miss brave teaches nyc

iTeach

2011-09-21T21:00:00.001-04:00

There's an article in GothamSchools today about how teachers plan to use iPads in their classrooms. I too have a DOE iPad, purchased by my school during last year's "the DOE is not going to let schools carry over their extra funding" spending spree. I honestly didn't see a use for it at first and wasn't sure how I would put it to use in the classroom. But I'm a big believer in making an effort to use all the resources provided to me -- especially ones as coveted and as expensive as the iPad -- so I started to build a library of apps that slowly but surely are making my teaching more effective.There is an app called Confer that is designed for the workshop model. For each subject, I can group my students by level or arrange them into groups of my choosing (in writing, for example, whenever I do a small group for a certain strategy, I rearrange the groups in the app). Each time I meet with a student, I can list the "tag," "strength," "teaching point" and "next steps" of our conference. The best part is that the app saves everything I enter so that I can enter it again if I find myself, say, using the same teaching point over with another student. It's also really nice for small groups so I don't have to put in the same information on four different sets of conference notes. Also, I can list my students by date, so I can see who I haven't conferences with in a while.This year I even started doing my running records on the iPad, which has taken some getting used to but which is cutting down tremendously on the amount of paper and ink I use. I open the running records from the TC website in an app called iAnnotate, which allows me to type directly into the PDF file.I use an app called TeacherPal to keep track of attendance and grades; it also has features for tracking behavior and personal information (for example, I have my students' parents' e-mail addresses in there and I can quickly send an e-mail to my class list from it).Lastly, I always have this problem where I type up my plans, print them out and then promptly misplace them before a lesson. Now I just load everything into Google Documents or Dropbox and then they're always available when I need them. I don't think I'd go out and buy an iPad if it hadn't been provided for me, but I'm lucky to have one and I'm looking forward to figuring out other ways I can make it work for me!

Rocking and rolling

2011-09-18T18:00:00.000-04:00

One full week (plus two days) of school is in the can! As Emeril Lagasse would say back in the '90s, "BAM!"

My students for the most part seem bright, personable, and eager to learn. As an extraordinary bonus, there are only 21 of them (for now) -- by far the smallest class I have ever had. Every time we line up to go someplace I experience a brief moment of panic where I think, "Where are the rest of them?!" until I realize that I do in fact have my entire class in front of me.

I have been frank about how nervous I was starting off this school year. I was brutally honest with myself in admitting that last year my co-teacher and I both made a lot of mistakes in the first few weeks of school that set the tone for the rest of the school year, errors that I obviously didn't want to repeat. At my former school, first period was first period: we gave our classes about ten seconds to unpack and then it was on to the academics of the day. My current school is more progressive in terms of the expectation that you conduct a "morning meeting" and build your classroom community, and one of the things I really wanted to nail in the first week of school was a sense of routine at the beginning and the end of the day. As part of our morning meeting, we're checking the weather and doing a brief math activity, and we've been able to jump into shared reading right from morning meeting every day, so that has been a success.

Another area where I can declare "so far, so good" is behavior management. My behavior chart looks like this one (only my students have numbers on our chart so it's not instantly like, "Look at Julio always on red again"), and I built in an escape clause for those students who turn their behavior around. At the end of the day, they use crayons to color in the day's square on the calendar; a week of greens earns a reward. I'm trying (and this is going to make me sound like Mean Teacher again) not to be too soft, or at least not to set consequences where I don't follow through (...actually, I guess that's not really the same thing). Our first consequence is a "friendly reminder," so instead of issuing a warning/threat like, "If this continues I will ask you to move your card," I just ask them to move their cards. More often than not the offending behavior stops and the student is back on green by the end of the day.

There are some teachers who warn you not to smile until December, and there are other teachers who will tell you that's baloney and you should be yourself from the beginning. I have to confess, after my students last year openly worried about how I would fare in a classroom "by myself" because they insisted I was "too nice" (I felt like an evil dragon lady from hell, but apparently my co-teacher was the "strict one"), I'm in the first camp. That doesn't mean I don't say funny things to my students or that I'm mean to them or that I'm unsympathetic when someone is hurt or sick or needs to use the restroom; it doesn't even mean I'm not nice. But in the past I've let far too many behavioral issues turn into negotiations or power struggles. As a recent article put it (I can't remember where I read this): "You're the only adult in the room. You've already won." So I'm trying to be gentle in my reminders but firm in my expectations. And so far, knock wood, I haven't raised my voice or felt my blood pressure shooting through the roof.

I'm not sure whether I've gotten more efficient at planning or whether it's the good fortune of having a relatively low-key class (again, so far! knock wood!), or more likely a combination of both, but during the first week of school I accomplished pretty much everything I set out to accomplish, which is both rare and awesome. I'm fortunate enough to have tons of technology available to me (I have a SMART Board, a document camera and an iPad), which has also made the beginning of the year much smoother; no more hours spent writing up mock drafts on huge chart paper, now I can just model with the document camera. I'm even able to do running records on the iPad, which cuts down tremendously on paper and printer ink...and considering that my toner is already low and the cartridge costs an astounding $400, is amazing.

I swore I was going to be better about blogging regularly and more thematically this year and this post is pretty much a mess, but there you have it: We all survived the first week of school.

Testing

2011-09-05T20:17:00.001-04:00

Just trying to test out this mobile blogging app...

(1) First official day back for staff is tomorrow...good luck NYC teachers!

(2) Through Wednesday, Staples is selling packs of 8 pencils and packs of 8 erasers for one cent each. (Yes, that's one penny each.) The limit is 2 per customer, but if you show your teacher rewards card, you can buy up to 25. So that's 200 pencils for 25 cents. I'm going to try to go back tomorrow and Wednesday if I can!

Dear Me

2011-09-02T09:58:00.000-04:00

A few weeks ago, another NYC teacher blogger, Mr. Foteah, wrote a letter to himself on the eve of his first year teaching. (I hope he doesn't mind me co-opting this topic here.) I enjoy reading Mr. Foteah's blog because it's so earnest. He comes across as incredibly passionate and dedicated, which makes me feel bad about my unkind thoughts toward the profession. Like this one: After I read Mr. Foteah's heartfelt letter to himself, I asked myself what I would have said to myself on the eve of my first year teaching. And as I told Mr. Brave, my letter could have been written in a single word: "Run."

Teaching will make you crazy, I would have told myself. Some nights you will come home so exhausted that you will eat Cheez Doodles for dinner and pass out on the couch by 8:00. You will find yourself hiding in your classroom with the lights off, alternately crying and blotching the redness out of your eyes so no one will notice you have been crying. You will feel anger directed at copy machines, hole punchers, staplers and staple removers. You will be called a "stuck-up bitch" by an eight-year-old. You will want to quit.

...which is why, four years later, I'm glad I never wrote such a letter. I've lived through a great deal of the teaching horrors I feared, and I survived. Even more miraculously, I stayed. Because I think I can do better. I refuse to be a cliche and tell you that it was all worth it when Michael learned to read or when Meredith thanked me for being the best teacher ever. Of course teaching has its magical moments; I've even written about some of them in this blog. But I would have wanted myself on the eve of my first year teaching to be clear on this: Teaching is not a movie, and being a teacher means so much more than teaching. On any given day, you may have to carry forty notebooks up six flights of stairs (manual laborer), mediate an argument between two seven-year-olds (marriage counselor), decide on a just punishment for misbehavior (judge), console a distraught parent who can't control her child (social worker), copy two stacks of handouts (secretary), bag a lost tooth (dentist), fix a broken zipper (MacGyver),...and the list goes on. No one teaches you those things in college when you're learning about Piaget.

Now, I wouldn't want Mr. Foteah (or you!) to think that I'm getting all bitter and jaded, so on the eve of my fifth year teaching, I issue myself this challenge: Find the good in every day. Last year I ended too many days feeling frustrated -- with my students, with my co-teacher, with myself -- and began too few days feeling refreshed and ready to start anew. I once read an anecdote about all these teachers in the faculty room comparing classroom horror stories, and another teacher comes along and says, "It happened to [the kids], not to you." Last year I too often felt selfish: What a bad day I've had, instead of realizing the kids had lived it too and it was up to me to change it for the better. I've already set all sorts of teaching goals for myself this year: Conduct targeted small group strategy lessons in reading and writing at least three days a week, squeeze in read aloud every single day, do an end-of-the-day wrap-up meeting as often as possible, make better use of my vocabulary word wall. Now my personal goal is to dwell on the good instead of the bad, to do my best to do better.

There are 185 days in the school year. That's 185 things I can teach, 185 good things that can happen for my class, 185 times we can all think, "I'm glad Miss Brave is my teacher." Let's make it happen!

Back on the chain gang

2011-08-29T21:26:00.000-04:00

Today was my first day back in my classroom since June, and I'll be totally honest: I was d-r-e-a-d-i-n-g it. Which is not a good sign, because the summer should have (and usually does!) left me feeling relaxed and refreshed and ready and other pleasantly alliterative r-words to set up my classroom. New Sharpie flip chart markers! New table names! New refrigerator and microwave for my classroom! ("No matter what happens this year," I said ominously when I bought them on sale at Target, "at least I'll have snacks.")

I must do a bad job teaching my students to respect our school supplies, or maybe $#@! just happens when you have nearly thirty 8-year-olds in a room, because I've had the misfortune of watching my supplies get destroyed so many times that it almost (almost!) sucks all the joy out of restocking my classroom with new ones. Every year I buy those cheap plastic sharpeners from Staples on sale for fifty cents, and every year they break three days into the school year (which is likely the fault of shoddy manufacturing, not mishandling by my students), and every year I buy more, reasoning, "Hey, it's fifty cents." If I added up all the fifty-cent sharpeners Staples has suckered me into purchasing, I could probably afford to purchase a fancy electric sharpener. (I have one of those, too, but the noise is so ear-splitting that my #1 classroom rule this year instead of "Respect classmates, teachers, schoolwork and property" is likely to be "No one touches the sharpener." Just kidding. Probably.)

Of course, it wasn't just the threat of broken school supplies that gave me pause. Last year was a really hard year for me. In some ways, it was my toughest year yet as a teacher because it so deeply shook my confidence in myself and my ability to teach, to work as a member of a team, to keep myself and my classroom organized, to get through to my students. It was my first year at a new school, and I left it somehow feeling as though I hadn't represented myself the way I wanted. I wasn't happy with myself as a teacher. I did a lot of thinking about it over the summer, because I knew that the only way to start fresh in a new school year would be -- as self-help-y as it sounds! -- to shift my perspective from excuses (I had a hard time because I didn't get along with my co-teacher, or I had a tough class) to pro-activity (next time, I can try to change...). Otherwise I could feel myself slipping easily into the role of those stereotypical bitter old teachers everyone is always complaining about.

When I got my teaching license in college, my professors made me write a statement of purpose defining my teaching philosophy. I wasn't yet a teacher, so how could I know what my teaching philosophy was? I just pulled out my fancy portfolio to look at it and it's filled with jargon-y buzzphrases like "empower my students with the ability to take charge of their own learning" and "differentiate instruction for students so that each student may have an opportunity to work at his or her instructional learning level." It's easy to look back on those words now and laugh at myself: Oh, undergraduate Miss Brave, IF YOU ONLY KNEW. But it's also easy to take those words in earnest. Of course students should take charge of their own learning! How fantastic it would be if teachers would always differentiate instruction for students so that each student may have an opportunity to work at his or her instructional learning level! (Memo to undergraduate Miss Brave: That is a mouthful.)

I guess my point is that the education debate sometimes feels so polarized that you're either a bitter old cow of a teacher who's just riding out the years until retirement, or you're a naive eager young teacher who's passionate about revolutionizing the teaching world. In terms of teaching experience, I'm practically middle-aged (according to this article, almost half of NYC teachers leave the system within six years), and this year like never before I feel a strange pressure to define my teaching philosophy for real this time, not just for pretend in a college class. And the truth is, despite what the movies would have you believe, I don't think that all it takes to help your students succeed is prove to them that you believe in them. I think it takes more than that -- a lot more -- and my task this year is to put those puzzle pieces together, to keep all those balls in the air. Be strict, but not mean. Be firm, but be flexible.

There was a really interesting article in the Times magazine recently about "decision fatigue," about how being forced to make lots of decisions -- even seemingly insignificant ones -- can sap your willpower. Mr. Brave's first reaction when I told him about it was to comment: "That explains why you're so exhausted at the end of a day of teaching." Then he put on his 8-year-old voice: "Miss Brave, can I go to the bathroom? Miss Brave, can I sharpen my pencil?" Teachers make dozens of decisions in the course of a school day. Last year I got so bogged down in the little decisions -- am I going to let this go or am I keeping him in for recess? Should I express my opinion or just keep my mouth shut? -- that I forgot to focus on the big ones. Am I going to try something new or just give up? Am I going to take charge of this class or aren't I?

So this year as I rearranged and reorganized and readied and other pleasantly alliterative r-words my classroom, I was realistic. I didn't fantasize about how my sharpeners would stay pristine and unsullied all year. I didn't tape up my new behavior chart without expecting it to fall down (which it did, moments later...and moments after I tacked it up again...and moments after that...until I finally tracked down my mounting tape!). But I did get a little geeked out about my hot air balloon nameplates for the door. And I did name my tables after important values I want my class to display this year. (Calling the Kindness table to line up is just much cooler than calling Table 3.) I started with the small decisions, so I could ease in to the bigger ones. What kind of year are we going to have? It's not entirely up to me, of course, but I need to set the tone -- and with September 8 drawing nearer, I'll have to make the decision to be ready.

