Not about school

This post has nothing to do with my work life- but still  I wanted to write this story.

I ignored my better judgement and stopped at the ethnic supermarket to pick up the ingredients for the holiday meal.

It was crazy crowded, The lines were ridiculous. The parking lot,  woefully inadequate on a typical week day, was an exercise in collision avoidance greater than any video game I ever played.

I tried to load my car without getting run over or causing damage to another vehicles.

"So easy to buy the food, so difficult to get home,"  the woman next to me said with a heavy European accent.

And the elderly woman next to her replied, Baruch Hashem, Thank Godl

We have food, and we can celebrate any holiday we choose.

And she was right of course. For such blessings we should:
Thank God
and maybe Thomas Jefferson
(so maybe this post is just a tiny bit about school)

Why I was absent and did Thomas Jefferson really write the Bible?

Attendance is a problem at my new school.
Thousands of kids, no one person responsible for any one of them.

Without the designated advisor, the progressive form of a homeroom teacher- no one person is in charge of hauling your sorry ass into school everyday.

And if we can't get the attendance rate up the soda hating, teacher loathing, sore loser of our mayor is gonna close us down.

So I ask everyone who misses a day, why they were absent.

Some answers:
It's personal miss...
I've got problems miss...
I couldn't get up
I had a migraine
And today's favorite, from Stuart, who responded when asked twice in English and once in Spanish.
I was buying a book bag. (Stuart was absent three days last week, it was a very elusive book bag.)


The American History class is studying the Declaration of Independence.
Daisy had to write a paragraph on what was her favorite part of the Declaration of Independence,
(No I am not making that up,)

Someone suggested she write about the part where it guarantees all men human rights.
Except, of course, if you happen to be a person of color. Or a woman for that matter.

Student One:  That's why Abe Lincoln put the part about freeing the slaves in the Preamble.

Me  Nope- not born yet Thomas Jefferson wrote the Declaration of Independence
Jefferson wrote (even if he didn't really mean it) that all men are created equal.

Student Two:- He didn't write that, God did- its in the Bible

Me- Nope- that was Jefferson - Google it

And she did - guess what? she wasn't the first person to claim the all men created quote was from Bible- several websites addressed the issue.

She still doesn't believe it though- she's pretty sure its from the Bible.

Student Three- Daisy why don't you just say your favorite part is all the complaints against England?
So she would have, but the bell rang.

Maybe I should just buy a really elusive bookbag and take a couple of days.

Just Teaching (and a little small group learning community time))

I am wondering if I learned to keep my mouth shut.

Maybe's it temporary. I'm afraid my good sense will wear off.

I wrote in the last post my reasons for leaving my little pond and big fish title, for the current very big one.  I think I am officially a minnow.

No one asks me anything.

 I spend my days teaching,
Just teaching.

I have three Resource Rooms, Up to eight students, in four different grades. They appear in the back of a half size classroom with a large south facing window which currently would be more effectively used for growing tomatoes,  And I try to do something worthwhile while they're there..

Currently we have been reading an article Is Algebra Necessary? I hoped to spark some lively debate but mostly we just crowd around a table and I try hard to get anyone to say anything.  Yesterday one group had a lively discussion about Sponge Bob Square Pants, but it died when I tried to steer the conversation back to the article.

I'm not sure if its the oppressive heat, the incredibly crowded quarters or we're still in the process of sizing each other up.

My two other assigned periods are with a self contained special education math classes.  (See and here I thought in the 21st Century no one isolates learning disabled kids into a separate program all day long- shows you what I know)

Bailey told me three times today she hated this class.  The third time I gave her a calculator walked her through the first problem and she managed to do the second one (which was something like find the absolute value of x-(-6) when x=4). in the remaining fifteen minutes of the period.She didn't mentioning hating the class again,
Didn't do much work.
But didn't call me over to tell me she hated me and the class.

Kandi only went to the bathroom for twenty minutes, (he's been averaging 30) and Lenny told me he might be able to learn enough math to pass a regents.

So I can still teach isolated self contained classes. (Please, don't read this--- gods of Chaos, I know my mother would have been sure that just typing that sentence would ensure a chair flying through a window tomorrow, but I am bucking a long tradition of superstition and writing it anyway)

My last obligation of the day:
Attending a small learning community session.

