I took that as a sign to keep my whining to myself because, of course, no actually wants to read about someone else’s tragedy. (If you do, may I recommend a counselor or some wine?) Soooo, I will instead remind myself of why I continue to get up at 6:18 each morning and work till well after a sane person would stab themselves with a rusty spoon, just to earn a sick day.

One of the coolest things about me being a teacher for my friends is that they get to peripherally and with absolutely no effort relive all the best parts of their elementary school experience. If I had a fish for every time some 20-something tells me “you should… in your classroom”, I would single-handedly  relieve the globe of our nasty overfishing problem. For example, my future roommate is enthused about the last 26-days of school countdown which will provide a daily theme in our last month of school. I’m interested in it but am not entirely enthused about the particular list I found. As per teacher practice, I’ll jack half of this and supplement the other half. My goal is to not spend any money and to have days that improve the classroom so I have less cleaning to do on June 22

A Art day—create a special art project in class

B Buddy reading—bring a book to read with a friend

C Career day—dress or bring props to show a job you may enjoy

D Donut day—we will enjoy donuts

E Experiment day—experiment with science

F Favorite book day—bring a favorite book

G Game day—your teacher will teach a new math game

H Hat day—wear a hat today

I Impromptu speech day—perform speeches in class

J Joke day—bring an appropriate joke to share at school

K Kindness day—share some extra kindness today

L Lollipop Day—Enjoy lollipops in class

M Memorial Day—No School

N No homework—no homework tonight

O Obstacle course—compete in obstacle courses

P Picnic lunch day—bring a sack lunch

Q Quiet Day—who is the quietest student in our class?

R Read a poem day—bring a favorite poem to share with the class

S Summer birthdays and sing a song—you can share b-day treats

T Twin day—dress like a friend

U Uplift someone day–give compliments to each other

V Video day—we’ll watch an educational movie today

W Water balloon toss day—compete and try to not get wet

X X-change autographs day—we’ll trade notes and letters to each other

Y Year end clearance day—clean up desks and the room

Z Zip up your bag and go home day—last day of school!

Looking at the calendar, I need to start this shindig on May 15. I’m going to need to come up with alternatives for the italicized days by then!

Hoo-boy. Where did this school year go?

I think I’m in such great spirits since I just came back from a run. Let me make it very clear: there is a time and place for running, and that is when you are being chased by a psycho with a knife. However, societal pressure being what it is, and the fact that my entire school team is crazy fit… I’m bowing to peer pressure! I will also be a Girls on the Run buddy come June at Soldier Field. Plus, I got compliments from a bike rider in the vein of “Mmm, yeah girl, work it” and a wink from another guy walking with another girl. Clearly, I’m sexier when sweating.

So what has it been like since November, you ask? Well… that’s like asking someone who lived abroad to tell you about traveling Europe. I haven’t done it yet, but I hope I adopt a superior air once I do. The daily trials and tribulations are exhausting, the rewards are incredibly astounding, and I’ve recently gotten into the habit of pausing at a random point in my day and thinking, “Oh God, what am I doing? How did I become responsible for 31 lives? I can’t even keep a cactus alive!”

- True story; very traumatic. I also killed a bamboo. And a palm tree. I’ve got skillz. –

I’ve recently realized that either (a) I’m hitting my stride! I’m a better teacher now! (b) I really suck and just subconsciously can’t work up the effort to care (c) I’ve gotten way better at faking it and stealing stuff! (d) a and c. I think I’ll use my test taking strategies and select d. I’m just getting more relaxed. I’m not pressuring myself to work all the time and micromanage every minute of my classroom time.

I’ve come to a realization that I’m sure my MTLD would not be a fan of. Sometimes, I let my kids read independently for almost a whole half an hour of the day. And that’s okay. Sometimes, I don’t redirect in the ten seconds when a scholar talks to their neighbor. I’m absolutely pulling my support from my middle school theory class – my kiddies are ten. Honestly, I need to let them talk. I absolutely am in control. For example, I caught a note in midair as it was flying across the room today – it was fairly epic. But they need to socialize. I do not want to turn them into the automatons that our school culture, with its emphasis on obedience and conformity, sometimes produces. I want creativity. I want debates. I want scholars who ask questions and find their own answers. If I need to justify my work as transformational change – there it is right there. I’m schooling thinkers and researchers… I hope.

