At the end of my last post, I said I would write later in the week about why teachers leave teaching. I decided to write about why I'm not going to be a classroom teacher next year instead because:
1) I've been trying to remember that all summer.
2) I think there are lots of reasons why teachers leave teaching, but all I really know is why I'm leaving.
As I said farewell to my students and colleagues in June, it was hard for me to believe that it ever seemed like a good idea to leave them. My favorite part about teaching is the relationships I get to build with a group of people who, in many cases, come from very different places than me. All of my students are Latino, many of them were born in rural Mexico, and many of them are growing up in poverty. I am white, grew up in Kentucky, and come from a pretty affluent family. Yet here we are, thrown together for six hours a day, getting to know each other.
Each week I would have one of my students be the Star of the Week, and the Star would get to make a poster full of pictures of herself and her family, plus fill out a little questionnaire about her favorite things, her dreams for the future, etc. The Star got to share her poster with the class, we asked some questions about it, and then it stayed up for the rest of the week. I was often amazed by the pictures by students brought in, but one really stood out to me. This picture was of Joaquin, a quiet, brilliant, intense, athletic boy who came to the U.S. from Mexico in first grade and managed to score Proficient or Advanced on math standardized tests from second grade on, despite the fact that he knew no English when he came here and his parents had very limited education themselves. In this picture, a four-year old Joaquin walks barefoot down a dry, dusty, deserted path, lugging a huge, huge bundle of corn stalks over his shoulder, carrying them where they need to go. What a different world he knew before - of corn and cows and dirt paths. Of course, that world exists in the U.S., but it doesn't exist in the town where I taught. Joaquin lives in an urban apartment building now, crammed with other families from Mexico and all over the world, with graffiti and gangs and pigeons and pavement, pavement, pavement.
Joaquin and I both got to cross borders in our classroom. I got to know about his worlds and he got to know about mine. And we got to create one together. Those opportunities can be so rare in life, opportunities to really build relationships with people whose lives are unlike ours in important ways.
It makes me cry to think about Joaquin. Not because anything bad happened to him - though I do worry about him because he has a bad temper and likes to hang with the tough guys, so I'm afraid he'll get into fights. But as far as I know, he's fine. He got identified as gifted and got redesignated as Fluent English Proficient, and both of those things should help him get into good classes in middle and high school. I cry when I think about him because I want our school system and our society to serve him well, and I'm afraid they won't. I want his brilliance to be recognized, I want him to learn all the math he wants to learn, I want him to get the support and encouragement and financial help he needs to go to college, I want him to feel proud of his native language and his background, I want him to stay out of gangs, and I want him to have all the doors open to him that a white middle-class kid would have.
In the largest sense, I'm going to grad school because I want to have more power to make the educational system serve Joaquin and all my students better.
I know that I had a lot of power as a teacher. I got to inspire Joaquin and my other students, to teach them about long division and the civil rights movement and haiku and Judy Blume and Gary Soto and global warming and irregular verbs and what college is like and what engineers do. Sometimes, though, I felt powerless, like a cog in a wheel of a machine that was shoddily built.
An example: The past two years because of pressure from No Child Left Behind, we had to teach language arts using only our state-adopted language arts curriculum. That seems reasonable at first. But our Houghton-Mifflin materials, the publisher insists, are not designed for students reading more than two years below grade level or students who have English Proficiency Levels of 1 (beginning) or 2 (early intermediate). Ten of my thirty-one students fell into these two categories. That means our state-adopted materials were not designed for about a third of my class.
Our district's answer to this problem was to start a reading intervention class. This class was called REACH and was for students decoding at least two years below grade level. During our regular two-and-a-half hour language arts block, students who qualified for this intervention program got pulled out of the regular classroom and were taught the REACH curriculum by our Resource Specialist teacher. This may or may not have been a good idea and a good program; I don't know enough to say.
Students who had been in the U.S. for less than two years were automatically excluded from participation in REACH, though. It makes sense that students whose reading difficulties are caused by lack of English knowledge need a different curriculum than students who are fluent English speakers but who still struggle with decoding words. Our school could have had a separate intervention program for students who were decoding at least two years below grade level AND who had been in the country less than two years. This English Language Development intervention group would have been taught by an ELD Coach, I think, and would have used High Point materials. But only a handful of fourth and fifth graders - mostly from my class - fit this description, so no High Point group was created.
Three of my students qualified for REACH. This left me with seven students in my language arts class for whom the language arts materials I had to teach with were inappropriate. When I pointed out this contradiction to administrators, they basically told me that yes, our language arts program was not designed for these students, but yes, I had to use our language arts program and only our language arts program as my curriculum for all my students. This made me feel like I was banging my head against a brick wall! Why wasn't my school taking my students' needs seriously? Why was I not allowed to adapt and modify curriculum as I saw fit to help my students actually learn to read and write in English?
My student Wilfredo, who I've written a little about before, came to the U.S. in third grade. Was I really just going to hand him the Houghton-Mifflin fourth grade reading materials in English and pretend that that's teaching him to read? Of course not! Did administrators really want me to do that? No! But in this weird follow-the-script, accountability climate, that's what they had to tell me to do and that's what I had to pretend I was doing.
That's just not right. Wilfredo should be able to get an excellent, appropriate education, building both his English skills and his content knowledge while getting support in developing friendships in his new environment. For too many kids like Wilfredo and Joaquin, though, that doesn't happen. They sit in class, not understanding what's happening, not learning either English or content knowledge, feeling alienated and/or checking out. We can't afford to waste these students' potential! And that's why I'm going to grad school.
Tuesday, August 14, 2007
Tuesday, August 7, 2007
Let's Improve Education By Firing Teachers
Turns out I needed a longer break from thinking about education than I anticipated. But I do have these topics I've been wanting to write about for a while. So here’s the first in … well, who knows – maybe an occasional series of posts on education policy and my experiences as a teacher, this time with more of a wide-angle lens.
Back in May, Nikolas Kristof wrote an op-ed in the New York Times with a proposal (developed by the Hamilton Project) for radically improving public education. He says presidential candidates should advocate these three measures:
1) Abolish teacher certification requirements.
2) Make tenure much harder to get so “weak teachers can be weeded out after two or three years on the job.”
3) Offer annual incentives of $15,000 to “good teachers” who teach in schools serving low-income communities
I agree that there are some teachers who should not be teaching, and I agree that the students who need the very best teachers are much more likely to have the least-qualified, least-experienced teachers.
But proposals to get rid of lots of teachers always strike me as quite odd. We do not currently have too many people clamoring for teaching jobs; we have too few. The extent of the shortage varies by state, grade level, subject area, etc., but the shortage exists. California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell stated in a press release this April that California is projecting a shortage of 33,000 teachers a year by 2015.
The shortage is not just a result of lots of teachers retiring. You have probably already heard the much-cited statistic that half of all teachers leave within their first five years in the profession. I’m now part of this statistic. And many of my friends who started teaching when I did are leaving, too. Most of us are still doing something related to education. There are three people (including me) out of my 20-person credential/master’s program cohort who are getting a PhD in education. Another woman in our cohort does curriculum development work now. A friend who got her credential/master’s a year before me went to work for a children’s book publisher. Out of the approximately 40 teachers at my school, 10 left at the end of this past school year. At least two of them are taking teaching jobs elsewhere, but many are planning to leave the profession for good.
With all of us leaving the classroom already, is the answer to the nation’s education woes really to get rid of even more teachers?
Let’s look at the proposal Kristof is advocating:
The Hamilton Project study recommends that the weakest 25 percent of new teachers should be denied tenure and eliminated after two or three years on the job (teachers improve a lot in the first two years, but not much after that). That approach, it estimates, would raise students’ average test scores by 14 percentile points by the time they graduated.
Where would we get teachers to replace the 25% of new teachers who would be “eliminated” each year? I understand that under the proposal Kristof is advocating, teacher certification requirements would be abolished, so I suppose the proposal’s authors are assuming that this would lead to more people applying for teaching jobs.
I don’t have research to back this up, but, just based on common sense, I bet that people who just jump in front of a classroom without any student teaching experience are more likely to leave teaching than teachers trained through a certification process. If you’ve never had a chance to try out teaching, to try out actually being on your own in front of a classroom, how can you know it’s what you want to do? One article on New York City’s Teaching Fellows program, which recruits people from around the country to come stand up in the front of their own NYC classrooms after just 7 weeks of summer training, states that 10% of these teachers leave before the end of their first year. Thirty percent are gone by the end of the third year. Program administrators say these rates of new teachers leaving are the same as other big city school districts’ numbers. I haven’t seen the numbers to prove or disprove this claim. But many Fellows complain that their training was inadequate and that they did not have a realistic picture of what to expect in their classrooms.
Regardless of whether non-credentialed teachers are more or less likely to leave teaching, it seems clear to me that too many teachers are leaving teaching, period. Sure, maybe some of them were ineffective and we’re better off without them, but all of them? That just can’t be. Poor teacher retention is an expensive problem. The costs associated with recruiting, hiring, and training a new teacher varies by district. One study tried to add them up, and put the national price tag at $7.3 billion annually. According to this study, Chicago spends almost $18,000 to replace each of its thousands of teachers that leave each year, while the small district of Jemez Valley, N.M., spent $4,366 on each new teacher. Even taking the low figure, that means my school will spend $43,660 (and countless hours of the principal’s time!) replacing the 10 teachers that left this year.
In addition to the costs associated with replacing teachers, think of all the school district (and therefore taxpayer) money that was spent training me and all the other teachers who are leaving. The value of those investments can disappear when we leave. I’m expensive. I got a state-funded tuition remission to pay for my master’s/credential program. I got some student loans forgiven via a state program for teachers. I got fellowships from my university that helped me support myself while I got my credential. I got paid to attend many professional development workshops during my five years as a teacher. This all adds up to tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer investment in me. And while I do intend to make use of this investment and contribute to the profession of education, I won’t be doing what these investments were supposing I would do – teach children in public schools.
Why do we leave? I’ll leave that for a blog post later this week.
But for now, let’s stop trying to improve education by hastening the departure of even more teachers!
(And who, exactly, would determine which 25% of teachers would be "eliminated"? How? I'm assuming these decisions would be left to principals. Perhaps 25% of all new principals should be eliminated within their first two years. And 25% of all new district superintendents. And 25% of all new education policy researchers.)
Back in May, Nikolas Kristof wrote an op-ed in the New York Times with a proposal (developed by the Hamilton Project) for radically improving public education. He says presidential candidates should advocate these three measures:
1) Abolish teacher certification requirements.
2) Make tenure much harder to get so “weak teachers can be weeded out after two or three years on the job.”
3) Offer annual incentives of $15,000 to “good teachers” who teach in schools serving low-income communities
I agree that there are some teachers who should not be teaching, and I agree that the students who need the very best teachers are much more likely to have the least-qualified, least-experienced teachers.
But proposals to get rid of lots of teachers always strike me as quite odd. We do not currently have too many people clamoring for teaching jobs; we have too few. The extent of the shortage varies by state, grade level, subject area, etc., but the shortage exists. California State Superintendent of Public Instruction Jack O’Connell stated in a press release this April that California is projecting a shortage of 33,000 teachers a year by 2015.
The shortage is not just a result of lots of teachers retiring. You have probably already heard the much-cited statistic that half of all teachers leave within their first five years in the profession. I’m now part of this statistic. And many of my friends who started teaching when I did are leaving, too. Most of us are still doing something related to education. There are three people (including me) out of my 20-person credential/master’s program cohort who are getting a PhD in education. Another woman in our cohort does curriculum development work now. A friend who got her credential/master’s a year before me went to work for a children’s book publisher. Out of the approximately 40 teachers at my school, 10 left at the end of this past school year. At least two of them are taking teaching jobs elsewhere, but many are planning to leave the profession for good.
With all of us leaving the classroom already, is the answer to the nation’s education woes really to get rid of even more teachers?
Let’s look at the proposal Kristof is advocating:
The Hamilton Project study recommends that the weakest 25 percent of new teachers should be denied tenure and eliminated after two or three years on the job (teachers improve a lot in the first two years, but not much after that). That approach, it estimates, would raise students’ average test scores by 14 percentile points by the time they graduated.
Where would we get teachers to replace the 25% of new teachers who would be “eliminated” each year? I understand that under the proposal Kristof is advocating, teacher certification requirements would be abolished, so I suppose the proposal’s authors are assuming that this would lead to more people applying for teaching jobs.
I don’t have research to back this up, but, just based on common sense, I bet that people who just jump in front of a classroom without any student teaching experience are more likely to leave teaching than teachers trained through a certification process. If you’ve never had a chance to try out teaching, to try out actually being on your own in front of a classroom, how can you know it’s what you want to do? One article on New York City’s Teaching Fellows program, which recruits people from around the country to come stand up in the front of their own NYC classrooms after just 7 weeks of summer training, states that 10% of these teachers leave before the end of their first year. Thirty percent are gone by the end of the third year. Program administrators say these rates of new teachers leaving are the same as other big city school districts’ numbers. I haven’t seen the numbers to prove or disprove this claim. But many Fellows complain that their training was inadequate and that they did not have a realistic picture of what to expect in their classrooms.
Regardless of whether non-credentialed teachers are more or less likely to leave teaching, it seems clear to me that too many teachers are leaving teaching, period. Sure, maybe some of them were ineffective and we’re better off without them, but all of them? That just can’t be. Poor teacher retention is an expensive problem. The costs associated with recruiting, hiring, and training a new teacher varies by district. One study tried to add them up, and put the national price tag at $7.3 billion annually. According to this study, Chicago spends almost $18,000 to replace each of its thousands of teachers that leave each year, while the small district of Jemez Valley, N.M., spent $4,366 on each new teacher. Even taking the low figure, that means my school will spend $43,660 (and countless hours of the principal’s time!) replacing the 10 teachers that left this year.
In addition to the costs associated with replacing teachers, think of all the school district (and therefore taxpayer) money that was spent training me and all the other teachers who are leaving. The value of those investments can disappear when we leave. I’m expensive. I got a state-funded tuition remission to pay for my master’s/credential program. I got some student loans forgiven via a state program for teachers. I got fellowships from my university that helped me support myself while I got my credential. I got paid to attend many professional development workshops during my five years as a teacher. This all adds up to tens of thousands of dollars of taxpayer investment in me. And while I do intend to make use of this investment and contribute to the profession of education, I won’t be doing what these investments were supposing I would do – teach children in public schools.
Why do we leave? I’ll leave that for a blog post later this week.
But for now, let’s stop trying to improve education by hastening the departure of even more teachers!
(And who, exactly, would determine which 25% of teachers would be "eliminated"? How? I'm assuming these decisions would be left to principals. Perhaps 25% of all new principals should be eliminated within their first two years. And 25% of all new district superintendents. And 25% of all new education policy researchers.)
Thursday, June 14, 2007
Day -1: The Index
Today was my last day of teaching at my school, at least for the foreseeable future. Here's a summary of my five years there a la Harper's Index. (I stole this idea from a blog I used to read.)
Number of times I've been late to school: 2 (both because my car broke down)
Number of field trips I've organized: More than 30
Number of students who started my class not knowing their letters and sounds in English or in Spanish: 2
Latest I've ever stayed at school: 11:30 pm, I think
Earliest I've ever gotten to school: 5:45 am, I think
Number of my students whose family members have been shot and killed: 2
Number of former students who have been expelled for dealing pot in middle school: 1
Number of former students (that I know of) who have ended up in juvenile hall: 1
Number of weekly progress reports I've filled out: 1050
Number of spelling tests I've graded: 1050
Number of babies who have been born to teachers working in the 10 classrooms in my building: 7
Number of student teachers I've supervised: 3
Number of students I've taught: About 160
This sort of seems like a sad list, a list dominated by problems. Maybe that's because it's hard to quantify the joys of my job, my successes. They are there, though, and I'll remember them.
