First off, a kid that I have a lot of trouble with. I recently informed him that the Spanish equivalent of his name is “Alejandro.”  He then crossed out his name on his exit ticket and wrote “Alahonderow” and sang Lady Gaga to himself for the remainder of the period. I found this to be slightly endearing/entertaining/wonderful.

Then there’s a pair of kids that I supervise during recess (which was a LOT of fun today, I love recess usually).  As they were heading out, someone goes, “I like your jacket” to my scholarly friend N.  K says “his African American jacket?” I take a look at N to realize he’s wearing a typical letterman’s jacket (in miniature since he’s in first grade).  I still don’t understand that but I thought it was hilarious.

On a more serious note, I finished up another round of vocabulary lessons today and so our exit ticket also counted as their weekly quiz.  I’m grading them tonight.  In one class many finished early and I asked them to write a note to me about whatever they liked (shout out to their gen ed teachers — at the beginning of the year they were complaining that they don’t get to draw pictures, and now they accept the fact that they are writing without complaint).  One student wrote the following letter to me –

Dear Ms. Domine you rock.  I wish you are my teacher for ever.  But I know one day you will have to leave and go to another school.  But when you leave you will allways stay in my heart for ever and ever.  I will always love you!

This child, one of my students, loves me desperately.  And there is no doubt in her mind that I will abandon her.  Consider that for a second.

I know that I complain a lot, and vocally.  I think there are many things lacking in this process that I am going through so that I ultimately will not become the excellent teacher I want to be as quickly as I want to be an excellent teacher.  Content knowledge is not a problem for me and in that way I am glad I can be of service to my kids in a meaningful way.  But I need a reminder like this every once in a while, not from another adult doing this work or supervising me as I do this work, but from a child who has literally no idea of the impact of her words.

My kids have no idea how much I love them, and that truly boggles my mind.  J will never know that this note made me cry.  Another student, Z, is going through a tough time and I think about him often.  He’ll never know that I wish I could just take him home with me, fix everything in the world for him, and make sure he’s got all the tools he needs to succeed that he doesn’t have access to right now.  The only thing I can do is think of him often, make sure he knows I’m seeing him try to be a better student (lots of behavior issues), and be there for him.  Oh, and teach excellent Spanish. We’re working on that.

I cautiously say that I believe my curriculum and instruction to be getting stronger.  I’m finding a swing of things that makes me believe students are learning — better exit ticket results, more and more meaningful participation, etc.  I have a LONG way to go.  But I am optimistic.

So I sign off tonight with a thought or two for my kids.  That my life is nothing compared to the 120 that I am helping to grow.  I hope I get better at it so they can get stronger and wiser in ways I can’t even imagine

–Heike

Luckily, when I feel this way I know who to talk to.  Many of my coworkers are sympathetic and inspiring people and I feel lucky to have them around me.  They know that sometimes this work sucks and often, without meaning to, their dedication to doing it anyway reminds me that I can do it, too.  In fact, I have to do it because my kids are counting on me.

My friends old and new and family are a source of strength when I am unable to pull myself out of the minute details of my life to look at the bigger picture.  I am so often caught in the world of teaching that the reminder that there is a whole world out there (incidentally, a world I want my students to inherit and make better) to enjoy.

The kindness of strangers gives me faith as well, and the people who reached out to me on this site were doing more than they realize.

Ultimately I’m an adult and so I must make the choice to suck it up and shut up.  Dwelling on the bizarreness of educational politics within a school will not help.  I can only hope to do my job, do it well, and not step on the wrong toes long enough to effect real change in the lives of my students.  And so that’s what I will do.

Grades are due tomorrow and I’m currently in a Barnes and Noble (I’ve been here since it opened) organizing my papers because for me it’s not really that I need to grade assessments, it’s that I’ve been experimenting so much in my classroom with exit tickets/anecdotal evidence/weekly assessments that I need to figure out what is the equivalent of what and how much everything counts for.  Needless to say my tracking has been an interesting amalgam of techniques.  I do have data that drives my decisions in the classroom…it’s just not a very pretty package.

Speaking of not pretty packages, there are one (maybe two) sections of my assessment that literally every student bombed.  Looking back (and with some input from my MTLD) I realize that the skills in those sections were 1) Not really aligned with the skills they used to learn the vocabulary I was testing them for in the first place and 2) Developmentally inappropriate tasks.  I’m going to have to retest those sections in different ways in the upcoming week but this realization bothered me in several ways.

First, at myself, I work with these kids 2 hours a day (some much more) four days a week.  How did I not realize I was setting them up to fail?  I need to be better at reflecting on the alignment of my lessons to my assessment.  That’s kid stuff for a teacher.