Not every day is great. I came home recently head dragging because there are two children I can’t seem to reach. Earlier in the year, their behavior had not been problematic. Now, they are constantly the central figures in my story. I’m scared to death that they will harm themselves as they scramble down the stairs or slide across the classroom floor. At times, I want to seriously consider Velcro connecting pants and seat bottoms. And I hope that I can find a topic to help them silently protest – mainly so I can enjoy the silence.

There are a lot of students I’m helping – both within my classroom and in other grades. Through coaching the boys and girls basketball team I have worked with several seventh and eighth graders who need a teacher who isn’t automatically against them. Unfortunately, some of them feel in opposition to their classroom teacher on a daily basis. My favorite part of a day is when I get an in-school suspension student and can reason through their choices with them and help them identify and problem solve negative behaviors. Sometimes, I’m really teacher-y ; sometimes, I keep it real. I’m more fun when I keep it real.

So while my life hasn’t slowed down, I have. I still tutor Mondays and Wednesdays after school. I still have faculty meetings on Tuesdays and Thursdays. I still have professional development, class, homework, and prep work to do. But I’m making a commitment to carry less home – literally and metaphorically. I’d rather leave it all here. This is my recommitment to myself to reflect on my teaching and work every day to find the joy. So, till tomorrow, good night and good luck.

Click to see the slides

Nine weeks have flown by before I even blinked. Thursday and Friday was a whirl of submitting my grades and getting ready for Parent Teacher Strategy meeting scheduling and reflecting on the fact that I created a plan for nine weeks worth of instruction. Somewhere around week 2, that went out the window.

So let me go over a few things,

1. Bwahahahahahahahahaha. I need to take a minute and laugh at myself. I just read a post about how the first nine weeks are going to be all about freedom fighters and that I’m going to teach the amendments. So far, I’ve taught polygons, summarizing, vertebrates, and explorers. We’ve written personal narratives, grown yeast, and read the first third of Where the Red Fern Grows. Yeah, right. I have taught so little of what I’ve wanted to. On Veteran’s Day, I realized that many of my students had never heard of the Revolutionary War or the Civil War. This follows the geography quiz where kids didn’t know Lake Michigan is next to Chicago. I remediate knowledge gaps daily.

2. Most days, I love my job…but I have the unique experience of having a crazy child in my classroom. My TFA MTLD, my coworkers, my administration all agree they have never seen a child so challenging or insane. I could make this blog one hundred percent about how bizarre and troubled this particular student is. For background, she has received more detentions than any student in the school, I met with her mother in the first week to try and establish a positive relationship (fail), her mother’s boyfriend left me a voicemail cursing me out and accusing me of child abuse, and she has lost the privilege of participating in class at all, or even having a desk. Here’s a sample of what interacting with her looks like on a regular basis:

Wednesday – November 9, 2011 – PN monitoring

P requested sitting on the carpet immediately when she came into school. During morning journal and literacy she was uninterested and only completed half of her literacy quiz. When I asked if she wanted to check her work, she said no and threw it at me. I positively praised her for completing the work she did, staying on task, and rewarded her with playing with clay in the five minutes before PE.

When we came back from PE she slapped her belt on the desk and announced “Introducing P——- N——, the psychopath”. I asked her if she knew what that meant and she said no. I had her look it up and determine if it was a positive or negative word. She decided it was negative.  I asked her to pick three words to describe herself and the first thing she picked was lazy. She then erased it because it was a negative word and I praised her for finding positive words instead. She chose special, helpful and nice. When she couldn’t find helpful in the thesaurus she switched to healthy and got frustrated. She said that her mom says she is special, is very creative and artistic like her sister. P told me her sister is in college and wants to be an artist but is studying to be an embalmer. I asked P what she wants to be and she said a veterinarian or artist. I asked her to pick what she needed to learn this year to go to college and do that. She picked multiplication, division, and fractions. I asked if she wanted to practice those and said no, it was too hard. She started getting attitudinal so I left her alone.