Staples: Not in fact all that easy

2011-08-24T11:17:00.000-04:00

I have a love-hate relationship with Staples. Like many teachers (Mrs. Mimi springs to mind), I love bright shiny new school supplies. But I sort of hate Staples, where I always wait on line for waaaaay longer than necessary and the staffers always seem to be singularly unhelpful.

Nevertheless, I've been at Staples frequently the past few days, trying to stock up on supplies while they're on sale. Today I was trying to buy five highlighters for a dollar, except the packages I had picked up apparently didn't match the teeny picture in the circular (even though the brand and colors were the same), so the cashier sent me back to Aisle 3 and then took another customer whose e-mail address he had difficulty inputting into the system, adding another twelve years to my wait.

Just before I handed over my Teacher Rewards card, he asked me if I would like to donate $1 to buy school supplies for children who can't afford them. I politely said, "No thank you." For one, I have done this before in one of my many, many trips to Staples. For two, that's pretty much what I was doing at Staples in the first place: buying school supplies for children who can't afford them.

He took my rewards card, shook his head, and said, "And you're a teacher." So...I know I'm very sensitive and easily offended, but...I was offended. This is where I should have exploded into a Taylor Mali-esque "What Teachers Make" moment, but what I said was: "Exactly. These are school supplies for children who can't afford them. I spend hundreds of dollars every year on school supplies."

On the way home from Staples, I ran into a former classmate of mine and we exchanged catch-ups. When I told him I teach third grade, he laughed and said, "That's so cute!" Ohhhh, former classmate, you have no idea.

It's that time of year again

2011-08-21T22:16:00.000-04:00

Since they start running back-to-school ads practically just as the last Fourth of July firework is shooting off, I try to ignore them as long as possible. But when Staples Teacher Appreciation Day hits, you know the end is nigh.

Like many teachers, I spent most of the summer trying to forget about school while simultaneously trying to psych myself up for next year. Every summer, I swear I'm going to do tons of preparation, and every summer, I don't do as much as I'd like. Growing up, I was always conscientiously over-prepared, but summer brings out the procrastinator in me.

One thing I did do this summer was to read Awakened: Change Your Mindset to Transform Your Teaching by Angela Watson, who runs the Cornerstone website for teachers. I'm sure there are tons of books out there about how to ease job stress, but it was interesting to read one that's aimed directly at teachers; only a fellow teacher can appreciate those uniquely frustrating circumstances like when your push-in prep teacher is fifteen minutes late or when an administrator suddenly demands that you have a classful of individual assessment results ready by tomorrow. The lesson Awakened teaches is something I already know but have extraordinary trouble doing, which is: It's healthier to let go than to stew about it in a seething rage. Summertime was the perfect time for reading it, too, because summertime is like New Year's resolution time for teachers: This year, I will remain refreshingly above it all and not get mired in misery of any sort! Ms. Watson is up-front about the fact that clearly this attitude is a work in progress. She's also up-front about the fact that she came by this attitude by way of her Christian faith, which I admit was disconcerting at first, but the content of the book doesn't really Go There, so to speak, which as a non-Christian I appreciated. Bottom line: Anyone who's trying to help teachers feel less stressed out so that they can be better at their jobs, rather than blaming teachers for the sorry state of everything ever, is cool with me.

Looking back to plan ahead

2011-07-14T20:15:00.000-04:00

Do you have any idea what you would have done differently this year if you could change something?

That question comes from Mr. Brosbe, a fellow NYC public school third grade teacher, and it's a question I'm glad he asked, because it gives me a chance to do some constructive reflection instead of wallowing in self-pity. One of the things that's disheartening, looking back on my year, is that I should have known better about so many of these things from the start. But beginning the school year at a new school in a CTT classroom for the first time threw me off my game, so to speak, and everything suffered as a result. So these aren't just "things I should have done differently," but rather "goals for next year."

1. Establish consistency and routine right from the start.
It's so hard to know what works, and I have a tendency to jump the gun (i.e., if the kids aren't getting something right away, I switch tactics and try something else instead of having a little patience and keepin' on with the keeping on). I wasn't used to teaching in a school where students trickle into the classroom on their own (as opposed to me picking them all up at once), or where a morning meeting is actually part of the daily routine, or where I set my own schedule altogether, for that matter. So much of your classroom community and culture comes from establishing those comfortable routines, and I think the lack of them in my classroom this year is part of why I never felt fully "bonded" with my students.

2. Keep it simple.
My co-teacher and I knew going into the year that we had a class that would need clear expectations set for them, and we set up this complex baseball-themed behavior system that involved "rounding the bases with good behavior!" and moving into the "strike zone" for acting out. It just got too complicated to manage and we dropped it early in the school year in favor of a ticket reward system, which also involved finding time for everyone to trade in their tickets for fabulous prizes. (The vast majority of our students preferred to hoard their tickets rather than trade them, with the end result that on the last day of school, I held a class-wide "ticket auction" in which everyone competed to see who would be willing to hand over the most tickets for the most worthless pieces of junk in the prize bin. This is how I sounded as the auctioneer: "I have one dinosaur bookmark! We'll start the bidding at 20 tickets. Okay, I see 30! Anyone going higher than 30 tickets?")

Now, of course every year you hope that your students will be so intrinsically motivated by learning that these sorts of systems aren't necessary, and I have heard from my future students' current teacher that "they want to please you" (the five sweetest words a teacher can hear), but next year I don't want to be messing around with when and how and where to distribute prizes...I just want a simple behavior system that manages itself!

3. Set reasonable, meaningful consequences.
My naughty friends this year were remarkably immune to negative consequences. I had several students who were not allowed to attend recess or eat with their friends in the lunchroom for weeks at a time (on the principal's orders, not mine), and they were (or at least they pretended to be) totally untroubled by this. One of them in particular enjoyed showing off just how untroubled she was by loudly declaring her contempt for whatever fun activity she was missing. So there were times when I thought, "Why bother take away recess, it doesn't bother them anyway," but then there were other times when I found myself coming to the end of my rope and making unreasonable threats like, "If I see that one more time, you're going straight to the principal's office," as if I were in some zany 1950s teen movie where I played the stern teacher.

So this goes with my above philosophy of keeping it simple: Consequences should be clear from the start, not invented on the spot by me in a fit of anger -- and the punishment should fit the crime, so to speak.

You'll notice I haven't said anything at all yet about actual instruction. That's because I felt like this year was so clouded by management issues that my biggest difficulty was actually getting to instructional time. But I will say for next year...

4. Use my student data to plan targeted small groups.
At my former school, we were expected to teach a million and one small strategy groups, but it was all about quantity over quality. At my new school, the trend ran more towards individual conferences. On the one hand, conferencing is a little easier because you just plop down next to a student, find out what he's working on, and go from there; on the other hand, I had a lot to learn about how to teach something in a one-on-one conferences (as opposed to just shooting the breeze). I did so many individual conferences that I really moved away from small groups, and I missed out on a lot of chances to work with my students together in a group. Next year, I'd really like to make sure I'm trying to group my students flexibly by need and do some groupwork on their goals.

And there you have it! I'm in the middle of a move, but I'm hopeful that by August I'll be all settled in and ready to really plan for next year!

Be careful what you wish for

2011-06-25T20:56:00.000-04:00

Last year I used to tell myself that if I could survive my class, I could survive any class. Which just goes to prove that you should be careful what you claim to be able to withstand, because "any class" could be coming sooner than you think.

Last June, at the end of a rough school year, I was able to look back at the year with a sense of relief and even pride. Despite some very difficult challenges and a huge lack of support from my administration, I could say with certainty that my students were leaving second grade knowing more than when they came in. I was reasonably sure that 100% of them were prepared to be third graders.

This year, I'm disappointed to report, I don't feel the same way. Three of my students failed the ELA exam (two of them have IEPs with modified promotional criteria; the third will be promoted via his promotional portfolio). Too many of my students moved too few reading levels, or haven't yet mastered their multiplication tables, or are writing the same kinds of pieces they were when they arrived in September. (I nearly cried when I compared their June '11 on demand writing with their September '10 on demand writing.)

I could give you hundreds of excuses that put the blame on them: they didn't do their homework! They're not reading! But I categorically refuse to do this. The truth hurts: It was a tough year, on the heels of another tough year, and I didn't do as much as I could have or should have to make sure the message went through.

And so I've made a promise to myself: Next year will be better. And it won't be because I have a better class (although I've been told over and over how amazing next year's third graders are); it will be because I plan to spend at least some of my summer vacation really planning thoughtfully for next year.

Next year will be better. At this point, it has to be!

Testing Miss Malarkey

2011-05-13T17:56:00.000-04:00

Top 10 Questions/Comments Made By My Third Graders During Their First Ever Set of ELA and Math State Exams

(aka "Why Teaching In a Testing Grade May Cause Premature Aging," or "Why I Have Band-Aids On All My Fingers From Nervously Picking Off the Cuticles While Proctoring")

10. "Why do we have to use a #2 pencil?"

9. (Directions read by me: "You may not speak to each other while the test is being administered." Student:) "What does 'administered' mean?"

8. "I don't get how to show my work for this part."

7. (The test directs students to continue working when they see the words GO ON at the bottom of the page and to stop working when they see the word STOP. On the ELA, students get ten minutes per passage and have to STOP before being directed to move on. On the math exam, they get 60 minutes to do all 40 questions, no STOPping. On the math exam, one student asked:) "When is it gonna say STOP?!"

6. "But none of these choices are right."

5. "But both of these choices are right."

4. "Can I look this word up in the dictionary?"

3. (while filling in a graphic organizer on the ELA in which the directions state, "Name two other things in the article that...") "Am I supposed to answer this using my background knowledge?"

2. (while pointing to an open-answer question on the math exam in which the directions state, "Show your work") "Do I have to show my work for this part?"

and the #1 comment one of my students made just prior to the start of the math exam...

1. "Wait, is this the real test?"

Happy end of testing season, everyone!

I ain't taking no deep breaths

2011-04-30T16:19:00.000-04:00

THE TEST is almost upon us! Recently I met with my principal to discuss what grade I’d like to teach next year. After many, many hours of soul-searching I had listed second grade as my first choice on my preference sheet, but there may not be an opening, so I then spent many, many hours agonizing over whether I’d rather move to first grade or stay in third. My principal asked me to be “completely honest” about my reservations in third grade.

“Well,” I said, “I’ve never done test prep before, and I’ve never had a class like this before, so getting this class through test prep has been…”

He finished the sentence for me. “Get me the hell out of third grade?”

Bingo! I have not enjoyed doing test prep – what teacher does, really? – but I also do not believe, as some teachers do, that a solid curriculum is enough to prepare eight-year-olds to take their first standardized test without any additional “test-taking” support. One of the highest readers in my class has committed a bubbling error on every single practice test we’ve taken. Another one of my highest readers has raised her hand during practice tests to ask to see a dictionary.

Then there’s Marco, an IEP student who’s reading below grade level (not dramatically, but still), whose main issue with THE TEST is just plain stress. During countless practice sessions, I’ve turned around to find Marco with tears streaming down his face, shaking his paper at me in frustration. Because Marco’s IEP grants him modified promotional criteria, there’s little danger that he’ll have to repeat third grade even if he does fail the test (which – fingers crossed! – probably won’t happen anyway). But Marco doesn’t know that, and he’s starting to crack under the pressure of day after day of reading test passages that are just a little too hard for him.

I’ve been working on some coping strategies with him, like: If a question is getting really hard, just turn your paper over for a few seconds and take some deep breaths before you go back and read it again. But the other day, I saw Marco’s fists starting to clench in anger. When I got there, before I could even say a word, Marco looked up at me, waved his paper in my direction and angrily blurted: “And I ain’t taking no deep breaths!”

Oh, THE TEST. May our pencil points stay unbroken, our bladders empty, and our minds calm!

April is the cruelest month

2011-04-26T09:23:00.000-04:00

More than any other school year, I've had a difficult time blogging about teaching this year (as my near-total lack of posting obviously suggests). I've always blogged a lot about my frustrations with my administration; at my new school, thankfully, most of those complaints no longer exist. As hard as it is to believe, I've been busier than ever with planning and also dealing with parents outside of school, which is sort of new for me; it was extremely rare for parents at my former school to communicate by e-mail, but this year I feel like I spend a lot of time at home composing e-mails to parents. Last year I posted a lot about my frustrations reaching my students; while my class this year is at least as "entertaining" as last year's wild bunch, I feel like I'm dealing with a lot of frustration more on a personal level than an academic one, which is difficult to put into words on this blog. Perhaps it's because I lack a certain amount of autonomy in the classroom now, and I don't feel entirely comfortable posting about my co-teacher and our negotiations over lesson planning.

I will say this: I had no idea how difficult it was going to be to work with someone else in the classroom. For two years at my former school, I frequently parallel taught in classrooms with other teachers (i.e., either I pushed into a classroom or a supporting teacher pushed into my classroom; the class was divided into two groups and each of us taught a group on opposite sides of the room). But we weren't necessarily teaching the same thing at the same time, we rarely planned together and we weren't "responsible" for the other teacher's students in terms of conferencing with them or recording data. Co-teaching in a CTT classroom is entirely different. You don't realize how many decisions you make in a day as a teacher until you've had to collaborate on every single one of them. Also, at my new school, teachers have a lot more freedom to plan their own schedules and their own curriculum, so that actually makes it more difficult to work with someone else because all that has to be decided upon. I've realized that my instincts are to plow through the curriculum and try to cram everything in and get it done, because I'm used to being told exactly what I'm teaching and when I'm supposed to be teaching it. When my co-teacher has had to suggest slowing down or reviewing material, I've looked at her like she has seven heads. If we review multiplication facts again, we won't get to number patterns in time for THE TEST!

