So today we had this full faculty meeting at Edison. And I was up at 4:30 am to take Rebecca to the airport. And I'm exhausted. A few things worth jotting down at the end of this long, long day.
I am continually amazed the by sheer quantity of logistics. Many of the agenda items at the meeting had to do with the flow of information about things like who handed in money for field trips, budgets, and schedules, who is showing up and who is should and shouldn't be in class, substitution folders and when subs might or might not need computers.
Stuart talked about the possible shifts in the master schedule, which Alice, the vice principal, had been working dutifully on for most of the summer. Part of the problem was that we still didn't have all of the staff required for the classes they were planning to teach. Four teachers were still outstanding, waiting to be hired, and that meant that the final class schedule couldn't be finalized. One of the teacher's they were waiting for was the drug and alcohol teacher, whose job was to coordinate the substance abuse curriculum which was going to be implemented by, among other people, me and Laura. Jennifer, a science teacher, commented that she didn't feel she needed any more training, and then the guidance counselor said, and I quote: "You shouldn't have to do anything at all with that." Meaning: you will be implementing the curriculum, but you shouldn't have to do any planning or thinking about the curriculum. That it was the drug and alcohol teacher's responsibility to do all the planning and copying etc. Which means that the underlying assumption is that the teacher is a kind of thoughtless implementer of something given by an outsider. A non-thinker.
Phew. That was disturbing.
Then we shifted to the bulk of the meeting, which was about bullying and harassment. We did this exercise where we wrote down all the possible behaviors we could think of re: bullying and harrassment, and then categorized them according to things we would ignore (not much), things we would politely interrupt, and things we would refer to the principal or guidance counselor. There is apparently an epidemic, district wide re: the whole "that's so gay" thing. Anyway, there was a long discussion about it.
Afterwards I asked the GC if Edison had a GSA, and she said no: "Wanna start one?" I said I'd be more than willing to help, but that I was a student teacher and wasn't sure what role it was responsible for me to play.
Then I read some student work, sat in on a few minutes of technology committee meeting.
Oh, and I spent much of the afternoon breaking both of the photocopiers at the school.
Enough. I'm done for today.
Wednesday, August 31, 2011
Tuesday, August 30, 2011
A Staff Meeting, Recycling
I mentioned yesterday that I was going to write a little bit about this teacher-proof curriculum I've been reading, but I don't have the heart for it today, and besides, I left the binder on my desk--I have my own desk!--at Edison. So instead I'll write about this staff meeting I attended this morning (my first public school staff meeting!) and then about a little recycling project Laura and I undertook.
The subject of the staff meeting was the bell schedule. Now the little school I taught at in DC didn't use bells, so the notion of a bells schedule was new to me. Except that what we were really talking about was the amount of time students would be spending in each class and when lunch would happen. Edison does this thing called sustained silent reading (or SSR, since everything, sooner or later, gets turned into an acronym by public educators); this is, in my opinion, a pretty brilliant idea: 15 minutes of silent, electronics free reading time, which everyone in the school does at the same time every day. Because of budget cuts, the school was shifting from a five period day to a six period day, and so Stuart, the school's new, very energetic (and barefoot!) principal held a staff meeting to get input about when the SSR should take place and how the schedule shift might effect things like when students would eat lunch.
It seemed like the majority of the faculty was pro-SSR; one teacher spoke fairly elegantly about how the purpose of SSR was to change the culture of the school, to promote a pro-reading environment. A few teachers grumbled about SSR never-being "useful" time; others complained about not being able to "make it work." But it seemed like all the good energy in the room was in favor of maintaining SSR; one teacher even pointed out that since they had implemented SSR, student's reading test scores had improved dramatically. Last year Edison was one of three schools (out of eight) district wide to meet the AYP (annual yearly progress goals, for you uninitiated).
A few things struck me about the meeting. First: it seemed like any old meeting in any old school about a seemingly important (but ultimately...not that important) matter of logistics. As Nellie, a 7th grade science teacher pointed out: "They decide when it'll go down, and I'll be there to make it work." Amen, sister. But tensions were high and the conversation was fairly heated. Secondly: the meeting was like any old meeting in any old school without a clear protocol. Side conversations were pretty rampant, and Stuart was actually called away from the meeting over the intercom for a meeting he had that he had forgotten about, so at the most heated point in the conversation the conversations leader left the room. Laura filled the void, and ultimately a sort of consensus was established, and we all placed our little red voting dots on the appropriate schedule. One other thing of note. I was struck by the depth of a few teachers quibbling about one of the options, which would (because of some bizarre eccentricity in the union-negotiated contract) require them to make up 15 minutes of "duty-time" before or after school. What was frustrating for me was that what was clearly the best option for the kids (maintaining the SSR and ensuring that all kids got to eat their lunch before one o'clock!) was being held up because two teachers weren't willing to do 15 minutes of "duty" at some other time of the day.