In the afternoon, she worked at her desk on math. She refused to work on division with the rest of the class so I gave her a subtraction worksheet so she could feel accomplished. She got frustrated during taking notes and banged her desk around the floor. I redirected her to open her book, take a look at the notes on the board and presented different options on how to complete the work (copying from the book, copying from the board, drawing different shapes and identifying them using the chart). She refused and began cutting up her manipulatives and destroying things at her desk. This was all accompanied by loud banging and animal noises.  I kept my door shut to prevent the noise level from disturbing other classes. When it looked like she was going to cut her hands, I took the scissors away. She had a meltdown, including screaming, cutting me, and clawing her face  I became seriously concerned for her safety and called my master  teacher (no answer), SPED teacher (no answer), and Academic Interventionist. Ms. W and Ms. Y arrived within a minute and attempted to calm down both P and the rest of the class.

I have write ups like these for every day of the school year.

3. My class and I get very frustrated with this child. While that morning was productive, it was at the expense of a guided reading group. I felt like once I had her talking, in the interest of long term engagement and relationship building I did not want to shut that connection down. My students complain of headaches and stomachaches regularly and admit it is because of the noise level. I recognize the chain reaction of management issues when on student is out of control the two or three others on the edge who take their opportunity. Without her in the classroom, I have limited to no management issues.

4. I have 24 boys in my class. I have a full class of boys, plus 5 girls. It is so much fun to watch them understand new concepts. On the weeks that I have planned in advance, I find that my students are mostly engaged and interacting in my lessons.

5. I rarely sleep or see my friends. My eating habits now include school lunch and that’s it. I haven’t seen the news in weeks, and the only way I know what is going on is through my smart phone’s news apps, if at all. I have a very dear friend who now begins our phone conversations with filling me in on important world events and the economic situation.

6. Now is not the best time to ask me about my life or my job. We’ve gone straight down the path to “my life sucks” part of the school year. You can see it on this chart.

Created by a TFA 2nd year

7. I’m really trying to stay positive and I think I’m doing alright so far. I keep my complaining to a minimum and focus on making my daily trials amusing at least so people will enjoy my anecdotes. The problem is I feel like quitting on a daily basis. I could rant and rave endlessly about unfair my job is. My pay is not enough, the demands are too high, and I’m more ineffective than I want to be.

It’s hard. But it’s important. And I’m going to keep doing this.

(And maybe someday I’ll get to update my blog too)

This “summer institute” has introduced me to my colleagues – an eclectic bunch to be sure. I am very much the youngest, least experienced member of the faculty and that has led to quite a bit of self-doubt. All my colleagues are super cool in that they have all offered to advise, work with, check over, help discipline or rescue me should the need arise. While I cross my fingers and hold on to hope that I can handle it, I sincerely appreciate the genuine teamwork. My supervisors and team leadership have all been fantastically patient with me so far as I ask more questions than they have even thought of. I feel like etiquette suggests I should apologize, but I have never wanted to apologize for trying to acquire for knowledge (this is what also makes it miserable to go to a museum with me… I have a compulsion to read every sign and plaque). I feel like so much is apparent to my co-teachers through experience that I simply cannot recognize yet. I keep on swimming though. And going to bed at 10 o’clock. Hopefully that will help.

I cut out all my reading objectives from the master map and played tetris with them as I tried to solve which logically went together in cycles to teach in chunks for the length of the quarter. I felt so much relief when I laid out my plan to my master teacher and she commended my supporting explanation but also provided feedback on how to make it even tighter. I think I’m in a good spot heading into the weekend.

Enjoy the sunshine, I’ll be relaxing with some old good friends, and it’s back to the chalkboard on Monday!

