Today, when I logged into the attendance, a little window popped up and told me a new student would be joining my class tomorrow. When I read the name, I actually let out a little scream briefly distracting my mentor teacher's class. Could this really be the same student I taught last year? Her last name is really common, but her first it totally unique. I liked this girl last year in my class in DC. She gave birth to a baby boy in, I don't know, like January? She did the home-school thing for about two months and then returned to my class. When she came back she was really good about taking responsibility for herself. We were in the middle of a project and she asked me for some extra time to do it. I asked her why and she said, "I'm raising a baby and going to school Ms. Newbie - this stuff is hard!" I had to laugh because it was so true. About a week later she had all the work she needed and she earned a B that quarter. So I actually find it really funny and nice that I'm getting this same girl again!
I stopped by the counselor's office to see if this really was the same girl when it occurred to me that the best way to check would be to see if her brother was coming too. This brought forth a whole different set of emotions. The girl I like, the brother, well, not so much. And it turns out he is coming, but he won't be in my classes. So here's the story of this boy:
I mentioned a couple posts ago how half way through the year I acquired a new class. Well this student was in that troublesome class. He didn't really stand out, at first, though. He was one of three boys who literally did nothing. They didn't even write their names on papers. They just leaned back in their chair and watched the class happen, but not in a rude way. You know how some kids lean back and it's like, "What makes you think I'm going to do any work for you?" These kids were more like, "Why work when you can just vegitate?" So I concerned myself more with teaching the 8 students who wanted to learn. On a regular basis I would call the students who wanted to learn forward and give them the lesson while the other 12 kids went to the back and rolled dice. That's all that could be done with this particular class. And even with those 8 kids it was a struggle to get them to focus.
So anyway, not long after I receive this class, the school was broken into in a big way. Over a three day weekend, a group of students walked into the apparently unlocked back door, broke the windows of nearly every classroom in the building and stole items from almost all of those rooms. (My room went untouched). They stole one of my colleague's personal laptop, another's stereo, some computers, etc. Well, we do have cameras in the school, so a few days later it's common knowledge amongst the staff in the building that this boy was the only one of the group that was a student here. The others were friends he must have brought along. For weeks this boy was absent, but we heard no kind of news about what was to happen to him. My colleagues said nothing was ever done about their personal possessions being stolen, so my guess is a police report was never even filed. A little later, I am asked to sign a letter acknowledging the boy is to be transferred to Choice Academy, the alternative school in DC. Despite this, for the last few weeks of school, this boy continues coming here. He never actually went to Choice.
Of course this kid failed big time. During the last days of school, the principal and the school secretary asked me if I could change his grade to a D. Apparently my F would have been the only thing holding him back. So I did. Under any other circumstances I would not give a student a grade they didn't deserve, but at the time it seemed to serve everyone's interests to get this kid out of the building. Plus I was leaving and it was the principal asking me. Was it really worth it to put up a fight in the interest of academic integrity?
Ha, well, here it came right back to bite me and I couldn't feel more guilty about it. Of course I shouldn't have changed his grade. And you know, I wouldn't feel so bad about it if I was teaching him myself, but I feel like I have unfairly brought a bad element to this good school and thrown a dangerous case on my fellow teachers.
I told the guidance counselor and she said both the brother and sister are listed as homeless. I'm going to email one of the students I'm still in contact with now and ask if he can find out if they really are out of their mom's house or what. It's a common thing in SE DC to lie about your address so you can go to a better school.
On a different note, I broke one of my own rules and brought work home with me. I should get to that. Later peeps!
Wednesday, September 12, 2007
Tuesday, September 11, 2007
Back-to-School Night
Hello again! It's late and I'm tired, but I really wanted to document how happy I am right now. I got back a short time ago from Back-To-School Night which was a success. I'd say I had about 6 parents per class and they all seemed to like me - and that's the whole point, right? Seriously, though, I can hear how much more confident I sound, not just because I'm better at public speaking, but because I know my class is just organized better this year.
For instance, last year when let students re-take quizzes, they kept the highest score. That ended up in a lot of students re-taking quizzes hoping they'd get lucky and score better. There was no connection in their mind between studying and succeeding, so it kind of defeated the whole purpose. This year, they keep the re-take score better or not.