Two teachers at my school retired today after 34 and 38(!) years of teaching in our school district, respectively. One of them had to sign an oath swearing she wasn't a Communist when she started. They weren't allowed to wear pants at the beginning. I'd like to see their Harper's Index of their careers.
I feel sad today. I realized that the reason I don't want to move out of my classroom yet is because I'm not quite ready to give it up. I still have a few blog post ideas in my head, too, so I won't give this up quite yet either.
Number of times I've been late to school: 2 (both because my car broke down)
Number of field trips I've organized: More than 30
Number of students who started my class not knowing their letters and sounds in English or in Spanish: 2
Latest I've ever stayed at school: 11:30 pm, I think
Earliest I've ever gotten to school: 5:45 am, I think
Number of my students whose family members have been shot and killed: 2
Number of former students who have been expelled for dealing pot in middle school: 1
Number of former students (that I know of) who have ended up in juvenile hall: 1
Number of weekly progress reports I've filled out: 1050
Number of spelling tests I've graded: 1050
Number of babies who have been born to teachers working in the 10 classrooms in my building: 7
Number of student teachers I've supervised: 3
Number of students I've taught: About 160
This sort of seems like a sad list, a list dominated by problems. Maybe that's because it's hard to quantify the joys of my job, my successes. They are there, though, and I'll remember them.
Two teachers at my school retired today after 34 and 38(!) years of teaching in our school district, respectively. One of them had to sign an oath swearing she wasn't a Communist when she started. They weren't allowed to wear pants at the beginning. I'd like to see their Harper's Index of their careers.
I feel sad today. I realized that the reason I don't want to move out of my classroom yet is because I'm not quite ready to give it up. I still have a few blog post ideas in my head, too, so I won't give this up quite yet either.
Wednesday, June 13, 2007
Day -2: Promotion
The two big events of the day were as follows:
1) My friend/teacher-across-the-hall and I went to go see our first class of students graduate from eighth grade. Wait, did I say graduate? I mean, of course, be promoted. As you have probably have noticed, sometime since we were all in eighth grade, using the word "graduation" to refer to what 14-year olds are doing when they don caps and gowns has become taboo. As the middle school principal pronounced today, "I present to you the promoted class of 2007." I never thought that vocabulary switch would take hold. But one of my former students came by the other day and said, "I just wanted to invite you to promotion on Thursday." The word at least crossed the kid-usage barrier.
We were sitting in bleachers on a football field behind an outlet mall, melting and squinting in the bright, bright sun. The students were far away from us on the field, but we cheered for all of them and we liked noticing how they still walked the same way we remembered them walking in elementary school.
I like knowing that four years from now, I can show up at high school graduation and lots and lots of those students (I hope!) will be there, and I can cheer for them again.
2) The new fourth grade bilingual teacher who will replace me spent the morning in my classroom. She just finished getting her teaching credential, and her enthusiasm is palpable. Talking to her makes me realize how much I've learned in five years. She is excited for her promotion, too.
1) My friend/teacher-across-the-hall and I went to go see our first class of students graduate from eighth grade. Wait, did I say graduate? I mean, of course, be promoted. As you have probably have noticed, sometime since we were all in eighth grade, using the word "graduation" to refer to what 14-year olds are doing when they don caps and gowns has become taboo. As the middle school principal pronounced today, "I present to you the promoted class of 2007." I never thought that vocabulary switch would take hold. But one of my former students came by the other day and said, "I just wanted to invite you to promotion on Thursday." The word at least crossed the kid-usage barrier.
We were sitting in bleachers on a football field behind an outlet mall, melting and squinting in the bright, bright sun. The students were far away from us on the field, but we cheered for all of them and we liked noticing how they still walked the same way we remembered them walking in elementary school.
I like knowing that four years from now, I can show up at high school graduation and lots and lots of those students (I hope!) will be there, and I can cheer for them again.
2) The new fourth grade bilingual teacher who will replace me spent the morning in my classroom. She just finished getting her teaching credential, and her enthusiasm is palpable. Talking to her makes me realize how much I've learned in five years. She is excited for her promotion, too.
Tuesday, June 12, 2007
Day -3: When Overwhelmed ... Sort Fraction Circles!
This leaving thing is so surreal. I can't get my head around the fact that three days from now I won't really be a teacher anymore. Perhaps I will still be a teacher in an abstract sense, and I will still be a teacher in the minds of my former students, but I won't be a current teacher at my school, thinking about the next school year.
I have been so overwhelmed by the idea of leaving that I have accomplished next to nothing in moving out or saying goodbye. Even the usual end-of-the-year projects I normally do - burning CDs for my students of songs we learned, writing awards for each student, filing papers in students' cumes (their folders that follow them from one grade to the next) - I have been unable to complete. Mostly, I've just been hanging out with people after school, spending time chatting with a student, the teacher across the hall, the custodian. I guess I can cast that as part of my leave-taking project; I'm appreciating the people around me and enjoying the time I have with them. It feels a little like that while I'm doing it, and it feels a lot like procrastination.
My friend (the teacher across the hall) was laughing at me yesterday because I accidentally flung my pen across the room, and I spent like 20 minutes crawling around on the floor looking for it, as opposed to doing all the millions of other things I should have been doing. But I needed that pen! It was the last ballpoint pen in my classroom! That task was immediately in front of me, so I could handle it. But I never found the pen.
Today, here's how I decided to spend my time after school: sitting on the floor with two students, resorting fraction circles into little plastic bags. You can imagine fraction circles, I'm sure. They are plastic discs, divided into fractional pieces. Each set has a whole, 2 halves, 3 thirds, 4 fourths, etc. These fraction circles are very useful for teaching students about equivalent fractions. But they'd gotten all mixed up over the years, so one set might have 8 fourths but no fifths. I decided to have two students empty out all 16 bags of fractions circles and resort the hundreds of pieces into complete sets. This was important, really it was! What would next year's teacher do if I left her with mixed-up fraction circle sets?
I sat there with my students, meticulously counting out eighths and tenths and twelfths while we talked about their families and their summer plans and their soccer team. They loved their monotonous task. "It's like a puzzle," Eddie said.
That hanging-out/procrastination time has been the best part of my days lately, just being in my classroom while that steady stream of people - current students, former students, other teachers - come through to visit me, the teacher-me. What will it be like when that teacher-me identity is gone, when no one can come visit it in my classroom?
I have been so overwhelmed by the idea of leaving that I have accomplished next to nothing in moving out or saying goodbye. Even the usual end-of-the-year projects I normally do - burning CDs for my students of songs we learned, writing awards for each student, filing papers in students' cumes (their folders that follow them from one grade to the next) - I have been unable to complete. Mostly, I've just been hanging out with people after school, spending time chatting with a student, the teacher across the hall, the custodian. I guess I can cast that as part of my leave-taking project; I'm appreciating the people around me and enjoying the time I have with them. It feels a little like that while I'm doing it, and it feels a lot like procrastination.
My friend (the teacher across the hall) was laughing at me yesterday because I accidentally flung my pen across the room, and I spent like 20 minutes crawling around on the floor looking for it, as opposed to doing all the millions of other things I should have been doing. But I needed that pen! It was the last ballpoint pen in my classroom! That task was immediately in front of me, so I could handle it. But I never found the pen.
Today, here's how I decided to spend my time after school: sitting on the floor with two students, resorting fraction circles into little plastic bags. You can imagine fraction circles, I'm sure. They are plastic discs, divided into fractional pieces. Each set has a whole, 2 halves, 3 thirds, 4 fourths, etc. These fraction circles are very useful for teaching students about equivalent fractions. But they'd gotten all mixed up over the years, so one set might have 8 fourths but no fifths. I decided to have two students empty out all 16 bags of fractions circles and resort the hundreds of pieces into complete sets. This was important, really it was! What would next year's teacher do if I left her with mixed-up fraction circle sets?
I sat there with my students, meticulously counting out eighths and tenths and twelfths while we talked about their families and their summer plans and their soccer team. They loved their monotonous task. "It's like a puzzle," Eddie said.
That hanging-out/procrastination time has been the best part of my days lately, just being in my classroom while that steady stream of people - current students, former students, other teachers - come through to visit me, the teacher-me. What will it be like when that teacher-me identity is gone, when no one can come visit it in my classroom?
Monday, June 11, 2007
Day -4: Retired Teachers' Wisdom
Today we went on our last field trip of the year. It might seem like I take my class on field trips all the time, but I really don't. In fact, this year I've taken my students on fewer field trips than ever before. My school narrowly missed making Adequate Yearly Progress as defined by No Child Left Behind. We met 15 out of 17 targets for improvements in our standardized test scores, but because a handful of Latino students and English Learners missed the target in Language Arts, our school is subject to a variety of sanctions. The way my school and district are interpreting these sanctions, we have to implement something obliquely called the "Academic Program Survey." We have to solemnly swear that we are teaching using the state-adopted textbooks for language arts and math and that we are teaching language arts and math for the state-mandated number of minutes each day (150 minutes a day for language arts and 60 minutes a day for math). Moreover, we must solemnly swear that we are implementing this state-adopted curriculum with "full fidelity."
This fidelity does not require a marriage vows, but it does require a disavowal of some field trips and other forms of fun. "Full fidelity" apparently means that we must teach the required number of minutes with the required textbooks 90% of the time. My school interpreted this very literally. There are 180 days in the school year, so we were granted 18 days this year when we could deviate from the state-mandated schedule/materials - 3 days at the beginning of school, 4 days at the end, and then 11 "Flex Days" of our choice. If we are deviating from the state-mandated schedule/materials on a give day, we must write "Flex Day" clearly across the top of our posted daily agenda.
Some teachers who used to take field trips eliminated them altogether this year because they were worried about using up their Flex Days. I still took 7 field trips this year, but I also used up more than my 11 Flex Days, I'm sure. Fortunately, I was not required to submit a list of which days were my Flex Days.
If this sounds bizarre, umm, it is.
But our field trip today was great - the complete opposite of our field trip to a mission a few weeks back. We went to our little town's local history museum. They don't have a great collection of artifacts or any amazing architectural treasure. But what they do have is a retired teacher/principal who designs and leads their student tours. What a gift she is giving to the town's students!
Our day started with students getting into three different groups to perform readers' theater plays. One was an Ohlone creation myth, another was a series of testimonials by people living at Mission San Jose, and the third was a play about the baptism of a new baby at the Mission and the surrounding conflict between the Ohlone and the Spanish. Students got to wear great costumes, which they loved! Then we had a snack break and our class split into two groups, one of whom got a tour of the museum and a brief overview of the town's history, focusing on the Rancho period after the missions closed. The other group went on a tour of an early home built by descendants of the original rancho land-grant holders. We ate lunch in the home's beautiful courtyard and then got ready for the afternoon activities. Parents led four different centers about different aspects of rancho life. At one, students got to design their own cattle brands and practice roping a (fake) cow. At the next, students made salsa and hot chocolate. For the third, students designed a map of their own imaginary rancho. In the fourth, students made beautiful punched tin milagros (which I'll try to take some pictures of tomorrow).
So many things about the day's events were great. The pace of the day was perfect, with students sitting and reading and listening to plays in the morning when they were the most calm and then doing hands-on activities in the afternoon when they were more antsy. The vocabulary the tour guide leader used was also perfect. She explained difficult words, showed objects to illustrate her points, and repeated key concepts many times, usually eliciting student feedback. To me, the best part of the day's plan, though, was that parents got to lead the centers in the afternoon. It was so great for my students to see their parents as experts in a school context! All of the centers revolved around activities that most of the parents grew up doing on their families actual ranchos in Mexico, and to have those experiences valued is so important. Our field trip helped students and parents to realize that the history of California is, in large part (at least pre-Gold Rush), the history of Mexico, that the people who lived in our little California town two hundred years ago were people a lot like them who spoke Spanish and ate tortillas.
So you retired teachers reading this blog (I know there are a few of you!), we current teachers need your wisdom! Plan cool activities for our students to do on field trips!
This fidelity does not require a marriage vows, but it does require a disavowal of some field trips and other forms of fun. "Full fidelity" apparently means that we must teach the required number of minutes with the required textbooks 90% of the time. My school interpreted this very literally. There are 180 days in the school year, so we were granted 18 days this year when we could deviate from the state-mandated schedule/materials - 3 days at the beginning of school, 4 days at the end, and then 11 "Flex Days" of our choice. If we are deviating from the state-mandated schedule/materials on a give day, we must write "Flex Day" clearly across the top of our posted daily agenda.
Some teachers who used to take field trips eliminated them altogether this year because they were worried about using up their Flex Days. I still took 7 field trips this year, but I also used up more than my 11 Flex Days, I'm sure. Fortunately, I was not required to submit a list of which days were my Flex Days.
If this sounds bizarre, umm, it is.
But our field trip today was great - the complete opposite of our field trip to a mission a few weeks back. We went to our little town's local history museum. They don't have a great collection of artifacts or any amazing architectural treasure. But what they do have is a retired teacher/principal who designs and leads their student tours. What a gift she is giving to the town's students!
Our day started with students getting into three different groups to perform readers' theater plays. One was an Ohlone creation myth, another was a series of testimonials by people living at Mission San Jose, and the third was a play about the baptism of a new baby at the Mission and the surrounding conflict between the Ohlone and the Spanish. Students got to wear great costumes, which they loved! Then we had a snack break and our class split into two groups, one of whom got a tour of the museum and a brief overview of the town's history, focusing on the Rancho period after the missions closed. The other group went on a tour of an early home built by descendants of the original rancho land-grant holders. We ate lunch in the home's beautiful courtyard and then got ready for the afternoon activities. Parents led four different centers about different aspects of rancho life. At one, students got to design their own cattle brands and practice roping a (fake) cow. At the next, students made salsa and hot chocolate. For the third, students designed a map of their own imaginary rancho. In the fourth, students made beautiful punched tin milagros (which I'll try to take some pictures of tomorrow).
So many things about the day's events were great. The pace of the day was perfect, with students sitting and reading and listening to plays in the morning when they were the most calm and then doing hands-on activities in the afternoon when they were more antsy. The vocabulary the tour guide leader used was also perfect. She explained difficult words, showed objects to illustrate her points, and repeated key concepts many times, usually eliciting student feedback. To me, the best part of the day's plan, though, was that parents got to lead the centers in the afternoon. It was so great for my students to see their parents as experts in a school context! All of the centers revolved around activities that most of the parents grew up doing on their families actual ranchos in Mexico, and to have those experiences valued is so important. Our field trip helped students and parents to realize that the history of California is, in large part (at least pre-Gold Rush), the history of Mexico, that the people who lived in our little California town two hundred years ago were people a lot like them who spoke Spanish and ate tortillas.
So you retired teachers reading this blog (I know there are a few of you!), we current teachers need your wisdom! Plan cool activities for our students to do on field trips!
Sunday, June 10, 2007
Day -5: Report Cards
I can't believe it, but I actually finished my students' report cards today. Each student's report card has 81 boxes, plus a space for written comments. I have 31 students. So that means that in the last 48 hours I have filled in 2511 boxes!
Back when I was in elementary school, I think we just got one grade for math, one grade for writing, etc. But in the brave new world of standards-based report cards, such simplicity is long gone. I have to give my students 19 different grades in math alone, one for each of the 19 math standards my district has deemed to be most important. There are actually 44 math standards that fourth graders in California are supposed to master, but we only give report card grades for 19 of them. Here is a sampling:
* Uses algorithms to add/subtract multi-digit numbers
* Knows the definition and value of prime numbers
* Decides and explains when a rounded solution is called for
* Uses and evaluates parentheses in equations
* Finds the length of horizontal line segments on a coordinate graph by subtracting the x-values
* Finds the length of vertical line segments on a coordinate graph by subtracting the y-values
For each of these standards, I have to assign a grade from 1 to 4 - 1 meaning that the student is working below grade level, 2 meaning close to grade level, 3 meaning on grade level, and 4 meaning above grade level.
This method of grading leads to many conundrums. For example, there are no standards about fractions on our report card. None. Yet fractions are an important topic in the fourth grade math curriculum. When I calculate my students' overall math grade, should I factor in their grades on work related to fractions?
Our district has standardized trimester assessments we give shortly before we fill out report cards, and data from these assessments are supposed to help us assign grades for each standard. Yet this trimester's math assessment has only 31 questions. Let's say there are three questions about using and evaluating parentheses in equations. If a student gets 2 out of 3 of those questions right, that's only 66%, which puts them below grade level for that standard (at least according to our old grading scale). Let's say the student got 80% on an algebra test I gave about using and evaluating parentheses in equations. How do I weight these two measures?
Also, our district assessments are not cumulative. Each trimester, different standards are assessed. But just because a student didn't show mastery of the algorithm for long division in March, though, doesn't mean he hasn't mastered it by June. Our district assessment we give in June does not have any questions about long division, however, so we have to figure out our own ways to reassess standards from earlier trimesters.
One of my favorite standards to assess is, "Uses a variety of strategies for reading comprehension." What does that even mean? Of course my students use different strategies for reading comprehension. We practice predicting, summarizing, questioning, and lots more with everything we read. But how can I reduce their use of reading strategies to a single number? What does "on grade level" mean when you are talking about how well someone makes predictions about texts? Or there's the standard, "Understands words with multiple meanings." Well, of course my students understand words with multiple meanings. They know that "bat" can mean a flying animal or something with which you hit a baseball. But how well my students do on assessments of their ability to understand words with multiple meanings just depends on whether they happen to be familiar with the words on the assessment. I can't possibly teach them every word in the English language with multiple meanings.
The district's answer to questions about the ambiguity of the standards when applied to reading is that students should be assessed on their mastery of these standards using "grade level text." But take the standard, "Recognizes events of the story and the motivation of characters." Some students can recognize a character's motivation in one story in our fourth grade anthology but not in another. Maybe they have a personal connection to a character in one story and that makes the character in one story easier to understand. How can I accurately state the student's ability to determine characters' motivation in all 4th-grade-level stories?
I have to think through these issues for 81 different boxes! And remember, this is elementary school. No one's life is going to be determined by what grade she got for "Uses and evaluates parentheses in equations" in fourth grade.
For better or worse, I've never had a parent question me about a grade I assigned. I kind of wish a parent would ask me to justify how I arrived at a grade. But the parents of students in my class are so deferential to teachers. "La maestra" is a title with real authority and respect in Mexico, and they really think that I know best when it comes to their children's education. Plus, the report card is so overwhelming, that many parents don't really know how to interpret it, never mind what questions to ask.
But, despite these issues, the important thing at the moment is that I'm done with report cards! I've never finished them 4 days before they were due before.
Back when I was in elementary school, I think we just got one grade for math, one grade for writing, etc. But in the brave new world of standards-based report cards, such simplicity is long gone. I have to give my students 19 different grades in math alone, one for each of the 19 math standards my district has deemed to be most important. There are actually 44 math standards that fourth graders in California are supposed to master, but we only give report card grades for 19 of them. Here is a sampling:
* Uses algorithms to add/subtract multi-digit numbers
* Knows the definition and value of prime numbers
* Decides and explains when a rounded solution is called for
* Uses and evaluates parentheses in equations
* Finds the length of horizontal line segments on a coordinate graph by subtracting the x-values
* Finds the length of vertical line segments on a coordinate graph by subtracting the y-values
For each of these standards, I have to assign a grade from 1 to 4 - 1 meaning that the student is working below grade level, 2 meaning close to grade level, 3 meaning on grade level, and 4 meaning above grade level.
This method of grading leads to many conundrums. For example, there are no standards about fractions on our report card. None. Yet fractions are an important topic in the fourth grade math curriculum. When I calculate my students' overall math grade, should I factor in their grades on work related to fractions?
Our district has standardized trimester assessments we give shortly before we fill out report cards, and data from these assessments are supposed to help us assign grades for each standard. Yet this trimester's math assessment has only 31 questions. Let's say there are three questions about using and evaluating parentheses in equations. If a student gets 2 out of 3 of those questions right, that's only 66%, which puts them below grade level for that standard (at least according to our old grading scale). Let's say the student got 80% on an algebra test I gave about using and evaluating parentheses in equations. How do I weight these two measures?
Also, our district assessments are not cumulative. Each trimester, different standards are assessed. But just because a student didn't show mastery of the algorithm for long division in March, though, doesn't mean he hasn't mastered it by June. Our district assessment we give in June does not have any questions about long division, however, so we have to figure out our own ways to reassess standards from earlier trimesters.
One of my favorite standards to assess is, "Uses a variety of strategies for reading comprehension." What does that even mean? Of course my students use different strategies for reading comprehension. We practice predicting, summarizing, questioning, and lots more with everything we read. But how can I reduce their use of reading strategies to a single number? What does "on grade level" mean when you are talking about how well someone makes predictions about texts? Or there's the standard, "Understands words with multiple meanings." Well, of course my students understand words with multiple meanings. They know that "bat" can mean a flying animal or something with which you hit a baseball. But how well my students do on assessments of their ability to understand words with multiple meanings just depends on whether they happen to be familiar with the words on the assessment. I can't possibly teach them every word in the English language with multiple meanings.
The district's answer to questions about the ambiguity of the standards when applied to reading is that students should be assessed on their mastery of these standards using "grade level text." But take the standard, "Recognizes events of the story and the motivation of characters." Some students can recognize a character's motivation in one story in our fourth grade anthology but not in another. Maybe they have a personal connection to a character in one story and that makes the character in one story easier to understand. How can I accurately state the student's ability to determine characters' motivation in all 4th-grade-level stories?
I have to think through these issues for 81 different boxes! And remember, this is elementary school. No one's life is going to be determined by what grade she got for "Uses and evaluates parentheses in equations" in fourth grade.
For better or worse, I've never had a parent question me about a grade I assigned. I kind of wish a parent would ask me to justify how I arrived at a grade. But the parents of students in my class are so deferential to teachers. "La maestra" is a title with real authority and respect in Mexico, and they really think that I know best when it comes to their children's education. Plus, the report card is so overwhelming, that many parents don't really know how to interpret it, never mind what questions to ask.
But, despite these issues, the important thing at the moment is that I'm done with report cards! I've never finished them 4 days before they were due before.
Thursday, June 7, 2007
Day -6: A Haiku
My students are finishing up their poetry books (finally!), and one boy wrote this haiku:
The moon is shiny.
It looks like the letter "C."
It may taste like cheese.
***
I found out that Wilfredo didn't go on our field trip to the park yesterday because he didn't have food to bring for lunch! I talked with him and explained he should never, ever not go on a field trip because he can't bring lunch and that I can order a free lunch from the cafeteria for him. But still ... I feel sad for him. He found out that there was a party and that there would have been plenty of food for him, so he started off the the day a little bummed out. He's so resilient, though. By 9:00 he said, "We're a great team!" when he and his partner found lots of prepositional phrases in our little Prepositional Phrase Hunt. Our school district continues to provide free breakfast and lunch to families during the summer, which really helps out people like Wilfredo. I wonder what he did eat for lunch yesterday.
The moon is shiny.
It looks like the letter "C."
It may taste like cheese.
***
I found out that Wilfredo didn't go on our field trip to the park yesterday because he didn't have food to bring for lunch! I talked with him and explained he should never, ever not go on a field trip because he can't bring lunch and that I can order a free lunch from the cafeteria for him. But still ... I feel sad for him. He found out that there was a party and that there would have been plenty of food for him, so he started off the the day a little bummed out. He's so resilient, though. By 9:00 he said, "We're a great team!" when he and his partner found lots of prepositional phrases in our little Prepositional Phrase Hunt. Our school district continues to provide free breakfast and lunch to families during the summer, which really helps out people like Wilfredo. I wonder what he did eat for lunch yesterday.
Wednesday, June 6, 2007
Day -7: "Que te portes bien en la otra escuela"
Today my fourth graders went to the park with their first grade reading buddies for an end-of-the-year celebration. It was very, very cute. The moms of both the classes surprised me with a potluck they organized themselves, complete with vegetarian pupusas and vegetarian taquitos (since I don't eat meat) and many kinds of salsa and flan. I made a summer date with the pupusa-maker to come over to my house and teach me how to make them!
Another thing that made me smile a lot today were the letters that our first grade reading buddies wrote to me. They thanked me for bringing my students to read with them, for being kind to them, etc. And then they offered me advice for my future life as a doctoral student:
"No se olvide de terminar la tarea." (Don't forget to finish the homework.)
"Pórtate bien." (Behave yourself.)
"No olvides a prestar atención a tu maestra." (Don't forget to pay attention to your teacher."
And my favorite - in English - from a student who has a really, really hard time at school, who's been retained, and who other kids get frustrated with sometimes: "Good luck at your new school. I hope you have a lot of friends there."
I was thinking about what to write back to them. I was thinking of promising that I would do all my homework and always pay attention to my teacher. But then I realized that might not be true! Maybe a big difference between first grade and 19th grade (which my students and I figured out is the grade I will be in) is that by the time you're in 19th grade you know when you can get away with not doing your homework and not paying attention - while still learning what you need to learn.
Another thing that made me smile a lot today were the letters that our first grade reading buddies wrote to me. They thanked me for bringing my students to read with them, for being kind to them, etc. And then they offered me advice for my future life as a doctoral student:
"No se olvide de terminar la tarea." (Don't forget to finish the homework.)
"Pórtate bien." (Behave yourself.)
"No olvides a prestar atención a tu maestra." (Don't forget to pay attention to your teacher."
And my favorite - in English - from a student who has a really, really hard time at school, who's been retained, and who other kids get frustrated with sometimes: "Good luck at your new school. I hope you have a lot of friends there."
I was thinking about what to write back to them. I was thinking of promising that I would do all my homework and always pay attention to my teacher. But then I realized that might not be true! Maybe a big difference between first grade and 19th grade (which my students and I figured out is the grade I will be in) is that by the time you're in 19th grade you know when you can get away with not doing your homework and not paying attention - while still learning what you need to learn.
Tuesday, June 5, 2007
Day -8: 60 Is the New 75
No, I'm not talking about ages. I'm talking about percentages.
Used to be that in order to score Proficient on my district's standardized trimester assessments in language arts and math, students had to get 75% of the questions on the tests right. About a month ago, however, some district administrators decided to change all that. Now, for this last trimester, students only have to get a score of 60% or higher to be considered Proficient.
Here are the old assessment guidelines we used:
0-59% = Far Below Basic/Below Basic
60-74% = Basic
75-89% = Proficient
90-100% = Advanced
Here are the new guidelines:
0-19% = Far Below Basic
20-39% = Below Basic
40-59% = Basic
60-79% = Proficient
80-100% = Advanced
It's a pretty drastic change to make midyear! The change in the guidelines was allegedly made to better align district assessment results to state standardized test results. But students' scores on state tests don't correlate at all with the district tests evaluated using the new guidelines.
Last year, when my current students were in third grade, 12 of them scored Far Below Basic in Language Arts on the state standardized test. But according to the latest district trimester Language Arts test, none of my students are considered Far Below Basic. In third grade, only one of my students scored Proficient on the state Language Arts test. But according to the latest district trimester Language Arts test, 10 of my students are now considered Proficient.
Of course I expect some students' state standardized test scores to be better than they were last year, but I can almost guarantee my students' state scores will not improve as dramatically as their district scores might suggest.
The state Department of Education shifts what percentage of questions students must get right to score Proficient each year, depending on the difficulty of test questions and other factors. They don't make it easy to figure out what the cutoff for that magic score of Proficient is. I went through all of my students' test results, though, and wrote down the percent of questions they got correct and their performance levels. As best I could figure out, for the 2006 3rd grade Language Arts test, here are the guidelines:
0 - ~36% = Far Below Basic
~37 - ~53% = Below Basic
~54 - ~72% = Basic
I can't tell what the cutoffs were for Proficient and Advanced because I only had one student score at these performance levels. He got 78% correct, which was reported as Proficient.
Even though my data are incomplete, it's clear to me that the district's new guidelines do not align at all with state guidelines. The state has lots and lots of well-trained people thinking about what should count as Proficient and using real statistical models to ensure reliability across grade levels and years - or at least that's what I assume. Our little district cannot hope to reproduce this.
Last year, a question on a district math assessment read as follows: "Four boys shared 38 pennies as equally as possible. How many pennies did each boy get?" The only possible answers listed were 8, 10, 12, and 6. What do you think the correct answer is? At least there aren't any questions as bad as that one on this year's assessments. But still, I hate how standardized test scores gain this mythic status as unbiased, objective, and reliable, when how students do depends totally on how hard the questions are and the scale used for their scores.
Letting a student who scores 60% on a pretty easy test be considered Proficient during this last trimester does not seem a step in any kind of right direction. Especially when that same score of 60% on the same kind of test was reported as Basic on that student's report card earlier this year. What parent wouldn't assume that their child improved markedly when seeing the jump from Basic to Proficient? But really it's just the bar that moved, not the child.
Ever wonder how all students are going to score Proficient in Language Arts and Math by 2014, as mandated under No Child Left Behind? Here's your answer. Just lower the bar.
Time magazine actually has a cover story this week about No Child Left Behind, which talks about this same problem at a national level. State test results often don't correlate with national test results. Students in California score 15 percentage points lower on the national reading test than they do on the state test - which is nothing compared to students in Alabama, who score 48 points lower on than national test than the state test. So just what does Proficient mean? And who gets to decide?
Used to be that in order to score Proficient on my district's standardized trimester assessments in language arts and math, students had to get 75% of the questions on the tests right. About a month ago, however, some district administrators decided to change all that. Now, for this last trimester, students only have to get a score of 60% or higher to be considered Proficient.
Here are the old assessment guidelines we used:
0-59% = Far Below Basic/Below Basic
60-74% = Basic
75-89% = Proficient
90-100% = Advanced
Here are the new guidelines:
0-19% = Far Below Basic
20-39% = Below Basic
40-59% = Basic
60-79% = Proficient
80-100% = Advanced
It's a pretty drastic change to make midyear! The change in the guidelines was allegedly made to better align district assessment results to state standardized test results. But students' scores on state tests don't correlate at all with the district tests evaluated using the new guidelines.
Last year, when my current students were in third grade, 12 of them scored Far Below Basic in Language Arts on the state standardized test. But according to the latest district trimester Language Arts test, none of my students are considered Far Below Basic. In third grade, only one of my students scored Proficient on the state Language Arts test. But according to the latest district trimester Language Arts test, 10 of my students are now considered Proficient.
Of course I expect some students' state standardized test scores to be better than they were last year, but I can almost guarantee my students' state scores will not improve as dramatically as their district scores might suggest.
The state Department of Education shifts what percentage of questions students must get right to score Proficient each year, depending on the difficulty of test questions and other factors. They don't make it easy to figure out what the cutoff for that magic score of Proficient is. I went through all of my students' test results, though, and wrote down the percent of questions they got correct and their performance levels. As best I could figure out, for the 2006 3rd grade Language Arts test, here are the guidelines:
0 - ~36% = Far Below Basic
~37 - ~53% = Below Basic
~54 - ~72% = Basic
I can't tell what the cutoffs were for Proficient and Advanced because I only had one student score at these performance levels. He got 78% correct, which was reported as Proficient.