Ah, the test. That's the other thing: test prep. It's been extremely stressful. First of all, I've never taught "test prep" before, not least of all to kids who have never taken "THE TEST" before. I'm convinced we don't know what we're doing and if (when?) they do poorly, it will be our fault for not adequately preparing them. Second of all, I went to this TC workshop where I was shamefully reminded that my students are eight years old. They are eight years old and I have spent the last four weeks being impatient with them because they don't understand how to bubble the bubbles correctly and we just taught you to circle the genre in the directions and that answer choice is directly from the passage and none of you are taking this seriously enough. Meanwhile, we have been gearing up and gearing up for the test, and then we hit vacation, and now the weather is finally lovely and I'm sure none of us want to return to school for THE TEST. When it's over (by the middle of May, both the reading/writing and the math test will be over), I'm not sure what we'll do. We have other units left to cover, of course, but I fear the kids will be mentally checked out of school for the year now that it will no longer be on THE TEST, and as teachers we'll be looking ahead to next year.

I know I'll be back in my own classroom next year; CTT is not for me! I'm hoping I'll be back in second grade next year, too (that is, if I don't get fired; just read this morning in the Post that the budget is still not looking good for teachers). I'm not sure if it's my third graders, or just all third graders, but third grade is a little too much attitude for me. I like my students small and sweet, not sassy (well, they can be a little sassy, like when I said to Mario, "It's not the end of the world," and he said, "Yes it is! In 2012! Like the movie!"). I also think I prefer the second grade curriculum. We spent three torturous units in a row this year in book clubs. That entailed: grouping the kids by reading level while simultaneously taking into account our ridiculous behavior issues; finding an appropriately leveled series for each book club to read; digging up multiple copies of multiple books in each series for each member of the book club to read; attempting to make sure each member of each book club read the same amount of pages each night in preparation for book club discussions; and monitoring book club discussions for signs of intelligent conversation. I'm not necessarily anti-book club units, but I am anti three-book-club-in-a-row units. In our class, we have many, shall we say, interesting personalities, at least a few of whom on any given day would outright refuse to meet with their book club, look at their book club, or sit near their book club. A few of our kids will go so far as to call other kids "cheaters" or claim, "He stole my idea" if someone expresses the same theory about a book (and we're not exactly talking Gamp's Law of Elemental Transfiguration here, we're talking "I think she was being a good friend because she said I'm sorry").

Thank goodness, our last unit of the year is more palatable; the kids research another country and then write little information books about that country. Bonus: connection with social studies! The other thing I miss about second grade is teaching science and social studies; my third graders go to science twice a week with another teacher, and we in theory teach social studies once a week but in reality hardly ever manage to squeeze it in (especially now with THE TEST) looming. I can't help feeling like there were so many little things that I managed to squeeze in last year with my class because it was me and only me calling the shots, and if I wanted to take five minutes to do something, I could. I'm hoping that next year will be a nice fresh start and then I can really enjoy my new school, which -- aside from my issues with my co-teacher -- I really do like.

2011-03-29T21:09:00.000-04:00

I had a dream that I didn't pass the state exams and was going to have to repeat third grade. Clearly the stress of test prep is getting to me.

I came home and followed a link on another blog to a transcript of a Rush Limbaugh show. I know that guy's a maniac and no one should listen to anything he has to say, but nevertheless, let's take a look at what Rush has to say:

"Can we get rid of the myth once and for all that school teachers, anymore, are these average, ordinary, next-door neighbors who are just doing everything they can to further the educational experience of your children? That's not who they are. They are left-wing activists, active members of unions who are oriented first by a political agenda, second by their own well-being, and your kids come last.

Could these people who are making what they're making as a result of state and federal accidents, could they earn that money in the private sector on their own? Do they have the skills? Do they have the talent? Could they? Do they have the ability to even do what they're doing now reasonably well? The whole educational system has been co-opted by people who have found an easy way to a good living, and they realize it and they don't want to give it up without a fight. It's always about the money."

Definitely, Rush, I know I certainly became a teacher because I was all, "Easy money!"

I don't know how to prove it to these jerks, but please believe me when I say: I work so hard for these children. I dream about these children. I wake up in the middle of the night worrying about how I can best further the educational experience of these children.

:::sigh:::

Booking it

2011-02-04T17:44:00.001-05:00

Like last year, I have some capital-A Angry Kids in my class. They are mistrustful and suspicious of everyone ("I don't need any friends, I don't trust nobody in this class"). They take everything as a personal affront or insult. They go out of their way to attract attention through every possible negative behavior: loud and frequent farting noises, banging on the table, kicking other kids' chairs, bumping the table so no one can write. And when asked to stop, they will tell you they weren't doing it even as they continue to do it.

Since winter break, our kids have been in "book clubs," reading the same book at the same pace so they can meet with each other and discuss the book. Now, imagine you're a capital-A Angry Kid. You hate books. You hate people. You hate being told what to do. Now you're in a book club. Perfect!

If you were to come to my classroom with the intention of watching my students chatter away in their book clubs, what you would probably witness instead in at least one corner of the room is someone getting Angry, kicking a chair or slamming a book down, and storming away from the group. Today it took me fifteen minutes just to determine that Marcelino hadn't finished his book, because he kept rolling his eyes and exclaiming, "Jesus Christ!" when I inquired whether or not he had done the reading. (He then went on to inform me in no uncertain terms that he had no intention of reading the rest.) Walter came to his book club meeting without his book and sat there for about twenty minutes; when Ms. Halpert told him to go get it, he got up, walked in a semi-circle around his chair, and sat back down. When I told him to go get it, he heaved himself up with a piercing "Okaaaaaaaaay!" Vanessa eloquently summed it up this way: "I hate school, I hate people, I hate reading, I hate reading to other people, I hate talking to people, I hate books..." I think it might have gone on from there, but honestly, I had heard enough.

I've been seeing that video clip of Cathie Black getting booed at the PEP meeting on Tuesday night and responding to the crowd's jeers with a sarcastic noise. I would love, love, love to see Cathie Black come into my classroom and demonstrate how to be one of those fantastic teachers she's always talking about, and show me how to raise the test scores of kids like my Angry Kids. I can be delivering the greatest lesson ever prepared in the most scholarly way ever, but if your hands are over your ears and you're rocking in the corner with your sweatshirt up over your head, that lesson is not going to reach you. I want someone like Cathie Black to acknowledge that quality teaching is only part of it, that one has to be a social worker and a psychologist and a guidance counselor and a parental figure all wrapped up into one.

Things I really needed

2011-01-27T11:49:00.000-05:00

First and foremost: the snow day, obviously. I had my hopes raised high for the last potential snow day; we even assigned "Sleep with your pajamas inside out and a spoon" as homework. I slept badly all night from the anticipation, woke up at 5 am to hear the big announcement, and ended up hugely disappointed. (Dirty teaching secret #437: I think teachers enjoy snow days more than our students.) So yesterday, when Ms. Halpert started to say, "What do you think are the chances that -- " I cut her off with a "Absolutely none. Zero." So it was an especially lovely surprise to get the gift of a snow day this morning! On the news, I saw a reporter interviewing several home health aides who had been waiting for the bus for more than thirty minutes so they could get to their patients, and I immediately felt guilty. So props to all the people (like Mr. Brave!) who did make it in to work today.

What I really needed, though, was a little encouragement. Between the situation with my co-teacher and my students' tiny attention spans, I was beginning to question my effectiveness altogether.

Then the other day, one of my students brought in a cake his mom had baked for us (delicious). The attached card thanked us for all of our hard work and dedication. "I have seen my son's love for school grow this year, and it could not have happened without you," she wrote. Both of us teared up when we read it; what a lovely expression of appreciation, and what validation for both of us.

For some reason, the other day, my thoughts drifted back to the infamous Julio. He's now in a self-contained class and, according to his new teacher, is doing great. Recently she contacted me to tell me that his classmates had voted him student of the month for his kindness. His kindness -- my Julio, who used to kick chairs in the direction of other students in my class. All of a sudden, I was tearing up again. Because I thought: I did that for him. Was I the only reason he got the services he needed? No. But was I an instrumental reason his mother finally saw the light after three unsuccessful, frustrating years in school? I give myself permission to say: Yes, I was. I may have wanted him out of my classroom, I may have had many, many unkind thoughts about him, I may have cried my eyes out with frustration over him, but I believed in that child. I am so honestly happy to hear that he's having a good year.

So that's what I really needed: to feel good about myself as a teacher again, if only for a few brief moments. (And to lie on my couch wearing my fuzzy pink slippers and blogging in the middle of the day while chunks of snow crack against my window -- that too.)

Time to change, time to rearrange

2011-01-23T12:21:00.000-05:00

There are some major differences in the culture at my former school, where I taught for the first three years of my teaching career, and the school I'm at now. One reason I was so happy to be hired at my current school was that the differences were so apparent: my current school is helmed by a principal who knows most (if not all) of our students by name and whose presence is obvious throughout the school. At my former school, the majority of my students literally could not identify the principal when they saw her. Also at my former school, all of our decisions as teachers were rigidly controlled by the administration. We didn't even write our own teaching points; they were handed to us by our literacy coach. By necessity, because we had so many push-in teachers, our schedules were arranged for us (and heaven help you if you were "caught" teaching a different subject than the one your posted schedule said you would be teaching). Everyone took conference notes in exactly the same way (a way that was changed so frequently you could get whiplash trying to keep up with which format to use). At my current school, there is a lot more -- dare I say it? -- trust that the administration puts in teachers.

There are other differences, though, that are more subtle, and they've made the transition rockier than I may have originally thought. I've blamed a lot of my unease this year on my co-teacher, but I'm sure that part of it is just adjusting to a new school. I started out doing things the way I'd always done them, just because that was the way it was done at my former school, only to find out that I'd missed the memo on my new school's way of doing things.

At my former school, for example, it was common practice to plaster every square inch of one's classroom with charts and examples of student work. You name it, I had it up on the wall in my classroom. Now, for my first two years I was a push-in teacher, and I got around to a lot of classrooms. All that stuff up on the walls? It was totally overstimulating. It was colorful, and it completely screamed "LOOK HOW MUCH LEARNING WE ARE GETTING DONE!", which is probably why we all did it, but it was extremely distracting and I'm not entirely sure whether it was for the benefit of our students or our visitors (I suspect it was the latter).

So when I got to my current school, I followed suit. Every chart we made went up on the wall somewhere. And it stayed there, because we were proud of them. The more stuff you have up, the more you must be teaching, right?

Then one day my principal gently informed us that he was going to help us "de-clutter" our classroom. He suggested we peek into other classrooms to see what was going on in them. And it wasn't that other classrooms didn't have anything up on their walls; it was just streamlined better, and not as overwhelming.

Case in point: We have a gigantic calendar in our room. It is so big that it literally eats up an entire bulletin board, so the only place we could stick it was behind the door, aka very far from the meeting area where calendars should live. We have this gigantic calendar because I used it last year when a teacher at my former school loaned it to me, and I loved it so much I went out and bought it for my new classroom, even though it was ridiculously expensive.

We recently rearranged, reorganized and relabeled our entire room, as part of our kumbaya efforts to work together more effectively. Our reorganization entailed carrying a dozen heavy tables back and forth down the hall (during which I stabbed myself in the ankle with a table leg, and it still hurts), wrapping every single basket in our library with packing tape, and countless hours of literal blood, sweat and tears. And then last week Ms. Halpert glumly reported that our principal had pointedly noted that our overlarge, inappropriately located calendar was still up.

And that's how it came to pass that we are replacing my beloved $100 calendar with a $13 one from Staples. If any teacher out there would like to purchase a very gently used, practically brand new gigantic classroom pocket chart calendar...contact me!

Phoning home

2011-01-21T18:18:00.001-05:00

I hate calling parents. I admit, this is almost entirely my fault. First of all, I always let too many infractions go by before I do so, so that by the time I call I have an insanely long list of complaints ("...and then today, he poked another child in the eye with his pencil and called him a boogerhead") that the parent is always shocked, I mean completely shocked to hear about because of course he's never been like this before and they had no idea there was any problem. (I know all the "Tips for Surviving Your First Year of Teaching" books always make it sound like you should practically be visiting your students at home over the summer to introduce yourself, but the reality boils down to: I don't have time to call 28 sets of parents just to shoot the breeze.) Second of all, at my last school, calling a parent inevitably resulted in one of three things: (1) The child returned to school alluding to the fact that he had been or would be spanked or hit if his parent received another call home; (2) the child returned to school even angrier at me and the world because one of his electronic devices had been taken away as a result of his behavior, prompting the child to make the entire world suffer for his own misery, or (3) absolutely zero change in behavior.

Thirdly, there's always the wariness factor. Often I'm calling parents I haven't met, because unfortunately the parents I need to speak to the most are the parents who don't come to Meet the Teacher Night or parent/teacher conferences. Sometimes there's a language barrier; sometimes I hear other children yelling or crying in the background; sometimes, with the advent of parents replacing their home phones with cell phones, I reach a parent who isn't really in a position to talk. Many times there are such long silences on the other end of the line that I'm not sure if I'm being met with hostility or not. In those cases I end up rushing through my prepared speech, or I find myself making excuses for the child ("I think he may have been upset because the other student took his pencil, but it's still not good manners to call someone a boogerhead"), even if in my head before the phone call I was ready to nail him to the wall. And a lot of the time, it's not like I'm telling the parent anything they don't know. "Yeah, he does that at home too, and I just don't know what to do about it" is a common response. It's as if they're telling me: "Look, lady, if I had better control over him, you wouldn't have had to make this phone call in the first place."

