The Home Stretch

It’s 9:45 pm and I’m still in my work clothes. Normally, I would consider that a bad sign. However, tonight I’m too excited to care. I’ve been working every possible minute of the day to refine tomorrow’s lesson plan and take care of smaller things, like writing 3 progress reports and a blurb for our weekly newsletter. But as of 9:00, I am printed, copied, packed and potentially finished writing lesson plans for the remainder of Institute! Our LPs for next Monday-Wednesday were due this morning, and we think our last two days are reserved for testing. I don’t want to get my hopes up, but I’m pretty sure that the bulk of the work is done. Just some refinement of my lessons the night before I teach them and some mini-lessons and I’m good to go.

Writing progress reports was hard. How do you tell a parent their child has chronic behavior issues that are impossible to resolve without corporal punishment (I’m kind of kidding, except that it is used at some of our schools—the principals have paddles!)? How do you find a way to compliment a child’s strength in reading comprehension without sugar coating the fact that she’s actually two grade levels behind? I definitely did not enjoy writing those, but you gotta do what you gotta do.

Yesterday, our class reached their class points goal and won a dance party. It’s only supposed to last five minutes, but we had some extra time after taking a survey so it ended up lasting 20 minutes. Honestly, it was too entertaining to stop. The kids went nuts when we turned on the songs they had requested the day before—moon walking, doing the “pretty boy swag”, jerking, and other dance moves with inappropriate-sounding names. It was hysterical to see their personalities really come out in a setting where they felt most like themselves. It was even more hysterical when Jamarcus demanded everyone’s attention for a big dance move, then promptly spun around, smacked his head into the whiteboard, and fell on the ground. I’m pretty sure one of my co-teachers was taping it—that footage is a must-have. Next week, I’ll be sure to bring my camera to try to capture the essence of Room 134 in all its glory.

This week I’m teaching my first reading lessons after the big switch. I have to say, as much as I love to read, teaching math is way easier in the sense that it’s much more concrete and the objectives are a little more…well, objective. In reading, I’m supposed to be teaching about cause, effect, problem, and solution. Concepts that you think a 4^th grader could easily understand. Wrong. They have no clue, and usually just end up writing completely irrelevant words and phrases on their quizzes. Unfortunately my group is part of a pilot that is testing out a certain kind of assessment, so we have to tailor our lessons to be able to teach to that assessment—not effective one bit, and it’s really frustrating to see our kids suffer because they want to test this program. The one fun thing about teaching reading is that I get to go back and read some of my favorite books from when I was little: Strega Nona, Miss Nelson Is Missing!, etc.

My problem child, Frederick, seems to be getting sneakier and less well-behaved by the day. My collab sat down to discuss what to do about him, and we decided that he is now on a different consequence system. Instead of having 5 chances before getting a call home, he only has 3. We’ve also noticed that he responds really well to having responsibility; he behaves the best when I choose him to be my lunch line leader. So this morning, I pulled him aside and informed him of his brand new responsibility, that I of course made into a way bigger deal than it actually is. Frederick is now our official Assessment Collector. After every class period, he is responsible for collecting everyone’s completed assessments. I made sure to stress how incredibly important it is that he is careful and gets all papers to the teacher, because it’s other people’s work and we want to take care of it. This job is also a piece of the consequence puzzle. If he gets more than 2 checks in a class period, he loses his responsibility for that class period. It was strategically chosen because it is a job for the end of each period, so he has to make it all the way through class. We’re crossing our fingers that this new responsibility coupled with the tailored consequence chart helps take care of some of our issues.

Below is a picture from our 4^th of July celebration last weekend. This weekend, we’re going back to the lake on Saturday and our new Mississippi friends are letting us take their boat out to swim in the middle. We’ll probably watch the World Cup game on Sunday and enjoy not having any major work to get done.

Hope all is well wherever you are. As always, thanks for stopping by.