Even though my data are incomplete, it's clear to me that the district's new guidelines do not align at all with state guidelines. The state has lots and lots of well-trained people thinking about what should count as Proficient and using real statistical models to ensure reliability across grade levels and years - or at least that's what I assume. Our little district cannot hope to reproduce this.
Last year, a question on a district math assessment read as follows: "Four boys shared 38 pennies as equally as possible. How many pennies did each boy get?" The only possible answers listed were 8, 10, 12, and 6. What do you think the correct answer is? At least there aren't any questions as bad as that one on this year's assessments. But still, I hate how standardized test scores gain this mythic status as unbiased, objective, and reliable, when how students do depends totally on how hard the questions are and the scale used for their scores.
Letting a student who scores 60% on a pretty easy test be considered Proficient during this last trimester does not seem a step in any kind of right direction. Especially when that same score of 60% on the same kind of test was reported as Basic on that student's report card earlier this year. What parent wouldn't assume that their child improved markedly when seeing the jump from Basic to Proficient? But really it's just the bar that moved, not the child.
Ever wonder how all students are going to score Proficient in Language Arts and Math by 2014, as mandated under No Child Left Behind? Here's your answer. Just lower the bar.
Time magazine actually has a cover story this week about No Child Left Behind, which talks about this same problem at a national level. State test results often don't correlate with national test results. Students in California score 15 percentage points lower on the national reading test than they do on the state test - which is nothing compared to students in Alabama, who score 48 points lower on than national test than the state test. So just what does Proficient mean? And who gets to decide?
Monday, June 4, 2007
Day -9: Mission Museum
Today was my fourth annual Mission Museum. As the culmination of our unit on missions, we invited families to come see students' models of missions, reports on missions, and diaries about mission life.
Making models of missions has been much-maligned in California by history educators, and I understand why. Craft stores sell kits for building each of the 21 missions out of styrofoam, and it is hard to see what educational purpose is served by just assembling styrofoam pieces. But my students and their families really love building models of missions! Many of my students' parents have a limited education in Spanish; having finished only fourth grade in Mexico is normal. Plus, many have only limited English skills. By the time their children are in my class, they often cannot help their kids with homework - in English or in Spanish - because they don't know how to do it themselves. Many students' parents, however, work in construction, carpentry, or related trades, so building is something at which they are experts. Our mission building project becomes, for many families, a total family effort, in which parents' "funds of knowledge" are valued. I encourage students to spend as little as possible on their mission models and tell them that I value their creativity much more than the accuracy with which they reproduce the exact proportions of the missions they are studying.
Another criticism of building models of missions is that it glorifies missions and does not help students think critically about the role of missions in California history. It seems wrong to value building pretty white churches over teaching about the enslavement of Native Americans at these pretty white churches. But I think there's no need to give up the latter while doing the former. Almost all of the my students wrote diaries in the voices of Native Americans who wished they could escape from the mission where they were living, who longed for the village where they used to live, and who, in some cases, were plotting an uprising against their captors.
About 20 parents came to my classroom today to see students' work. Many of them dressed up for the occasion. Students were so proud to show off their missions. We put out papers for our museum visitors to write comments, and every students' comment sheet was full with really thoughtful feedback from their peers and from parents. Students would come back over and over to check how many comments they had gotten and read what they said.
Every time I invite parents to come see students' work, I always vow that I should do it more. It's so easy, and the students and parents love it. Somehow, though, I never manage to pull it off as often as I hope.
Here are pictures from our mission museum. Students and their families really had ingenious ideas for building - lentils for a pathway, folded construction paper for a roof, aluminum foil for a reflecting pool. Look closely!
Making models of missions has been much-maligned in California by history educators, and I understand why. Craft stores sell kits for building each of the 21 missions out of styrofoam, and it is hard to see what educational purpose is served by just assembling styrofoam pieces. But my students and their families really love building models of missions! Many of my students' parents have a limited education in Spanish; having finished only fourth grade in Mexico is normal. Plus, many have only limited English skills. By the time their children are in my class, they often cannot help their kids with homework - in English or in Spanish - because they don't know how to do it themselves. Many students' parents, however, work in construction, carpentry, or related trades, so building is something at which they are experts. Our mission building project becomes, for many families, a total family effort, in which parents' "funds of knowledge" are valued. I encourage students to spend as little as possible on their mission models and tell them that I value their creativity much more than the accuracy with which they reproduce the exact proportions of the missions they are studying.
Another criticism of building models of missions is that it glorifies missions and does not help students think critically about the role of missions in California history. It seems wrong to value building pretty white churches over teaching about the enslavement of Native Americans at these pretty white churches. But I think there's no need to give up the latter while doing the former. Almost all of the my students wrote diaries in the voices of Native Americans who wished they could escape from the mission where they were living, who longed for the village where they used to live, and who, in some cases, were plotting an uprising against their captors.
About 20 parents came to my classroom today to see students' work. Many of them dressed up for the occasion. Students were so proud to show off their missions. We put out papers for our museum visitors to write comments, and every students' comment sheet was full with really thoughtful feedback from their peers and from parents. Students would come back over and over to check how many comments they had gotten and read what they said.
Every time I invite parents to come see students' work, I always vow that I should do it more. It's so easy, and the students and parents love it. Somehow, though, I never manage to pull it off as often as I hope.
Here are pictures from our mission museum. Students and their families really had ingenious ideas for building - lentils for a pathway, folded construction paper for a roof, aluminum foil for a reflecting pool. Look closely!
Saturday, June 2, 2007
Day -10: The Priest's Son
Last year, I tried a new writing project at the end of the year. I had my students assume the role of a person living in one of the periods of California history that we had studied, and I had them write a diary in the voice of that person. It was a fun and revealing exercise, giving students a too-rare chance to really exercise their imaginations. I would turn the lights off, have the students help me with sound effects as our time-travel machine warmed up, and then narrate events we were traveling backwards through. "We're traveling back before cellphones were invented, before computers were invented, before there were cars, before there was electricity. We're traveling back before California was a state," etc. And then I would ask students a series of questions, guiding them as they tried to imagine their lives in the past. "The sun is rising and you are waking up. What do you hear? What do you see around you? Who is with you?" And so on.
This year, the time I have for teaching social studies each week has been cut in half (down to 45 minutes a week from at least 90 minutes a week in past years) due to our school's "Program Improvement" status. (Schools that fail to meet standardized test score targets must implement a variety of changes, and in elementary schools, those changes mean that everything but language arts and math instruction is basically eliminated - or at least drastically reduced). I felt like I didn't have time to do the historical fiction project on the same scale this year, plus my students have learned about fewer time periods than in past years. So I decided to have everyone set their diaries during the mission period this time around. Some students assumed the roles of Native Americans living at missions and some assumed the role of Spanish priests or soldiers.
Alex wrote this diary, and though he has some misconceptions about the sex lives of priests (misconceptions, I guess, which are shared by some priests themselves), he gets the important parts.
P.S. What students really liked about the historical fiction project last year was that I bought parchment paper (the kind you use for baking) and cut out rectangles that they used for the covers of their diaries. They loved crumpling up the parchment paper so it would look old. It is hecka hard, though, to hole-punch parchment paper!
This year, the time I have for teaching social studies each week has been cut in half (down to 45 minutes a week from at least 90 minutes a week in past years) due to our school's "Program Improvement" status. (Schools that fail to meet standardized test score targets must implement a variety of changes, and in elementary schools, those changes mean that everything but language arts and math instruction is basically eliminated - or at least drastically reduced). I felt like I didn't have time to do the historical fiction project on the same scale this year, plus my students have learned about fewer time periods than in past years. So I decided to have everyone set their diaries during the mission period this time around. Some students assumed the roles of Native Americans living at missions and some assumed the role of Spanish priests or soldiers.
Alex wrote this diary, and though he has some misconceptions about the sex lives of priests (misconceptions, I guess, which are shared by some priests themselves), he gets the important parts.
I see a bed, a cruz on a wall, a cemetery. No one is with me. The room looks old world, really old. I hear the bells and the people speaking to me. I hear birds. I see the old pictures. I'm going to the church because I am the padre. I am a priest. I am 20 years old. My family is in Spain. I came here to become a priest like my father. My name is Jesus.
It's in the middle of the day. I fed the animals. I helped the Native Americans with chores. When I first came here it was a disaster. I planned to marry a beautiful Spanish woman and to be the best priest ever. I will learn to pray more to believe in God. Make the Native Americans believe in God. God has the power. There's only one god, not a bunch of gods. You people should believe in God. That's my dream speech. I want a nice house in Spain. Sometimes I want to go back to Spain, meet my family there, make a new life there, become the greatest priest in Spain. People will respect me. The day is fainting away. It's time to sleep and dream sweet dreams. Good night.
P.S. What students really liked about the historical fiction project last year was that I bought parchment paper (the kind you use for baking) and cut out rectangles that they used for the covers of their diaries. They loved crumpling up the parchment paper so it would look old. It is hecka hard, though, to hole-punch parchment paper!
Thursday, May 31, 2007
Day -11: On Discipline
My mom told me that a friend of hers who sometimes reads this blog said, "It's amazing that she doesn't have any discipline problems!"
I definitely don't mean to give that impression. I definitely do have discipline problems, if that means students who give me headaches, who interrupt/annoy/upset/hurt other students and/or me.
I am not a natural classroom manager. Thinking up curriculum ideas is easy for me, as is building relationships with students, seeing gaps in students' understanding and then planning interventions to fill in those gaps, making connections between content areas, trying out new instructional strategies, and lots of other parts of teaching. Not easy as in a cakewalk, but easy as in, while it's intellectually demanding, it builds on natural strengths of mine. Classroom management I do by sheer force of will. I will myself to establish a limit and enforce it. I try to will myself (when I'm feeling well-rested, anyway) to enforce those limits calmly without getting visibly angry, but I am not very good at that. Juan definitely knows he can get an emotional reaction from me if he pushes hard enough.
I remember when I was interviewing for my first teaching job 14(!) years ago (OK, it was just a summer program, but still), I said that I thought engaging curriculum was the foundation of good classroom management. I still believe that, in part. If students find the work they are doing meaningful and interesting, they are much less likely to get into trouble.
The only problem is ... that has been taken away from me. I have so little control over the curriculum I teach now, that I can't rely on my curriculum to limit discipline problems. But I still do my best. For whatever I'm teaching, I try to think up a meaningful end-product that students will show to some audience, even if it's just to each other. I can feel the difference in students' energy and focus when they are rehearsing a play they are about to perform for another class or even just putting finishing touches on their biographies that (after we share them in partners) I'm just going to pin up on the wall. I can't think up a great final product for every random grammar subskill I have to teach, but nonetheless, I try to tie isolated skills to a meaningful context whenever I can. I try to vary the pace of the day, too - mixing in lots of opportunities for whole group instruction, work in small groups, work in partners, and individual work, and I think this balance help some students get in the socializing time they need.
The part of classroom management I'm best at, as is probably apparent from the kinds of stories I write about in my blog, is the relationship-building part. I do think having strong relationship with students and their families is an essential precursor to good classroom management. Obviously, I don't have to eat lunch with students or go to their first communions, but building relationships with my students is actually my favorite part of my job, so it's no hardship for me to do that - though it does take time. But when a student knows that I know his parents well, that definitely affects the students' behavior.
I think another key to classroom management is a well-established set of routines and procedures. I might not be quite as good at this as I'd like to be, in fact I was lecturing my students just today about how they really should understand the rules for our end-of-the-day homework time by now! But I know clear expectations and predictability make a huge difference.
About a week ago, I felt like the end-of-the-year behavior slide was setting in, that restlessness that students and teachers alike feel as vacation approaches. I felt like I had been battling with students too much, so I cracked down. The most extreme example of this crackdown was last Wednesday when my class was walking across the playground to visit our first grade buddies, and I made us turn around and go back to our classroom without ever going to buddies because students were playing around in line and (potentially, anyway) distracting other classes. This consequence, while obviously not the fairest since all students were punished, worked (or at least stopped the problem and refocused the class on learning for the moment) because I gave it very dispassionately, and instead of giving a long lecture, I talked briefly about my decision and the reasons for it, and then moved on and started students on a math activity instead.
Our school uses this uniform system of consequences. The first time a student is doing something inappropriate on any given day, the student gets a warning. The second infraction during that same day is a 5-minute timeout. The third time is a 10-minute timeout. The fourth time is a timeout in another classroom plus a phone call home. And the fifth time is getting sent to the office. During my little crackdown this week, I started giving more consequences for small things like whispering when it was time to listen silently, etc. It has worked to allow me to teach more, for the most part, but it does get tiring to enforce.
A week into the crackdown, though, and its benefits are wearing off. Eventually students see that getting sent to another room for a timeout isn't all that bad (at least in some students' eyes). Juan has come to accept that consequence with little protest. He will always start crying, though, if he reaches "Level 5" and I send him to the office, which I've done three times this year, I think.
Each year I become a little stricter, and that's for the best, I think.
Everyone (i.e. their past teachers and their P.E/science/music/computer teachers), say that the class I have this year is challenging in terms of discipline issues, so I'm curious how my classroom management would feel with a new class next year.
There is a part of me that hates being the enforcer of limits, that knows how cool my students are as people and wants them to be engaged all the time, that blames myself if they are more interested in goofing off. But when there are 31 kids in one room who are often supposed to be doing the same thing at the same time (no matter how much I try to differentiate), the teacher has to be a strong enforcer of limits or nothing gets done. That's the one part of teaching that I wasn't sure I could do, and it has not been easy for me to learn how to do. So in some weird way, learning to be at least a passable enforcer of limits is something I'm proud of. And I can count on Juan to test just how good I am at navigating the love and limits dance each and every day!
I definitely don't mean to give that impression. I definitely do have discipline problems, if that means students who give me headaches, who interrupt/annoy/upset/hurt other students and/or me.
I am not a natural classroom manager. Thinking up curriculum ideas is easy for me, as is building relationships with students, seeing gaps in students' understanding and then planning interventions to fill in those gaps, making connections between content areas, trying out new instructional strategies, and lots of other parts of teaching. Not easy as in a cakewalk, but easy as in, while it's intellectually demanding, it builds on natural strengths of mine. Classroom management I do by sheer force of will. I will myself to establish a limit and enforce it. I try to will myself (when I'm feeling well-rested, anyway) to enforce those limits calmly without getting visibly angry, but I am not very good at that. Juan definitely knows he can get an emotional reaction from me if he pushes hard enough.
I remember when I was interviewing for my first teaching job 14(!) years ago (OK, it was just a summer program, but still), I said that I thought engaging curriculum was the foundation of good classroom management. I still believe that, in part. If students find the work they are doing meaningful and interesting, they are much less likely to get into trouble.
The only problem is ... that has been taken away from me. I have so little control over the curriculum I teach now, that I can't rely on my curriculum to limit discipline problems. But I still do my best. For whatever I'm teaching, I try to think up a meaningful end-product that students will show to some audience, even if it's just to each other. I can feel the difference in students' energy and focus when they are rehearsing a play they are about to perform for another class or even just putting finishing touches on their biographies that (after we share them in partners) I'm just going to pin up on the wall. I can't think up a great final product for every random grammar subskill I have to teach, but nonetheless, I try to tie isolated skills to a meaningful context whenever I can. I try to vary the pace of the day, too - mixing in lots of opportunities for whole group instruction, work in small groups, work in partners, and individual work, and I think this balance help some students get in the socializing time they need.