However, my administrators have had my assessment and my LPs since August.  They looked over my assessment the day before I gave it.  I wish that they cared enough to actually look through it rather than glancing through the pages to check if there are any odd formatting issues.

Overall I feel like with a little more oversight I would blossom professional-development-wise.  I’m really looking for feedback and constantly asking for it.  I feel like I’m teaching in a vacuum and that my kids and I are floundering with no one noticing or caring.  I know that’s dramatic and in reality my kids are actually learning a good amount of Spanish, but I want to be the best teacher I can be for them and I am recognizing I need to close the gap not only for them but also between what I need and what I have professionally with a little more hard work.

With that in mind, I’m re-reading Teach Like A Champion and reading a new book … Teaching With Love and Logic. I’m a little skeptical right now but it’s interesting at least.  I’ll keep you updated.  And recommend some books/online resources/etc. for me to grow my teaching for my 120 exploradores!

Enjoy your Sunday all

–Heike

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My “office” lives behind a temporary wall in the resource room, so I spend an unusual amount of time around my resource room kids.  God, do I love them.

They are in the room for varying behavioral issues, but there is one kid (P) who is pretty severely autistic.  He won’t do a lot of things that the other kids do, and has special dietary considerations, etc.  A lot of my job teaching Spanish to the resource room has been figuring out a way to make him feel comfortable participating.

Those kids love P so damn much.  They love to be the person who gets to sit next to him, they love to help him and encourage him, and they are delighted when he laughs or smiles.  He is very good at math, and they think he’s pretty much the smartest kid ever come math time.

It just warms my heart.  Maybe people don’t understand these kiddos as easily as the kids in other classes, and they may do things sometimes that are hurtful physically and mentally.  But being able to witness every day how unequivocally humongous their hearts are makes me smile.

Hope you are all well.

-Heike

This week was our first week back at the job (we had two weeks off instead of the usual one).  A lot of people were very pleased with this.  I personally found it a bit too long — I hate “getting into the routine” of a break (I did in college too) because it makes it that much harder to get out of.  The two weeks also means that we don’t have a February break.  Regardless, as you may have seen in my previous post, I managed to more or less enjoy my break (dramatic personal life developments aside, alas).  This week has certainly been interesting.  Over break, I developed a nasty cough that hasn’t stopped since.  Even my kids were alarmed by the violence of my coughing.  Other than the cough, I’ve felt perfectly fine though, so I’ve just been trying to hope it goes away.  When that didn’t work, I left work a little early on Thursday to see my doctor.  She gave me an antitussive pill (which doesn’t work) and codeine for at night, which is $60 a bottle and made me so emotional I burst into tears and my evening turned into a therapy session within a half hour of taking it.  Oh well.  Back to hoping.

My lessons went well Monday, Tuesday, and Wednesday.  I taught my lessons ENTIRELY IN SPANISH!  I would say that over the course of the week, I said less than a dozen words of English in any of my classes.  Not only did it feel great to actually get a chance to speak Spanish again, but the kids were DEFINITELY more engaged, the classes were certainly more rigorous, and they didn’t have time (most of the time) to misbehave.

That’s why when Thursday bombed it was even more depressing for me.  It was an evaluation day, one that I desperately needed to take in order to see how their first week of immersion had gone.  The lesson was planned badly, talking in English in order to make sure that everyone got the evaluation instructions sent them back into pre-Spanish behavioral mode, and the assessment was VERY confusing to them (not aligned to the LP … or anything we had ever done before).  Complete.  Failure.  I’ll be grading those tonight, but I have a feeling I know what they’ll look like…Sigh.

Friday was a really productive and positive day overall though, and so I went home in a pretty good mood.  I met with my MTLD about the letter you have already seen and we’ve figured out some strategies to “force” me into better habits — for me, and for my kids.  A lot of the problem that I’m having stems from my feeling that my administrative team cares not at all about my classes.  Perhaps it’s a bit of an inferiority complex.  They check LPs, double check them, watch them implemented, make suggestions to make them better.  But not my LPs.  In fact, there are weeks that I haven’t even sent them in (and then waited until the Sunday before implementation to write them, bad idea), and no one has noticed or cared.  My boss’s first two observations were after deciding to use this framework for “grading” teacher effectiveness based on the amount of nonverbal redirects they do during a class.  I receive no content input and support.