This isn't to say I haven't made progress. Last year, I pretty much gave up on sending notes home when I found several weeks' worth of The Baby's negative behavior reports stuffed into his desk. This year, I called a few parents on a day when Ms. Halpert was out of the building, and when she returned she wanted to know what the students had done that was so much worse than usual. My answer was nothing, really, but at some point the usual shenanigans deserve a phone call home too. Out of sight is out of mind, and I think some of our kids' parents have convinced themselves that they're perfect angels when they're out of sight at school all day...and if they don't hear anything to the contrary, how are they supposed to know what is really going on?

My favorite parent to call was The Antagonist's mother. She was the first one to tell you that her son had faults, and she was refreshingly open to hearing them. I called her so often that she would answer the phone by saying, "What did he do now?" and then we would both laugh. It may not have always changed his behavior, but just the idea that he knew that Mom knew what I knew at least put it all out in the open.

Unfortunately, I often call parents from my cell phone, just because it's more convenient to make a call from the privacy of my classroom, where I don't have a phone. Last year, Julio sauntered into the classroom (late as usual) one morning and informed me that his mother had sent me a text message. This year, my newest troublemaker's mother has taken to texting me at all hours; today, I got a text from her at 2:30 pm about where her son was supposed to go after school. I didn't actually read the text until after school was over, because -- believe it or not, newest troublemaker's mother! -- my phone does not ring out loud nor do I check my texts during the school day, even on Friday afternoons. On the up side, she gave me permission to call her at any time, and one of my favorite tricks is to whip out my cell phone during class and prepare to put students on the phone with their parents right then and there. (This backfired on me once when no one answered and I had to leave a message instead.)

Disengaged

2011-01-18T18:20:00.000-05:00

On any given day, I might find myself frustrated by a number of things that go on in my classroom. I've written before about minor calamities (broken pencils! lost folders!) and major ones (suicide threats! thrown chairs!). For the most part, those incidents -- like many things that happen when you become a teacher -- had nothing to do with my actual teaching ability, but rather my ability to not jump out a window in the face of overwhelming despair.

Lately, though, I've noticed something that does make me worry about my teaching ability: A number of my students, during mini lessons, are deeply engaged. Deeply engaged, that is, with various activities other than paying attention to my mini lesson. They are drawing on their folders. They are playing with their fingers, or with the person's hair in front of them. They are, in short, paying so little attention to the lesson that they are not even bothering to pretend to pay attention by staring at a space approximately above my head.

Over the years, I've tried a number of methods for bringing these students back to earth. There's the singsongy, syrupy approach, in which I praise various other students in the vicinity of the offending student who are paying attention: "I can see that A.J. is ready to learn. I would like to thank Tanya for paying attention..." This approach has a calming effect, but when you have students who are seriously hardcore not paying attention, they don't even notice you're doing it. Then there's the cranky bitter teacher approach, in which I zero in on a daydreamer with laser precision: "Manny, can you repeat what Jada just told us? ...I didn't think so, because you're not paying attention." I'm not such a fan of this one.

Recently, though, I realized what does get their attention: not pleading, not "I'm waiting," not barking out orders to "sit on your bottoms, eyes on me." What does get their attention is when I really get into my teaching; when I use funny voices, or toss in jokes, or act over-the-top animated like I'm just having such a good time teaching and we all will too, ha ha ha! In short, when I teach like a teacher should teach. Which leads to a vicious cycle, because when I'm frustrated by looking out into a sea of uninspired third graders who aren't paying attention, it's not easy to throw myself into a lesson that I'm convinced no one's listening to anyway. So I carry on with the other stuff, and half our day is lost on just getting settled on the rug.

My principal told me once that maybe I focus too much on that management, that I should just concentrate more on my teaching and the rest will follow. I think I need to experiment with taking his advice.

Putting the teach in team teaching

2011-01-13T21:29:00.001-05:00

Friends, I am having a rough year.

Those of you who followed my exploits last year -- or, for Pete's sake, since I began teaching three years ago -- may be throwing your hands up and thinking, "Seriously, Miss Brave, again?" Last year, alone in a classroom full of maniacs, all I wanted was for another adult to join forces with me to stop the madness. That's why I was so eager to teach in a CTT classroom at my new school. Now I'm...not alone in a classroom full of maniacs, and all I want is for my co-teacher to disappear.

I haven't blogged about it because I'm still not quite clear on when it all started to go downhill. I know that I come from a school where, by necessity, we ran a pretty tight ship on time management of our lessons. Because we had many push-in teachers for various subjects, if math was supposed to end at 9:37, math had to end at 9:37. I got a little frustrated with Ms. Halpert when it was 9:37 and she was still working with one student instead of transitioning to our next activity. But I never said anything to her about it, and that was my mistake.
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The year progressed. I started to leave school a little earlier at the end of each day, and Ms. Halpert (who is a first-year teacher) continued to stay late. As it turns out, she was becoming more and more resentful of the fact that I wasn't there with her. But she never said anything to me about it, and that was her mistake.

Meanwhile, both of us became increasingly fed up with trying to plan with each other; I tend to over-estimate students' capabilities, and Ms. Halpert tends to want to over-scaffold them. But neither of us said anything to each other about it...and that was our mistake.

It all came to a head during a grade-wide writing planning session in which Ms. Halpert sat with her back to me (not very "turn and talk to your partner"-like behavior) and an extremely tense and awkward vibe seethed in the air. The next day, our principal asked to speak with us individually; Ms. Halpert went first. I don't know exactly what was said at that meeting, but it was alarming enough that my principal told me he thought he might have to take one of us out of our classroom mid-year.

Eventually we agreed we would salvage our partnership through the end of the year. (We also privately agreed that we did not want to work together again next year.) But that decision has opened up a whole new world of work for both of us. In the process of transforming the layout of our classroom (again -- having 28 students and two meeting areas makes for an extremely cramped classroom space), I got whacked in the ankle with a heavy table leg. It hurt. We've been asked to work with the literacy coach and the math coach, which naturally makes us feel scrutinized. To add insult to injury, the literacy coach (who has never watched either of us teach a lesson) has been bringing us to other classrooms to observe the "structure of the mini lesson," which is something we both know we can recite in our sleep. Ms. Halpert was a student at Teachers College; I was a reading teacher for a full year. Both of us know how to teach a mini lesson; what we don't know is how to navigate each other.

We agreed to try to do it, but it's a long, hard slog through the bleak, dark days of January, and what awaits us now doesn't seem all that rewarding. Some days it makes me question my commitment to teaching altogether. Other days, I just want to make it all the way to June.

2010-12-10T17:48:00.000-05:00

If you read this blog regularly, you probably know already that I have a long list of complaints about my students: laziness, whining, extreme aggression toward other children...you name it, I've probably bemoaned it.

One of the most disappointing things I've encountered in my teaching career is when students show such an enormous lack of respect for classroom materials and supplies. At the beginning of my first year in the classroom, I bought colorful caddies to sit on each table and filled them to the brim with brand new supplies: pencils, pens, erasers and pencil sharpeners. Not more than a week later, everything was broken, missing, or defaced. My fellow second grade teachers and I made a mutual decision to stop giving our students post-its to jot on, because inevitably we would find post-its scattered all over the floor, ripped up into pieces, inscribed with inappropriate language or being made into flip books. Some of my students used markers to draw on pencils, on our desk caddies, on the floor.

This isn't, of course, a universal problem. A great many of my students treat their supplies exactly the way I remember treating mine in school, with the utmost care -- each pencil and eraser tucked lovingly into their pristine pencil case. (I hate to generalize here, but let's face it: Most of them are girls.) But every time I turn around, I inevitably catch someone scribbling doodles on a post-it and then ripping it into pieces that end up on the carpet, or someone else drawing on his notebook with a dry erase marker, or someone else using a scissors to whittle a pencil. (Why do you even have a dry erase marker? How did the scissors end up on your desk instead of in the scissors bin where they belong?) One of our students routinely snaps pencils in half when he gets angry. (Are you tempted to suggest that we give him a squishy ball instead? Been there, done that, our students managed to break the squishy balls.) My friend Edward managed to color all over the bottom halves of his sneakers with red marker (which then bled onto the floor, leaving red streaks.) Several of our students have managed to use their pencils to bore holes through the protective covering over their nametags, scribbling over their names until they were little more than black streaks.

How do you teach your students to respect their supplies?

Why can't we just get along?

2010-12-04T17:51:00.000-05:00

One of my students hates me, and I'm not sure what to do about it.

Sure, I've had students express anger and even rage at me before. I've had students glare at me and grumble at me and gripe at me. I've even had students yell at me. But having never team-taught before, I've never experienced a situation where a student is so freaking rude to me alone -- not my co-teacher, but only me.

Edward registered on my radar at the beginning of the year as a slightly spacey, soft-spoken kid who appeared to be in his own world most of the time but occasionally contributed really insightful comments during read aloud. His mother wrote us thoughtful notes about how she was working with Edward on his maturity.

Then, a few months into the school year, Mom got a new job. Edward started coming to school wearing dirty clothes, or clothes that were inside-out and backwards, or, most bizarrely, his karate uniform. He started putting his head down and falling asleep in the middle of the afternoon, and complaining that he was hungry and hadn't eaten dinner or breakfast. He stopped doing work altogether in class, stopped participating in African dance, and started antagonizing his classmates (one of whom I overheard exclaiming with exasperation, "Why is Edward so hard to work with?!").

And he started a significant crusade against me. When I said in a casual, friendly voice, "Hey, Edward, what's in your lunch bag there?" he snapped, "None of your business!" When I try to talk to him, about anything, he frequently puts his hands over his ears or a book in front of his face and says, "Blah blah blah!" He's asked me never to speak to him again, he's expressed a desire to petition the principal to have me fired and, most oddly, he's told me I smell like carrots (I diplomatically replied that I would take that as a compliment).

He can't explain -- or has chosen not to explain -- why he has such a huge problem with me, but no problem with my co-teacher. (Not that his interactions with her are a bed of roses, but he will at least follow her directions, whereas he has actually run away from me on numerous occasions.) The only reason we've ever been able to eke out of him is that I'm "mean." But I make every effort to speak to him in a polite, civilized tone of voice, and still our classroom interactions play out like this:

(Edward is rolling around on the carpet taking up spots that should belong to other kids.)
Miss Brave: "Edward, please sit up."
(No response from Edward. Ms. Halpert comes over.)
Ms. Halpert: "Edward, sit up NOW!"
(Edward sits up.)

A-ha, you might be thinking, it sounds like Edward is one of those kids who responds better to stern voices! Except when I do the stern voice, Edward claims I am "screaming" at him. I can assure you: In our classroom, it is Ms. Halpert who does most of the screaming.

I honestly didn't think it would bother me this much -- after all, as I said, I've had kids dislike me before -- but when every day he is insufferably rude to me and then responds to Ms. Halpert, I can't help taking it personally. Edward has decided I don't have to listen to anything Miss Brave says, because she is mean. So we're locked in this vicious cycle where I try to ignore his behavior, only to have him amp it up to the point where he's literally throwing it in my face (watch me misbehave! ha ha!), so I feel compelled to address it, and then I get: You're mean. Yesterday I informed him that he would not be participating in choice time, and he responded with, "That's what you say." In the end he spent choice time sitting next to Ms. Halpert wearing the angriest of angry faces, but didn't talk back to her the way he always talks back to me.

We're working to get counseling added to Edward's services, so I'm hoping this is something the counselor might be able to address with him. But in the meantime, I dread my interactions with him, which is a shame because I am, you know, his teacher. Julio's behavior last year was much more out of control, but at least Julio believed that I was, at least some of the time, on his side.

All over the place

2010-11-30T21:10:00.000-05:00

I'm not sure how to admit this. I'm not sure if you'll even believe me when I say it. Or perhaps, if you're a teacher yourself, you'll nod your head knowingly and say, "I could have told you this would happen."

Are you ready for it?

I miss my old class.

Don't get me wrong. I love my new school. I do not miss my old school. I love that the principal knows my students' names and that I can walk through the always-open door in his office and ask for help with a problem. I love that my super third grade colleagues and I are constantly firing off e-mails to each other about ways to strengthen our teaching. I love that my students get to participate in African dance, and chess, and playwriting, and musical theater, and tons of other opportunities that weren't available at my old school.

And yet -- that's why I miss them. When a handful of my third graders acted obnoxiously during one of our African dance classes, I couldn't resist the urge to lecture them about how my former second graders would have cherished the opportunity to participate in something so unique. And thus, not only did my mind wipe itself clean of memories of obnoxious behavior on the part of those very same second graders, but I pulled out one of those "you don't realize how fortunate you are" speeches that pretty much has zero effect on obnoxious third graders.

This is a school year of firsts: my first year in a new school, my first year teaching third grade, my first year in a CTT classroom. On the latter two, I remain conflicted: I enjoy the independence of my third graders but miss the relative sweetness and innocence of my second graders. I enjoy the collaboration of team teaching, the way my co-teacher challenges my thinking to better ideas and pushes me to be accountable to my ideas, but I miss the freedom of having my own classroom. But this is my fourth year teaching, and every year I've switched positions. I'd like something to remain the same for next year, just so I could have the experience of going into a school year already familiar with the curriculum.