The part of classroom management I'm best at, as is probably apparent from the kinds of stories I write about in my blog, is the relationship-building part. I do think having strong relationship with students and their families is an essential precursor to good classroom management. Obviously, I don't have to eat lunch with students or go to their first communions, but building relationships with my students is actually my favorite part of my job, so it's no hardship for me to do that - though it does take time. But when a student knows that I know his parents well, that definitely affects the students' behavior.
I think another key to classroom management is a well-established set of routines and procedures. I might not be quite as good at this as I'd like to be, in fact I was lecturing my students just today about how they really should understand the rules for our end-of-the-day homework time by now! But I know clear expectations and predictability make a huge difference.
About a week ago, I felt like the end-of-the-year behavior slide was setting in, that restlessness that students and teachers alike feel as vacation approaches. I felt like I had been battling with students too much, so I cracked down. The most extreme example of this crackdown was last Wednesday when my class was walking across the playground to visit our first grade buddies, and I made us turn around and go back to our classroom without ever going to buddies because students were playing around in line and (potentially, anyway) distracting other classes. This consequence, while obviously not the fairest since all students were punished, worked (or at least stopped the problem and refocused the class on learning for the moment) because I gave it very dispassionately, and instead of giving a long lecture, I talked briefly about my decision and the reasons for it, and then moved on and started students on a math activity instead.
Our school uses this uniform system of consequences. The first time a student is doing something inappropriate on any given day, the student gets a warning. The second infraction during that same day is a 5-minute timeout. The third time is a 10-minute timeout. The fourth time is a timeout in another classroom plus a phone call home. And the fifth time is getting sent to the office. During my little crackdown this week, I started giving more consequences for small things like whispering when it was time to listen silently, etc. It has worked to allow me to teach more, for the most part, but it does get tiring to enforce.
A week into the crackdown, though, and its benefits are wearing off. Eventually students see that getting sent to another room for a timeout isn't all that bad (at least in some students' eyes). Juan has come to accept that consequence with little protest. He will always start crying, though, if he reaches "Level 5" and I send him to the office, which I've done three times this year, I think.
Each year I become a little stricter, and that's for the best, I think.
Everyone (i.e. their past teachers and their P.E/science/music/computer teachers), say that the class I have this year is challenging in terms of discipline issues, so I'm curious how my classroom management would feel with a new class next year.
There is a part of me that hates being the enforcer of limits, that knows how cool my students are as people and wants them to be engaged all the time, that blames myself if they are more interested in goofing off. But when there are 31 kids in one room who are often supposed to be doing the same thing at the same time (no matter how much I try to differentiate), the teacher has to be a strong enforcer of limits or nothing gets done. That's the one part of teaching that I wasn't sure I could do, and it has not been easy for me to learn how to do. So in some weird way, learning to be at least a passable enforcer of limits is something I'm proud of. And I can count on Juan to test just how good I am at navigating the love and limits dance each and every day!
Wednesday, May 30, 2007
Day -12: Readers' Choice
A quick story:
My friend who teaches the fifth grade bilingual class at our school and who has all my students from last year popped her head in my room last Friday. "Oh my God! I almost killed Pedro!" she burst out.
Pedro deserves a whole blog entry all to himself, but suffice it to say that he is rather odd. He is obsessed with fashion (especially Abercrombie and Fitch), has a new spiky gelled hairdo, is a tetherball star, and does not reason the same way your average fifth grader does.
The fifth graders have been doing a project in which they thought of "What's your favorite ...?" questions, surveyed first graders, and made bar and pie graphs showing the results of their surveys. As they were preparing posters with their results, Pedro picked up a glue stick, proceeded to smear glue all over the bottom of both his sneakers, and then started walking around the classroom. My friend finally realized what was going on and was so angry that all she could think of to do was point furiously at Pedro and scream, "KNEEL! KNEEL RIGHT NOW!"
Fortunately for her and him, he gathered what the word "kneel" meant and did it, thereby getting his sticky feet off the floor. My friend was so angry and flabbergasted that she made Pedro stay there for a minute or two until she calmed down and had time to deal with him. He cheerfully mopped up the sticky mess. What he will take from this incident is anyone's guess.
***
I can't believe there are so few days left of school!
In talking with a few people who read this blog, I've heard some ideas for topics they'd like for me to write about during these last few days. To save myself some time and brain energy tonight, I thought I'd pose a question instead of writing a regular post.
What do you want to read about? I have 12 days left at my school with my students. What do you want to know about them and my teaching life?
Some topics other people have suggested to spark your thinking:
- discipline (i.e. what kinds of discipline problems do I deal with, how do I deal with them, etc.)
- the social worlds of the girls in my class (ins and outs of their cliques, gossip, etc.)
- how my curriculum has changed as a result of No Child Left Behind and other mandates (what, specifically, I have stopped doing and what I do more of now)
Please take a minute and post your vote for a topic you'd like to read about - one of these or anything else that you've been wondering about. You can post your comment anonymously if you want. Or you can send me an email to my regular email address if you have it. Thanks!
My friend who teaches the fifth grade bilingual class at our school and who has all my students from last year popped her head in my room last Friday. "Oh my God! I almost killed Pedro!" she burst out.
Pedro deserves a whole blog entry all to himself, but suffice it to say that he is rather odd. He is obsessed with fashion (especially Abercrombie and Fitch), has a new spiky gelled hairdo, is a tetherball star, and does not reason the same way your average fifth grader does.
The fifth graders have been doing a project in which they thought of "What's your favorite ...?" questions, surveyed first graders, and made bar and pie graphs showing the results of their surveys. As they were preparing posters with their results, Pedro picked up a glue stick, proceeded to smear glue all over the bottom of both his sneakers, and then started walking around the classroom. My friend finally realized what was going on and was so angry that all she could think of to do was point furiously at Pedro and scream, "KNEEL! KNEEL RIGHT NOW!"
Fortunately for her and him, he gathered what the word "kneel" meant and did it, thereby getting his sticky feet off the floor. My friend was so angry and flabbergasted that she made Pedro stay there for a minute or two until she calmed down and had time to deal with him. He cheerfully mopped up the sticky mess. What he will take from this incident is anyone's guess.
***
I can't believe there are so few days left of school!
In talking with a few people who read this blog, I've heard some ideas for topics they'd like for me to write about during these last few days. To save myself some time and brain energy tonight, I thought I'd pose a question instead of writing a regular post.
What do you want to read about? I have 12 days left at my school with my students. What do you want to know about them and my teaching life?
Some topics other people have suggested to spark your thinking:
- discipline (i.e. what kinds of discipline problems do I deal with, how do I deal with them, etc.)
- the social worlds of the girls in my class (ins and outs of their cliques, gossip, etc.)
- how my curriculum has changed as a result of No Child Left Behind and other mandates (what, specifically, I have stopped doing and what I do more of now)
Please take a minute and post your vote for a topic you'd like to read about - one of these or anything else that you've been wondering about. You can post your comment anonymously if you want. Or you can send me an email to my regular email address if you have it. Thanks!
Tuesday, May 29, 2007
Day -13: Celebrations
Nope, this isn't a picture of a friend getting married.
On Saturday, five of my students had their first communions at the church down the street from our school. The pews were packed with probably 1000 people. The boy who passed the collection basket down my row was a former student of mine, and I saw lots of other former students and their families, too. There were many poofy white dresses and tiny suits, plus lots of hairspray, cologne, nervousness, and pride.
Day -14: Open House Photos
Here are a few things my students showed off at Open House. You can click on them to see slightly bigger versions.
First, this is an example of a list each student made of things they wanted their parents to see.
Here are some posters a pair of students made about the book Sarah, Plain and Tall. It's hard to see in this picture, but I liked their comic-book style drawings.
And here are a few of my students' biographies. Anyone know who Omar Bravo (on the biography in the upper righthand corner) is? I didn't, but all my students do!
Probably the biggest hit of the evening was the little iPhoto slideshow I made a pictures from our field trips this year. One parent asked if I could email her some of the pictures that her daughter is in. This is the first year that a few parents of students in my class have email.
First, this is an example of a list each student made of things they wanted their parents to see.
Here are some posters a pair of students made about the book Sarah, Plain and Tall. It's hard to see in this picture, but I liked their comic-book style drawings.
And here are a few of my students' biographies. Anyone know who Omar Bravo (on the biography in the upper righthand corner) is? I didn't, but all my students do!
Probably the biggest hit of the evening was the little iPhoto slideshow I made a pictures from our field trips this year. One parent asked if I could email her some of the pictures that her daughter is in. This is the first year that a few parents of students in my class have email.
Thursday, May 24, 2007
Day -15: Japan Is Cooler than China
At least that's what Alex thinks (Alex of the "I rest my case" comment a few days back).
I was hanging out with Alex and a few other kids at the Book Fair after school. (Oh, the excitement the Book Fair creates ... but that's another story.) He spotted a book in a new Magic School Bus series that centers on social studies rather than science themes. In this particular installment, Ms. Frizzle takes her class to China.
Alex flipped through the book briefly and then put it back. "That looks cool," I said.
"Yeah," Alex answered half-heartedly, "but I'm more into Japan than China."
"Really? Why?" I asked.
"Japan is cooler than China," he elaborated. "Japan has cool cartoons. And Tokyo looks like the future."
***
Tonight was Open House. I love Open House, but I didn't get home until 9:00, having worked more than 13 hours straight with about a 10-minute break for lunch. I'll post a few photos tomorrow.
I was hanging out with Alex and a few other kids at the Book Fair after school. (Oh, the excitement the Book Fair creates ... but that's another story.) He spotted a book in a new Magic School Bus series that centers on social studies rather than science themes. In this particular installment, Ms. Frizzle takes her class to China.
Alex flipped through the book briefly and then put it back. "That looks cool," I said.
"Yeah," Alex answered half-heartedly, "but I'm more into Japan than China."
"Really? Why?" I asked.
"Japan is cooler than China," he elaborated. "Japan has cool cartoons. And Tokyo looks like the future."
***
Tonight was Open House. I love Open House, but I didn't get home until 9:00, having worked more than 13 hours straight with about a 10-minute break for lunch. I'll post a few photos tomorrow.
Wednesday, May 23, 2007
Day -16: Health
Today I found out that Celeste, one of my former students who's in 7th grade now, has had a really tough past few months. Turns out that since hitting her head in a car accident recently, Celeste has had two epileptic seizures. And then a month ago, her dad had a serious stroke while he was at work. He has been hospitalized ever since. Currently, he can't talk and is almost entirely paralyzed on the left side of his body, though he can wiggle his toes. I got all this news from Celeste's second-grade sister. I ran into the second grader on the playground and asked how Celeste was. Out spilled all the details, very matter-of-factly. But this normally very bubbly second grader was clearly out-of-sorts.
Students' lives can contain such tragedy. And health issues occupy a surprising amount of my time.
This year, I have a student with diabetes. She needs to get her insulin levels checked every day at lunch and has to stay in at recess every morning for a snack. She was hospitalized for almost a week last summer when her diabetes was diagnosed. I have another student this year who has a hormone disorder which made her grow to her full adult height by the end of third grade. She is 5'9" now, I'd say, and looks like she's at least 15. I don't know the name of her condition, but she goes frequently for MRIs and check-ups. I have another student David (mentioned in the "duda") post) with achondroplasia, which means he is a little person. His mom is illiterate in Spanish and in English, so she sometimes has difficulty accessing services for him, but he has a team of doctors that keep tabs on him. I have two students with serious asthma and lots more with less-serious asthma. One of the serious asthma cases, Leonardo, also has serious vision issues that went uncorrected until this year because his mom didn't have health insurance and couldn't pay for an opthamologist's exam. Janette has spent much of the year without her glasses, which keep breaking. And Marco just went to get his glasses today, after being referred for them back in October.
For the large number of my students without health insurance, these health problems are that much more complicated and stressful. Whenever people start talking about denying health care services to undocumented immigrants and their children, I can't even bear to listen for very long. Are they honestly saying that they want Leonardo to die of an asthma attack? Or that Celeste shouldn't get epilepsy medication?
Students' lives can contain such tragedy. And health issues occupy a surprising amount of my time.
This year, I have a student with diabetes. She needs to get her insulin levels checked every day at lunch and has to stay in at recess every morning for a snack. She was hospitalized for almost a week last summer when her diabetes was diagnosed. I have another student this year who has a hormone disorder which made her grow to her full adult height by the end of third grade. She is 5'9" now, I'd say, and looks like she's at least 15. I don't know the name of her condition, but she goes frequently for MRIs and check-ups. I have another student David (mentioned in the "duda") post) with achondroplasia, which means he is a little person. His mom is illiterate in Spanish and in English, so she sometimes has difficulty accessing services for him, but he has a team of doctors that keep tabs on him. I have two students with serious asthma and lots more with less-serious asthma. One of the serious asthma cases, Leonardo, also has serious vision issues that went uncorrected until this year because his mom didn't have health insurance and couldn't pay for an opthamologist's exam. Janette has spent much of the year without her glasses, which keep breaking. And Marco just went to get his glasses today, after being referred for them back in October.
For the large number of my students without health insurance, these health problems are that much more complicated and stressful. Whenever people start talking about denying health care services to undocumented immigrants and their children, I can't even bear to listen for very long. Are they honestly saying that they want Leonardo to die of an asthma attack? Or that Celeste shouldn't get epilepsy medication?
Tuesday, May 22, 2007
Day -17: MySpace
I've known this for awhile, but most of my 9- and 10-year old students have MySpace accounts. (And yes, you're not allowed to register unless you say you're 14 or older.)
When I started teaching five years ago, I think one of my 32 students had a computer at home with Internet access. Now I think almost a third of my class does. Most of the rest regularly use the Internet at friends' houses or at the library.
I was eating lunch with five students today, and over turkey sandwiches, we started talking about how much TV they watched. "Sometimes I watch 'Lety La Fea,'" Maria said, referring to a popular telenovela, "but I use the computer and MySpace more."
This prompted a whole discussion about their MySpace profiles, how they can protect themselves from the "people who can rape you" on MySpace (as one girl said), spam, friend requests, and Tom. Maria, the most-frequent MySpace user in the group (and the students whose family was considering moving back to Mexico because they are afraid of deportation), was listing off her MySpace friends, most of whom are students in our class, and added, "And then there's Tom."
"Yeah, everyone's friends with him," another girl added. "He started MySpace."
This cracked me up. For you non-MySpace users, there is this guy named Tom who supposedly did start MySpace and who becomes your "friend" as soon as you set up your account. The idea that my peers who are on MySpace and my students all have this same "friend" named Tom - that they and his 179 million other "friends" have never met - is rather odd. How many conversations has Tom inserted himself into?
I was impressed with my students' Internet savvy, their knowledge of Tom, their knowledge that those banner ads they saw for free iPods when they were setting up their MySpace accounts were not something to fall for. I wonder how the Internet and MySpace and YouTube and instant messaging will shape literacy practices and language learning in the future. I am not the first to wonder this, obviously. But I don't think teachers think about it enough.
***
On a different but communications-related note, AT&T decided that it's really no big deal to disable the phone system for a school of 850 students and 75 staff members for two days. They are supposedly "upgrading fiber optic cables" in our area, the principal says, and this upgrade involves cutting the current cables before the new ones are up and running. We have had no phone or Internet access for two days. What kind of business, especially one with almost 1000 employees on-site, would stand for this?
When I started teaching five years ago, I think one of my 32 students had a computer at home with Internet access. Now I think almost a third of my class does. Most of the rest regularly use the Internet at friends' houses or at the library.
