were thrilled just to have the kids be able to identify what a hypothesis and variables were.

"We" reminds me of something. One of the last things I mentioned last year was how we finally got a new teacher to fill the third science vacancy. Sadly, just a few weeks later he quit. He couldn't take it. I couldn't take it either, obviously, but I just didn't quit. The vacancy remained a vacancy until the last day. So I never had planning and was often planning work for the other classes that no student ever did and no teacher ever checked. Also, halfway through the year, they added a fifth class to my schedule. These kids were generally bad. A bunch of 8th graders who had no English teacher for a quarter, no science teacher for two quarters, and no homeroom teacher all year. A recipe for disaster, I'd say. I did get to meet a few more students I fell in love with, but overall, they were a bunch of thugs.

I got through Christmas, which was a major goal of mine. In January, I started helping a couple of the other more energetic teachers at the school start and run an after-school detention program. When this program first rolled out, it was a miracle. For two or three weeks, then entire student body was on better behavior with the threat of detention so imminent. All teachers were in on it. Then word quickly spread how the kids who were getting detention weren't showing up and yet nothing happened to them. Within three weeks, the whole school realized the administration would not suspend or even scold students who skipped detention, so the whole thing fell apart. I kept manning these after-school detention sessions every day for about two months. We kept trying to revamp it, but nothing stuck. Finally, I crashed a adminstrator/team leader meeting in about March or April and set the principal straight. He kept saying things like, "Yea, we need to talk about how to fix that" and I shot back quickly, "No, let's talk now. What are we going to do?" as I put my pen on the paper and got ready to write down everything he said. He still wouldn't volunteer anything, but I came up with some solutions, he kinda nervously would nod, and I wrote it down. I told him I'd have the memo to hand out to the staff by tomorrow. I did. And boy was it good. If he had actually photocopied and gave that memo to all the teachers in the school, and he stuck by his promises of dealing with students who skipped, it would have worked. I know it. Too bad that instead of having a staff meeting the next day, a boy got into a fight and arrested at school, so the principal cancelled the meeting. The memo never went out, and I gave up on it.

Well you know, even that's not true. I tried to do detention in my room for a couple of weeks but that failed just like everything else.

Around this time was an up - I got to take four of my students to the district-wide science fair. None of them won anything there, but it was a really fun experience anyway. I was so proud of them :-)

Seeing how much those students enjoyed going to the science fair dowtown, I decided to allow my students to enter another competition for extra credit. I got this thing in the mail from the US Botanic Garden about how they were starting a new annual competition about plants. Kids could submit entries like a rap song about plants, a comic book about a world with no plants, etc. After exlaining the extra credit opportunity to all my classes, I got a whopping six kids to enter. Amazingly, though, two of them won in their categories! And then I won a prize for being an outstanding teacher! All of this was due largely on the fact so few people entered the competition at all, but still. Combine those prizes and we won $500 for the school to go towards our environmental education program. Say what? Environmental education?

By the time I got this prize, I already had put in my resignation letter. I knew that no matter how much I loved some of these kids, I couldn't keep doing all this to myself. As good as this competition was, it was still a daily struggle to feign happiness. Also, as a side note, I got a $1000 bonus (before taxes) for resigning. Somehow the teacher's union worked it out that if you resigned before March 31st, you'd get a bonus. I guess it was that big a problem to have people resigning the week before school starte. I got that bonus check in the mail just the other day. Niiiiice.

In the classroom, I experimented with a lot of things. I spent about two weeks helping my seventh graders craft the perfect essay on natural selection. That was good. Hard to do, but good I think. Meanwhile, I gave me eighth graders a project where they were given a list of activities and how many points each was worth, and then they spent the next month in class doing the activities on their own to earn enough points. This resulted in much better behavior in class, but somehow more grading. I kind of designed the whole thing with the sole intention of giving me less grading, but it didn't work. Then, by the end, all the kids were just cheating so it became futile. Oh well.

My 8th graders also took the standardized DCCAS science test. This was the very first year they gave it and I still don't have the scores back. I'm guessing they're going to be real low since I found the test pretty hard myself just glancing over it.

Then I spent fully the last week of school cleaning out my room. My classroom was such a nightmare when I came in, that I didn't want to leave it like that for the next person. The last week, it literally took me all day every day, with all of my students hauling trash to the dumpster out back, to get everything out. I realized it wasn't just one or two teachers before that left crap. It was every teacher since 1940. I found newspapers with headlines about the VietCong. I found about 30 bottles in cardboard boxes labeled "poison". I found science equipment that belongs in the Smithsonian. Most sadly, I found out that the microscopes I had in my room the whole time actually do work. I didn't know that there were special lights to shine on to them until that last week. So anyway, everything is labeled and organized now so the new teacher better appreciate it.