I'm starting a club this year that I'm really excited about. It's going to be based on the eCyberMission competition hosted by the US Army. I couldn't come up with a non-nerdy name for it, so my homeroom students named it for me: Mi$$ion Impossible - win cash with your science fair project. Basically, its a separate competition but similar enough to the science fair that I can help students tailor their projects so they can submit the same work to both competitions. I think science fair is a huge waste of time, but I really like this eCyberMission thing. Instead of focusing on things that students find so boring, it focuses on asking the students to propose a real solution to a real problem in their community. Talk about relevance.
And the rest of my first week and the beginning of this week have been great. I'm not going to say easy or stress-free. I was at work until 6:00 every day and until 7:30 on Friday. I'm still a slow lesson planner. But it occurred to me today that I haven;t put a single check on my clipboard yet. I have not once had to move past just asking a student to stop. They always did the first time! Glory Glory Hallelujah! I love these kids! I can't wait until their personalities really come out, because the only down side right now is they are kind of boring. It's like they are too easy to teach. And by the way, I'm not the only teacher at the school who has noticed this. I heard another one saying the same thing; that we must have gotten a really good crop this year.
And I am so missing some of my babies from last year. I'm emailing with one of my favorites and I get phone calls once in a while from another. But some other kids I am just dieing to know how they are doing. I want to ask them how they're doing in school. Basically I'm thinking of my lunch crowd. By the end of the year I had a group of about 15 students who ate lunch with me every day. I miss them. But you know what, of course, there were certainly that many students I hated to see every day in class. I can think of about 5 students I truly hated on a personal level. Hopefully I won't be hating any students this year. That was really the main reason I left. How could I possibly teach if I actually hated some of the kids. That's just so wrong. It's against teacher code, and even my own personal values. I clashed with that culture. I think switching schools will mean that culture is not quite as pervasive.
Tomorrow we stop doing review activites (metric system, latin roots, etc.) and do our first lab. I'm doing the same paper towel lab I did last year. The only thing is I ran out of time to assign lab groups. Oops. Maybe just have them count of by four this time and assign groups next time? We'll see.
So in summary, still love my new school, but can't make any real substantial judgements yet. I'll get back y'all later. Until then, have lovely days.
For instance, last year when let students re-take quizzes, they kept the highest score. That ended up in a lot of students re-taking quizzes hoping they'd get lucky and score better. There was no connection in their mind between studying and succeeding, so it kind of defeated the whole purpose. This year, they keep the re-take score better or not.
I'm starting a club this year that I'm really excited about. It's going to be based on the eCyberMission competition hosted by the US Army. I couldn't come up with a non-nerdy name for it, so my homeroom students named it for me: Mi$$ion Impossible - win cash with your science fair project. Basically, its a separate competition but similar enough to the science fair that I can help students tailor their projects so they can submit the same work to both competitions. I think science fair is a huge waste of time, but I really like this eCyberMission thing. Instead of focusing on things that students find so boring, it focuses on asking the students to propose a real solution to a real problem in their community. Talk about relevance.
And the rest of my first week and the beginning of this week have been great. I'm not going to say easy or stress-free. I was at work until 6:00 every day and until 7:30 on Friday. I'm still a slow lesson planner. But it occurred to me today that I haven;t put a single check on my clipboard yet. I have not once had to move past just asking a student to stop. They always did the first time! Glory Glory Hallelujah! I love these kids! I can't wait until their personalities really come out, because the only down side right now is they are kind of boring. It's like they are too easy to teach. And by the way, I'm not the only teacher at the school who has noticed this. I heard another one saying the same thing; that we must have gotten a really good crop this year.
And I am so missing some of my babies from last year. I'm emailing with one of my favorites and I get phone calls once in a while from another. But some other kids I am just dieing to know how they are doing. I want to ask them how they're doing in school. Basically I'm thinking of my lunch crowd. By the end of the year I had a group of about 15 students who ate lunch with me every day. I miss them. But you know what, of course, there were certainly that many students I hated to see every day in class. I can think of about 5 students I truly hated on a personal level. Hopefully I won't be hating any students this year. That was really the main reason I left. How could I possibly teach if I actually hated some of the kids. That's just so wrong. It's against teacher code, and even my own personal values. I clashed with that culture. I think switching schools will mean that culture is not quite as pervasive.
