Too Many Cooks

One recent Monday morning I had 4 extra adults in my room.  I was assigned a “summer worker”, a high school student who uses our school as a summer job.  I was assigned an “assistant”, a student of divinity who is interning at the church we are loosely partnered with.  Our SPED teacher was trying to work with a student, pull in.  The school psychologist was trying to observe the same student.  If you add onto that the math specialist and reading specialist who both popped in to pull multiple groups throughout the morning, there were people coming and going like Grand Central.

I felt overwhelmed and overcrowded and I knew what was going on and what everyone’s role is.  The kids went nuts.  They suddenly couldn’t do anything on their own.  They needed help to get the easiest stuff done.  The noise level was off the charts as kids talked to various adults at the same time. By lunch time, I was losing patience and my temper.

I realized I am very alpha when it comes to my classroom.  I want things my way.  And when they aren’t it unsettles me.  And what unsettles me, unsettles everyone.

I started out the session with a plan.  I thought, final session, more independent work and more conferencing.  Back off on pulling groups, focus a little more on math.  It’s clearly not happening.  After a couple days of well intentioned, bored summer workers laying around my room and distracted, argumentative kiddos, I realized we all need to be doing the same thing and we all (grown-ups included) need to be engaged in that thing.  (This is a huge step back for me.  I have carefully nurtured the ability in my kids to have multiple things going simultaneously and engage themselves in whatever their assigned role is.  Unfortunately, I did not do that with my summer workers.)  Otherwise, I was going to spend sixth session listening to a constant whine of “I want to be in your group” and “can I read with…”

On top of all of that, I had to find something for my two non-teacher summer workers to do that felt meaningful to them.  The teenaged worker proved quickly that clerical work was well beyond her ability and the adult worker was promised that she would “work with kids.”  My adult summer worker (a divinity student) is very analytical and well intentioned, but she doesn’t yet have the little kid instincts that allow her to figure out the quick and easy way to do stuff, so she spends a lot of her time engaged in dead ends with kids.

So, I created the mother of all behavior systems.  Each child has a “passport” with behavioral rubrics for each part of the day.  (For example, independent reading says: Read the whole time.  Read in a whisper voice.)  There are 25 pts for the whole day.  Each student gets a sticker for each thing they do successfully.  (They get a prize if they can meet one of two daily goals and I’m doing a Friday lunch with the teacher for the weekly goal.)  I divided the class into three groups.  Each of us is responsible  for one group at a time.  I rotate the groups each independent work session so I touch bases with every group in every subject a couple of times a week.

The summer workers feel empowered and productive.  The kids know which person to try first at any given moment.  (Though my diehard needy kids still sneak over to ask me first.)  With two extra people helping with management it is usually pretty chill in the room…plus my babies do love a good prize driven sticker chart, so they are pretty happy.  I set the goals low enough and give prizes frequently enough that they all feel successful at least once a day.  (Plus they are getting lots of math practice compulsively counting their stickers.)  Names on the board are down to zero and the only office referral we had happened at gym.

It is in so many ways everything I try not to do, don’t really think works in the long run, and thinks sends messages that are not super healthy to kids.  But we have three weeks.  It’s do what you gotta do to get through time.

Final Session

The last session of the year always makes me a little sad. It feels like this is the point where I know what’s what with the kids and now it is time to start preparing them (and me) for the transition to a new teacher.

This week the kids have been having a lot of conflict and have been really hard on each other, in addition to a field trip, a birthday party, and picture day disrupting our schedule. It will probably be like this until the end of the year.

I also have a student who has started SPED services this week (with no less than 3 specialists working with this one child). And I was assigned a parapro and an intern for various parts of the day. There is a lot going on.

Report Cards

We have to be the only public school in the world with five page report cards. 5 pages X 14 kids = 1 very cranky and sleep deprived teacher.  But they are done, printed and ready to be mailed to mom and dad.  

In addition, we have a group presentation for PD today (because PD in Wonderful charter school is a Alice and Wonderland mix of a book club and a grad school class.)  So I was up past midnight trying to get a bunch of powerpoint slides in order.  

But tomorrow is VACATION… so it is all forgiven.  I heart my job.

The Home Stretch

Today was the last day of fifth session.  One more to go before I send these kids on to their next teacher.  This is always a bittersweet time of year.  I want desperately to prepare them for their next big move, but at the same time we are all tired and enthusiasm can be hard to come by.  Knowing I only have six more weeks of shorter days and a significant amount of material to cover is problematic for me.

Every year.  

Today we had a pizza party to mark the end of our reading challenge.  The class read 380 books in 12 weeks as homework.  It was fun.  I ordered $50 worth of pizza and had the rare luxury of saying “Go for it, eat seconds.”  The co-director came up and read them a special story, which made them happy.  (Her daughter is in my class and she sat next to me and glared.  I think she was nervous with her mom in the room.) Then we watched a movie.  It was a relaxing way to end the session and we all felt very mellow for the first time in weeks.