I was really much more nervous about my first day when I allowed myself to hype myself up about it.  I thought about how I should bring cookies to bribe my co-workers into liking me (what? it worked in first grade) or make sure I spent extra time on my hair and makeup so I could look my best. I carefully considered how early to arrive. Arriving too soon and being the only one there is lame but on the other hand, to be on time is to be late and I did not want to be late on my first day! I hemmed and hawed and worried and put off worrying by helping my friends move into their new apartment. As I did, I realized that I was at a drastically different place in my life than they were despite the age difference of only two years. You see, they are preparing for their junior year of college. They were reveling in the experience of an apartment with not one, not two, but three locks (and an alarm system ooh!) and picking out shower curtains to match the colored floor tile. They were unpacking crates of books and packages from amazon in preparation for their advanced seminars which begin next week. I was excited to offer my guidance on if they really needed an extra paper towel holder and the merits of a real couch or second futon. I’m only two years older – barely one year older chronologically – and yet in such a different place.

So after exulting in being the voice of the all-prepared all-knowing big sister, I was pretty keyed up to come home to my own condo and realize that New Teacher Orientation was going to be drastically different. I would have no answers, just questions. I would need people giving me advice I didn’t even know I needed. A 5 mile, two hour walk, helped to calm me down quite a bit. In fact, it calmed me down almost too much. I walked into today with absolutely no expectation or even excitement. I woke up on time and rolled out about fifteen minutes late. I found a parking spot and walked up to the school, catching my school team outside and introducing myself while in the same breath asking if we finally had a schedule; this was to be my refrain throughout the day.  I grabbed an orange juice and a flour-y blueish berry scone and found a seat. Then my innate shyness kicked in.

I know some people would have no idea that I am incredibly shy. Mostly because it only surfaces in situations in which I do not feel in control. I engineer my life so that I am always in control. But as a result, in this instance, I was much too afraid to say a word. Thank goodness the person next to me introduced herself so we were able to maintain a conversation until the session actually began. She later switched seats; I hope it was not because I was boring. So people talked at us for seven hours. We had a few breaks to chat with others and “process the wealth of information” but it was overwhelming to some extent. Some information had already been covered, some was genuinely useful, but most just reminded me how much I don’t know and have not learned. As I explained to a colleague, I’m on a steep learning curve and just moving as fast as I can but I don’t have all the information yet to actually plan my classroom. I’m comforted by the fact that we have been assured and reassured that we will cover the crucial information again next week in our school team. At three o’clock they were still talking so we left when they were done.

And that was it. My first day on the job. My first day as a “real person”. Hardly exciting.
just… kinda…
there

“Real Life” isn’t really that exciting after all. Boy, Hollywood fooled me good.

I have nightmares of drowning in millions of
management plans and
investment speeches and
methods to signal transitions and
consequence charts and
classroom posters…
…
…

On my last day of Institute I cleaned the classroom and I found two books under the windowsill. Books without a home, without a reader to open the pages and be filled with inspiration and journey to a different world and perspective. Not one to leave a book homeless I took them; two copies of the same book.
Beautiful Hard Cover
THE DREAMER was labeled across the top
No synopsis on the back – only a question
~
In the largest of worlds, what adventures await the smallest of ships?
~
The book was thick and I wondered “would it be right for my 5th graders?” “was it any good at all?”

I figured if nothing else it would anchor my bookshelf
and provide ballast for the sea of knowledge therein

Tonight with no motivation to work – too intimidated to wade through the mess of ideas and plans and charts and posters
Too scared to begin the work of organizing for a classroom and students I know nothing about, I began to read

350 pages flew by as I read hour after hour entranced by a book that was biography, poetry, artistry and illustration
The story was the life of Neftali Reyes; his harsh father worked for the train company and his stepmother loved and shielded him as best she could. His older brother was broken by his father; his younger sister was his companion. His uncle was his inspiration to write…
At the age of 14 he published poetry in the Universidad newspaper but his father’s punishment led to an act of self preservation:

The discovery of
a nom de plume
or
more accurately
a nom de guerre

And now I am inspired but even more overwhelmed – How do I integrate yet one more design into my ever expanding reservoir of classroom idea? How can I inspire my scholars  be poets? How do I tie in a Nobel Laureate to inspire my students? I have too many
BIG IDEAS
my vision for my students is global and generational
How in the world do I boil it down?