Unfortunately, lately I've felt a little stuck in a rut -- as if I was pinning so many hopes on this new school, as if I could switch schools and magically all my teaching problems would go away. Since the school year started, however, I've been realizing that now that I no longer have to worry so intensely about covering my behind and keeping up with absurd paperwork, I have no excuse but to focus on my actual teaching...and in teaching, of course, that work never ends. Especially in our CTT classroom, my co-teacher and I face this constant struggle. Am I scaffolding enough?

Also, while I love the other teachers on my grade, several of them teach gifted and talented classes, and those of us with general ed kids often find ourselves in the awkward position of trying to decide whether a particular unit or lesson will be appropriate for our kids. When I walk down the hallway and peek into the TAG classes, where all the kids have their noses stuck in books or are busily working in hushed whispers, and then I open the door to my own zoo of a classroom, I'm faced with uncomfortable questions. Are the gifted kids better behaved? Is it normal for 27 third-graders to be making this much noise, or are we doing something wrong in here?

Just the other day, though, Mr. Brave commented on what a huge difference it is coming home to me this year. No longer am I crying about the latest out-of-control incident in my classroom, or seething with rage about the latest directive from my principal.

So, that's where I'm at. And at some point in the (hopefully) near future, I'll be writing less about my personal conflicts and more about the learning that's taking place in my classroom.

Back by popular demand

2010-10-26T22:09:00.000-04:00

I hate those bloggers who suddenly stop blogging, only to return with abrupt, short, cryptic posts that promise longer posts in the future. So because I didn't want to write until I actually had time to sit down and write...I just stopped writing altogether. And therefore became one of those bloggers who doesn't know how to play catch up because so much has happened since the last time I blogged.

There was my school's fall festival, at which I applied temporary tattoos (some of them woefully more temporary than others) and watched in awe as my principal painted delicate designs onto the faces of our students. (My principal face painted, people!) I gaped at the stacks of school merchandise (sweatshirts! mugs! hats!) being sold by the PTA, and the enormous bake sale, and the long lines in the schoolyard...what an incredible shock coming from P.S. Throwing Chairs, where no one even showed up for PTA meetings.

There was the Great First Grade Debacle, in which my principal made good on his longtime threat to send one of our notorious troublemakers Back to First Grade...a move that appeared to have backfired once he shrugged it off and observed, "It's just like third grade, only easier and I get to be the cool older kid."

There was the phone call from the school secretary notifying us that one of our other notorious troublemakers (we have five, to be exact) is moving out of the state. (I got the same phone call right around this time last year about Julio, however, and we all know how that turned out.) "When are you sending up the cake so we can celebrate?" I replied. (I said it. I admit it.)

There was the uncomfortable grade meeting during which my assistant principal awkwardly noted that students from "non-standard English-speaking families" (i.e., minority students) under-perform on state tests and average three and a half reading levels behind by the time they're in third grade.

There was the day a teacher accosted my fellow third grade teacher in the hallway to tell her that her class and my class were "the worst of the worst" in the school, and the time I had to console my co-teacher by telling her that at least she'd always remember her disastrous first class. (When I noted I'd had much worse, she responded by saying, "I think that's why you're so calm cool and collected all the time!")

There was today, when I arrived in the cafeteria after lunch and one of the school aides said to me, "I feel sorry for you, I don't know how you do it!"

I know how: By not letting behavior get to me. By remembering that tomorrow is another day. By savoring moments like when Gabrielle apologized to Shawna by saying, "I didn't know you felt that way, I'm sorry" or when Tara flawlessly explained the intricate plot of her level Q chapter book. By energizing myself towards productive activities like lesson plans...amazingly, I find that now that I don't have an assistant principal or literacy coach dictating my every lesson, I'm producing better work. My co-teacher and I have developed some great rubrics and models of the work we want our kids to be able to do in their reading notebooks and in their writing. I've even gotten a little pumped up about teaching math, because the kids seem to like it so much and I'm determined to make the abstract TERC curriculum clearer to follow.

So where have I been? I've been reprimanding Kiana to stop rolling her eyes and try African dance, I've been collecting suggestions on how to title my bar graph, I've been developing a grading rubric for reading notebooks, I've been struggling in vain to show Michael how to use quotation marks. ("Look in this book, Michael. Do you see quotation marks around every single word? Do you see quotation marks around the word 'said'?") I've been arguing with Brian about the best player on the Mets (he's partial to Jason Bay and Jose Reyes -- Mr. Brave's head about exploded when I told him, considering, "Jason Bay doesn't even PLAY!") and introducing my word work group to trigraphs. I've been reassuring Aliyah that sometimes glasses snap in half...and trying to convince Kiana to wear her glasses. I've been seething at the potential release of those teacher data reports, and frothing over the closing credits of Waiting for Superman (as if texting the word "possible" to some 5-digit number is all that's need to solve the problems in urban education!).

I've been adjusting. But in the future, I'll try to do a better job keeping you posted while I do.

The magic five

2010-09-25T06:43:00.000-04:00

Before the school year started, Ms. Halpert and I were warned (ominously, in some cases) about a group of our students, whose second grade teachers referred to them not-so-affectionately as the "magic five." Considering I used to teach in a classroom where a "problem behavior" was throwing chairs, I was prepared for anything. I was prepared for war.

But actually? They're not that bad. Are they irritating? Yes. Are they impulsive? Yes. Are they lacking in self-control and the ability to sit still during a lesson? Yes and yes. But are they throwing chairs? No.

I expressed this to a colleague of mine, and she rolled her eyes. "Some teachers here have never taught anywhere else," she said in a low voice. "You've definitely seen worse."

Is it the neighborhood? Maybe. Is it the attitude projected by the administration? Possibly. But the impression I get is that, whatever the cause, my new school's "worst kids" don't hold a candle to the worst kids as P.S. Throwing Chairs.

Speaking of which, I received an e-mail from a colleague of mine at my former school, who now has the infamous Julio in her self-contained special education class. She wrote:

We're working on relaxation techniques and developing him into a good leader. he is so kind to the other kids, he loves helping them and me. On the second day of school, Julio said to me, "Ms. J, I really like being in the small class. I was nervous at first but now I'm not. When I used to be in a big class, I used to get frustrated." He's doing REALLY well! Thanks for caring so much about him, he tells me that some of the things I do for him are what you used to do. He won't forget you.

Not to be all full of it, but: I credit myself for finally convincing Julio's mother, after years and years of guidance counselors and teachers all telling her the same thing, that a self-contained class was where Julio would thrive. And if I can help reform that kid, I can certainly reform the magic five.

What a difference CTT makes

2010-09-10T09:37:00.000-04:00

Even though I was eager to teach in a CTT classroom, and even though Ms. Halpert and I seemed to be getting along well for relative strangers, I had my reservations. Last year, my classroom at times resembled a war zone. And as the only person over the age of 9 in a room of thirty people, I learned to think fast, to make firm decisions, to improvise. I had no paraprofessionals and no push-in providers, so I never had to clear my decisions with anyone else. If I wanted to extend my social studies lesson and shorten my word work period, I did it. If I wanted to spend all of first period discussing the schedule for the week and changing classroom jobs, I did it.

When Ms. Halpert and I sat down and started planning, I quickly realized I would face a new challenge: compromise. One of the things I appreciate and admire about Ms. Halpert is that even though she's a brand-new teacher, she doesn't just take my word for it and let me make all the decisions. If our roles were reversed and I was a brand-new teacher working with someone more experienced, I would probably take a passive role and let the experienced teacher take the lead. But Ms. Halpert doesn't do that, and our give-and-take on decision-making often leads to better decisions. The downside is that decision-making can take twice as long.

So in addition to my usual first-day-of-school fears, I had added concerns about co-teaching for the first time. Even though we'd been working together and practically attached at the hip for the first few days, we'd never actually seen each other in front of a group of kids before. Would we accidentally interrupt each other's first-day-of-school speeches? Would we disagree in front of the students?

So I'm pleased to report that the first day of school went really well. I really, really like Ms. Halpert's style with our class -- probably because it's so similar to my style, which reassures me even more that our principal really knew what he was doing when he "arranged our marriage," as he put it. I felt confident that we really presented as a united front, a teaching team.

Even better, I'm really pleased with the style of CTT. When we walk our class through the narrow stairwell (where our 28 students don't all fit on one flight of stairs), one of us is at the front of the line and the other at the back. When we did our Writing On Demand, Ms. Halpert walked around the classroom to check in with our students, and I sat with Karolina, who's newly arrived from Hungary and speaks very little English. We looked through a picture dictionary together and worked on simple sentences ("I like books," "My brother plays football"), and I didn't have to worry that somewhere else in the room something sneaky was going down.

After school, we high-fived each other, went to the dollar store to buy 10,000 more sets of plastic bins (classroom teachers, take note: you can never have too many plastic bins) and divided up our extensive to-do lists for the weekend. And thankfully, I still feel optimistic about the way the year will go.

10 Things I Wish a Teacher Had Told Me

2010-09-07T18:21:00.000-04:00

Happy back to school! In honor of my officially becoming a tenured teacher (take that, new value-added teacher data reports to determine tenure), I present to you 10 Things I Wish Someone Had Told Me When I Started Teaching.

1. Don't sweat the small stuff.
You put your students' names on everything in your room only to find out that some of them are spelled wrong on your class list. Or some of them moved away and you're getting three more instead. And now you don't have enough little birthday cakes to complete your class chart! Something like this will inevitably happen in the first week of school. But the truth is, the only person who will notice is you -- and if you resent the fact that you're going to stay at school until 6 pm redoing it, you're just going to make yourself miserable.

2. If you can put off until tomorrow what you planned on doing today...you might want to think about it.
I realize this sounds an awful lot like procrastination, which to most teachers is a dirty, dirty word. But as a new teacher, you're going to be staying in your classroom until nightfall anyway. Your classroom is going to become a time-sucking vacuum of dry erase markers and despair. (That was poetic, no?) So if you really, really wanted to plan out your entire week's worth of math lessons, but it's after 5 pm and you've got at least an inkling of what you're going to do tomorrow -- go home. You'll take care of tomorrow tomorrow; tonight, you have to take care of you.

3. You can only plan what you can plan.
You can't build a house without bricks. So if you're itching to start planning your word work period but your workbooks haven't come in yet, don't make yourself do the same work twice. If you're a brand-new teacher, it will kill you that you have empty boxes in your plan book. Trust me, you will fill them with something. Probably forty-seven somethings that you won't finish. Which brings me to...

4. There is no such thing as empty time.
When I first started in my own classroom, I used to panic about how I was going to fill all the hours in the day. Then I quickly learned that at no point in your teaching career, ever, will you look around the classroom and say, "Well, kids, we're all done for the day! Let's knock off for a bit!" First of all, if you have elementary schoolers, everything will take seven times as long as you think it will (except, of course, the activities you actually want to drag out). And you can always ask the kids to read. Or write. Or practice their math facts. Or...you get the idea. If you're relatively innovative and have a good head on your shoulders, you will always come up with something for your students to do. That said...

5. Be prepared for anything. Really: anything.
Preps get canceled. Field trips get canceled. Assemblies get canceled. Push-in and pull-out teachers cancel. You know who never cancels? Your naughtiest student, that's who. It always pays to have extra activities on hand -- or at least in the back of your mind -- that you can pull out when the copy machine breaks and you can't hand out your social studies worksheet. Because idle students are restless students, and restless students are troublesome students.

6. Improvise.
I used to love it when my math teacher's guide instructed me to display something on my overhead projector. Because guess who didn't have an overhead projector? Or when I taught reading AIS and wanted to construct the same chart in all five of my classes, but desperately needed to save paper. That's when I discovered that contact paper + dry erase markers = reusable heaven. Work with what you have, and as Tim Gunn would say: "Make it work!"

7. Use resources from your sources.
Last year, when I was new to classroom teaching, I would fly into my neighbor's classroom every morning in a panic about something. "Today's math lesson says all the kids need individual thermometers!" "The first teaching point in the writing unit mentions a character map and I don't know what that is!" And every morning, my saint of a colleague would patiently walk me through it. "Oh, we never do that thing with the thermometers, we just skip it and do it whole-class." "Let me take out my writing stuff from that unit last year and we can put in for copies." Most of your co-workers were brand-new teachers once, too, and most of them will be more than willing to help you out.

8. Never assume. Speak up!
When I was first hired as a cluster teacher, my principal vaguely assured me that at some point in the first few weeks of school -- she wasn't clear on the details -- we would sit down and talk about what I should expect to be teaching in my brand-new position. If you've ever worked in a school like my former school, it won't surprise you to hear that I didn't talk to my principal again until she came to observe me teach -- in April. Sometimes you have to speak up and ask, whether it's about the curriculum you're unfamiliar with or the workbooks you haven't gotten or the dismissal procedures you're unclear on. At my former school, classroom teachers were responsible for picking up their classes from cluster teachers and delivering them to lunch; at my new school, cluster teachers bring their classes to and from lunch. (Which means, since I have a before-or-after-lunch prep three days a week, I get almost two solid hours kid-free in the middle of the day. Duuuuude.) So it never hurts to clarify. But remember...

9. Some days, you have to be brave and hold your own hand.
Your first year of teaching is often overwhelming. If you're lucky, you'll have a support system in the form of friends, family and fabulous co-workers. But your fabulous co-workers have their own bulletin boards to staple up, their own spelling inventories to grade and their own running records to copy. Those are the days when you may feel terribly alone in the world. But this too shall pass (and all that junk). Three years in, you'll be writing blog post reassuring new teachers about how much they don't know.