Today's discussion, the uselessness of small learning community sessions.
My contribution.
Nothing.
I didn't say watching the video clip about good teaching practices on Tuesday  made me put a graphic organizer into Wednesday's plan.
Even though it did.
Who wants to be known as a suck up.

I said
Nothing.

Maybe, just maybe I've learned to keep my mouth shut!

New Year New School

Six years ago I worked at a small recently  created  high school.   I was assigned the new math teacher to mentor.  Okay so I was a special education teacher.  But I felt I knew everything about everything and somehow mesmerized the principal to believing that.  I agreed to be his mentor.

The first time I observed him, I watched him the command the attention of thirty antsy eighth graders as he spent well on forty minutes speaking in his fine Jamaican lilt about the joys and foibles of equations.

No one moved.

In the feedback session I noted that I almost always told teachers to speak for no more than ten minutes or you are bound to lose attention.

"Yet you spoke for more than four times that amount,"  I reflected, "and no one moved.  You are like Castro!"

So the years roll by faster than summer vacation days and somehow, I convinced the not so new math teacher to apply to the fast track principal program.

And he did.
And I fulfilled the promise to go with him.
Not to the small new innovative high school I imagined him leading when I promised to come with him, but to a large troubled high school which the mayor threatens to close, daily.

Tuesday he spoke to a staff of over two hundred (the old school had less than fifty.) many of whom faced losing their jobs when they left in June only to be saved by a Union initiated contract arbitration at the last minute.
Forty five minutes later he had at least opened the door to the healing process.

"Good job, Fidel"  I texted him as he left the stage.

So here I am, as I enter my twenty-ninth September in hot sweaty building, unable to dissipate the the humidity the Atlantic hurricanes insist on pushing our way.

And so begins the next chapter.

(Scary note- this principal knows about this blog!  Good thing he will be too busy to read it )

Lucky

I want to learn how to play guitar this summer.

I wanted to lean since I was sixteen and bought a guitar.
But I still haven't mastered it.

Wait who am I kidding?  I still haven't  really begun to play.   (okay full disclaimer- I know a few chords and can accompany Kum-ba-ya and other campfire songs)- but I want to be at the place where I can pick up a guitar and dazzle  (not offend) the listener. Even just for a couple of measures.

The music teacher from school has been trying to teach me. I actually practice- something I refused to do when Eddie Simon, Paul Simon's brother tried to teach me a half century ago.
I'm getting it- slowly.

Here is what I know.  I have a decent ear- I can hear when a note is wrong. I just have a hard time making it right. I have absolutely no rhythm.  I can count to four-I just can't make the spaces between the numbers even.  And these old fingers don't always go where I will them to.

And the point?

I can declare loudly that I'm going to be a musician.  My teacher can reassure me over and over that we are a community of guitar learners. But this is hard for me.  Damn hard.

Yet I've eaten everyday for that last half century.  Without one musical bone in either my parent's, my husband's  or my body we've earned our living.  We've worked year in and year out for decent wages.

When I show the guitar teacher the piece at the end of the book, and make a vain stab at trying to figure it out- she 's says, "Not yet, you'll get there but you're not ready for that level just now," and turns back to the pages I can struggle through.

No one accuses her of not having high expectations.  No one says those early pieces are not rigorous.
Okay- so it's just me and her in the living room but if I'm willing to be her student I'm willing to trust her teaching decisions.

I'm lucky- I had the right match to the skills someone said were the one's I needed for college. Mastering guitar had nothing to do with my academic success. Mastering guitar had nothing to do with my earning success.

Mastering algebra did. Not that algebra is  more use to me today than guitar playing is.  I haven't ever had the desire to walk into someone's home, picked up an equation and dazzled the audience with my solution.

I was born in an age, in a society a culture where mathematical skills not musical ones were a ticket for success. That's why I'm lucky.

Not everyone is.  I'll end here.  The tips of my figures are kinda sore.
Sorry.

We Interrupt this summer vacation for a common core commercial

So I hit the wall and then school ended, graduation happened and I haven't blogged in a month.
I took pictures at graduation and I want to  post them, with some stories about the graduates but first I have to  alter them and that entails mastering the graphics program I bought for  $19.00  when I took a sick and tired day in April..