I was eating lunch with five students today, and over turkey sandwiches, we started talking about how much TV they watched. "Sometimes I watch 'Lety La Fea,'" Maria said, referring to a popular telenovela, "but I use the computer and MySpace more."
This prompted a whole discussion about their MySpace profiles, how they can protect themselves from the "people who can rape you" on MySpace (as one girl said), spam, friend requests, and Tom. Maria, the most-frequent MySpace user in the group (and the students whose family was considering moving back to Mexico because they are afraid of deportation), was listing off her MySpace friends, most of whom are students in our class, and added, "And then there's Tom."
"Yeah, everyone's friends with him," another girl added. "He started MySpace."
This cracked me up. For you non-MySpace users, there is this guy named Tom who supposedly did start MySpace and who becomes your "friend" as soon as you set up your account. The idea that my peers who are on MySpace and my students all have this same "friend" named Tom - that they and his 179 million other "friends" have never met - is rather odd. How many conversations has Tom inserted himself into?
I was impressed with my students' Internet savvy, their knowledge of Tom, their knowledge that those banner ads they saw for free iPods when they were setting up their MySpace accounts were not something to fall for. I wonder how the Internet and MySpace and YouTube and instant messaging will shape literacy practices and language learning in the future. I am not the first to wonder this, obviously. But I don't think teachers think about it enough.
***
On a different but communications-related note, AT&T decided that it's really no big deal to disable the phone system for a school of 850 students and 75 staff members for two days. They are supposedly "upgrading fiber optic cables" in our area, the principal says, and this upgrade involves cutting the current cables before the new ones are up and running. We have had no phone or Internet access for two days. What kind of business, especially one with almost 1000 employees on-site, would stand for this?
Monday, May 21, 2007
Day -18: Endings vs. Beginnings
Does it make me a bad teacher that I like the beginning of the school year so much better than the end?
I feel like by the end of the year, I'm supposed to have built one big, happy family. I'm supposed to be able to sit back and bask in the glow of all the learning we've done. But that's not how it is for me.
The beginning is all possibility. In September, I'm meeting this group of 30-odd students, getting to know them and falling in love with their quirks and smiles and questions and aspirations. They've just spent a couple of months sitting around watching too much TV (in some cases, anyway), away from their friends, and they have gotten bored, bored, bored. They are so eager at the beginning of the year, hanging on my every word, so excited to see what the mysterious world of fourth grade will be like, trying so hard to put their best foot forward. When I look at their work in the fall, I see what I need to help them with, and I dream big of all the progress they will make, all the learning we will do together. Kids really do ask me for homework and get sad on Friday because there isn't school the next day.
But now, they're sick of each other, sick of me, sick of our routines, sick of tests. Their hopes that suddenly they would master the multiplication facts they didn't learn in third grade haven't been realized either. It's so easy to focus on the gaps between where I want students to be and where they are now. At the beginning of the year, those gaps weren't my fault; I was just entrusted with closing them. But now I see, in some cases, how big the gaps remain, and it can't help but depress me.
Not that students haven't made progress. Of course they have. Sometimes I look at our whiteboard full of math problems we do each day and marvel at the fact that at the beginning of the year, they didn't know how to do any of those problems - find equivalent fractions, write decimals, calculate area and perimeter, do long division. But other times I focus on the students who still can't do some of those problems. Like Arturo, who still, still does not reliably use capital letters at the beginning of his sentences! He knows, when reminded, what to do. He punctuates sentences appropriately. He just does not start sentences with capital letters. I have handed back countless papers of his, forcing him to add capitals in appropriate places before I would grade his work. To what avail? Almost none. He will dutifully add capitals without any prompting from me about where they needed to go, but will he use capital letters appropriately on his own for his next assignment? Usually no. He is a smart kid. He remembers lots of other, much more obscure things. What's his block about capitals? I wish I knew. I think his fifth grade teacher is going to kill me.
Thankfully, the very-end-of-the-year nostalgia will set in, for both me and my students, pretty soon, and then we will focus on all the good parts of our year together. At the moment, though, I feel disintegration rather than creation.
I feel like by the end of the year, I'm supposed to have built one big, happy family. I'm supposed to be able to sit back and bask in the glow of all the learning we've done. But that's not how it is for me.
The beginning is all possibility. In September, I'm meeting this group of 30-odd students, getting to know them and falling in love with their quirks and smiles and questions and aspirations. They've just spent a couple of months sitting around watching too much TV (in some cases, anyway), away from their friends, and they have gotten bored, bored, bored. They are so eager at the beginning of the year, hanging on my every word, so excited to see what the mysterious world of fourth grade will be like, trying so hard to put their best foot forward. When I look at their work in the fall, I see what I need to help them with, and I dream big of all the progress they will make, all the learning we will do together. Kids really do ask me for homework and get sad on Friday because there isn't school the next day.
But now, they're sick of each other, sick of me, sick of our routines, sick of tests. Their hopes that suddenly they would master the multiplication facts they didn't learn in third grade haven't been realized either. It's so easy to focus on the gaps between where I want students to be and where they are now. At the beginning of the year, those gaps weren't my fault; I was just entrusted with closing them. But now I see, in some cases, how big the gaps remain, and it can't help but depress me.
Not that students haven't made progress. Of course they have. Sometimes I look at our whiteboard full of math problems we do each day and marvel at the fact that at the beginning of the year, they didn't know how to do any of those problems - find equivalent fractions, write decimals, calculate area and perimeter, do long division. But other times I focus on the students who still can't do some of those problems. Like Arturo, who still, still does not reliably use capital letters at the beginning of his sentences! He knows, when reminded, what to do. He punctuates sentences appropriately. He just does not start sentences with capital letters. I have handed back countless papers of his, forcing him to add capitals in appropriate places before I would grade his work. To what avail? Almost none. He will dutifully add capitals without any prompting from me about where they needed to go, but will he use capital letters appropriately on his own for his next assignment? Usually no. He is a smart kid. He remembers lots of other, much more obscure things. What's his block about capitals? I wish I knew. I think his fifth grade teacher is going to kill me.
Thankfully, the very-end-of-the-year nostalgia will set in, for both me and my students, pretty soon, and then we will focus on all the good parts of our year together. At the moment, though, I feel disintegration rather than creation.
Sunday, May 20, 2007
Day -19: Math Whiz
On Friday, I gave my students a little quiz on multiplying by two-digit numbers and long division - the most difficult and important math concepts to master in fourth grade. We studied these concepts earlier in the year and have been doing other things in math lately, like decimals and probability. But since multiplying by two-digit numbers and long division are so important for success in fifth grade math, I want to reteach them to students who still are having trouble, so I wanted to see who needed reteaching.
For the last part of the quiz, I had students write and solve 3 division problems - one they considered easy, one they considered medium, and one they considered hard. (This is a Marilyn Burns assessment idea.)
One of my math whizzes this year is Omar. He is a rail-thin student who came to the U.S. from Mexico when he was in first grade. He is a video game master. He has twin two-year old sisters. Some teenagers pointed guns at him and his family as they were coming home from a Halloween party this year. Writing in English is hard for him, and he gets a little mischievous when he is bored or uninterested in what we're doing in class. But he just loves math and has serious math skills that come from who-knows-where. One time Omar said to me, "How come math is so much funner than everything else?" as if this was a question that really stumped him. Another time back in December when he had a few minutes to kill in class, I came upon him solving a long multiplication problem. "What are you doing?" I asked. "I'm figuring out how many hours there are until Christmas," he answered. And sure enough, that's exactly what he was doing.
For his "hard" division problem on Friday, Omar gave himself the problem 123,456,789 divided by 2. And he got it right! That made my day.
For the last part of the quiz, I had students write and solve 3 division problems - one they considered easy, one they considered medium, and one they considered hard. (This is a Marilyn Burns assessment idea.)
One of my math whizzes this year is Omar. He is a rail-thin student who came to the U.S. from Mexico when he was in first grade. He is a video game master. He has twin two-year old sisters. Some teenagers pointed guns at him and his family as they were coming home from a Halloween party this year. Writing in English is hard for him, and he gets a little mischievous when he is bored or uninterested in what we're doing in class. But he just loves math and has serious math skills that come from who-knows-where. One time Omar said to me, "How come math is so much funner than everything else?" as if this was a question that really stumped him. Another time back in December when he had a few minutes to kill in class, I came upon him solving a long multiplication problem. "What are you doing?" I asked. "I'm figuring out how many hours there are until Christmas," he answered. And sure enough, that's exactly what he was doing.
For his "hard" division problem on Friday, Omar gave himself the problem 123,456,789 divided by 2. And he got it right! That made my day.
Thursday, May 17, 2007
Day -20: Game Over
Today Juan came into my room at lunch, hysterical. "I'm scared, I'm scared," he kept blubbering through tears. "I'm afraid I'm gonna get suspended."
As the story came out, I discovered he had taught some people the Bloody Mary game, which I don't really understand but have some vague recollection of from elementary school. In Juan's version, it basically involves one student closing his eyes while the other touches the first's hands and, through some sort of voodoo power of suggestion, makes the first person feel an alleged spirit touching his hands. This game had spread like wildfire and was freaking out the entire fourth and fifth grade classes. Juan thought that he was going to be called to account by the principal. I'm not sure exactly what he thought the suspend-able infraction in teaching students the Bloody Mary game was, but he was convinced it was seriously wrong. I let him sit in my classroom until he calmed down a little. I promised that after students came back from lunch and English Language Development, we would have a little talk and we could put the game and its spooky powers to rest.
After lunch was over and I went to go pick up my class, Juan was in tears again. In a brief and interrupted exchange, he explained that he was still worried about getting suspended. When I explained that I really didn't think that he should worry about this, he told me that he had already gotten in trouble, that the principal had made him "sit on the bench" for the end of recess (our school's punishment for recess rule-breaking). The rest of my teaching day was such that I never got to fully understand what this meant. My best guess is that Juan probably went up the prinicpal and confessed that he had taught students a game that was freaking everyone out. I bet the principal, trying to dispatch with problems as quickly as possible, simply said, "Mmmm, that was a bad choice. Go sit on the bench for the rest of recess," without even thinking about it. A rule-breaker presents himself and gets punished. Why would the punisher do anything different? I'm really not blaming the principal. I like him, for the most part. I didn't have time to hear Juan out either.
Things calmed down a little, but Juan really wanted to make sure I talked to the class about not playing the game anymore, that it wasn't real, etc. I said this, and in the course of my little lecture said, "The game is over."
"Game over!" Wilfredo, an avid video game player called out.
I took the analogy and tried to run with it. "Yep, game over," I repeated. "You've gotten the high score, you gone to the highest level, and it's just not fun anymore." I tried to make my best video game sound effects, which, not being a video game player, were not very good. "Game ... over," I repeated with attempted sound effects this time.
It did at least get students' attention, if not put the game to rest permanently. And Juan had no more tears for the day.
How do Bloody Mary and Punch-Buggy and not stepping on cracks so as not to break your mother's back spread across generations and geographical areas and socioeconomic classes and ethnic groups? Nintendo and Punch-Buggy. My students have those things in common with all fourth graders in America. One is propagated via marketing, the other through what exactly?
As the story came out, I discovered he had taught some people the Bloody Mary game, which I don't really understand but have some vague recollection of from elementary school. In Juan's version, it basically involves one student closing his eyes while the other touches the first's hands and, through some sort of voodoo power of suggestion, makes the first person feel an alleged spirit touching his hands. This game had spread like wildfire and was freaking out the entire fourth and fifth grade classes. Juan thought that he was going to be called to account by the principal. I'm not sure exactly what he thought the suspend-able infraction in teaching students the Bloody Mary game was, but he was convinced it was seriously wrong. I let him sit in my classroom until he calmed down a little. I promised that after students came back from lunch and English Language Development, we would have a little talk and we could put the game and its spooky powers to rest.
After lunch was over and I went to go pick up my class, Juan was in tears again. In a brief and interrupted exchange, he explained that he was still worried about getting suspended. When I explained that I really didn't think that he should worry about this, he told me that he had already gotten in trouble, that the principal had made him "sit on the bench" for the end of recess (our school's punishment for recess rule-breaking). The rest of my teaching day was such that I never got to fully understand what this meant. My best guess is that Juan probably went up the prinicpal and confessed that he had taught students a game that was freaking everyone out. I bet the principal, trying to dispatch with problems as quickly as possible, simply said, "Mmmm, that was a bad choice. Go sit on the bench for the rest of recess," without even thinking about it. A rule-breaker presents himself and gets punished. Why would the punisher do anything different? I'm really not blaming the principal. I like him, for the most part. I didn't have time to hear Juan out either.
Things calmed down a little, but Juan really wanted to make sure I talked to the class about not playing the game anymore, that it wasn't real, etc. I said this, and in the course of my little lecture said, "The game is over."
"Game over!" Wilfredo, an avid video game player called out.
I took the analogy and tried to run with it. "Yep, game over," I repeated. "You've gotten the high score, you gone to the highest level, and it's just not fun anymore." I tried to make my best video game sound effects, which, not being a video game player, were not very good. "Game ... over," I repeated with attempted sound effects this time.
It did at least get students' attention, if not put the game to rest permanently. And Juan had no more tears for the day.
How do Bloody Mary and Punch-Buggy and not stepping on cracks so as not to break your mother's back spread across generations and geographical areas and socioeconomic classes and ethnic groups? Nintendo and Punch-Buggy. My students have those things in common with all fourth graders in America. One is propagated via marketing, the other through what exactly?
Wednesday, May 16, 2007
Day -21: Grass
Here's another poem by a former student that I discovered in my files.
Grass
The green grass
looks like money
Its dark as
cuauhcamole.
Light as paint.
Moves like
hands waving.
Looks like
spikes.
For the illustration, s/he (I don't remember who wrote it and there's no name!) drew a bunch of blades of grass, except three of the blades in the middle of the field had turned into little hands waving.
We finally finished state standardized testing today. Hooray! And I would wager that most of my students bombed the questions on figurative language. Did you know that fourth graders are supposed to be able to correctly identify similes, metaphors, personification, and hyperbole? Can the average U.S. adult do this? Plus, my students need to know the terms for these literary devices in both English and Spanish. I wish I could submit their poems as evidence that they can use figurative language in interesting ways, but nope, that is not to be. Their poems don't matter; their bubbles do.
***
Teaching high school doesn't usually sound that appealing to me, but this project, sort of related to grass, makes working with high school students seem pretty awesome.
Grass
The green grass
looks like money
Its dark as
cuauhcamole.
Light as paint.
Moves like
hands waving.
Looks like
spikes.
For the illustration, s/he (I don't remember who wrote it and there's no name!) drew a bunch of blades of grass, except three of the blades in the middle of the field had turned into little hands waving.
We finally finished state standardized testing today. Hooray! And I would wager that most of my students bombed the questions on figurative language. Did you know that fourth graders are supposed to be able to correctly identify similes, metaphors, personification, and hyperbole? Can the average U.S. adult do this? Plus, my students need to know the terms for these literary devices in both English and Spanish. I wish I could submit their poems as evidence that they can use figurative language in interesting ways, but nope, that is not to be. Their poems don't matter; their bubbles do.
***
Teaching high school doesn't usually sound that appealing to me, but this project, sort of related to grass, makes working with high school students seem pretty awesome.
Tuesday, May 15, 2007
Day -22: Being Funny
Though Juan is definitely the student in my class this year who demands the most attention, there are lots of other fascinating characters, too.