And lastly...
10. Your moment will come to you.
Teaching will rarely play out in your classroom the way it does in the movies. In your first year, probably no one will thank you for changing her life or turning his academic career completely around. But a little girl may delight in the books you picked out for her. Or a goof-off may admit, for the first time ever, to liking reading. Or you may just emerge unscathed from a year of epic battles. Whenever it happens, that will be your moment as a teacher -- and nothing in your value-added teacher data report can take that away from you.

The walls, the walls are coming down

2010-09-03T10:20:00.000-04:00

"The walls, the walls are coming down
The here and now is coming round"
--Fanfarlo

This year I will be the general education teacher in a CTT ("collaborative team teaching") classroom. In the CTT model, there are two teachers in a classroom, one a special ed teacher and one a general ed teacher. 60% of the students are general ed, and 40% have IEPs ("individualized education plans" for students with special needs -- IEPs outline a student's struggles, modifications and specific goals for progress in the year ahead). CTT classrooms are a good fit for students who need more support than SETTS (pull-out special ed services) but can function in a less restricted environment than a "self-contained" special education classroom (also known as a 12:1:1 because there is one teacher and one para-professional to every twelve students).

When I interviewed at my new school and the principal asked me whether I'd be interested in a CTT classroom, I immediately said yes. I had so many frustrating experiences last year with William and Julio, who needed IEP services but weren't getting them; I wanted the experience of being in a classroom where students who needed a modified curriculum were getting the services they deserved. And I was also interested in the experience of team teaching. As my new principal explained, "CTT is like a marriage, and I've set up a lot of blind dates."

Co-teaching will definitely be a new adventure. My new co-teacher and I have spent a significant amount of time together this week, setting up our room and planning for the first few days. One thing our principal warned us about our class is that we've got a number of strong personalities (something I'm used to by now!) and that we'll need to be highly structured in our expectations of behavior and get ourselves on the same page so that we can be consistent. There are so many things that go into classroom management that I've never had to agree upon with another teacher: What signal will we use to get our class silent and attentive? When is it okay to get out of your seat, or to ask permission to go to the bathroom? I have to admit, at one point, our endless discussions started to wear me down; when you're in a classroom by yourself, you get to make all the executive decisions and be done with it. I'm also experiencing a little bit of culture shock, moving to a new school; when we were discussing what the consequences should be for inappropriate behavior, my co-teacher suggested "removal from the group." Apparently it's common to send a student to another classroom, or banish someone from the meeting area--both totally verboten at my former school. (Which isn't to say that we didn't do it, but I preferred the gentler terminology of "giving someone a break" from the crowded meeting area or distracting classroom, because making a student sit apart was basically considered akin to corporal punishment.)

When I went for my interview at my new school, I could tell my principal was pleasantly invested in making sure that my co-teacher (who had already been hired) and I would make a good team. Apparently many people interviewed for the position, which tells me that he didn't hire just anybody to throw together, and he noted that we have similar styles. He also wanted us to meet each other first before he officially hired me. (I remember sending her silent messages of "Please like me! Please help me get hired!") I can see why he thought we would be a good fit; we're both analytical and detail-oriented. Unfortunately, sometimes we seem to be oriented to different details: In the past few days, my co-teacher (henceforth known as Ms. Halpert) has been focused on planning our curriculum, while my priority has been to get our room set up and in order
for the first day. Which is probably natural considering that I'm entering my fourth year and this is her first; I can teach those first few management mini-lessons in my sleep (you know, "writers think of ideas for personal narratives by sketching a memory," "readers prepare for reader's workshop by setting goals for themselves," blah blah blah), while she may not have ever considered that our students will need to practice pushing in their chairs over and over and over again on the first day of school. She starts a lot of her sentences with "I'm worried that..." but has at least given me permission to tell her to calm down.

So slowly but surely, we nailed down our routines and expectations. We'll ring a bell for attention, but we won't clap. No one may go to the bathroom when we're meeting at the carpet, but you don't need to ask permission to get up to get another pencil or piece of paper. And there will be no boys' line and girls' line -- because when I taped down lines on the floor to mark the beginning of each line, my new principal gently asked me to rethink it; there was a girl at the school who identified as a boy, and the principal preferred not to delineate gender specifics. "I want especially the girls to know that they're people, too, not just 'girls,'" he said.

Inside, I cheered. And I slowly began to think outside the box my former school built around me. We could do a "Question of the Day" as part of our new morning routine! We could build choice time into our Friday afternoon schedule! We could let our students have more than two minutes to pack up at the end of the day! "Here, no one will tell you how to do anything," noted a veteran teacher down the hall. And that is an idea I can get married to.

It's the end of the summer, when you send your children to the moon

2010-09-01T17:52:00.001-04:00

"She doesn't want to go, because she won't know what she's up against
The classrooms and the smart girls, it's the end of the summer"
--Dar Williams

The end of the summer always sneaks up on me. One minute I'm taking myself shopping mid-week and trying to convince myself that summer has weeks and weeks left to enjoy, the next I'm feeding the parking meter at the school supply store and blowing my entire Teacher's Choice allotment (this year clocking in at a grand $110) in a single hour.

This school year brings a huge amount of change to my teaching career: new school, new grade, my first year in a CTT classroom. But to my pleasant surprise, I've yet to have a single back-to-school nightmare, and I find myself uncharacteristically relaxed about the entire endeavor. Maybe it's because my lovely co-teacher is brand-new to teaching and has confessed to a serious case of "nervous new teacher" syndrome, leading me to assume the (out of character) role of laid-back veteran. (As I joked to Mr. Brave, "Can you believe there's a partnership where I'm the laid-back one?) Maybe it's because nearly everything horrible that could happen to me as a teacher has already happened. Maybe it's because the vibe at my new school is already so much more relaxed than my old one (which is going to take some getting used to: I still jump about when my principal drops by my room just to say hello and check in, and I'm still processing the news that teachers get to set their own classroom schedule).

So even though I'm never ready for summer to be over, this is the most excited I've ever been to start a school year (well, as a teacher, at least). Let's hope the feeling lasts, at least through Rosh Hashanah!

Summer dreams

2010-07-22T14:49:00.001-04:00

School may have ended, but my dreams about it have not -- at least Ms. Flecha's most recent post has reassured me that I'm not the only teacher who dreams about school over the summer. Most of my dreams have been of the "it's a regular day in school but something seems wrong for some reason" variety; of course, after I wake up, I realize that something seems wrong for some reason because schooooooool's. OUT. FOR. SUMMER! (Sing that like Alice Cooper, baby.) In one nightmare, my (former) principal was observing me in math, and I was panicking internally because I was going to have to pull some strategy lessons out of my you-know-where, and my mind was shrieking, "But didn't we already get permission to take apart our data binders?!" (In fact, we never did receive an e-mail granting us permission, and my AP came looking for some of my spreadsheets on the last day of school, so I waited until literally the moment before I walked out of the building -- walked out of the building forever, mind you -- to dismantle my data binders and throw away my data. Hundreds of pieces of paper, forests of trees, wasted.)

My most recent dream was a peculiar dream-meld of my former school and my new school: In it, I was team teaching, but with a former colleague, and I told her I'd be leaving the school. Our schedule for the day had "dance" on it (my new school has more arts, theater, music and dance enrichment programs available than my former school), but at that point the dream took a major digression (as dreams often do), wherein I may have been a student on the way to class myself.

But no such luck, I'm still a teacher -- while in Colorado on vacation, Mr. Brave and I made a pit stop at Target to buy shaving cream, and I was lured into the Dollar Spot like a bear to honey. If you're a teacher and you haven't experienced the sensory overload of the Dollar Spot, get yourself to Target -- they actually do have useful supplies for educators that come way cheaper than the ones in those Carson-Dellosa/Oriental Trading/Really Good Stuff catalogues. (I love Really Good Stuff -- I would buy all their really good stuff if I could -- but who can pay thirty dollars for a set of desk nametags when you can buy a set at the Dollar Spot for 1/30th of the price?) Poor Mr. Brave had to pack my bounty of little pointers and bookmarks and birthday badges in between his clothes so they wouldn't get crushed on the trip back. (Yes, there are Targets in New York, but the one in Colorado had tantalizing supplies I'd never seen before.)

While I was away, my new principal sent an e-mail to his new hires about a workshop he wanted us to attend before school started. I replied that I was familiar with the program but I would attend anyway -- and he wrote back that the workshop was really for beginners and there was absolutely no need for me to attend something superfluous. It was a really simple exchange, but it strengthened the good feeling I've had about my new principal and school.

Now, if only we could do something about the heat...! I can't believe I was out of town for two weeks and it's been this hot the entire time I was gone.

Lastly, this is belated, but in my first year of teaching I made a "School's Out" playlist. I dedicate it to all my fellow teachers who are enjoying a relaxing and well-deserved summer off:

1. "Freedom," George Michael
2. "Salt of the Earth," The Rolling Stones
3. "Forever Young," Rod Stewart
4. "Damn It Feels Good to be a Gangster," Ghetto Boys
5. "School's Out," Alice Cooper
6. "At Last," Etta James
7. "Child," Low Stars
8. "The Best of What's Around," Dave Matthews Band
9. "Better Days," Bruce Springsteen
10. "Bigger Than My Body," John Mayer
11. "You Can't Always Get What You Want," The Rolling Stones
12. "I Need a Holiday," Scouting for Girls
13. "Long Time Comin'," Bruce Springsteen
14. "How Far We've Come," Matchbox Twenty
15. "It's All Over Now Baby Blue," Them
16. "All Will Be Will," The Gabe Dixon Band
17. "Summer in the City," The Lovin' Spoonful
18. "See You in September," The Happenings

The last day

2010-06-29T10:20:00.003-04:00

On the last day of school, I sternly instructed my students, no one would be allowed to leave before I received a "real goodbye." There would be no sneaking off while my back was turned, I warned them, no frantic cries of "Iseemydadbye!" amid the usual chaos of the schoolyard.

As it turned out, the last day of school was just as much of a blur as the first. By the time we returned our books to the class library, cleared out our desks and seat sacks, played our last round of board games from home (did you know that Uno now comes in a Disney Princess edition?), ate our last leftover snacks from our Friday celebration, discussed our favorite moments from the school year, the importance of reading over the summer (with the Baby defiantly proclaiming, "I'm not reading nothing over the summer, it's boring!") and our summer vacation plans (Ecuador! Mexico! Florida! Sesame Place!) and handed out report cards and important notices (why did we photocopy a letter from Joel Klein addressed to "colleagues" that effectively slammed the UFT and send it home to the parent of every child in the school? who knows?), there was nothing to do but leave.

So leave we did, trooping down to the schoolyard in our summer clothes, the Mean Girl outfitted in a printed T-shirt that proclaimed a need for a "boy slave," Ashima in a pretty pink dress. Arianna (who, during our discussion about summer reading, noted, "My mom used to buy me boring books, but after you gave me those two Amelia books, I asked her if she could get me those instead) presented me with gorgeous white flowers; Marielle gave me a cardboard box inside an enormous pink bag that turned out to be an elaborate ceramic sculpture of two gilded elephants, which I'm informed represent good luck.

Good luck, Miss Brave's class.

Onward

2010-06-25T20:07:00.003-04:00

Monday will be my last day teaching at P.S. Throwing Chairs. Even though I've been waiting to say that for, oh, three years now, leaving will still feel bittersweet. The old adage about how "whatever doesn't kill you makes you stronger" has never run truer than in my teaching career. In my first year of teaching, I taught 400 students in 19 different classes on six different grade levels, in a school where I knew no one. I taught English Language Learners and special needs students in CTT and self-contained classes. I taught English Language Learners who were special needs students in CTT and self-contained classes. I had no curriculum, no mentor, and no bathroom key. I wrangled entire grades in the auditorium all by myself during mass preps and our school's most notorious troublemakers in the suspension room. By the time the year was over, I knew I never wanted to be a cluster teacher again, but I also knew how to walk into a room full of strange children and command respect (or at least a few moments of suspicious silence).

My second year, I provided small-group academic intervention in reading. My roster shrank from over 400 students to under 60, but for the first time I was subject to the same intense scrutiny of my teaching (not to mention my ability to sift through sanity-crushing loads of data) as everyone else. I survived weeks (months, even) when it felt like I was testing more than teaching and other weeks (other months, even) when it felt like I was covering other teachers' classes more than teaching. When the year was over, I felt I had finally developed a niche as a reading teacher...only to have my principal decide to place me in a classroom of my own.

At the beginning of this year, I had a running debate with myself over whether this year's start was harder or easier than my first year. In my first year, I didn't know a soul; at least this year, I had a support network of other teachers. In my first year, though, I got to flee the classroom after 50 minutes; this year, I had to stick it out with my most challenging students all day.

Was it easy to deal with William and Julio, to battle the Not-So-Magnificent Seven and my apathetic literacy coach? To teach an above-average size class of 28 students with zero push-in support and hold in my pee for hours on end? Of course not. But did it strengthen me as a teacher? I have to hope that it did, otherwise my three years here were in vain. And I can't bring myself to believe that.