Tomorrow we stop doing review activites (metric system, latin roots, etc.) and do our first lab. I'm doing the same paper towel lab I did last year. The only thing is I ran out of time to assign lab groups. Oops. Maybe just have them count of by four this time and assign groups next time? We'll see.
So in summary, still love my new school, but can't make any real substantial judgements yet. I'll get back y'all later. Until then, have lovely days.
Tuesday, September 04, 2007
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!
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!
Friday, November 03, 2006
First Quarter Grades Are In
And they do not look good. Like I said, before, most of my students are failing. I have four classes, and the average grade distribution in each would be something like 1 A, 1 B, 2 C's, 2D's, and 15 F's. I even went to the principal's office to ask him if that was OK or if I should alter my grading scale so that like a 50% was passing. Thankfully, though, he said that it was find if I failed most of my students and that sometimes they just need to see that F first quarter to motivate them to try the next quarter. I think I'm failing more students than the average teacher at my school, but not many more. I was hearing very similar comments from all the other teachers while we were in our new "computer lab" (3 P.C.'s) logging grades into the system.
I want to thank those Joe and anonymous for leaving messages again. You are absolutely right that I need to keep my personal and professional life separate and find more joy in the small successes I do have. On that note, I am slowly getting more students coming into my room at lunch, which is such a great sign. That means they like me which means they respect me and the more students in a class who respect me, the better behavior is bound to become. So as irritating as it can be some days to babysit a bunch of kids during my lunch break, the reward outweighs the cost.
I think I last blogged two weeks ago. I felt basically the same way the whole next week, which is why I didn't blog again. Last weekend I must have a hit a low point. I basically did no work and instead just layed around moaning about how I hate my job and hate grading papers and lesson planning. My boyfriend, getting exasperated with having to listen to the same thing over and over told me to just take a day off. Ding! Lightbulb! Take a day off? Why of course! Why didn't I think of that! Then the next day my mom came down to see my new apartment and I spent our entire lunch complaining about everything again and she agreed. Take a day off! So what did I do? First thing on Monday I wrote a letter to the principal explaining how I need an entire day off in order to catch up on grading and on missed sleep because I hadn't slept more than 5 hours a night in two weeks. I was afraid the principal wouldn't go for it, but instead he said something along the lines of, "Oh that's fine, go ahead. We all need a personal day now and then with this job. We appreciate what you do here." So on Halloween, I stayed home.
Playing hooky is one of the best things I have ever done. I slept in, ate a decent breakfast, then graded papers and calculated letter grades from about 10:30 am to 10:30 pm. I only got 75% done, but that was a huge chunk out of my workload. Also, I did not have to chaperone the Halloween dance, which if it was anything like the dances at my high school, must have been mad raunchy.
Wednesday I went in to work refreshed. I may not have seemed any different to my students, but I just felt better overall. I was still yelling at them and everything, but I didn't care so much. I'm getting more used to the constant yelling at children. Almost luckily for me, 3 students in my bad 7th grade class almost immediately broke rules that got them sent out of my room. The emotionally disturbed girl I mentioned last time threatened a boy and sprayed water all over my floor. One boy was punching another. Another girl had a cell phone ring in class. Oddly enough, it was the girl with the cell phone who ended up getting suspended because she yelled at me so bad for trying to take her cell phone from her while the security guard was standing right there. Silly kids. The funniest part was when she came back in my room at the very end of class and was just seething mad at me. She kept saying, "Don't look at me. Don't say my name. I hate you Ms. Newbie I hate this class." Meanwhile, I absolutely could not help but laugh at her. Of course, that just made her more mad. But I got a laugh in during class time and that is a thing to cherish.