Take Alex, for example. He is obsessed with drawing SpongeBob and Captain Underpants characters; in December he drew me a whole SpongeBob Christmas scene. He always bids me farewell each day – every Friday, without fail, adding, “Have a great weekend.” In his school picture this year he is wearing a black t-shirt that says in white letters “Sometimes I Amaze Myself,” and he looks really, really amazed at himself in the picture. One day he asked me, apropos of nothing, “Do you know what Armageddon is?” He had been thinking about this and wanted to gauge whether I thought Armageddon was a real possibility in the near future, after ascertaining whether I was familiar with the concept. Another time, in the middle of something completely unrelated, he said, “Do you think we’re alone?” – as in are we alone in the universe or are there other life forms out there. You never know what he’ll say. (He’s also the maker of the harp seal drinking Coke and dreaming of a tropical paradise collage, for those who have been following the story.)
Today, when we came in the classroom, he started talking with another student about which team would win team points this week. Another student thought Team 3 might win, and Alex really disagreed. He offered a few reasons why, and then said forcefully, “I rest my case,” but under his breath added, “whatever that means.”
“I rest my case,” is the kind of idiomatic English that my students rarely use, but Alex just decided to try it out anyway – and nailed its usage on the head without even knowing it. I cracked up so much at this unexpected expression coming out of Alex’s mouth that Alex started cracking up, and soon that whole side of the room was laughing.
My class this year is by far the funniest class I have ever taught. A lot of other teachers complain about this particular group of students and how challenging they are, but sometimes I think it’s just because they’re so funny. There are at least five students who want nothing more than to make everyone laugh.
I was telling the group of students who were eating lunch with me today how funny I thought they were, and I asked if they thought I was funny. They all nodded. I told them that I’m not sure all my classes thought I was funny – but maybe it’s because my other classes weren’t as funny, I added.
***
Juan made up another joke today as we were eating turkey sandwiches for lunch. “Where do turkeys come from?” he asked us.
“Where?” we asked.
“Kenturkey,” he said proudly.
My students all know I grew up in Kentucky, and they are endlessly fascinated by that fact. Kentucky seems like Oz to them - or Pluto or Zanzibar. They have no idea what it’s like, and it has a mesmerizing hold on them.
Take Alex, for example. He is obsessed with drawing SpongeBob and Captain Underpants characters; in December he drew me a whole SpongeBob Christmas scene. He always bids me farewell each day – every Friday, without fail, adding, “Have a great weekend.” In his school picture this year he is wearing a black t-shirt that says in white letters “Sometimes I Amaze Myself,” and he looks really, really amazed at himself in the picture. One day he asked me, apropos of nothing, “Do you know what Armageddon is?” He had been thinking about this and wanted to gauge whether I thought Armageddon was a real possibility in the near future, after ascertaining whether I was familiar with the concept. Another time, in the middle of something completely unrelated, he said, “Do you think we’re alone?” – as in are we alone in the universe or are there other life forms out there. You never know what he’ll say. (He’s also the maker of the harp seal drinking Coke and dreaming of a tropical paradise collage, for those who have been following the story.)
Today, when we came in the classroom, he started talking with another student about which team would win team points this week. Another student thought Team 3 might win, and Alex really disagreed. He offered a few reasons why, and then said forcefully, “I rest my case,” but under his breath added, “whatever that means.”
“I rest my case,” is the kind of idiomatic English that my students rarely use, but Alex just decided to try it out anyway – and nailed its usage on the head without even knowing it. I cracked up so much at this unexpected expression coming out of Alex’s mouth that Alex started cracking up, and soon that whole side of the room was laughing.
My class this year is by far the funniest class I have ever taught. A lot of other teachers complain about this particular group of students and how challenging they are, but sometimes I think it’s just because they’re so funny. There are at least five students who want nothing more than to make everyone laugh.
I was telling the group of students who were eating lunch with me today how funny I thought they were, and I asked if they thought I was funny. They all nodded. I told them that I’m not sure all my classes thought I was funny – but maybe it’s because my other classes weren’t as funny, I added.
***
Juan made up another joke today as we were eating turkey sandwiches for lunch. “Where do turkeys come from?” he asked us.
“Where?” we asked.
“Kenturkey,” he said proudly.
My students all know I grew up in Kentucky, and they are endlessly fascinated by that fact. Kentucky seems like Oz to them - or Pluto or Zanzibar. They have no idea what it’s like, and it has a mesmerizing hold on them.
Monday, May 14, 2007
Day -23: Reality Sinking In
It's strange how knowing that I won't be teaching next year filters into my actions and thoughts.
I realized my second year of teaching - after coming to terms with the fact that I had saved almost nothing from my first year, or at least I hadn't saved it in a way that I could easily use it again - that organization is such a big part of teaching. But now I don't have a next year to organize for. One of my favorite things about teaching is that there's always a next time. This lesson on decimals didn't work out how I envisioned it - well, how can I make it work better next time? It seems so depressing to think that maybe I will never get to teach long division, personal narratives, the Gold Rush, etc. better than I did this year.
Another of my favorite things about teaching is always getting to try new things. Today we tried a reading comprehension strategy called "Hot Seat." It's not that deep, but I'd never really done it with my class before. The idea is that one person takes on the role of the main character of a story the class has read, and they're in the "hot seat." Meanwhile, the rest of the class thinks of questions to ask the character. My students loved this. I had each team of four students come up with a question to ask the main character, and midway through the question-asking, students really started playing up the whole interview dynamic. "Channel 4 here," a student sitting at Team 4 started off. Then students at other teams started miming cameras rolling and holding microphones out, and it just took off. It seems so sad that I won't really get to refine "hot seat" and figure out how to make it work best for my students.
But most of all, what I'm most afraid of not being able to live without, is those moments when all of a sudden, I see a students' eyes go from bored/struggling/disengaged to sparkling, when students get excited about something, when they understand something, when they connect to something we're talking about, when they see possibilities in front of them. I read somewhere recently about a veteran teacher who said that the truly great teachers were the ones who could see the face of God in all the students they taught. And I don't know if I even believe in God. But when I see that sparkle in students' eyes, I feel energy, too - a spiritual communion in a very literal sense. That's such power we have as teachers, to be able to make those moments happen sometimes, and I know I will miss it - the power and the communion.
Does that sound too wacky?
***
On Friday, Juan said to me with that sparkle in his eye, "I don't know when I started to get interested in poems."
"I do," I answered. "After you read Love That Dog."
Juan kind of nodded in agreement and then went back to writing a page-long joke-y love poem on his own time at recess. (I will try to get that poem and reprint it here - though I'm almost sure he will have lost it because he loses everything).
If you don't know Love That Dog, read it. Juan and a small group of other students read it this year with me, and it doesn't always speak to every student, but for some students, it's captivating. Maybe I'm giving it too much credit, but I think that after Juan read that book, he started checking out poetry books from the library, finding some of the poems mentioned in the book, and discovering new poets, too. You never know what will open up new worlds for students.
I know I will miss having Juans in my everyday life next year. And the chance to help open up new worlds for students.
But I am excited about grad school, too, and maybe it's just a pause from teaching ...
I realized my second year of teaching - after coming to terms with the fact that I had saved almost nothing from my first year, or at least I hadn't saved it in a way that I could easily use it again - that organization is such a big part of teaching. But now I don't have a next year to organize for. One of my favorite things about teaching is that there's always a next time. This lesson on decimals didn't work out how I envisioned it - well, how can I make it work better next time? It seems so depressing to think that maybe I will never get to teach long division, personal narratives, the Gold Rush, etc. better than I did this year.
Another of my favorite things about teaching is always getting to try new things. Today we tried a reading comprehension strategy called "Hot Seat." It's not that deep, but I'd never really done it with my class before. The idea is that one person takes on the role of the main character of a story the class has read, and they're in the "hot seat." Meanwhile, the rest of the class thinks of questions to ask the character. My students loved this. I had each team of four students come up with a question to ask the main character, and midway through the question-asking, students really started playing up the whole interview dynamic. "Channel 4 here," a student sitting at Team 4 started off. Then students at other teams started miming cameras rolling and holding microphones out, and it just took off. It seems so sad that I won't really get to refine "hot seat" and figure out how to make it work best for my students.
But most of all, what I'm most afraid of not being able to live without, is those moments when all of a sudden, I see a students' eyes go from bored/struggling/disengaged to sparkling, when students get excited about something, when they understand something, when they connect to something we're talking about, when they see possibilities in front of them. I read somewhere recently about a veteran teacher who said that the truly great teachers were the ones who could see the face of God in all the students they taught. And I don't know if I even believe in God. But when I see that sparkle in students' eyes, I feel energy, too - a spiritual communion in a very literal sense. That's such power we have as teachers, to be able to make those moments happen sometimes, and I know I will miss it - the power and the communion.
Does that sound too wacky?
***
On Friday, Juan said to me with that sparkle in his eye, "I don't know when I started to get interested in poems."
"I do," I answered. "After you read Love That Dog."
Juan kind of nodded in agreement and then went back to writing a page-long joke-y love poem on his own time at recess. (I will try to get that poem and reprint it here - though I'm almost sure he will have lost it because he loses everything).
If you don't know Love That Dog, read it. Juan and a small group of other students read it this year with me, and it doesn't always speak to every student, but for some students, it's captivating. Maybe I'm giving it too much credit, but I think that after Juan read that book, he started checking out poetry books from the library, finding some of the poems mentioned in the book, and discovering new poets, too. You never know what will open up new worlds for students.
I know I will miss having Juans in my everyday life next year. And the chance to help open up new worlds for students.
But I am excited about grad school, too, and maybe it's just a pause from teaching ...
Sunday, May 13, 2007
Day -24: Poems
My students are working on a poetry unit, and I was looking through my files for copies of poems by former students. I forgot how good some of my old students' poems were. Here are two. They probably lose something without the kid handwriting and cute illustrations that accompany them, but you'll get the idea.
Ocean
The ocean
is blue
as a
dolphin.
White as
the clouds
crashes like
cars.
STRABERRY'S
Straberry's mmm, mmm,
mmm they are so so
good. When I eat
them they are
like eating ice
cream. I can't
resist eating
straberry's
they are
so so
good
that
instead
of
selling ice cream
and loli pops
they should sell
straberry's lots
of them
Anti-childhood obesity marketers, take note. If anyone wants to license this poem for use in an ad campaign, the copyright holder is a seventh grader now, and I know where to find her. (She wrote most of it in the shape of a strawberry. I'm not sure how well that will translate to this page.)
Examples like these are priceless for teaching my current students how to write poems. Part of me really wants to just toss all my files out at the end of the school year because it will be so time-consuming to sort through them all and decide what's worth keeping. But on the other hand, I can't imagine teaching again without having files full of students' writing to use.
Ocean
The ocean
is blue
as a
dolphin.
White as
the clouds
crashes like
cars.
STRABERRY'S
Straberry's mmm, mmm,
mmm they are so so
good. When I eat
them they are
like eating ice
cream. I can't
resist eating
straberry's
they are
so so
good
that
instead
of
selling ice cream
and loli pops
they should sell
straberry's lots
of them
Anti-childhood obesity marketers, take note. If anyone wants to license this poem for use in an ad campaign, the copyright holder is a seventh grader now, and I know where to find her. (She wrote most of it in the shape of a strawberry. I'm not sure how well that will translate to this page.)
Examples like these are priceless for teaching my current students how to write poems. Part of me really wants to just toss all my files out at the end of the school year because it will be so time-consuming to sort through them all and decide what's worth keeping. But on the other hand, I can't imagine teaching again without having files full of students' writing to use.
Thursday, May 10, 2007
Day -25: Another Field Trip
Today we took a field trip to one of the missions. The best part, by far, was watching my students play, play, play at the awesome playground near the mission. They swung from super-high rings, sped down poles, jumped in unison off a wooden ship, played some sort of shark tag game they made up, and got really sweaty and glowing from the fun of it all.
Our tour guide at the mission, though, was really not what they needed. He talked to us for an hour-and-a-half about obscure bits of Catholic trivia and equally obscure bits of local nineteenth century gossip. He made no mention of any negative aspects of the missions at all. He spoke as if he were addressing a group of well-educated adults, using words like "fabricated" and "bequest" in every sentence. And instead of letting my students wander around some parts of the mission and the attached museum and cemetery, discovering things for themselves, he wanted us to move all together in lockstep so he could tell us yet another story about yet another saint. But, umm, hello ... nine-year olds like thinking of their own questions and making their own observations and inferring things for themselves, not being lectured to for 90 minutes.
Oh well. At least they got to actually see a mission. That's the important part.
And plus, they got to hear that the history of our state is so tied up with the history of Mexico, where almost all their families are from. One student, after hearing his name mentioned a lot in stories about the mission, turned to me and said, "Teacher, there are a lot of ________(his name, in plural) here. I must be rich."
I wish someone would start a consulting business helping all the museums and historical sites revamp their educational programs to be developmentally appropriate for kids, plus train their docents in how to talk with English Learners. I know docents are volunteers, but I also know that they want their messages to get across to the students with whom they're working, so I bet they would be receptive to at least some high-quality training. (I'm sure someone is probably already doing this ... but I'm still almost always disappointed by the ways docents try to get their messages across to my students.)
I think it might be really fun to be a docent somewhere when I retire.
Our tour guide at the mission, though, was really not what they needed. He talked to us for an hour-and-a-half about obscure bits of Catholic trivia and equally obscure bits of local nineteenth century gossip. He made no mention of any negative aspects of the missions at all. He spoke as if he were addressing a group of well-educated adults, using words like "fabricated" and "bequest" in every sentence. And instead of letting my students wander around some parts of the mission and the attached museum and cemetery, discovering things for themselves, he wanted us to move all together in lockstep so he could tell us yet another story about yet another saint. But, umm, hello ... nine-year olds like thinking of their own questions and making their own observations and inferring things for themselves, not being lectured to for 90 minutes.
Oh well. At least they got to actually see a mission. That's the important part.
And plus, they got to hear that the history of our state is so tied up with the history of Mexico, where almost all their families are from. One student, after hearing his name mentioned a lot in stories about the mission, turned to me and said, "Teacher, there are a lot of ________(his name, in plural) here. I must be rich."
I wish someone would start a consulting business helping all the museums and historical sites revamp their educational programs to be developmentally appropriate for kids, plus train their docents in how to talk with English Learners. I know docents are volunteers, but I also know that they want their messages to get across to the students with whom they're working, so I bet they would be receptive to at least some high-quality training. (I'm sure someone is probably already doing this ... but I'm still almost always disappointed by the ways docents try to get their messages across to my students.)
I think it might be really fun to be a docent somewhere when I retire.
Wednesday, May 9, 2007
Day -26: A Humbling Day of the Teacher
Today was my birthday and also the Day of the Teacher.
Juan greeted me first thing in the morning with a big bouquet of calla lilies from his family's garden. "They're called Alcatraz," he kept repeating, which perhaps is a variety of calla lily. Who knows? Anyway, they were beautiful and all wrapped up fancy with blue ribbon. Our first grade buddies and my class sang me "Happy Birthday," a team of students made me a card with my name written in hieroglyphics (or a kid's book version of hieroglyphics, anyway), a bunch of my former students came back to visit me and give me hugs, and I got another big beautiful bouquet of flowers from a mystery parent when I was out of my classroom. I was happy with my students as they finished another part of standardized testing and made gorgeous Mother's Day cards. Those were the good parts of the day.
Then after school I found out that my friend's student got taken out of school in handcuffs and involuntarily committed to the psych ward of a hospital, at least overnight. He will almost certainly be expelled from our school.
This fourth grader has been extremely challenging almost from the moment he came to our school late in the fall. He deliberately tripped a first grader for absolutely no reason, gave his classmate a black eye, threw a chair in the principal's office, grabbed the vice-principal's arm so hard she had bruises, and lots, lots more. I knew him a little bit because he spent time in my classroom on two occasions - once when his class went on a field trip and he couldn't go and another time when he had a time out from his regular class. He was certainly the most challenging student I ever encountered, but he could be sweet and funny and insightful, too, just like any kid.