Recently, with my classroom still in a shambles after Julio's most epic meltdown, I spent my prep on the phone with the parent of one of my students who's been diagnosed with tic disorder and will probably qualify for testing modifications and occupational therapy next year. He's a student who's been frustrating me all year, because despite his intelligence he bottles all his frustration inside him and prefers to work independently (very, very independently) rather than with anybody else. So this mother and I were talking, about the ways in which testing mods wouldn't give him an escape hatch from hard work but rather ease his frustration a little bit, and his mother very sincerely said to me, "You're describing my son exactly the way I see him." I can't even tell you how gratifying that is for a teacher to hear -- not "You're the best teacher in the world," or "You have changed my child's life forever," but simply, "You're describing my son exactly the way I see him" -- You know my child. You understand him. You may not always be able to get through to him the way you hope, but you continue to strive for him.

Later that week, she phoned our IEP coordinator and mentioned how happy she was to have me as her son's teacher, that she wanted to visit the school and tell the principal how much she appreciated me. Seeing as my principal hasn't acknowledged me since I notified her that I would be leaving, I don't think she's feeling particularly appreciative of me at the moment, but it was still nice to hear. Then I got an e-mail from my new principal, whose tone in addressing his staff seemed so cordial and genuine. It made me feel hopeful. I've been so happy in my personal life and yet so miserable in my professional life for so long. This time, maybe, I won't have to kill myself quite so much to become stronger.

First and last

2010-06-21T17:58:00.004-04:00

This school year, I have gone on interviews for three jobs. One was an administrative-type position at a non-profit that organizes free sports activities in the five boroughs. Even though I was overqualified for it and it would have meant taking a substantial pay cut, I was so desperate to get out of my classroom that I would have taken it anyway. Fortunately, I didn't get it.

The second was an opportunity to create and direct a toddler curriculum for another sports organization. I went on multiple interviews and even presented a PowerPoint. I was told the position had come down to me and someone else.

I didn't get that job either.

It appears that the third time's the charm. In the next school year, I'll be teaching in a third grade CTT class in another borough.

I have been trying to leave my school since the day I arrived, but after three years, my feelings are more mixed than I thought they would be. Leaving my school also means leaving behind a significant portion of my favorite students, who would have been in my class next year, and my fabulous colleagues. And just because my class this year was populated by the Not-So-Magnificent Seven doesn't mean every class would be.

But while my students would have changed, what probably never would have is the lack of support I get from my administration. Since the beginning of June, Julio has been off the wall out of control. I'm talking throwing chairs, throwing his shoes across the room, emptying the garbage can all over the floor, showing all of us the middle finger, running around the room hitting kids on the head, excessive swearing, jumping off tables, chewing on paper towels, and did I mention throwing chairs?! Actual chairs, people. Not pushing them, but picking them up off the floor and tossing them. One day last week I hustled my entire class out of the room ("Like it's a fire drill, line up and get into the hallway and don't make a sound"), and my principal sent someone upstairs to take pictures of my wrecked classroom like it was a crime scene, and other teachers stood by in the hallway and gawked like it was a crime scene, and after it was over people asked me, "Are they going to let him come back after this?" when I knew that the truth was that he wouldn't get suspended and that there would be no discernible consequences of any kind. And did you know that you are only "allowed" three (official) student removals per semester? I found out when my AP said, "Because this would be your second..." in a leading tone.

Today I called upstairs to tell her that Julio was walking around the room hitting kids on the head, cursing at them and grabbing their stuff away from them to throw it on the floor, trying to code a little urgency in my voice, like, remember what happened last week when my classroom was a crime scene? From there the conversation proceeded like this:

AP: "Oh, well, I'll try to call the guidance counselor."
Me: "Yeah, she already spoke to him."

AP: "Okay, well, I'll try to give her a call."

Translation: Hang up the phone and shut up. So now I feel a little bit like a second grader myself: You don't want to help me? Fine, I'm leaving and I'm taking my toys with me!

Someone inquired in a comment on my last post about whether Julio would get his special education placement. The answer is yes. Julio's mother signed her consent for Julio to enter into a self-contained second/third grade bridge class in our school next year.

Endings and beginnings

2010-06-11T18:21:00.002-04:00

I had a truly fantastic birthday at school. First and foremost, Julio's mother gave me the greatest birthday gift of all by not sending Julio to school on my birthday. As a result, it was a blessedly relaxing day, and I was genuinely touched by the gifts and the love my students gave me. The Sneak's mom even sent in birthday balloons! (Since Julio recently chose a meeting between me, his mother and my assistant principal to reveal his claim that the Sneak had showed him a condom in his wallet at lunchtime, the guidance counselor cynically observed that the Sneak was probably kissing up. Side note: When this juicy tidbit of information was revealed, my eyes literally bugged out of my head. It was followed by my assistant principal asked Julio, "How did you know what it [aka the condom] was?" Most awkward silence ever!)

I wrote thank-you notes to all the kids who made me cards or gifts :)

Of course, just when you're least expecting it, the $#@! will hit the fan. When I arrived in the morning on our Brooklyn-Queens professional development day, I wasn't expecting to find next year's organization sheet in my mailbox...but it was there. With my heart pounding, I quickly scanned all the names of next year's second grade teachers.

And my name...wasn't among them. Apparently my students aren't the only ones moving to third grade next year!

I wasn't thrilled. I did not want to change grades, I did not want to move into a testing grade, I did not want to deal with this year's second graders again, I did not want beginning ELLs, and I did not want to change rooms. And now: I'm changing grades, I'm moving into a testing grade, I have to deal with this year's second graders again, I'm going to have beginning ELLs, and I have to change rooms.

After the shock wore off, I consoled myself with some of the advantages. I will get push-in AIS support for math and reading and push-in ESL support for my ELLs, none of which I had this year. My new room is lovely and has much less bulletin board space (which translates into less wrestling with backing paper and standing on my tiptoes on tables trying to reach the top). And because we didn't do our articulation of classes until today, I was able to selfishly and sneakily place eight of my favorite students in my third grade class.

After dismissal, I went to see Arianna, one of my chosen eight, in her after-school program. Last year, Arianna was in my reading group, and when she was held over in second grade, I was happy to have her in my class. She's a lovely, sweet, earnest girl who isn't getting a lot of support at home and sometimes seems a little lost.

Last year, Arianna's second grade teacher lent her Amelia's Notebook, a book that purports to be the notebook of a young girl who loves to doodle and record her ideas. Arianna kept the book for months. When she finally returned it, I caught a glimpse of Arianna's own notebook. She had copied the pages of Amelia's Notebook -- copied them! -- so that she would be able to save it for herself.

Ever since then, I've been telling myself, You've got to get that girl her own copy of Amelia's Notebook. So today, after school, I presented Arianna with her own copies of Amelia's Boredom Survival Guide and Amelia's School Survival Guide. She gasped, then threw her arms around me and exclaimed, "Miss Brave, you're the best teacher ever!"

And at that moment, seeing how completely thrilled she was, knowing that she would treasure those books all summer long and that she would be coming with me to third grade...I kind of felt like it.

Fishy

2010-06-07T21:03:00.002-04:00

Every elementary school classroom probably has that one student who loves to shower her teacher with homemade gifts and trinkets. In my classroom, that student is Ashima, who came to my class from an English boarding school in Nepal. Ashima is an adorable, pint-sized study in the adjustments of immigration: At seven years old, she has an impressive knowledge of her Nepalese background ("Miss Brave, in Nepal, the cats are our gods"), but her wardrobe is 100% Hannah Montana. I have no idea what it's like to attend an English boarding school in Nepal, but it definitely hasn't always been easy for Ashima to adjust to life in a New York City public school; more than any other of my students, she's so easily upset by perceived slights of friendship or disturbances in which she doesn't receive a proper apology for the injustice in question.

Ashima comes to school nearly every day bearing some gift for me; once, a little bracelet she made from beads, once a figurine of a dog with a bobbling head. But today, she outdid herself; inside the bag she proudly presented to me was a miniature tank with a single beta fish swimming lazily around a teeny palm tree.

I let the kids write down suggestions for its name; ultimately, I went with Wilbur. So now we're a classroom of 28 children, 30 brassica plants, 1 burned-out teacher, and 1 Wilbur the fish. Here's my concern, though: My birthday is on Wednesday. Do I need to worry that she's going to bring me a puppy?

Sweet sixteen

2010-06-03T20:56:00.004-04:00

Well, it's been an eventful few days. First Julio had a meltdown of unprecedented proportions, in which he hurled an art project constructed from wooden blocks halfway across the room, then picked up the broken pieces and began smashing them to the floor, screaming incomprehensibly. This was literally ten minutes before the end of the school day, and I had an obligation to leave right when school was over, so I stayed just long enough to notify my assistant principal and hear her standard "Write it up as an anecdotal, call his mother and tell the guidance counselor" line. God forbid he had thrown those blocks toward us instead of away from us, and we'd be all be looking at concussions.

Meanwhile, Julio has spent a lot of his time lately insisting that he is "dumb" and "stupid," which is probably the source of all the rage simmering underneath the surface, so...this is a child in crisis, and I cannot for the life of me get anybody to care. I love our guidance counselor, but she is extraordinarily overworked as it is and she seems to spend most of her day running around the building putting out fires and dealing with immediate emergencies. (Ironically, her office is directly across the hall from my classroom, but naturally she wasn't in it when Julio threw the blocks.) My assistant principal is an intelligent, competent administrator, but she seems more interested in how things look on paper. And all over the school there is a chain reaction of middlemen, from the IEP coordinator to the social worker to the guidance counselor, when what we really need is a direct line for emergency situations.

That night, Julio put on a pint-sized superstar performance at the school talent show, and the next day, he didn't show up for school. Obviously he had some recuperating to do. All this time I've been thinking he's an emotionally disturbed child with untreated ADD, but maybe he's just preparing for his future as a rock star!

Sixteen more days, sixteen more days...

And what are we going to be doing with our time in those sixteen days? Not doing any quality teaching, that's for sure! No, we're administering a final round of reading assessments. Back at the beginning of the school year, we started these new assessments that took us two months to complete, and that was with a push-in AIS teacher helping us. Now, we have sixteen days of school left and no push-in AIS teacher, so this is going to get done how...? It's not going to have any impact on report card grades, because those are due before we'll finish. We never looked at our original set of data from September or used it to drive our reading instruction in any way, so I have no idea what this round is supposed to measure or accomplish. All I know is that it means I have students reading at fantastically high levels that I never encountered when I was in AIS (my highest reader is a P, or end of third grade), but I won't get to meet with them for guided reading or small group instruction because I'll be busy assessing whether my students know how to read pairs of rhyming words.

In other news, today in read aloud we were up to the chapter of Charlotte's Web where Charlotte dies. I think I almost cried a little in front of my whole class. Even though we had been preparing for Charlotte's death for a while now (and most of the kids have already encountered the movie, so the cat was out of the bag), they still seemed faintly stunned that it had actually happened. I don't think they're enjoying this book as much as they did James and the Giant Peach, because it's not as outrageously funny, but I think it has such rich messages about friendship and loyalty and duty and growing up (they loved the parts where Fern is itching to go off and ride the Ferris wheel with Henry Fussy). Today, in another attempt to move past the vocabulary of "sad," I talked about the word "grief" and how grief is deeper than sadness, like what you feel when someone close to you dies. "You might be sad if you lose your favorite toy," I said, "but you wouldn't feel grief." So we talked about how Wilbur is grieving for Charlotte, and Ashima, who joined my class when she moved to the United States from Nepal in November, raised her hand and said, "That reminds me of James and the Giant Peach when James' parents died." Yay! There's nothing like a good literary connection to warm an embittered teacher's blackened, shriveled heart.

Miss Brave gives up

2010-06-01T20:52:00.004-04:00

I have a long post about Julio saved that I've been meaning to finish and post, but I've got to be honest, people, I'm kind of tired of talking about him. To his mother, to my assistant principal, to the guidance counselor, and the IEP teacher, and even to Mr. Brave when I come home and say, "You won't believe what Julio did today..." I mean, what more can you say about a kid who crawls under your desk, takes his shoes off, tosses them into the middle of the room and then emerges, feigning confusion and asking, "What happened?" Last week, Julio asked me if he could have a drink of water. I told him he would need to wait until after our mini lesson. He went to the water fountain, drank water, and then returned to me and...asked me if he could have a drink of water. I couldn't help it: I laughed. "You just drank water," I exclaimed. Julio shook his head. Drops of water were literally flying off his lips as he proclaimed, "I didn't drink any water!"

How can you reason with that? You can't. So...I just stopped trying. I'm not going to argue with him. I'm not going to berate him. I'm pretty much going to ignore him. Wait, let me rephrase that: I'm going to ignore his antics. The singing. The banging. The dancing. The screaming. See, Julio does his work; he just doesn't do it at the same time or in the same manner as everyone else, because Julio thinks he is Justin Bieber and has to schedule his schoolwork around his concert performances of "Baby" (now playing at a classroom rug near you). Any antics can't ignore, I either (a) address in a supernaturally calm voice or (b) pick up the phone and call my AP, my guidance counselor or the office...whoever picks up the phone and will send someone to come get him. (Recently, a school aide burst into our room asking, "Where is he?" 27 pairs of eyes immediately slid over to the closed bathroom door, where Julio had barricaded himself and was loudly banging out the rhythm to "We Will Rock You." "What's he doing in there?" the school aide demanded. I shrugged. Lady, if I knew that, I'd either be making a lot more money or we wouldn't be in this mess in the first place.)

Julio isn't getting placed in 12:1:1 by the end of the year -- I believe the guidance counselor's exact words were "You're stuck with him until the end of the year, I'm so sorry." So I have developed an attitude of Zenlike patience and calm. The mantra that goes with it sounds like this: Eighteen more days, eighteen more days, eighteen more days...