The meeting scattered. We'll find out what decisions were made about the bell schedule tomorrow.
Laura and I spent most of the afternoon going through her four resource closets. (Side note: during the staff meeting I met most of the other teachers at the school; at one point, Laura introduced me to an art teacher. The art teacher said: "Oh, you have a student teacher. Could I borrow him for a few hours this afternoon? I have a lot of stuff to move around in my classroom." I was struck by her asking Laura this while I was sitting not four feet away from her and that she viewed student teachers in general as a source of exploitable labor. My esteem for Laura, which was already pretty much through the roof, was further raised when she sort of scrunched up her eyes and said, without any equivocation: "No. We have lots of our own work to do.")
We organized and recycled a truly massive collection of paper. My role was pretty clear: separate paper clips for reuse from materials to be recycled and approach the stacks with a totally dispassionate eye. Laura has a pack rat tendency (as do I, with my own stuff) and I found myself playfully asking her if she wanted to keep things like budgetary request forms from 2007 or the newsprint version of the 2006 Oregon State Standards.
Now this might all seem like menial, busy work, and of course looked at one way it was, but there was something pleasant and rewarding about the whole thing. Laura has opened the door of her classroom to me--and the closets and the file cabinets--and has already allowed me to root about and organized and file stuff. That kind of openness is the sort of thing I cherish in a collaborating teacher, and is a sign of, I suspect, good things to come.
At the end of our four hour organization session, she sort of asked: "So, do you feel like we need to talk about what we're going to teach?"
After all, a week is an eternity, and we still have more paper to sort through.
One last thought: Laura logged checked the rosters for our sections. She kept saying numbers like: 37, 39, 35, 36, and saying: "Phew. That's not so bad."
And at one point I said: "Those numbers give me panic attacks. 39 is twice the size of the largest section I have ever taught."
She smiled. "Well, then. It looks like I do have a thing or two to teach you."
The subject of the staff meeting was the bell schedule. Now the little school I taught at in DC didn't use bells, so the notion of a bells schedule was new to me. Except that what we were really talking about was the amount of time students would be spending in each class and when lunch would happen. Edison does this thing called sustained silent reading (or SSR, since everything, sooner or later, gets turned into an acronym by public educators); this is, in my opinion, a pretty brilliant idea: 15 minutes of silent, electronics free reading time, which everyone in the school does at the same time every day. Because of budget cuts, the school was shifting from a five period day to a six period day, and so Stuart, the school's new, very energetic (and barefoot!) principal held a staff meeting to get input about when the SSR should take place and how the schedule shift might effect things like when students would eat lunch.
It seemed like the majority of the faculty was pro-SSR; one teacher spoke fairly elegantly about how the purpose of SSR was to change the culture of the school, to promote a pro-reading environment. A few teachers grumbled about SSR never-being "useful" time; others complained about not being able to "make it work." But it seemed like all the good energy in the room was in favor of maintaining SSR; one teacher even pointed out that since they had implemented SSR, student's reading test scores had improved dramatically. Last year Edison was one of three schools (out of eight) district wide to meet the AYP (annual yearly progress goals, for you uninitiated).
A few things struck me about the meeting. First: it seemed like any old meeting in any old school about a seemingly important (but ultimately...not that important) matter of logistics. As Nellie, a 7th grade science teacher pointed out: "They decide when it'll go down, and I'll be there to make it work." Amen, sister. But tensions were high and the conversation was fairly heated. Secondly: the meeting was like any old meeting in any old school without a clear protocol. Side conversations were pretty rampant, and Stuart was actually called away from the meeting over the intercom for a meeting he had that he had forgotten about, so at the most heated point in the conversation the conversations leader left the room. Laura filled the void, and ultimately a sort of consensus was established, and we all placed our little red voting dots on the appropriate schedule. One other thing of note. I was struck by the depth of a few teachers quibbling about one of the options, which would (because of some bizarre eccentricity in the union-negotiated contract) require them to make up 15 minutes of "duty-time" before or after school. What was frustrating for me was that what was clearly the best option for the kids (maintaining the SSR and ensuring that all kids got to eat their lunch before one o'clock!) was being held up because two teachers weren't willing to do 15 minutes of "duty" at some other time of the day.
The meeting scattered. We'll find out what decisions were made about the bell schedule tomorrow.
Laura and I spent most of the afternoon going through her four resource closets. (Side note: during the staff meeting I met most of the other teachers at the school; at one point, Laura introduced me to an art teacher. The art teacher said: "Oh, you have a student teacher. Could I borrow him for a few hours this afternoon? I have a lot of stuff to move around in my classroom." I was struck by her asking Laura this while I was sitting not four feet away from her and that she viewed student teachers in general as a source of exploitable labor. My esteem for Laura, which was already pretty much through the roof, was further raised when she sort of scrunched up her eyes and said, without any equivocation: "No. We have lots of our own work to do.")
We organized and recycled a truly massive collection of paper. My role was pretty clear: separate paper clips for reuse from materials to be recycled and approach the stacks with a totally dispassionate eye. Laura has a pack rat tendency (as do I, with my own stuff) and I found myself playfully asking her if she wanted to keep things like budgetary request forms from 2007 or the newsprint version of the 2006 Oregon State Standards.
Now this might all seem like menial, busy work, and of course looked at one way it was, but there was something pleasant and rewarding about the whole thing. Laura has opened the door of her classroom to me--and the closets and the file cabinets--and has already allowed me to root about and organized and file stuff. That kind of openness is the sort of thing I cherish in a collaborating teacher, and is a sign of, I suspect, good things to come.
At the end of our four hour organization session, she sort of asked: "So, do you feel like we need to talk about what we're going to teach?"
After all, a week is an eternity, and we still have more paper to sort through.
One last thought: Laura logged checked the rosters for our sections. She kept saying numbers like: 37, 39, 35, 36, and saying: "Phew. That's not so bad."
And at one point I said: "Those numbers give me panic attacks. 39 is twice the size of the largest section I have ever taught."
She smiled. "Well, then. It looks like I do have a thing or two to teach you."
Monday, August 29, 2011
I Begin
As the product of parochial (Episcopalian and Catholic) and private schools, I have never set foot inside a public school. Until last Friday when I went to visit my cooperating teacher in her classroom at Edison (a pseudonym) Middle School. A few immediate reactions:
I have read in one my many philosophy of education readings about the smell of an american public school, and I recall thinking at the time that it wasn't possible for all schools to smell the same. And I still have my doubt. But when I walked in the door to the school (or, rather, when I walked out of the front office and into the long, perilous, central hallway) I smelled it: chemical, vaguely threatening, the smell of floor buffer fluids and newish paint.
The school was empty: save for Mindy, the receptionist, the principle and assistant principle (who I did not see), a few other office staff, the maintenance crew (who appeared quite busy) and a few teachers, Laura among them, who had come in to prepare for the new year.
If you have taught, then you know perhaps what an empty school feels like. It is hard to describe the eeriness of a school without children, but I will give it a go. School's are built on fairly large scales, even small schools like the one I'm most familiar with. Edison is a large Middle School, home to 500 children in 6th through 8th grade. The central hallway runs down the middle of the school like a wide river, with lockers and smaller tributary hallways on its sides. It's probably 10 feet across. Walking it by myself, navigating my way towards Laura's classroom, I felt aswim in something larger than myself. It was echoey, harsh. But there were lots of windows, so the hall was bright with natural light, and I must say it was a fairly cheerful hallway, though the only things I saw on the walls was a poster about sanitizing and washing hands to prevent the spread of germs and a kind of mantra: "Be safe, be productive, be responsible," which seemed like the kinds of generic principled we give to young people when we don't really know what to say to them.
Anyway, what I felt walking down that long, empty hallway was a sense of a vast waste of space. That is, at its core, what it felt like: that all of this wood and brick and drywall and metal and paint and glass was somehow being wasted becuase, at this point, it was not filled with kids.
It is perhaps of note that the first two rooms I passed on my way to Laura's classroom were the orchestra room and the art center, and seeing these two rooms first gave me a sense of hope. At least the kids at Edison (which is not, by any means, a wealthy school) will have the chance to learn some music and art before they move on.
I walked into Laura's classroom. My first reaction: the room is bright, sparsely decorated (again that silly mantra: "Be Safe; Be Productive; Be Responsible"), with many windows. My eyes were drawn to the number of desks: there were 40 of them, in little pairs, in rows. This was a different world than I was used to. In a few weeks 40 6th and 7th graders would be jockeying for space in this room, but for now it was just Laura and me, talking about what was to come.
I immediately like Laura. She's in her fifties, is a devout equestrian and lapsed Catholic, a lifelong Oregonian who believes that anything above 75 degrees counts as a heat wave. Though she said at one point that she "didn't like middle schoolers", its pretty clear by the way she talks about them that this isn't entirely true. She has five section of 6th and 7th graders, with around 40 kids per section; Laura will teach 200 hundred children this year. I taught about 70 kids during my busiest year teaching in a private school.
She's done a little research on me. She has hosted quite a few student teachers in the past, and told the program coordinator that she was blowing up her writing curriculum this year, that her class was probably going to be a real mess, and that she probably shouldnm't subject a beginning teacher to that. The placement coordinator told her that she had "just the guy for you." Laura looked at my resume and said: "Oh yeah. He'll do."
