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."
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