And I’m done whining (about that at least).  Anyway, My MTLD will be looking at my LPs the Wednesday before they are implemented, which then gives me a good amount of time to look over them before that Monday.  We’ve also worked time into my schedule to ensure that I am prepping my materials the week before as well, so I don’t feel rushed during the week and can spend a significant portion of time really considering my curriculum, which what I need to be doing during the day.

I really appreciate my MTLD because she spent her first year being a terrible teacher.  She was at a very well-regarded charter school, and was actually told not to teach for a portion of the year.  She went on to be an excellent teacher. It gives me hope that hard work can get me there, and she’s very insightful about implementable things that can help me get to where I want to go with my teaching.

I’ve heard a lot of complaints about “corps culture” on this website, some of them very harsh.  I would like to put out there that I like the corps culture that Newark Greater Region has, and I feel it’s getting better, not worse.  As a group, the great majority of us are strongly intellectual and passionate people and I feel that we are there for the next two years with a shared vision to be wonderful teachers for our wonderful kids, and support each other in growing as much as possible.  The people in my corps are genuinely nice, and genuinely smart, even if I don’t agree with their manifestations of care sometimes.  I think the staff is in this way supportive as well.  They need some help learning to cope with our increasing size, but I genuinely like and work well with the great majority of staff.  I just wanted to throw some contentment in this winter of our discontent.

Anyway, this weekend is feeling productive and I’m hoping that I continue in this vein in order to get ahead a little.  That’s when my kids will really be able to benefit from the work that I’m doing.  No point in working hard if it’s not helping my 120 favorite people.

I leave you with a most excellent note I found on an assessment:

–Heike

I think my resolution this year is to live intentionally. I want to erase those moments of cool irony from my life–I think it takes a lot of courage to announce your passion for the world, to embrace it and its wonder. It is easier and safer to be cynical and jaded. But if more people lived their lives with joy, and lacked shame for the things that move them, I firmly believe it would be a happier place. I hope you notice a difference in me as I take on 2012 with you.

So that, friends, is my resolution for this year (as seen on Facebook).  I think a mini-resolution is to update this more often, as I think it will help me with my real resolution.  When I spend time on this site, it reminds me to power through the tough things because I’m here for a purpose that I believe passionately about.

I think that’s a pretty uplifting way to start this update, no?  Unfortunately, I don’t know if I’m actually in such a positive place when it comes to thinking about my teaching.  Rather than rehash again (redundant), I think I’ll just copy and paste a letter I sent my MTLD this morning (at 4:45, when I had already been awake for an hour…or two).  Enjoy, and I’ll leave some more words after it.  It’s not my proudest moment, but it’s how I feel:

With [my resultion] in mind, I wanted to fill you in on my break.  My plan this break was, essentially, to read up on everything I could get my hands on to help me come into 2012 with a reset in all my classes–reteach some procedures, including a new one I’ll talk about more in a minute, but especially to redo my curriculum, which I feel desperately needs it.

What I actually did this break was read Kite Runner and clean my house. As I woke up obscenely early this morning to do some last minute things with none of my break goals even attempted, I wondered what went wrong.  The reason I am telling you this is because you have been the single most helpful resource for my teaching that I have been gifted with during this year.  I’m sure you’ve noticed more than one occasion, however, where we seem to agree on a course of action or something that I need to work on, and it simply hasn’t happened.  I’m left wondering about that follow through in the same way that my plans for break have exemplified.

I think that I fear the follow through and lack the courage to take the kinds of risks in the classroom that I need to be an excellent teacher.  I think that kinds of changes that I need to make involve experimenting in a way that leaves me open for failure in a big way.  Though my ego is certainly part of the stake here, more so I fear risking and failing with and in front of my kids.  I don’t know what that will do to the dynamic of the classroom and to their education.

I also fear the parameters that are set up by TFA and [graduate school] and [my place of emplyment] which I KNOW are there to help me and keep me accountable.  I’ve not been very good at data tracking, but I also don’t know what it will look like if all of a sudden I’m taking out large chunks of my curriculum.  The direction I want to go in is like “exit ticket” driven and more final-assessment non-traditionally assessed (I’ve decided this after input from [a person who is helpful] and reading up some on the matter).  But that means that my TFA tracker might look wacky for a while and I DEFINITELY need to talk to [grad school teacher] about my [grad school] trackers because that’s just not going to look right at all.  But I guess my point is this kind of deal is holding me accountable, yes, but in a paralyzing rather than empowering way.  I know this is pretty easy to fix because these negative connotations are not the intent of these tools, but I thought you might want insight into the mindset I’m coming in with.