They say it’s your BIRTHDAY!

Today is my birthday and I indulged in a lot of shameless self promotion.  I told everyone under the age of 9.  Several parents mentioned that their kids woke up this morning saying, “It’s my teacher’s birthday!”  We did a countdown all week in the morning message.  

I assigned the following prompt to my students:  What do you think Miss Sara should do on her birthday?  Their answers were very interesting.  Some of my kids had a pretty good idea of what adults might want to do on their birthdays (do their nails, go out to eat, buy new clothes, go on a relaxing vacation at the beach.)  Other students clearly could not separate me from themselves and just recounted our planned party or in one case, suggested a number of exciting activities such as counting all the words on the word wall and having recess.  

The class I taught last year, now in third grade, joined us for our party and brought their own interesting spin on it all with lots of fond memories.  One student said in her card that she knew when she saw me that I was just perfect.  (That one is a keeper.  I remember when she first saw me at new student orientation.  My room was the only one that was fully set up and I led most of the activities that year.  She (and her very hyperactive brother) glommed onto me right away.)  

Now, with a belly full of sushi, I’m ready for the real plan for my birthday…  crashing out on the couch at 9:00 with my sweetie while watching t.v..

MIA

I know I have been missing in action for over a month now. I have still been teaching, learning, thinking, making decisions, adjusting, reevaluating, modifying, starting over, differentiating, assessing, and sometimes referring. This school year has been sort of kicking my butt. I’ve been on the crisis roller coaster for almost 8 years now and I’m ready to get off, so a lot of my thinking at the moment is about how to make school be sane and do what I need to do without having to become someone I don’t like.

Whatever. I’ll try and post more. No promises.

Son

I was walking down the back stairs to drop off my kids in the lobby at the end of the day.  The middle school boys were headed down at the same time and I noticed several stopped by an ex-student of mine, patted him on the head, and said, “Son.”   

The middle school boys teacher followed close behind his class and I took a minute to ask him what was up with the son thing.  (I’ve also noticed that several of my girls have been running up to the middle school boys lately and giving them hugs and that the boys are responding to this with positive, mature, and relatively parental responses.)  He said that it was all about sons and daughters with his class.  The people they felt affection for were their sons and sometimes they even called him “son.”

I have noticed that my kids refer to their friends as family and sometimes say they are cousins.  I am convinced it is a genuinely affectionate response, but it seems a little out of whack.  

Huh?  Any ideas about what it might mean for 12 and 13 year old boys to react this way?

Growing A Tree From A Seed

My brain is hard-wired for randomness more than most people.  I have always been like that.  I make connections easily, but often lose the more direct train of thought that I could use to be productive on a daily basis.  So, when I saw this title on a library book, for some reason I assumed it would be a book about education, not a book about horticulture.  (Which it was btw.)

I’ve been thinking a lot about how long it takes for kids to grow up and how little of a slice of that time I get to have with each child.  In fact, it is sort of like growing a tree from a seed.  It takes years to really see what it will be when it gets tall and strong.  

I was driving in the car today and I realized that I don’t have more than passing memories of my childhood before third grade.  I can remember sensations and occasionally an event or two, but my strongest memories start in third grade, when I was 8.  Yet, I have worked almost all of my professional career with 3-7 year old kids.  Kids who most likely won’t remember much about the specifics of my time with them.

Because I only have them for a year, and sometimes less, I have a tendency to over-value my own contribution to their growth and development.  I worry that they won’t read by the end of first grade or learn to add the big numbers or write on the lines.  Like July of first grade is their last opportunity to learn these things, when in reality it is just my last opportunity to teach them.  Chances are good they will get it sooner or later by themselves or from someone other than me.  

So someone else plants the tree and I hang out for a year with a sprout or a seedling.  Then I hand it over to someone else to transplant in different (richer?) soil.  And every year, we repeat the cycle.

The Free School and Me

This is not the first time I have posted about the Albany Free School on a blog I’ve written.  I am fascinated by the idea of a school free of the trappings of school-ness:  classes, compulsory instruction, being stuck in the same room with a bunch of kids without either of you being able to leave for hours at a time.  As I continue to read about it (Chris Mercogliona’s book Teaching the Restless is on my bookstand as we speak)  I keep having this feeling this when you turn a combination lock that final time and everything clicks into place and the lock opens suddenly.  (I had bad combination lock experiences in middle school. Apparently my trauma has leaked into my metaphors.)

I was having tea with a friend the other day and I said, “I’m going through another one of those phases where I don’t think I believe in school.”  It’s true that I tend to get bit by this bug every couple of years, often around this time, when the shine is wearing off the new class and the obvious things have been tried and rejected in making things work well in my room.  There are some basic things about school that are not very kid friendly and in the context of my classroom, it is hard to resolve them in a reasonable way.

I’m still struggling with it.

Election News First Grade-Style

I asked my kids to accompany thier parents to the voting booth and then write about it.  Here are some of the results: