Getting Started, year 12

First day of in-service training was today. I took absolutely every day of the summer for myself and my family. On the last day of my professional duties in June, I turned in the key to my classroom, got in my car, picked up my family, and drove to the beach. After a week getting into summer mode by the sea, we launched on a six week tour of California and New England, hiking, swimming, reading, playing, sleeping, cooking, eating, doing whateverthehellIwant... It was amazing. I arrived home last night happy and refreshed, and today barely made it to school in time for our continental breakfast and staff introductions. As it is entirely inappropriate to retire at the age of 41, I guess it's time to get back to work.

It was great to see my colleagues who have become friends. It's a diverse group of men and women in all stages of their careers. All fundamentally good people. All characters. There are over 100 people on staff. After two years, I can say I know over half of their names.

This is my third year at My School, and the grime and disfunction I found so disturbing during my first year is now just comfortable background noise. I find the fact that the staff bathroom has a quarter inch of water on the floor and a broken stall door charming. The missing ceiling tiles and the worn rugs are just part of the ambiance. The broken AC, however, is not cute. We are experiencing an extended heat wave, and there was another heat advisory issued today. The index was in the 100s. The cafeteria felt oppressively humid and stuffy, but when I went to my classroom it was literally an oven. When I opened the door, I felt a blast of heat. After a few minutes the cheese on my sandwich started to melt. After an hour of shoving desks around, the water in my bottle was warm enough to steep tea. I left when I started to feel nauseous.

Two years ago I would have rushed to the office to inform someone about the problem. (Surely, no one knows about this. If they KNEW it would be fixed, right?) Today I didn't bother. When I happened to see the head of maintenance in the hall, he looked exhausted himself, and said, "Yeah, the whole building is out. It's a mess. I'll put in a work order." Which is code for, "Buy a fan."

After 12 years of preparing for the first day of school, and after a summer of serenity, I am not panicking as I once would. If the AC doesn't come on, we'll figure it out. If my classroom library isn't set up on the first day, I'll have the kids do it in teams. There is no such thing as perfection in this business. It's all process.

Snow Days

Today is the fifth day of no school since the blizzard and they have already called school for tomorrow. More than a week out. At this rate we’ll be in school until July.

My own children also missed the week before that, Son for a school trip and Daughter for an ear infection, and then two days from the week before that for a family trip. Nine, going on ten, days of missed school.

It’s been wonderful.

I moved to this school district for weeks like these, when I would have been screaming my head off about school endless closures and scrambling for childcare so I could get to work, but instead I am having a pleasant, impromptu vacation with my children. We’ve been reading books, sledding, making food, watching movies. Today, since roads are all clear and it’s a mystery why school is closed in the first place, we may hit up some museums.

But that’s not the case for all of my students.

Jaime Rodriguez has called me five times every day since the snow fell. Each day when I finally pick up he says in his impossibly small voice (Jaime was retained once, is 11 years old in the fourth grade, and towers over his peers), “Is there school tomorrow?”

“Well, I hope so. I sure miss you guys... But most likely we’ll be closed so they can fix up the streets and plow the parking lots.”

“Oh, ok.” There is silence, but he doesn’t hang up.

“What have you been up to, Jaime?”

“Nothing. Watching tv.”

“Are your grandparents around?” Jaime lives with his grandparents who both work early shifts, so they are never at home when he has to wake up for school. Many days he doesn’t wake up for school. We exchanged cell phone numbers so I could call him when he doesn’t show up. Or so he can call me five times a day to ask if there will be school.

“No, mostly I’m just here by myself…. So when will there be school?” I picture him on the couch in a living room crowded with furniture, photos, plastic flowers and hand crocheted doilies, a widescreen tv, no siblings or adults around, on the phone with me.

“I don’t know,” I admit. I hope there’s school on Friday... If we do anything fun tomorrow, I’ll give you a call and maybe you can join us.” I say this because I mean it, but even as the promise escapes my lips I wonder if I could really pluck Jonathan out of his life for a day (for a lifetime). How many more of my students are sitting at home, by themselves, nothing much to do, each snow day? How many kids could I pluck? I am reminded of the teacher in Bridge to Terabithia who takes Jesse to the Smithsonian for the day without telling his parents so everyone thinks he is dead. I never understood how that teacher could be so irresponsible (except for the fact that she was an art teacher in the 70s). Now I know. Maybe I am that teacher.

I return to my fantasy of buying an old school bus, painting it bright green, getting my CDL license, and taking my whole class on field trips every week. I am Miss Frizzle, magic wand in hand.

Jaime is a year older than most of his peers, tall, rail thin, sweet.  He never sits down, a reality which I mostly ignore. When I absolutely need him to be still (because I am losing my mind) I give him a piece of playdough and that absorbs his energy for a minute. He does not read. At age 11 he has learned to sound out most words, and to hear him you might place him at a late second grade reading level. But he will not pick up a book unless there is an adult sitting directly by his side. He cannot spell most sight words and his handwriting looks as if he has never been taught to form letters. Even in my class of below grade level students, he is an outlier.

Jaime cannot afford to miss school. He does not want to miss school.

“Ok,” he tells me. “See you Friday maybe.” His voice doubts that I will call him tomorrow. I will be at home, typing on my computer, no magic wand in sight, waiting for him to call me.

(Happy) New Year: a return to joy

It's five a.m. on New Year's Day and all is not well. After a year and a half at my new school, I have returned to a state of despondence. Many days I do not look forward to work. I do not always enjoy teaching. I have lost hope for myself and my students.

But why?

I would chalk it up to a poor professional fit. Maybe I just chose the wrong career path fifteen years ago. I've given it a good go, but after all that, turns out I really don't have what it takes to be a teacher. Time to do some soul searching and move on.

But I see it everywhere. When I look at the faces of my best and brightest colleagues on any given day I feel the same hopelessness and exhaustion reflected back at me. When I ask almost teacher in my building on a Monday morning, "How was your weekend?" I can bet you the answer will be, "Too short." Even after a three day weekend. Even after a holiday break. Even after a seven week summer vacation. It's always, "too short."

This should not be the case. Schools should be fun, dynamic environments where everyone looks forward to coming to work. Learning is fun. Children are never boring. We chose this profession because (most often) we were called to it.

So what's the problem?

That's what I want to continue to explore with this blog: How is it I have come to a place where I no longer look forward to going to work to do what I love to do? What makes a school (and teacher) successful? How can schools become place where everyone thrives?

Is there hope? And, of course, where is the joy?

in small amounts

There are many of moments of joy during a teaching day. When a child makes a meaningful connection to a book, or asks a question that elicits a collective "oh!' from the group. When the class groans because it is time for lunch and they don't want to stop working the math problem. Each time two students collaborate on a task. 

At the end of a long week (or even one shortened by snow days and delays, like this one) I must remind myself that my days are peppered with these moments. Because too often on Friday evening I only remember the sour taste of the many frustrations: lessons that fell flat, students who were unkind, that pile of papers I still need to grade. My challenge is to highlight the joy, to bring it to the top and savor it like cream, and help my students to do so as well.

And yet it is impossible to drink a cup of cream. Joy is best in small amounts, when surrounded by acidity. 

They Why and How of Progress Reports

It's that time of year. We've had our students for four and a half months. It's a reasonable amount of time to get to know them, identify strengths and weaknesses, try out some strategies, gather data to see how their doing. It's the time of year when teachers all across the country are sitting down, usually late at night or on the weekends, averaging quizzes and tests, entering grades into the computer, scouring journals and papers for glimmers of proof of progress. It's the time of year when I always consider quitting.

My first year of teaching I was blindsided by grades. I was teaching sixth grade in a large rural consolidated school north of Burlington, VT. There was no formal system for grading or keeping grades or entering them anywhere. On my first day of work I was handed a binder with the state standards which I promptly put on a shelf to gather dust. No one asked me to pull them out, so I didn't think of doing so. The only curricular textbook I had was from the Everyday Math program, so I presumed the folks at the University of Chicago knew what they were doing and I wouldn't have to worry about it as long as I stuck to the program. As for reading and writing, social studies and science, I floundered through self designed units loosely based on topics like "Mysteries" and "the Solar System," and just hoped to God the kids were picking up something useful. Occasionally I would find standards to throw in my lesson plans, but if I didn't no one would know or care.

And then I had to come up with grades. I needed a letter for each student in the areas of Reading, Writing, Math, Social Studies and Science. Perhaps there were some other ones, like Spelling or Homework Completion, I can't remember. It is only fair to say I made them up. In the end, after panicking for 24 hours, I looked at a few quiz and test grades, thought about how the kids fared in my classroom, and I gave them each a letter. A. B. Hmm, C +? I am pretty sure I even wrote them directly onto the reports by hand.  I knew it wasn't right, but I was so busy trying to figure out how to teach all of those subjects, I couldn't manage to actually grade them. No one ever challenged or questioned me about it. There was no space on the report card for comments, so I didn't have to worry about that.

The following year, determined to have my grades be based on something, I purchased a palm pilot and downloaded a free trial of Easy Grade Pro. I graded every assignment and recorded observational scores during class.  I was too cheap to buy the full version, so about a week before the end of the first term the software expired and I lost all of my grades. For the second year in a row I just made the letters up. I would kind of throw each kid up on the wall and stare at them with one eye closed, stepping closer and farther away for perspective, and say, "Eh, she's a B. Yeah, totally a B." Again no one seemed to mind. I mean, after all, the kid really was a "B."

In New Hampshire the grading system was equally amorphous. Each grade (ex. Kindergarten, First, Second, etc.) in my school had their own report card and the teachers at each level could choose what and how to grade as long as every class in the grade level was the same. We were expected to teach the state standards, but we were not expected to report on them. There were no rubrics or scales or criteria for the numbers we assigned (for some reason numbers were supposed to be more accurate than letters, but teachers and parents alike considered them analogous).

I was once again teaching a new grade in a new school, but this time with a new baby at home, so I repeated my strategy of focusing on instruction rather than evaluation and neglected to record any meaningful grades for the entire semester. When January rolled around I resorted to my gestalt method, using the single sentence comment line to justify the 2s, 3s and 4s in my class (I didn't assign any 1s or 5s for fear of attracting attention).

I got in trouble when a fellow teacher in the district attended his daughter's progress conference. He and his wife wanted justification for the 3 in Reading, when obviously their child was reading above grade level. (She was.) "She doesn't challenge herself with her independent reading," was my only excuse. In truth I had no idea what level the child was reading on, since I had focused my efforts on the struggling students. She was doing fine. I thought that was enough.  The mom left the conference livid, and over the next two years as I sheepishly worked closely with the fellow teacher in professional development I never forgot my transgression. I would never again assign a grade with no support to back it up.

Flash forward to this past weekend, when I spent three solid days crafting comments for this round of progress reports. Things have changed since my first year of grading (or rather, NOT grading) ten years ago. No Child Left Behind took the country by storm. The Common Core has arrived and it looks like it is here to stay. Charter schools are able to demand as much as they wish from teachers without the constraints of Unions or contracts. Standardized assessments, and assessments of any kind, are paramount.

Over the course of the semester I grade student work each week, assigning each assessment or experience a number between 1 and 5 to describe the level of mastery on a particular Common Core Standard. We are expected to record the grades in an online program and then return to work families every week. I do not. But I do my best. This process is time consuming, and as a working mother I cut corners where I can. The benefit is that at the end of the term I have a healthy handful of "grades" to draw from, as well as a stack of 18 pieces of communication with family members, when I sit down to write comments. My hope is that no one next week will say, "My child is a THREE?!" They've seen it coming.

For each child I write a comment for reading comprehension, reading foundations, writing, language, math, social studies or science, and social emotional progress. Each of these comments has one paragraph explaining what we did over the course of the semester, and a second paragraph about the child's individual performance. Much of the content is cut and pasted from previous reports or generic narratives I craft ahead of time. But each comment must be thought out, confirmed with evidence, and revised a bit to suit that child. I look back at grades, sift through their journals for writing samples, think for a moment about classroom performance, try to throw in a line about something anecdotal or personal. All in all, from first thought to hitting SUBMIT on the final report in the computer, the whole process takes me about an hour per student. I have 25 students. That's over three full work days of reflecting and writing about my students.

This is great. It's the way it should be. But in the midst of all that reflecting and writing, I also have to continue teaching. My school gives us a three half days of report writing time, which adds up to about 12 hours. The other 13 hours need to come from my family and my students. I am not such a great mom or teacher leading up to Progress Reports. My biological children watch a lot more TV than usual. My husband does a lot more dishes. My students do a lot more worksheets and maybe even watch a video or two. The 13 hours have to come from somewhere, and last I checked I'm not exactly going to the gym every day or hanging out with friends at the pub.

When I described this process to a friend who stopped by to drop off his kids for a play date today, he said, "Is it necessary?" I stopped, not knowing what to say. "I mean, is there value to it? Do you need to?"

My initial response was, "No. I mean ,who really reads them anyway?" Then I thought for a moment and corrected myself. "Actually, it's a good opportunity for me to stop and reflect, to think carefully about each kid. By having to write about it, it helps me to evaluate where we are and what needs to change in order to get where we need to be. So yeah, I guess it's valuable."

Necessary, however, I don't know.

As I move into this next phase of teaching, the phase where I should sure as hell know what I am doing, and I should be able to teach without so much stress and not quite so many hours of work each week, I am continually asking myself, "Is it necessary?" Good is great. Great is better. But in order for me to sustain this work I so long to do, I must do only what is necessary.

I must assume it is.

What makes a great school?