The new teacher better also appreciate the program I put together with the Anacostia Watershed Society (AWS) for the entire seventh grade to do this year with the money we won. The AWS is going to give a few workshops at the school, have the kids paint "No Dumping" signs on the drains around the school, and take them on a canoe trip up and down the Anacostia River.

I had every logical reason to stay in DC. If I stayed, I would have become the science department chair (being the most experienced science teacher since the other one moved) and would have been able to spend this money myself. I don't think I have to explain why I still left though.

SUMMER BREAK! is waaaay under-rated by the way. This perk is definitely worth any low pay that teachers are perceived as having. I went to Germany and Paris with my mom for two weeks right after school let out and loved it! I don't know if I can say that enough. Every time I think about that trip, I miss it. What I would give to sit in a cafe in Paris or a Biergarten in Germany for three uninterrupted hours with friends again. Aaahhh....

Then for the rest of the summer, I focused on personal projects I'd been putting off all year. I realized I was doing things for myself and enjoying it again. I was laughing just for the heck of it again. I was happy to be around people again. And I realized I had woken up. Whatever that nightmare of a depression/anxiety disorder that had overcome me a few months earlier was, was now gone. I remembered how I actually did used to be kind of silly and hyper before I started teaching. This was me again, for the first time in months.

I also learned like two days before I went to Europe, that I got my dream job at new school that is still in the DC area. I had actually turned down a job at Roosevelt High School in DC because I was still concerned with DCPS. And god thing I did, because my new job is fantastic. It's still in a city environment but with a small town feel. The student body is incredibly diverse racially and economically. The special ed students get the support they are supposed to. And every student in the school is issued a laptop! Yea, I said it. Every kid has a laptop! Every teacher has a webpage, too. It's a dream come true.

Now, let me talk about the differences between this year so far, and last year up to this point.

Last year, I cried during orientation. This year, I had a great time at happy hour with some other teachers, old and new. This year, I can't get people to stop saying, "You'll love these students - they're great". Last year, we had to chant in unison, "Every child can learn." Last year, the closest thing I had to a mentor commanded me to stop stressing out, and by the way, you need to put more color on the walls. This year, I have a mentor and love her! Actually, I basically have two mentors because I'm switching between two classrooms. My official mentor is a wonderful teache I share the classroom and an office with. She gave me all kinds of great activities for the first few days of school. My unofficial mentor is who I share the other classroom with, and she too gave me lots of ideas. Not to mention these two were basically in charge of decorating their own rooms, so I had very little to do myself. A year ago I didn't want to take a job if I had to be a "cart-teacher" switching from room to room. Now I'm realizing all the benefits of not keeping up a room and being able to spy on other, better teachers all the time. Wahoo!

And my first day of school went really well. Sure, there were parts where everyone was bored and some put their heads down, but I was able to get them up and out of their seats talking to one another for a review Bingo game. The kids were respectful. Most of them were shy, but some of them were quite ready to join in class discussions in all the right ways. I can point out only one student that I think I'll need to get on "my side" before he decides to become a bad student. And get this: I even had one student say, "This is going to be a good class!" after I explained my new and improved class-wide rewards program.

Here's some things I am doing differently this year. We are not going to rehearse procedures just for the heck of it like Harry Wong (very famous teacher-author) says to. We will rehearse those procedures when we need them. I only have 5 rules this year. Not the 30 or so I had last year. What a dumb idea! Though, even when I later narrowed it down to 6 it still didn't work. My rules this year are:

1. Follow directions the first time they are given
2. Be prepared an focused during all instructional time
3. Watch your mouth
4. Hands to yourself
5. Nothing goes airborne

I like them, don't you? (In the spirit of full-disclosure, I stole a lot from an article at teachers.net) My class-wide rewards program is also cool. Instead of deducting time from a set 15 minutes of free-time on Fridays, the class earns Friday Fun-Time. First off, fun-time will mean review games, not chaos. Secondly, time is earned for things like the whole class is in their seat when the bell rings (3 points), turns homework in on time (3 points), passes a test (10 points), or gets A's on a test (30 points). Then, points are lost from the tally for every check on my clipboard. I put a check by a student's name on my clipboard every time they break one of the five rules. So I'll let you all know how this new plan works in reality.

Tomorrow will essentially be the first day of school again. Here's hoping it's not like last year when one of my students poured water all over another's notebook and ripped up their folder.

I won't make the mistake of making any promises on how often I'm going to post this year, so thank you that much more for reading. Talk to you again soon!