At one point she confessed that she loved having student teachers becuase she "learned a lot from them" but also because they "did a lot of work for her."
She talked about the classes. She seemed obsessed with helping her kids conquer their "writing problems." When I asked her what those problems looked like she started to give a canned response, the kind of response I imagine her giving a principal or superintendent, and then she stopped, and said: "You know, I don't know where the issues come from. But I have lots of student work that we can look at."
She sent me home with two pieces of curriculum that the school had purchased, and her hope was to steal and pillage from the best of each. It was reading one of these pieces of curricula that reminded me to go write about my experience at Edison. I will have more to say about the experience reading the writing curriculum, but I will say this: it made me very, very angry, mostly because the writer of the curriculum thought that the teacher who would be reading was either idiotic or incompetent or both. And I have grown so tired with the assumption that students need to be protected from their teachers.
I have read in one my many philosophy of education readings about the smell of an american public school, and I recall thinking at the time that it wasn't possible for all schools to smell the same. And I still have my doubt. But when I walked in the door to the school (or, rather, when I walked out of the front office and into the long, perilous, central hallway) I smelled it: chemical, vaguely threatening, the smell of floor buffer fluids and newish paint.
The school was empty: save for Mindy, the receptionist, the principle and assistant principle (who I did not see), a few other office staff, the maintenance crew (who appeared quite busy) and a few teachers, Laura among them, who had come in to prepare for the new year.
If you have taught, then you know perhaps what an empty school feels like. It is hard to describe the eeriness of a school without children, but I will give it a go. School's are built on fairly large scales, even small schools like the one I'm most familiar with. Edison is a large Middle School, home to 500 children in 6th through 8th grade. The central hallway runs down the middle of the school like a wide river, with lockers and smaller tributary hallways on its sides. It's probably 10 feet across. Walking it by myself, navigating my way towards Laura's classroom, I felt aswim in something larger than myself. It was echoey, harsh. But there were lots of windows, so the hall was bright with natural light, and I must say it was a fairly cheerful hallway, though the only things I saw on the walls was a poster about sanitizing and washing hands to prevent the spread of germs and a kind of mantra: "Be safe, be productive, be responsible," which seemed like the kinds of generic principled we give to young people when we don't really know what to say to them.
Anyway, what I felt walking down that long, empty hallway was a sense of a vast waste of space. That is, at its core, what it felt like: that all of this wood and brick and drywall and metal and paint and glass was somehow being wasted becuase, at this point, it was not filled with kids.
It is perhaps of note that the first two rooms I passed on my way to Laura's classroom were the orchestra room and the art center, and seeing these two rooms first gave me a sense of hope. At least the kids at Edison (which is not, by any means, a wealthy school) will have the chance to learn some music and art before they move on.
I walked into Laura's classroom. My first reaction: the room is bright, sparsely decorated (again that silly mantra: "Be Safe; Be Productive; Be Responsible"), with many windows. My eyes were drawn to the number of desks: there were 40 of them, in little pairs, in rows. This was a different world than I was used to. In a few weeks 40 6th and 7th graders would be jockeying for space in this room, but for now it was just Laura and me, talking about what was to come.
I immediately like Laura. She's in her fifties, is a devout equestrian and lapsed Catholic, a lifelong Oregonian who believes that anything above 75 degrees counts as a heat wave. Though she said at one point that she "didn't like middle schoolers", its pretty clear by the way she talks about them that this isn't entirely true. She has five section of 6th and 7th graders, with around 40 kids per section; Laura will teach 200 hundred children this year. I taught about 70 kids during my busiest year teaching in a private school.
She's done a little research on me. She has hosted quite a few student teachers in the past, and told the program coordinator that she was blowing up her writing curriculum this year, that her class was probably going to be a real mess, and that she probably shouldnm't subject a beginning teacher to that. The placement coordinator told her that she had "just the guy for you." Laura looked at my resume and said: "Oh yeah. He'll do."
At one point she confessed that she loved having student teachers becuase she "learned a lot from them" but also because they "did a lot of work for her."
She talked about the classes. She seemed obsessed with helping her kids conquer their "writing problems." When I asked her what those problems looked like she started to give a canned response, the kind of response I imagine her giving a principal or superintendent, and then she stopped, and said: "You know, I don't know where the issues come from. But I have lots of student work that we can look at."
She sent me home with two pieces of curriculum that the school had purchased, and her hope was to steal and pillage from the best of each. It was reading one of these pieces of curricula that reminded me to go write about my experience at Edison. I will have more to say about the experience reading the writing curriculum, but I will say this: it made me very, very angry, mostly because the writer of the curriculum thought that the teacher who would be reading was either idiotic or incompetent or both. And I have grown so tired with the assumption that students need to be protected from their teachers.
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