“But you seem so smart,” she said, “why would you pick teaching when you can do something worthwhile?”

I literally stared at her open-mouthed; my grandmother would have told me I looked like a cod fish. After a second of reminding myself that every moment is a teaching moment – yes, even this one – I marshaled a reply I hoped would convey the strong objections I had to her comment in a totally constructive way.

“What could be MORE worthwhile than teaching?” was my response. “Take a moment and think about everything you have ever learned. Who was our first president?  How do you mix primary colors to create the rainbow? How to punctuate a sentence, how to construct well written paragraphs, where countries are in the world… I guarantee that everything you know, you learned from a teacher and it was probably in school.” She fired back with the oft-repeated phrase that students tend to rely on – but when will we ever need to know this in real life?

Every skill that we have is a learned behavior. Can you count money? That’s a second grade skill. Can you figure out how much soil to buy for your garden? That’s a sixth grade skill. Can you drive and follow traffic signals and regulations? That’s a high school skill.  It’s regrettably true that some teachers don’t obviously make the connection of the everyday value of the knowledge they teach but the reality is that every person in every job is using something they’ve been taught in order to be successful.

I earned quite a bit of criticism with my decision to teach post-college rather than pursue a doctorate or move into the corporate world. Folks kept telling me, just like that lady on the train, to do something important. I argue that preparing our next generation is THE highest calling. The students in my classroom come from homes less privileged than the suburb I was fortunate enough to be raised in – they can’t count on dinner every night or two parents checking on their homework, however, they deserve an excellent education. They deserve the open doors that education will offer them. They deserve the opportunity to present a resume with pride somewhere down the line in which the name of their college or university commands instant respect from the recipient. We nationally value higher education, therefore, we must allow our students access to a superb foundational education so they are prepared for that higher institution. Teaching is going to be the most challenging, draining, demanding work I have ever done – I can’t wait.

Our children are our future. We are going to be depending on them to create medications, grow sustainable food, and administer the global economy – why wouldn’t we give them our very best?

2. Don’t stay up perfecting a lesson plan until you triple check that it is the lesson plan for tomorrow and not the lesson plan from yesterday.

3. Try not to drink on Tuesday nights. Even with the $3 special, you will spend much more money than you wanted to or thought you would.
* Positive Corollary – You will have the best night’s sleep of the week if you drink on Tuesday nights.

4. Ensure all the library books checked out in your name are in your possession. Leaving them at school or in a collab member’s hands will rack up fees quickly.

5. Don’t fall into the trap of thinking that the food is free. It’s included. We work 18 hours a day for it.

6. Keep your cell phone on you in school – but not in your bra. Children will touch your chest when it lights up. Also avoid putting it in the pocket of the shorts you wear under your skirt. Just as awkward to pull out and hand a child when they need to phone home about poor behavior.

7. When you do switch classrooms, take your behavior consequence chart with you. Much easier to discipline when they still have to physically move their own clip.

8. Giving a student a diagnostic is only effective if it was done right the first time. Take your time on the front end or you will screw it up royally when you try to do it later. I can guarantee none of my students lost 7 points. Pretty sure they didn’t gain 19 points either. I’m happy with just moving six points up.

9. Print a fifteen page packet of review.Perfectly scaffold those questions that are engaging for your students. Include your students name in every word problem. Remember to bring those review packets to school.

10. Laugh twice as loud, twice as hard, and three times as much as you cry. Yes, this is stressful. Yes, we have no manager of teacher leadership and development, we have no grad school information, we might not even have a calendar for next week’s required events. What we do have are Toshiba tables in the lounge, collab members cracking dirty jokes on the bus, and kids who say the darndest things. So smile and release the tension. You’ll fall asleep that much sooner and you won’t make the mistakes that overtired teachers make. Don’t give up.

I am going to do this for two years (at least). They aren’t even prepared to handle me.