Last week I took advantage of my chronic insomnia and used those bonus hours between 3 and 6 am to write a letter to the CEO of my children's school district. Prince George's Public Schools is "one of the nation's 25 largest school districts, having 204 schools, approximately 124,000 students and nearly 18,000 employees." It is enormous. It's unwieldy.

So far, however, I have been pleasantly impressed by the district. Despite the fact that I am one parent among thousands, when my children's kindergarten classes were too big I sent emails and within a week there was an extra aide on staff. When I spoke at the School Board meeting about enrichment programs I was approached by several board members afterwards, and when the CEO (think "superintendent") visited my children's school, he inquired about my comments. They are listening. I am now working on the premise that most of the responsible adults involved are interested in seeking innovative solutions for serving so many children and supporting so many schools in such a diverse system.

So how do we do that?

A high quality education should not be for the lucky and the wealthy, it should be for every last child in our county. This is what the "No Child Left Behind Act" purported to do, to set the expectation that all children could achieve at the same level, irregardless of income, race, native language or learning disability. It is a noble goal. I am skeptical about the ability of each child to reach the same level of achievement (just look at the diversity of learning styles and outcomes in your own family to realize the great variation that exists within the human race), but I do think it is reasonable to demand that each child receive the same quality of education. The basic recipe for a high quality school is not complicated:

1) Intelligent, well-trained, hard working teachers and support staff
2) Small class sizes
3) Safe school buildings with access to open spaces, books and current technology
4) Research based curricula that holds students and teachers to high standards
5) Enrichment opportunities (project based learning, arts, foreign language instruction)

On top of this you can add nuts and chocolate, go vegan or low-fat, whatever suits your community.

Yes, assessment plays a part, and we should know what kids know and track how are schools are doing by monitoring their scores. However, we should also be looking closely at the school experience of each child. Do children have access to similar benefits, whether they are in a charter or a traditional public school, whether they go to school in DC or Prince George's County?

No one can dispute that the answer is a resounding NO. Schools are vastly dissimilar, from state to state, across counties, even within towns. Everyone can think of an example of a great school and a mediocre or bad school "just down the road."

In the PG County school district we have magnet schools. As their name suggests they are designed to attract better students, so slots on their rosters are highly coveted. Some are language immersion programs and produce students with the highest test scores in the county. Others have speciality programs, like the Montessori school which only accepts children into kindergarten and then limits class size after that. Most are TAG schools (Talented And Gifted) which were formed on the premise that TAG students (meaning those students who come from a literate, English-speaking household and do not have learning disabilities) need and deserve access to rigorous classes, foreign language instruction, and more enrichment opportunities. The schools are better than most of the neighborhood schools. I despise them for this.

My late-night letter to the CEO argues that the decision to invest so many resources in these magnet schools is both unjust and unwise. If our school district is going to be great, the place to invest is in the neighborhood schools. Strong neighborhood schools will both attract better students and make better students.

The letter is in his mailbox now, and in the mailboxes of school board members, and my county council member, waiting to be opened after a vacation of reflection and resolutions. I ask for small class sizes, an art teacher and a Spanish teacher. A modest and manageable request, I think. My vision is much grander, it is a county of nothing but great schools, but this is a start. And if I receive no response? Maybe it's time to start looking at charter schools.

Why Teachers Might Not Write (or at least Why I Don’t): An Apology

It is Monday, December 23^rd and technically the first day of vacation. It is the first opportunity I have had to sit down and string together sentences since October. I resolved five months ago to write “regularly,” with the noble fantasy of waking up an hour early or devoting the last thirty minutes of each day to reflection and cataloguing and trying to make sense of what is going on in the messy petri dish of my classroom. To be fair, each morning I wake up and go to bed THINKING about thinking about my classroom. But I don’t take the time to write. There is plenty to write. There is no time.

I often wonder (certainly daily, sometimes hourly) if there is something wrong with me. I see other teachers coasting into their orderly classrooms a few minutes before 8 am each morning, and scooting out the door just after 4. I read facebook posts about their tv shows and hobbies and weekends away. I observe colleagues volunteering to run committees, delivering home baked cookies to the teacher’s lounge, hanging out in the office having casual conversations about the news and their daily lives. From my perspective just about everyone else has figured out how to make teaching a sustainable career capable of achieving equilibrium. I have not. My days go like this:

After waking up my kids, making lunches, getting everyone dressed and in the car and dropped off at school, I drive through traffic and park so I can jog to school where I squeak in the door at 8:00, 7:45 if I am lucky, and then I print up my schedule, copy any worksheets for the day, check for any last minute email changes, after which I take the stairs two at a time to my classroom, unstack the chairs, write the Morning Message on the white board, pick up and sharpen pencils and wipe down tables, try to bring order to my desk which is usually covered with a collection of completed work, notes from parents, confiscated items and randomly acquired markers, just in time for the students to arrive at 8:15 whom ideally I meet at the door where I check in on behavior goals for the day, ask if they have gotten enough sleep and eaten breakfast, try to make a positive touch point before a long day of disciplining, remind them to turn in homework and sharpen two pencils, until finally it is 8:30 and we all gather for Morning Meeting on the rug where I collect their first math problems of the day, take attendance, lead them in a greeting, a share, a game, a time to set our intentions for the day, until 9 am when it is time to transition to Literacy and I read a short piece of text and model my thinking on chart paper, and dismiss them to a “menu” of independent activities, making sure the list is not too long to be overwhelming and not too short to leave them any time to fool around, making sure each child has reading material that is both accessible and challenging, so I can pull small groups, sometimes one or two at a time working on decoding (sounding out) multi-syllable words, sometimes in groups as large as six who are reading novels like A Wrinkle in Time and working on determining character motivation, trying to stay focused on the needs of each group and relying on my assistant teacher to manage the kids who want to chat, who refuse to read, who are taking scissors and systematically removing all of the erasers off of all of the pencils, but still there is the inevitable student who needs to talk to  me, to ask about an assignment, a concern, a question that only I can answer, so I remind them that I am not to be interrupted, and remind the assistant to address their concerns, until it is time for snack, at which point we must feed all of the children lest they start arguing and crying before lunch time, and remember that Nate needs his rest to mitigate his physical disability, and remember that Jane needs all materials loaded onto her iPad to mitigate her visual impairment, and remember that Darcy and William need their sensory break to mitigate their inattention, and Cory and Tom need a movement break to mitigate their hyperactivity, after which there are demands of water, requests for the rest room, messes to be dealt with, before it is time for them to line up and leave the room for the blessed “Special,” music, art, drama, PE, Spanish, when once a day they leave and I am awarded 45 minutes to get something done, which is the point when I must start running again, to the copier, to the meeting, to make the chart for the lesson, to check-out the computers for math practice, to set up the materials for the demonstration, before it is time for them to return and start math, when they break into groups according to what they know and what they need to learn, rotating between independent work which is catered to their individual needs, and fact practice on the computers which has been selected for the skill, and instruction with me or another teacher on the rug or at the back table where we pose problems, share solutions, walk through strategies, trying to ensure that each child feels both challenged and successful, before it is time for lunch which must be distributed, monitored, mediated, after which there are crumbs to be swept, spills to be absorbed, trash to be removed, before spelling when there are 500 pieces of paper with spelling words sorted onto desks and pasted into books, or writing which is the best time of day, because there is silence and because they are pouring their souls into their journals, and the worst time because so many hate to think about their own lives, followed by recess when I must check-in the homework from last night and hand out the homework for tonight and prepare for the last lesson of the day, until finally Expedition with its small groups and deep questions and problem based learning when the children are the least focused and most tired and more likely to drag their feet, refuse to work, become distracted, engage in conflicts, but we implore them to give us one last hour until it is finally, thankfully 3:00, when homework must be written down and tucked into folders, when chairs must be stacked and pencils picked up and stray markers put into supply bins (or tossed onto my desk), when parents must be greeted and small details discussed, like who misbehaved, or who didn’t have a lunch, or who needs to review X or Y or Z before the quiz next Monday, until finally, thankfully they leave, one by one, and there is quiet, and I can use the bathroom, and there is a moment to sit and sip my tea which has been waiting in its thermos before I turn to the work to be graded, the lessons to be planned, the emails to be written about the meeting that needs to be held about the child who is not progressing as we would expect given the circumstances or the field study that we would like to hold next month or the pencils that need to be ordered, all before it is time to race out the door at 5 pm, not to an exercise class but to pick up my children and shepherd them home for dinner and homework and books and songs and a kiss and bed, when I might take a moment to ask my husband about his day before turning once again to the tests to be graded, the essays to be read, the emails to be sent, until I can’t keep my eyes open and I let myself fall asleep, because in a few hours I will wake up and begin again.

So I don’t write.

There is a rhythm and reason to this apparent cacophony. The days have a level of predictability. After ten years in the classroom I have systems that run themselves, and many responsibilities are assumed by my assistant, without whom I could not survive.  But this is the first year that I have begun to feel that “I am too old for this.”   I need to find a way to lubricate the weeks so that I move through them without so much friction. So that there is energy left at the end of the day for myself and my family.

So I can write.