But I've been busy, sleeping late, fooling around with the guitar, cleaning closets and having every part of my body poked, prodded and scanned. Not sick- just suffering an advanced case of post fifty teacher- with -good -health insurance syndrome.

The last week of July arrived and I needed to  interrupt this vacation with a word from our sponsors.- our district offered  common core workshops.

It seemed like a great idea in May . The workshops, like the previews of the common core standards held promise.  Heralded as a way to bring a new approach to thinking about instruction- a structure of standards for the 21st Century, the century where every factoid is available in seconds on the smart phone everyone of us perches on our desk.

And there's also all the per session pay.

 But the week has been frustrating.  First  we looked at all these new reading and writing standards.  Then we discussed that no one actually knew how these standards would effect the assessments. And if there was any chance of forgetting the  all importance of success on the assessments - stories of  "I have my job, I don't have my job, I have my job again or maybe I'm in a real closing school  and really don't have a job," filled the room with a palpable tension as thick as the July humidity. (If you don't follow NYC teaching news, suffice it to say this has been a summer where over three thousand teachers were in jeopardy of being jostled out of positions due to the vagaries of the NCLB closing schools debacle.  In the end the the local justice system put brakes on the most outrageous scenarios, but those teachers in the schools that were scheduled for the  so called "closing of failing schools"  earlier in the  year found themselves in the ATR- the misplaced teacher pool anyway.)

We were broken up into groups to write curriculum maps.  One teacher in the room asked why the state, city, district wouldn't just provide a curriculum - like  in the good old days when teaching the history of the world was- well let's say planned out by people who knew what they were doing, (And probably paid for it too)

The answer was:
Because there is no curriculum
And the city was providing 20 hours of per session pay and all the bagels you could eat, for anyone who signed up for the week to write their own.

I sat at the wrong table.  I ended up with the kid my mother always wished on me, the one who (I greatly feared) was a  present day example of my former self.

She knew everything.  About everything.  I couldn't get a word in edgewise. All this in two years of teaching and before her twenty fifth birthday.

I wanted to punch her out.

In the end Ms Know It All and the third member of the group (younger and more inexperienced) plotted the history of the world ona  grid that included every factoid they could scrape out of an outdated scope and sequence  and outdid  each other with "Oh how cute activities" including those that involve sharing out M&Ms to represent Feudalism.and jumping around papers to represent the geography of Japan.

Then they looked at the common core standards and stuck an appropriate one on their adorably cute activities.

So much for developing a new curriculum to meet the needs of a world with information at our fingertips.

For me, the frustration of the week was summed up by the young man in the back who asked about how  students  by the end of grade 10 will read and comprehend history/social studies texts in the grades 9-10 text complexity based independently and proficiently(sic), when the could hardly read at all.  "Its like they're stuck in a revolving door to nowhere," he observed.

Tomorrow its over.
I'll sign my timesheet, visit my old paraprofessional, who lives right by the workshop

And return to summer vacation.

No more teachers no more ....

The year is spinning to an end.
I keep singing the that song from my childhood.
No more homework 
No more books
And then the question comes up- is the next line
No more teacher's dirty looks
              or
Let the teacher's hang on hooks.


Both feel terribly archaic to me, the first because no one seems the least bit stymied by any look I might generate and the second because we don't seem to have any hooks anywhere.

Oh wait there is a hook in the lockers- but nobody wants to "rent" the lockers after the winter months so I haven't seen those hooks in ages.  And anyway those lockers are way too skinny to squeeze my big behind into.

Sixth grade social studies ended up being a cinematic tour of Africa. The last movie we watched is called The First Grader, I carefully researched so many movies about Africa, Netflix puts African dramas and documentaries first, for my preference.  But The First Grader, just came up in the new release stream.
The coach was covering my class yesterday (long, complicated Regents testing week) and I promised him I would leave the movie set up for him,

"Your going to show these sixth graders a little kid movie?" he asked
"Little kid movie? How old do you think the first grader of the movie name, is exactly?"
"Uh- six, maybe seven?"

"Nope- eighty four! Watch the movie coach!"
 It is a great movie of  a Kenya freedom fighter who learns to read at an advanced age.

Now if only Netflix would get Invictus.
It would end African movies 101- I'm afraid I might have to buy it from Amazon.

Maybe I should sing

No more homework 

No more movies

I don't know what rhymes with movies?