I don't really know what precipitated today's incident, but I do know that at lunch the office was locked down, he was in there screaming, there were four police cars outside, and in the end he was taken off to an ambulance in handcuffs.
Here's something I wrote on my train ride home:
I feel sad for the world in which this happened, for the world in which a boy could feel such anger, could be so disconnected from the social norms of behavior, could get so little help - apart from being one of 32 kids in a classroom with one teacher to meet his and the 31 other students' needs. I feel sad for the world in which a father could feel so tangibly the effects of discrimination and racism that he didn't want his son even tested for special ed services because of the stigma and the over-representation of black boys in special ed. I feel sad for the world in which a nine-year old boy could feel so unsupported, so confused within himself that the best thing he could think of do to was to hide his ADHD medication after pretending to take it. I feel sad for the world in which a boy could be laughing about basketball at recess in the morning and then at lunch be in a screaming rage. I feel sad for the world in which a nine-year old boy gets taken out of school in handcuffs. And I feel sad for the world in which this image of a black boy in handcuffs does not seem so strange; it's what his father was trying to avoid without knowing how. I feel sad for the world in which some people's spirits get broken so easily that I have a strange sort of respect for this boy's defiance, for his refusal to back down in the face of teachers, principals, and even the police. Not that he's in the right, of course.
That's what I wrote before my stop came. A few more thoughts: I feel sad for the other students at our school, too, the ones who got hurt by him physically, the ones who he scared, and the ones who were his friends sometimes. I feel sad for what seeing a boy taken away in handcuffs does to them (not that many kids saw this, but some did and many more will hear about it). And I feel sad for my friend, this student's teacher, who cared about him and tried so, so hard to figure out how to have him as part of his class.
And what I started thinking about as I rode my bike the rest of the way home is that on this Day of the Teacher, I guess it's important to remember that we teachers can only do so much. We are part of this crazy, messed up world, and sometimes we are in this web that we can't circumvent, where society plays out in ways we can influence but not separate ourselves from. And sometimes that breaks our hearts. I don't know what this student needs exactly, but I know that he needs more than a teacher and a dad and a vice principal that care about him. He needs a whole world that cares about him and his future. God, I hope he sees good doctors tonight.
Juan greeted me first thing in the morning with a big bouquet of calla lilies from his family's garden. "They're called Alcatraz," he kept repeating, which perhaps is a variety of calla lily. Who knows? Anyway, they were beautiful and all wrapped up fancy with blue ribbon. Our first grade buddies and my class sang me "Happy Birthday," a team of students made me a card with my name written in hieroglyphics (or a kid's book version of hieroglyphics, anyway), a bunch of my former students came back to visit me and give me hugs, and I got another big beautiful bouquet of flowers from a mystery parent when I was out of my classroom. I was happy with my students as they finished another part of standardized testing and made gorgeous Mother's Day cards. Those were the good parts of the day.
Then after school I found out that my friend's student got taken out of school in handcuffs and involuntarily committed to the psych ward of a hospital, at least overnight. He will almost certainly be expelled from our school.
This fourth grader has been extremely challenging almost from the moment he came to our school late in the fall. He deliberately tripped a first grader for absolutely no reason, gave his classmate a black eye, threw a chair in the principal's office, grabbed the vice-principal's arm so hard she had bruises, and lots, lots more. I knew him a little bit because he spent time in my classroom on two occasions - once when his class went on a field trip and he couldn't go and another time when he had a time out from his regular class. He was certainly the most challenging student I ever encountered, but he could be sweet and funny and insightful, too, just like any kid.
I don't really know what precipitated today's incident, but I do know that at lunch the office was locked down, he was in there screaming, there were four police cars outside, and in the end he was taken off to an ambulance in handcuffs.
Here's something I wrote on my train ride home:
I feel sad for the world in which this happened, for the world in which a boy could feel such anger, could be so disconnected from the social norms of behavior, could get so little help - apart from being one of 32 kids in a classroom with one teacher to meet his and the 31 other students' needs. I feel sad for the world in which a father could feel so tangibly the effects of discrimination and racism that he didn't want his son even tested for special ed services because of the stigma and the over-representation of black boys in special ed. I feel sad for the world in which a nine-year old boy could feel so unsupported, so confused within himself that the best thing he could think of do to was to hide his ADHD medication after pretending to take it. I feel sad for the world in which a boy could be laughing about basketball at recess in the morning and then at lunch be in a screaming rage. I feel sad for the world in which a nine-year old boy gets taken out of school in handcuffs. And I feel sad for the world in which this image of a black boy in handcuffs does not seem so strange; it's what his father was trying to avoid without knowing how. I feel sad for the world in which some people's spirits get broken so easily that I have a strange sort of respect for this boy's defiance, for his refusal to back down in the face of teachers, principals, and even the police. Not that he's in the right, of course.
That's what I wrote before my stop came. A few more thoughts: I feel sad for the other students at our school, too, the ones who got hurt by him physically, the ones who he scared, and the ones who were his friends sometimes. I feel sad for what seeing a boy taken away in handcuffs does to them (not that many kids saw this, but some did and many more will hear about it). And I feel sad for my friend, this student's teacher, who cared about him and tried so, so hard to figure out how to have him as part of his class.
And what I started thinking about as I rode my bike the rest of the way home is that on this Day of the Teacher, I guess it's important to remember that we teachers can only do so much. We are part of this crazy, messed up world, and sometimes we are in this web that we can't circumvent, where society plays out in ways we can influence but not separate ourselves from. And sometimes that breaks our hearts. I don't know what this student needs exactly, but I know that he needs more than a teacher and a dad and a vice principal that care about him. He needs a whole world that cares about him and his future. God, I hope he sees good doctors tonight.
Tuesday, May 8, 2007
Day -27: A Joke
This joke is only funny if you know a little Spanish. Plus, it works much, much better orally than on paper. But anyway ... I'll tell it first and then explain after.
It was time for lunch and my students were talking about beans for some reason. "They give you gas!" one boy said.
"Yeah," another boy added, switching to Spanish. "Mi papá dice que los frijoles tienen la vitamina P2."
Explanation:
The boy said, "My dad said beans have vitamin P2."
The letter "p" in Spanish is pronounced like the word "pay" in English.
The number 2 in Spanish is "dos," pronounced with a long-o sound.
The word for farts in Spanish is "pedos" - pronounced "pay-dos."
P2=pedos
I was excited because I hardly ever get jokes in Spanish right away, but I got this one!
Maybe this doesn't make sense online ...
It was time for lunch and my students were talking about beans for some reason. "They give you gas!" one boy said.
"Yeah," another boy added, switching to Spanish. "Mi papá dice que los frijoles tienen la vitamina P2."
Explanation:
The boy said, "My dad said beans have vitamin P2."
The letter "p" in Spanish is pronounced like the word "pay" in English.
The number 2 in Spanish is "dos," pronounced with a long-o sound.
The word for farts in Spanish is "pedos" - pronounced "pay-dos."
P2=pedos
I was excited because I hardly ever get jokes in Spanish right away, but I got this one!
Maybe this doesn't make sense online ...
Monday, May 7, 2007
Day -28: Testing Inequitites
We finished our standardized testing in English. Tomorrow we get to start standardized testing in Spanish. Makes sense, right? Our bilingual program is attempting to enable students to achieve on grade level in both Spanish and English, so of course students should be assessed in both languages.
But it's not all it's cracked up to be. In my five years of being a bilingual teacher, I have administered three different state standardized tests in Spanish - the SABE (for three years), the Aprenda (for one year), and this year the STS - State Standardized Tests in Spanish. So can my students' scores be compared longitudinally? Of course not. Can I become familiar with the format and structure of the test so that I can prepare students well for it? Nope. There are reams and reams of documentation about the state standardized tests in English - released test questions, test blueprints. What is there for the state standardized tests in Spanish? One little pdf that lists how many questions will address each state standard in language arts and math.
Plus, in their infinite wisdom, the state has decided that only students in the US less than 12 months plus English Learners in bilingual programs need to take this test. That means that my students who have developed strong English skills in our bilingual program and have been redesignated as Fluent English Proficient don't get tested in Spanish. That makes sense, doesn't it? As numerous studies show, it is these redesignated students who outperform all other students (including English-only students) in standardized tests and other measures of achievement. So let's take all our highest-achieving students and throw out their scores.
Plus, since my Fluent English Proficient students don't get tested in Spanish, that means that I have to figure out something for them to do during the 8 hours of testing we will have over the next two weeks.
And best of all, we still haven't gotten students' results back for last year's standardized tests in Spanish. Try as I might to use data to inform my instruction, it's a little tough to do when I don't actually have the data.
But my students will valiantly fill in their bubbles tomorrow nonetheless.
But it's not all it's cracked up to be. In my five years of being a bilingual teacher, I have administered three different state standardized tests in Spanish - the SABE (for three years), the Aprenda (for one year), and this year the STS - State Standardized Tests in Spanish. So can my students' scores be compared longitudinally? Of course not. Can I become familiar with the format and structure of the test so that I can prepare students well for it? Nope. There are reams and reams of documentation about the state standardized tests in English - released test questions, test blueprints. What is there for the state standardized tests in Spanish? One little pdf that lists how many questions will address each state standard in language arts and math.
Plus, in their infinite wisdom, the state has decided that only students in the US less than 12 months plus English Learners in bilingual programs need to take this test. That means that my students who have developed strong English skills in our bilingual program and have been redesignated as Fluent English Proficient don't get tested in Spanish. That makes sense, doesn't it? As numerous studies show, it is these redesignated students who outperform all other students (including English-only students) in standardized tests and other measures of achievement. So let's take all our highest-achieving students and throw out their scores.
Plus, since my Fluent English Proficient students don't get tested in Spanish, that means that I have to figure out something for them to do during the 8 hours of testing we will have over the next two weeks.
And best of all, we still haven't gotten students' results back for last year's standardized tests in Spanish. Try as I might to use data to inform my instruction, it's a little tough to do when I don't actually have the data.
But my students will valiantly fill in their bubbles tomorrow nonetheless.
Sunday, May 6, 2007
Day -29: More on Colonization
I got to do another lesson this week about the attempts of Spain to colonize the indigenous peoples in California through the establishment of missions. Our role play last week of sixth graders coming to claim our classroom for their middle school and ordering us to do their homework worked so well, I decided to do another role play this time. Most of the class imagined they were Ohlone people (the first groups to live in the San Francisco Bay Area), while two students played the roles of the Spanish, coming to order the Ohlone to live at the mission. After a brief skit, I had students do a quickwrite, completing the sentence "If I were an Ohlone and the Spanish tried to tell me that I had to live at Mission Dolores, I ..."
Students' responses were fascinating. Two students said they would start a war. "Yo quiero mis derechos," (I want my rights) one of these students wrote.
Seven students said they would try to escape. "Yo me escaparía porque conozco más el bosque," (I would escape because I know the forest better) one escape planner wrote. Below his writing, he drew a picture of a Spanish soldier shooting a gun at him while he fled into the trees.
Five students wrote that they would go to Mission Dolores because they didn't want to get killed by the Spanish. We talked about how the Spanish had guns but the Ohlone only had bows and arrows, and this fact seemed to figure heavily in these students' decisions. "Yo hubiera dicho que si porque ellos tenían armas," (I would have said yes because they had weapons) one mission-goer wrote.
Seven trusting, optimistic students decided that they would go live at the mission because there might be more food there and maybe the Spanish would help them and teach them things. As one student put it, "Así yo tendría una mejor vida para mi y para los otros Ohlones. Ellos me podrían enseñar cosas que podría hacer" (That way I would have a better life for myself and for the other Ohlones. They could teach me things that I could do.)" "Yo les daría una oportunidad y ver como es así y si no me gusta allí, me voy," (I would give them an opportunity and see how it is there, and if I didn't like it there, I'd leave) another wrote.
Janette wrote a nuanced response. (She is often the most thoughtful writer in the class.) "Yo me escaparía," she wrote, "porque yo no hubiera querido separarme de mi familia. Pero si se llevan a mi familia pues con gusto voy" (I would escape because I wouldn't have wanted to be separated from my family. But if they take my family, then I'd go with pleasure."
I think these responses, which were really not guided by me at all, ended up reflecting the real range of choices that the Ohlone made - and that indigenous peoples around the world have made when faced with colonization.
I found my students' responses fascinating from a linguistic perspective, too. Social studies is basically the only thing that I teach entirely in Spanish, and I only get to teach it about 60 minutes a week now. As a non-native Spanish speaker, I had to stop and think about Spanish verb tenses when I posed the hypothetical quickwrite question in the conditional - "what would you do if ...?" These are the exact same verb tenses that even my most fluent English-speaking students cannot accurately produce. But in Spanish they could use tenses that I can't really produce correctly, like Janette's past perfect subjunctive ("yo no hubiera querido separarme de mi familia").
My students need more opportunities to write sophisticated compositions in Spanish and to draw on their knowledge of Spanish as they build their knowledge of English. I definitely can't rely on Houghton-Mifflin and other state-adopted materials for this kind of curriculum, though!
Students' responses were fascinating. Two students said they would start a war. "Yo quiero mis derechos," (I want my rights) one of these students wrote.
Seven students said they would try to escape. "Yo me escaparía porque conozco más el bosque," (I would escape because I know the forest better) one escape planner wrote. Below his writing, he drew a picture of a Spanish soldier shooting a gun at him while he fled into the trees.
Five students wrote that they would go to Mission Dolores because they didn't want to get killed by the Spanish. We talked about how the Spanish had guns but the Ohlone only had bows and arrows, and this fact seemed to figure heavily in these students' decisions. "Yo hubiera dicho que si porque ellos tenían armas," (I would have said yes because they had weapons) one mission-goer wrote.
Seven trusting, optimistic students decided that they would go live at the mission because there might be more food there and maybe the Spanish would help them and teach them things. As one student put it, "Así yo tendría una mejor vida para mi y para los otros Ohlones. Ellos me podrían enseñar cosas que podría hacer" (That way I would have a better life for myself and for the other Ohlones. They could teach me things that I could do.)" "Yo les daría una oportunidad y ver como es así y si no me gusta allí, me voy," (I would give them an opportunity and see how it is there, and if I didn't like it there, I'd leave) another wrote.
Janette wrote a nuanced response. (She is often the most thoughtful writer in the class.) "Yo me escaparía," she wrote, "porque yo no hubiera querido separarme de mi familia. Pero si se llevan a mi familia pues con gusto voy" (I would escape because I wouldn't have wanted to be separated from my family. But if they take my family, then I'd go with pleasure."
I think these responses, which were really not guided by me at all, ended up reflecting the real range of choices that the Ohlone made - and that indigenous peoples around the world have made when faced with colonization.
I found my students' responses fascinating from a linguistic perspective, too. Social studies is basically the only thing that I teach entirely in Spanish, and I only get to teach it about 60 minutes a week now. As a non-native Spanish speaker, I had to stop and think about Spanish verb tenses when I posed the hypothetical quickwrite question in the conditional - "what would you do if ...?" These are the exact same verb tenses that even my most fluent English-speaking students cannot accurately produce. But in Spanish they could use tenses that I can't really produce correctly, like Janette's past perfect subjunctive ("yo no hubiera querido separarme de mi familia").
My students need more opportunities to write sophisticated compositions in Spanish and to draw on their knowledge of Spanish as they build their knowledge of English. I definitely can't rely on Houghton-Mifflin and other state-adopted materials for this kind of curriculum, though!
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