Thursday was the Reading in Fundamental kickoff. Every homeroom was given a class set of books to read and a volunteer came into read it to them for about half an hour after talking about why reading in important. Volunteers, you say? How nice! Well, not so much. For the whole school, we could only wrangle 5 volunteers from the community so the rest of our "volunteers" were administrators. My class is reading "Island of the Blue Dolphins" by Scott O'Dell. I like this because it means I have an activity every day for homeroom now. I don't need to hunt for newspaper articles or dream up team-building or citizenship activities anymore.
Next, the students had an assembly, but a handful of my homeroom students lost their minds and could not even be quiet in the hallway on the way down to the auditorium, so I had to keep 6 boys and 1 girl in for 1 hour of silent detention in my room during the assembly. At least it was mostly silent. A couple of boys kept whining. That was irritating as hell. I hate detention more than making phone calls home. It really does punish the teacher more than the student. And on top of that, I missed seeing some of my lunch-time friend/students participate in their speech and debate competition during the assembly. I was even surprised myself how disappointed I was I didn't get to see that. I felt like I was missing my own son's performance or something. I guess I do like kids after all... :-)
So anyway, I only had to teach one class on Thursday (my GT class) and they just did the book work they didn't do with the sub (because they were at the Halloween dance). Then Friday, today, was a half day since teachers needed to log their grades in, so again, I only had one class and they too just did the book work they didn't do with the sub (because they were slackers).
Oh, and notice how I said sub. Yes. A real, honest-to-goodness substitute. The DC central office shifted personnel around the system so my school finally got teachers for our science and english vacancies. This is fantastic for two reasons. One, the subs that were in those spots are now free to sub for sick teachers so I won't have to cover other classes nearly as much as I used to. Two, I don't have to plan lessons for the other 8th grade science classes anymore or plan for 8th grade all by myself. I now have another physical science teacher to collaborate with. The bad news is that this new science teacher is a first-year just like me, so we are both equally inadequate at helping each other. But it's better than nothing, right? (Remember that the third science teacher in my school is just a second year teacher, too. Are we the most inexperienced team of teachers you've ever heard of?)
Now that I going through a not-really-caring-about-bad-behavior phase and a I-did-everything-I-can-do-so-it's-not-my-fault-they-all-failed phase, what can I whine about in my blog from now on? Science fair - that's what. I hate science fairs. EVERYONE hates science fairs. Why must we hold one? Why are science teachers held accountable for planning and assessing this huge undertaking that definitely does not teach kids anything about how science really works and that barely anyone enjoys. Ugh. This 3 month long science fair period is going to get underway in just a week or two and I am just frightened. I would so much rather just teach science content than coddle a bunch of kids who can't read or write or operate a keyboard and don't care into doing lame fake experiments and writing massive reports about them. Meanwhile, I'll have the kids who can read and write and can type 100 words a minute who will have finished weeks ago. What am I supposed to do with them? I'll let you know how it goes.
Anyway, I think that's really all for now. I plan to relax a bit this weekend guilt-free and then develop independent projects my students can do in class that will take them several days. I think their behavior will be much better if they are just working on some kind of project. I'm basing this on the fact the days when my 7th graders were making posters were always the ones when the most students participated and behaved well. Have a good weekend all!
I want to thank those Joe and anonymous for leaving messages again. You are absolutely right that I need to keep my personal and professional life separate and find more joy in the small successes I do have. On that note, I am slowly getting more students coming into my room at lunch, which is such a great sign. That means they like me which means they respect me and the more students in a class who respect me, the better behavior is bound to become. So as irritating as it can be some days to babysit a bunch of kids during my lunch break, the reward outweighs the cost.
I think I last blogged two weeks ago. I felt basically the same way the whole next week, which is why I didn't blog again. Last weekend I must have a hit a low point. I basically did no work and instead just layed around moaning about how I hate my job and hate grading papers and lesson planning. My boyfriend, getting exasperated with having to listen to the same thing over and over told me to just take a day off. Ding! Lightbulb! Take a day off? Why of course! Why didn't I think of that! Then the next day my mom came down to see my new apartment and I spent our entire lunch complaining about everything again and she agreed. Take a day off! So what did I do? First thing on Monday I wrote a letter to the principal explaining how I need an entire day off in order to catch up on grading and on missed sleep because I hadn't slept more than 5 hours a night in two weeks. I was afraid the principal wouldn't go for it, but instead he said something along the lines of, "Oh that's fine, go ahead. We all need a personal day now and then with this job. We appreciate what you do here." So on Halloween, I stayed home.