So, in a way, I think it was good that I “wasted” my break (although I wish I had set aside the TINIEST amount of time for lesson planning).  I went to the doctor for the first time in like 6 years. But I also thought about my kids every single day and I’m recognizing that I don’t want to feel guilt when I picture their faces.  I want to do the overturn that I was planning, but I think I should do it more slowly, with more input from excellent resources like you, like [person who is helpful] (who I actually haven’t been able to get a hold of in some time), and like [grad school teacher] and the [grad school] team–as well as TFANet.  I guess my professional resolution is in fact to use my resources and not be afraid to ask for help.

Sorry this email is pretty much Anna Karenina length.  With all of the above in mind, I’m wondering if you want an hour or so sometime during this week or the next that you would be willing to sit down with me and look at my Unit Plans and pacing, compare them to that of [nearby charter school with decent curriculum] and [person who is helpful], and help me to consider how to modify everything to be a manageable and effective tool of instruction.  Going forward from that, I would love input on my lesson plans as I work to make them more reflective of what I’m actually doing in the classroom.

A big update in my classroom that I’d also like you to be aware of/have your input about is that I’m considering (and this week trying) splitting the class in half and doing two rotations, one with me and one with my TA.  one would be vocab introduction and review and the other would be structure practice.

ANYWAY.  This email has certainly gone on long enough but I feel better letting you know where I am mentally!  Talk to you soon.

All the best,

Heike

I think updates about what I’m actually doing and all of that can wait until next time, because to me it’s important to capture genuine moments like this.  I should have never been allowed to do my own curriculum with no oversight!!  These moments are not particularly flattering to me or to TFA, but I want people to know that even the teachers that TFA finds no fault or issue with, self-doubt, fear, and passion mix in anxiety-inducing ways.

–Heike

In the weeks since I have posted, I have gone through professional development and been at my school for around 4 weeks.  I have been teaching Spanish for two weeks, and content for one week.  I moved closer to my school (during a hurricane, as a matter of fact).  Incidentally, I also help teach literacy in the mornings in second grade and help with Targeted Academic Support in the afternoons.

Most days run about 12 hours (6-6, then grading at home), and administratively, my world is hanging on the edge of chaos at each moment.  We are a few teachers short of a picnic, as some quit in the first week and others are threatening to if their positions are not shifted.  Of course we know that supplies, money, etc., are scarce, but communication is too.  Everyone is polite, but it doesn’t really translate to teamwork.  At least not yet for me.

But the kids.  Oh my gosh, my kids are amazing.  There are trying ones (a decent handful, many with IEPs whose law-mandated needs are not being met), but they are all lovable at the very least, and all smart and capable of learning Spanish.  I’m just finishing up my first week of content.  The difference between the exit tickets on day 1 and day 2 were amazing — like a 30% jump in each class’ average!  I was so happy.  I’m making each student an individual tracker folder with their tracker, their name in their favorite color, and a strip of their own stickers to mark their trackers with.  I hope they are as excited as I am — we did a mini lesson on the trackers but it’s been a while.

Trying to move and teach at the same time was a truly interesting experience.  We didn’t have hot water for almost two weeks, or a stove or dryer.  I looked pretty bad that week!  But the kids don’t notice.  One kid even told me my hair smelled good the other day when I bent down to give him a check.  Bahahaha.

I’ll update more in the future (I’m on lunch, and I’m teaching kindergarten all day today — I know you’re saying wtf), but I just wanted to indicate my essential alive-ness.

I’m in the right place.  I’m doing the right thing.  And I hope it keeps working

–Heike

Three days before classes started at the school that I was teaching at, I was switched from a kindergarten to a bilingual first grade classroom.  It was a lot of work to redo lesson plans, investment plans, charts, etc. etc., but I was so SO SO SO excited about teaching bilingual.  I already knew my escolares were going to be amazing (and they were) and that we would have so much fun and learn so much.

The four weeks seemed to go on forever; at the same time they are a blur.  It wasn’t as hard as people bitched, but it was hard.  I got 5-6 hours of sleep a night, and I can function on that.  My kids made growth; some of it was dramatic.  Some fell through the cracks and remind me that I need to always work harder to get every kid.

I met F., one of the smartest almost-second graders I have ever met, who loved to read, write, and draw and loved his baby brother more than anyone.  F moved up 2 levels in reading, the equivalent of 17% of a year’s worth of reading instruction in 4 weeks.  I met A., to whom I was not shy in expressing my admiration of his handsomeness and intelligence, and J.

J was that kid for me.  He got here from Santo Domingo a few months ago, and spoke probably 4 words of English.  He had a lot of trouble sitting still, (obviously) especially if the class was being conducted in English.  He could write his name (and would do so with gusto, and including his middle initial), and count to 12 in Spanish.  I loved him immediately, with his little smile and when on the second day he came in with a Mohawk, I was delighted.