Playing hooky is one of the best things I have ever done. I slept in, ate a decent breakfast, then graded papers and calculated letter grades from about 10:30 am to 10:30 pm. I only got 75% done, but that was a huge chunk out of my workload. Also, I did not have to chaperone the Halloween dance, which if it was anything like the dances at my high school, must have been mad raunchy.
Wednesday I went in to work refreshed. I may not have seemed any different to my students, but I just felt better overall. I was still yelling at them and everything, but I didn't care so much. I'm getting more used to the constant yelling at children. Almost luckily for me, 3 students in my bad 7th grade class almost immediately broke rules that got them sent out of my room. The emotionally disturbed girl I mentioned last time threatened a boy and sprayed water all over my floor. One boy was punching another. Another girl had a cell phone ring in class. Oddly enough, it was the girl with the cell phone who ended up getting suspended because she yelled at me so bad for trying to take her cell phone from her while the security guard was standing right there. Silly kids. The funniest part was when she came back in my room at the very end of class and was just seething mad at me. She kept saying, "Don't look at me. Don't say my name. I hate you Ms. Newbie I hate this class." Meanwhile, I absolutely could not help but laugh at her. Of course, that just made her more mad. But I got a laugh in during class time and that is a thing to cherish.
Thursday was the Reading in Fundamental kickoff. Every homeroom was given a class set of books to read and a volunteer came into read it to them for about half an hour after talking about why reading in important. Volunteers, you say? How nice! Well, not so much. For the whole school, we could only wrangle 5 volunteers from the community so the rest of our "volunteers" were administrators. My class is reading "Island of the Blue Dolphins" by Scott O'Dell. I like this because it means I have an activity every day for homeroom now. I don't need to hunt for newspaper articles or dream up team-building or citizenship activities anymore.
Next, the students had an assembly, but a handful of my homeroom students lost their minds and could not even be quiet in the hallway on the way down to the auditorium, so I had to keep 6 boys and 1 girl in for 1 hour of silent detention in my room during the assembly. At least it was mostly silent. A couple of boys kept whining. That was irritating as hell. I hate detention more than making phone calls home. It really does punish the teacher more than the student. And on top of that, I missed seeing some of my lunch-time friend/students participate in their speech and debate competition during the assembly. I was even surprised myself how disappointed I was I didn't get to see that. I felt like I was missing my own son's performance or something. I guess I do like kids after all... :-)
So anyway, I only had to teach one class on Thursday (my GT class) and they just did the book work they didn't do with the sub (because they were at the Halloween dance). Then Friday, today, was a half day since teachers needed to log their grades in, so again, I only had one class and they too just did the book work they didn't do with the sub (because they were slackers).
Oh, and notice how I said sub. Yes. A real, honest-to-goodness substitute. The DC central office shifted personnel around the system so my school finally got teachers for our science and english vacancies. This is fantastic for two reasons. One, the subs that were in those spots are now free to sub for sick teachers so I won't have to cover other classes nearly as much as I used to. Two, I don't have to plan lessons for the other 8th grade science classes anymore or plan for 8th grade all by myself. I now have another physical science teacher to collaborate with. The bad news is that this new science teacher is a first-year just like me, so we are both equally inadequate at helping each other. But it's better than nothing, right? (Remember that the third science teacher in my school is just a second year teacher, too. Are we the most inexperienced team of teachers you've ever heard of?)
Now that I going through a not-really-caring-about-bad-behavior phase and a I-did-everything-I-can-do-so-it's-not-my-fault-they-all-failed phase, what can I whine about in my blog from now on? Science fair - that's what. I hate science fairs. EVERYONE hates science fairs. Why must we hold one? Why are science teachers held accountable for planning and assessing this huge undertaking that definitely does not teach kids anything about how science really works and that barely anyone enjoys. Ugh. This 3 month long science fair period is going to get underway in just a week or two and I am just frightened. I would so much rather just teach science content than coddle a bunch of kids who can't read or write or operate a keyboard and don't care into doing lame fake experiments and writing massive reports about them. Meanwhile, I'll have the kids who can read and write and can type 100 words a minute who will have finished weeks ago. What am I supposed to do with them? I'll let you know how it goes.
Anyway, I think that's really all for now. I plan to relax a bit this weekend guilt-free and then develop independent projects my students can do in class that will take them several days. I think their behavior will be much better if they are just working on some kind of project. I'm basing this on the fact the days when my 7th graders were making posters were always the ones when the most students participated and behaved well. Have a good weekend all!
Sunday, October 22, 2006
Still going
I've been trying to only blog when I'm in a good mood, but I haven't been in a good mood since last Wednesday. I don't want to use this public space just to whine and moan. My purpose here is more to inform my friends and family of my progress in life and to inform anyone else just what this is like. I'm discovering what it's like to teach for the first time, and seeing how I find it extremely dramatic and interesting, I thought others might like to discover it with me.
I just watched the movie, "Papillon" last night starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. The whole movie is about their attempted escapes from prison in French New Guinea. In the movie, there are scenes of Steve McQueen, or Papillon, in solitary confinement that are just torturous. When Papillon goes through similar experences again, the audience is simply told of the ordeal. We aren't asked to watch it over and over again. In the same way, I don't want to burden my audience with reading the same depressing story over and over again. I should just be able to tell you that everything is the same as always and you'll understand.
I should also point out that solitary confinement in French New Guinea prison circa World War II does, in fact, seem much worse than teaching in SE DC. So at least there's that.
But I don't even know what to say. The end of the advisory period is on Friday and almost all of my students are failing. I was at work hours longer than usual on Thursday making up packets of all the worksheets all my students needed to still turn in knowing full well that even when I hand them each what they need personally, they are still not going to do it. I've been dealing with lots of parents lately coming to realize that they all either have no effect on their children, or talk a big game but really don't mean it. Look at my grade book and you'll see that I've only assigned a few real homework assignments all quarter, and it's those assignments I'm lucky to have 3 students that have turned it in. I try to play jeopardy review on the days before the tests I've given, but none of the students pay attention. I repeatedly tell them that about 80% of the test is exactly the same as the questions in Jeopardy, and they still don't pay attention. Instead, I hear whines of, "I don't get it" and then the second I try to explain it to them in a new way, they turn around and talk to a friend.
I was talking to another teacher and he was saying this job is the fastest and cheapest psychotherapy you can get. It makes you evaluate your life's purpose and worth very fast. I have never felt so ineffectual and pointless in my life. I have four students that eat lunch with me everyday. For all I can see, those four students are the only ones who care if I come in to work everyday. Now I know that that's not true. I know that in these kids lives, the fact that I am a consistent presence in their life may be more important than I can understand. Maybe I really am reaching some of the shy kids. Maybe I really am challenging some of the problem kids to evaulate what they want out of life. Because at this point I've stopped caring how much science the kids know when they leave my class - I just want these students to leave with some sort of life goal, or at least an understanding of the fact that they need goals. Right now I see a culture of defeatism. Everyone believes they will fail so much, and cares so little that they will because failure is all they've ever known, that they only hope to have a lot of fun and excitement on the way down. They don't even recognize the connection between studying and learning, or learning and succeeding. Was I this blind to the consequences of my actions when I was 13, or is it their culture? I probably was short-sighted in middle school as well, but my parents certainly weren't. They made sure I worked hard so I could get to where I am today. But these kids I'm teaching are being raised by kids who were raised by kids. This is a whole generation of children raised by un-wed teenage moms who are still living with Grandma if their lucky. You can pick the kids with fathers out of the crowd - they are the ones who are dressed decently and act politely around adults. The majority of these kids have no idea what proper manners are because their mothers and grandmothers have never modelled them before.
I mean just the other day I walk into the front office and see the mother of a girl who must be emotionally disturbed. I called home a couple nights in a row leaving messages about all the profanity and threats her daughter had been using in my classroom. When I tried to apologize to this mom for not returning her latest call, she says to me without ever even turning to face me, "I can't even talk to teachers right now. The only person I want to talk to is the principal. I am so mad." The more I think about this encounter, the more mad I get. How dare you show your daughter (who was standing right there) that it is expected and ok to show such aggression toward a teacher or lack of manners toward any adult. Especially an adult who has been suffering the presence of your daughter and meanwhile trying her hardest to teach the 23 other students in the room, nevermind this disturbed girl, too. How can we expect children coming out of households like these to ever succeed in school or the workforce? They've been taught to be rude and selfish and aggressive since birth. How can I be expected to teach children like this? When I see these kids only 2 or 3 times a week for 90 minutes, am I really supposed to revolutionize the way they approach other human beings and their own lives??
This is why I shouldn't blog when I'm upset...
But it is really catching up to me just how upset I am. I've past the point of nervous breakdown. I almost had one a few weeks ago but I didn't. I survived that. Now I'm just unhappy. I can barely remember what it is to have fun. I am never relaxed. When I get home and during the weekends, I am so drained and feeling down that all I want to do lay on the couch and watch tv allll day. And as I do this, I am feeling immense guilt and dread because I know that I have 6 hours of grading ahead of me and I don't have a clue what my classes are doing on Monday.
With that in mind, I need to go do that grading now. Oh but there is some good news. I got my DC driver's license, tags, parking permit and car title. And it only took like 45 minutes yesterday, too. I just waited until 2:00 in the afternoon to go, and it was fine. No line at all. So keep that in mind anyone who's moving to DC. Don't got to the DMV in the morning.
I'd also like to respond to the comment I got. I did call all of my 8th graders at the beginning of the year to introduce myself, so I figure that was kind of a positive phone call. I also called 7 parents last week and asked the parents to reward their children at home with a tasty dinner since their children were so great in my class. You had suggested I should call all parents with a positive message, and I do agree. But I just don't think I can. I hate calling home and it takes sooo much time. For every phone call I make, there's like 5 to 10 minutes of paperwork. Plus, I've made so many negative phone calls to some families already, it'd be hard to make a positive one. I might adapt your method and make a point of calling home to the typically bad kids on any one day they are good. Will they ever be good... I also wanted to call home everyone at least once a quarter, but again, I just don't want to take the time. When the day ends, calling parents is always the last thing I want to do.
Listen to me - I'm already a burned out teacher. This is so dissappointing. A few months ago, I loved kids and wanted to make a difference and loved teaching. Now it's the opposite. I gotta go grade now, though. Hopefully, I'll feel better soon and leave a more pleasant post.
I just watched the movie, "Papillon" last night starring Steve McQueen and Dustin Hoffman. The whole movie is about their attempted escapes from prison in French New Guinea. In the movie, there are scenes of Steve McQueen, or Papillon, in solitary confinement that are just torturous. When Papillon goes through similar experences again, the audience is simply told of the ordeal. We aren't asked to watch it over and over again. In the same way, I don't want to burden my audience with reading the same depressing story over and over again. I should just be able to tell you that everything is the same as always and you'll understand.
I should also point out that solitary confinement in French New Guinea prison circa World War II does, in fact, seem much worse than teaching in SE DC. So at least there's that.
But I don't even know what to say. The end of the advisory period is on Friday and almost all of my students are failing. I was at work hours longer than usual on Thursday making up packets of all the worksheets all my students needed to still turn in knowing full well that even when I hand them each what they need personally, they are still not going to do it. I've been dealing with lots of parents lately coming to realize that they all either have no effect on their children, or talk a big game but really don't mean it. Look at my grade book and you'll see that I've only assigned a few real homework assignments all quarter, and it's those assignments I'm lucky to have 3 students that have turned it in. I try to play jeopardy review on the days before the tests I've given, but none of the students pay attention. I repeatedly tell them that about 80% of the test is exactly the same as the questions in Jeopardy, and they still don't pay attention. Instead, I hear whines of, "I don't get it" and then the second I try to explain it to them in a new way, they turn around and talk to a friend.