There’s more to why J was that kid.  After the first day, when I was sitting with my School Mentor Teacher, she expressed a lot of shockingly racist views and it included a lot of strong opinions about “Dominicans” and “Blacks.” She mentioned her opinion that J was unable to learn and that he did not speak English or Spanish, just made “animal noises” (not true, by the way).  That’s when I knew J HAD to learn this summer, if for no other reason than he would be having my SMT as a teacher in the fall and someone needed to show her how smart he was.

With the hard work of my collab, J went up 300% on his reading diagnostic and went from a 13% to a 39% on his math exam.  More importantly, J was no longer afraid to raise his hand.  J loved being with his teachers and the other students.  J lead activities and helped the teachers.  He was still hard to control, but I believe that J is now invested in learning in a way that he wasn’t before, and in a way that the SMT would not have bothered to try to instill.

There was drama some times, and tears other times (or at the same time…), but I did what I could for those children with the resources I was given.  Logistics across the board were a consistent and absolute nightmare, and going into a specialist in the fall I felt particularly unsupported, but I now have a lot of great material to help me transition into the fall.  I can say that, though nervous about it, I am still excited.

I’m also still pissed off.  I had the opportunity to observe one of the monolingual 1^st grade classes and I was so, so upset that their material seemed SO much more advanced than what we were teaching in our room.  I felt like I was witnessing one of the “gaps within the gap” that we talk about in TFA.  I think I would be interested in teaching bilingual in the future, but I’m also pissed about the state of language education in the US and I’m thrilled to do something about it starting very soon!

I’ll probably think of more kids to talk about, and I’m very sad that I can’t post any pictures of them, because they are hands-down the cutest almost-second-graders that ever spoke two languages.  Until then, I’ll be working to get ready for the 100 or so 1^st and 2^nd grade scholars I’ll be welcoming into my clase very shortly!

Long time no see.  I’m not going to write about weeks 2, 3, and 4.  First thing I’m going to do is post a reflection I found on the computer from the first week of Institute.  This is dated as July 1, 2011:

I am currently sitting in a session that is, once again, asking me to reflect.  So, I think that I will do so—albeit perhaps not in the way that the session facilitator intended.

Let’s talk about what’s happened so far this week.  If you look at many of the blogs here from the NYC Institute (and it could be other ones as well, I don’t know), you may notice a general theme.  I don’t really know about last year’s Institute experience, but I would like to talk for a moment about frustration.

First a caveat: This is only the first week.  The things that we are doing are reasonable, the amount of time spent in sessions is reasonable, and the amount of time we are given to complete tasks is (theoretically) reasonable.  If this were all I had to deal with, I would have gotten so much sleep this week.

Instead, the first day (Sunday) we didn’t do anything until late evening.  Then Monday, the same thing.  The programming on these two days was entirely abstract and overarching, about Teaching As Leadership and Vision.  I am all for these lessons, but I think they could have been condensed into a day.  Also, a lot of the information is exactly what was presented in the pre-Institute work, except that the pre-Institute work is not ever, ever mentioned.  It’s like we never even did it.  And then, more or less, the first half of Tuesday was the same.  That’s three half days (comfortably a full day).

The pulse of the CMs was getting restless until we started doing things.  We got Vision Planning Templates, Management Plan Templates, Investment Plan Templates, and (again theoretically) Lesson Plan Templates.  We sat through sessions, trusting the TFA machine to give us information in a session called “Investment Plan” to create ours, which was due the same night.  Turns out, our trust was misplaced.  This is where a large part of the frustration comes in.

Between constant room changes, assignment changes, differentiated sessions (such that any PK-2 teacher teaching literacy has not yet learned how to write a lesson plan!), there is the simple fact that we sit through information for an hour and a half only to come out of the other end with no real help, “exemplars” or support during the writing process.

The CMA sessions have been the most helpful so far, even though a large portion of the sessions are spent addressing miscommunications rather than supporting independent practice and so we “waste” a lot of time on clarification.

The end result is handing in a lot of work that is not good.  Now, I know a lot of us as CMs are grappling with our perfectionism as we create lesson plans, etc.  I want to assure you that this is not what I am talking about.  I am talking about not being transferred the skills necessary to perform the tasks.  Owning that ignorance and attempting to rectify it using the written materials we have access to is very, very time consuming.

Let’s take a look at the positives so far this week.  For the most part the staff, with a few exceptions, are very nice [...]

———-

Ironically, this is where I stopped.