I was talking to another teacher and he was saying this job is the fastest and cheapest psychotherapy you can get. It makes you evaluate your life's purpose and worth very fast. I have never felt so ineffectual and pointless in my life. I have four students that eat lunch with me everyday. For all I can see, those four students are the only ones who care if I come in to work everyday. Now I know that that's not true. I know that in these kids lives, the fact that I am a consistent presence in their life may be more important than I can understand. Maybe I really am reaching some of the shy kids. Maybe I really am challenging some of the problem kids to evaulate what they want out of life. Because at this point I've stopped caring how much science the kids know when they leave my class - I just want these students to leave with some sort of life goal, or at least an understanding of the fact that they need goals. Right now I see a culture of defeatism. Everyone believes they will fail so much, and cares so little that they will because failure is all they've ever known, that they only hope to have a lot of fun and excitement on the way down. They don't even recognize the connection between studying and learning, or learning and succeeding. Was I this blind to the consequences of my actions when I was 13, or is it their culture? I probably was short-sighted in middle school as well, but my parents certainly weren't. They made sure I worked hard so I could get to where I am today. But these kids I'm teaching are being raised by kids who were raised by kids. This is a whole generation of children raised by un-wed teenage moms who are still living with Grandma if their lucky. You can pick the kids with fathers out of the crowd - they are the ones who are dressed decently and act politely around adults. The majority of these kids have no idea what proper manners are because their mothers and grandmothers have never modelled them before.
I mean just the other day I walk into the front office and see the mother of a girl who must be emotionally disturbed. I called home a couple nights in a row leaving messages about all the profanity and threats her daughter had been using in my classroom. When I tried to apologize to this mom for not returning her latest call, she says to me without ever even turning to face me, "I can't even talk to teachers right now. The only person I want to talk to is the principal. I am so mad." The more I think about this encounter, the more mad I get. How dare you show your daughter (who was standing right there) that it is expected and ok to show such aggression toward a teacher or lack of manners toward any adult. Especially an adult who has been suffering the presence of your daughter and meanwhile trying her hardest to teach the 23 other students in the room, nevermind this disturbed girl, too. How can we expect children coming out of households like these to ever succeed in school or the workforce? They've been taught to be rude and selfish and aggressive since birth. How can I be expected to teach children like this? When I see these kids only 2 or 3 times a week for 90 minutes, am I really supposed to revolutionize the way they approach other human beings and their own lives??
This is why I shouldn't blog when I'm upset...
But it is really catching up to me just how upset I am. I've past the point of nervous breakdown. I almost had one a few weeks ago but I didn't. I survived that. Now I'm just unhappy. I can barely remember what it is to have fun. I am never relaxed. When I get home and during the weekends, I am so drained and feeling down that all I want to do lay on the couch and watch tv allll day. And as I do this, I am feeling immense guilt and dread because I know that I have 6 hours of grading ahead of me and I don't have a clue what my classes are doing on Monday.
With that in mind, I need to go do that grading now. Oh but there is some good news. I got my DC driver's license, tags, parking permit and car title. And it only took like 45 minutes yesterday, too. I just waited until 2:00 in the afternoon to go, and it was fine. No line at all. So keep that in mind anyone who's moving to DC. Don't got to the DMV in the morning.
I'd also like to respond to the comment I got. I did call all of my 8th graders at the beginning of the year to introduce myself, so I figure that was kind of a positive phone call. I also called 7 parents last week and asked the parents to reward their children at home with a tasty dinner since their children were so great in my class. You had suggested I should call all parents with a positive message, and I do agree. But I just don't think I can. I hate calling home and it takes sooo much time. For every phone call I make, there's like 5 to 10 minutes of paperwork. Plus, I've made so many negative phone calls to some families already, it'd be hard to make a positive one. I might adapt your method and make a point of calling home to the typically bad kids on any one day they are good. Will they ever be good... I also wanted to call home everyone at least once a quarter, but again, I just don't want to take the time. When the day ends, calling parents is always the last thing I want to do.
Listen to me - I'm already a burned out teacher. This is so dissappointing. A few months ago, I loved kids and wanted to make a difference and loved teaching. Now it's the opposite. I gotta go grade now, though. Hopefully, I'll feel better soon and leave a more pleasant post.
Wednesday, October 11, 2006
Down again and up again
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.
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.
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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