The ownly best teacher in the world, part 2

2010-05-22T08:19:00.002-04:00

After I hugged the girls and thanked them for their cards, I told them I would take them home and put them on my refrigerator, where I hang all the cards they make for me. (When I hang them on my desk in the classroom, they inevitably get ripped and torn down by my whirling tornado students.) As usual, they were fascinated by any mention of my personal life (Miss Brave has a refrigerator?!).

"Did Mr. Brave ever make you a card telling you he loves you?" one girl asked.

Mr. Brave? Love? Everyone giggled the way second grade girls giggle when the subject of romantic love comes up.

Then, glancing toward our class birthday calendar (my birthday is next month), she ran away with it: "Ooooh, maybe he is waiting for your birthday and he is going to surprise you!" With that, everyone began chiming in. "I think Mr. Brave should make you a birthday surprise!" "Yeah, I think Mr. Brave is going to surprise you on your birthday!"

"Wow," I said, "I should bring Mr. Brave here to listen to your suggestions!" Now poor Mr. Brave has to compete with the girls in my class for a birthday surprise.

The ownly best teacher in the world

2010-05-20T07:31:00.003-04:00

Here's hoping that at least some of you fabulous teachers out there were blinded by a dazzling display of appreciation this past Teacher Appreciation Day. I know I sure felt appreciated by those "STOP LISTENING TO THE TEACHERS' UNION!" commercials I hear at the crack of dawn as I steel myself for another day in my overcrowded classroom with zero intervention services support and no accommodations for my special education student in a teaching position that may or may not be eliminated due to excessing and budget cuts...but hey! Thanks for the belated bagel!

Anyway, my class had a trip on Teacher Appreciation Day, so in the morning before we left, I had my kids make Teacher Appreciation Day cards for other teachers in the school. Most of them chose their first grade teacher. Emilio (aka the Class Clown) started going on and on about how he loved Ms. S because she had given his class ice cream. I reminded him that we had had an ice cream party, too.

"Yeah, but that was one time," he said scornfully. "In Ms. S's class we had ice cream like millions of times." (As you may have guessed, Emilio is prone to exaggeration.)

"Oh, so you like Ms. S better than me because she gave you ice cream?" I asked jokingly.

"No, I like Ms. S better than you because she's nicer than you."

Zinged! No one cuts a teacher's self-esteem (well, other than those "STOP LISTENING TO THE TEACHERS' UNION!" commercials) more skillfully than the Class Clown.

Since then, a few of the girls in my class have been out on a mission to reassure me that I am, in fact, the teacher most deserving of appreciation. I'm sure every class has a cohort of those girls: They live to please, they always volunteer to help, they bat their eyelashes adoringly and shyly tell you that they want to be teachers exactly like you when they grow up. And that's how I ended up with these:

Take that, Education Reform Now! Now I feel appreciated.

What every teacher longs to hear

2010-05-15T07:09:00.002-04:00

The Class Clown has recently discovered the Magic Tree House books, a series about a boy and a girl who travel back in time and around the world to solve mysteries. The other day, he looked up from his book with an amazed expression on his face.

"Miss Brave," he began, "I may have never said this before ever in my whole life, but...this book is awesome!"

Later on, he approached me with an expression on his face that said, Are you ready for this?

"Miss Brave," he said, "I may have never, ever, ever, ever said this before, in my whole life, but...I like reading!"

Ladies and gentlemen, my work here is done.

Be here soon, June

2010-05-13T17:08:00.004-04:00

This morning, a very verbal, intelligent student said to me, "Miss Brave, my daddy said something really bad about you." Then she kind of clapped her hands over her mouth. Half-concerned, half-curious, I asked what he had said.

"He wasn't gonna get up and take me to school because he was too lazy. So I said, 'Do you want Miss Brave to give me a bad report card and I won't go to third grade?' And he said, 'If Miss Brave gives you a bad report, I'll just punch her in the face. She's short anyway.'"

Apparently I don't deal with enough; now I have parents telling their students they have no problem with punching me. I felt like I was in that scene in It's a Wonderful Life where George Bailey calls up Zuzu's teacher and bawls her out for letting Zuzu walk home with her coat open and then the teacher's husband punches George in the bar. "She cried for an hour!"

To top it all off, on the way to lunch, one of my girls dropped an entire can of Pringles (why do parents send an entire can of Pringles for lunch? Particularly when we eat lunch at 10 am?) on the staircase, and The Baby decided to eat chips off the floor. I don't know why they constantly pull stunts like that when they're so totally and obviously going to get caught; besides the fact that about six grossed-out classmates ratted him out as soon as we exited the stairwell, plus the fact that their grossed-out-ness was reported to me by another teacher who overheard cries of "Ewwww, he ate it!", but he was staring at me bug-eyed with chipmunk cheeks and chip crumbs all over his face. It was exactly like that scene in cartoons where the cat eats the bird and there are bird feathers floating in the air.

30 more days?

Miss Brave: Lawyered

2010-05-12T19:00:00.003-04:00

One of my students handed me this note this morning as I was taking attendance.

5/12/10

(Yes, he actually wrote the date.)

Dear Miss Brave

I Just need to tell you that the Mean Girl is bothering me here are the things she does.

(What follows are actual bullet points, ladies and gentlemen)

Dosent know how to play.
hits me.
tells me to tell something to someone else when you arnet looking.
takes my pencils.
Dosen't let me concentrate when you are speaking.

she bothers me soso so so so so much.

Miss Brave I want you to change the Mean Girl's seat.

(And just in case it wasn't clear...)

P.S. I don't want to be her partner :(

Too funny not to share

2010-05-11T20:06:00.003-04:00

Scene: My classroom, during art. Our lovely art teacher, Ms. R, is good-naturedly complaining to my students about their habit of anxiously hollering her name across our (small) classroom.

"Every five seconds I'm hearing, 'Ms. R, Ms. R!'" she scolds. Emilio throws up his hands.

"Welcome to Miss Brave's world," he says.

The Not-So-Magnificent Seven

2010-05-07T15:18:00.003-04:00

My new points system is working out pretty much the way I thought it would (although not necessarily the way I hoped it would): my most fantastic, excellent, never-ever-misbehaved students have hit 30 points and above, my good students have between 20 and 30 points, a large chunk of the class has between 10 and 20 points, and then I have seven students -- the Not-So-Magnificent Seven, let's call them -- who have yet to reach 10 points for their first "reward" and usually hover dangerously around zero.

What I like about my new system is that it allows me to hone in on the kids who are doing the right thing, rather than going right to the kids who aren't; when I stand there with my points clipboard, I'm looking for the kids who are doing what they're supposed to be doing. It's allowed me to recognize those quiet kids who always slip under the radar because they never cause problems. It's also allowed me to recognize exactly who's in that troublemaking category, that core group of seven kids who can't manage to hang on to their points long enough to earn a chintzy eraser from the small prize bin. 75% of my class makes an effort and strives to do right most of the time. But it's the Not-So-Magnificent Seven, the other 25%, that cause 90% of the problems. They are the kids most likely to call out, to interrupt, to be unprepared, to lose their books and papers and folders and pencils, to use unkind language and violent behavior. Together, they present such a broad spectrum of capital-I Issues that, for those of you who have never had the chance to observe the Not-So-Magnificent Seven in their natural habitat, I thought it would be useful to present a guide to their actions and behaviors should you recognize one of the Seven in your own classroom.

1. The Sneak
The Sneak gets away with a lot because he, unlike many difficult students, is not loud and obnoxious. It's only by making careful study of his actions that a teacher begins to realize that the Sneak is not actually working, as he appears to be, but rather is crashing colored pencils together under his desk, or thumbing through Pokemon cards, or drawing crude pictures of gangster-looking dudes with giant sunglasses and weapons. The Sneak is frequently discovered to have items that don't belong to him in his possession, but when confronted with the evidence, the Sneak goes completely blind, deaf and mute, all "Who, me?" and "I don't know how that got there" and "Someone must have put it in my desk!"
Most common form of communication: Shrugging and blank stares.
Most recent offense: Getting up in the middle of Read Aloud to pass a notebook to another member of the Not-So-Magnificent Seven. When I confiscated the notebook, I found that it was filled with inappropriate language and drawings. The Sneak, of course, could not explain how any of it appeared in his notebook or why he was getting up in the middle of a lesson to pass it on.

2. The Baby
The Baby mistakenly believes that he can get his way in the classroom simply by pouting and whining, even though he is neither cute nor persuasive. When others are being rewarded for good behavior, the Baby is frequently heard to exclaim, "I want that!" or "I wish I could get that!" without acknowledging the unfortunate truth that one needs to behave in order to earn rewards. When threatened, the Baby reacts by pulling his sweatshirt or schoolbag over his face, avoiding eye contact, refusing to explain himself. The Baby is unhealthily stubborn and reserves the right to stew in his own bad attitude even in the face of others enjoying themselves. Although he clearly finds the thought of negative behavior intoxicating, the Baby doesn't have it in himself to cultivate that devil-may-care attitude, so his forays into genuine troublemaking usually result in him bursting into tears and begging for a second chance.
Most common form of communication: Whining "Aw, man!" when he gets in trouble.
Most recent offense: Refusing, for an entire afternoon, to do any work. When I whipped out my cell phone to call his mother (I have threatened to do this many times, but this was the first time I actually went for it), he flipped out.

3. The Drama King
With an attitude usually assumed to be more native to females, the Drama King insists that it's not his fault he can't get any work done -- everyone has it in for him! Someone was making fun of him! Someone didn't want to share! Someone snatched something away from him! Someone won't leave him alone! No one wants to be his friend! The Drama King is so wrapped up in his woe-is-me lifestyle that he often isolates himself in a corner of the room for no apparent reason. Should something unfortunate happen to him -- such as a broken pencil or a dropped book -- everyone in the room must experience his inappropriately loud cry of distress. When caught red-handed in the act of wrongdoing, the Drama King's rebuttal emerges in a rambling flood of mumbled excuses that typically have nothing to do with the crime at hand, usually something like: "It's because, at lunch no one wanted to sit next to me, and I was trying to get the pencil but she just snatched it away from me, and everyone was just telling me to stop for no reason, and my head hurts because I'm so thirsty because I didn't eat breakfast this morning because my stomach was hurting."
Most common form of communication: All misery, all the time.
Most recent offense: According to the Sneak, the Drama King is allegedly the author of many of the inappropriate sections of the confiscated notebook.

4. The Antagonist
Unlike the Drama King, who mistakenly believes that he is always the target of some imagined offense, the Antagonist is spoiling for a fight. A bright and creative thinker, he believes all of his classmates are far less intelligent than he is and never passes up the opportunity to let them know it; a loud "Duh" or an exasperated "Noooo!" to a classmate's wrong answer is the Antagonist's favorite weapon in his arsenal against second grade stupidity. The Antagonist, unlike the Baby, actually is cute enough to get away with some degree of wrongdoing, but his taunting of his classmates and his aggressive behavior leave other students begging to be separated from him.
Most common form of communication: Name-calling and the occasional punch in the arm.
Most recent offense: A sad-eyed student approached me in the lunchroom today and said, "I don't feel comfortable with the Antagonist at my table because he called me a poopie girl and took my pencil away from me." (Side note: Don't you just love that she phrased her complaint by saying, "I don't feel comfortable"? I changed his seat pronto because that girl worked it.)

5. The Class Clown
Hyper-energetic, frenetic and occasionally entertaining, the Class Clown loves to sacrifice a serious mood in the classroom for the sake of a good joke. He wants all the attention, all the time, even if it makes him the target of what he believes to be unfair punishment. Despite his obvious intelligence, the Class Clown is so focused on pretending he's the star of his own one-man show that he is often lost when it comes to independent work. While others listen to directions, the Class Clown calls out to ask what he's supposed to do because he wasn't listening the first time the instructions were given; while others raise their hands and wait for help, the Class Clown hollers across the room that he doesn't understand, or needs help, or doesn't get it. The Class Clown just can't seem to stop himself from jumping out of his seat and interrupting constantly. Believing himself to be adorable and funny, he is deliberate in his attempts to get away with everything from extra sips of water from the fountain to drawing pictures during work time. While his behavior may seem harmless and cute in small doses, his overbearing personality and refusal to admit any wrongdoing will wear thin by May.
Most common form of communication: Sly (although toothless) grin.
Most recent offense: While making a card for his first-grade teacher for Teacher Apprecation Day, he commented that he loved her because she gave the class ice cream a lot, whereas I have only held one ice cream party this year. "So, you like her better than me because she gave you more ice cream?" I joked. He replied, "No, I like her better because she's nicer than you." Ba-dum-ching!

6. The Mean Girl
Interestingly the only female of the group, the Mean Girl is all attitude, all the time. Her responses to simple requests ("Please take out your math journal") consist of dramatic sighs, elaborate eye rolls and often the phrase "Oh my Gawd." A resentful teenager trapped in the body of an eight-year-old, the Mean Girl spends every waking second of the school day chatting, gossipping and making excuses, all the while managing to act incredibly put out that she's being expected to do any work.
Most common form of communication: Besides all the dramatic body language, the Mean Girl is cursed with a loud, piercing voice that somehow always manages to sound like a whine.
Most recent offense: While sitting right in front of me during one of my many lectures about not speaking when a teacher is speaking, she attempted to whisper to someone at the next table.

7. The One Who Completely Loses His $#!@
This is, of course, Julio, about whom no further explanation is really necessary; what other kid would deliberately squeak his sneakers across the floor so often and so loudly during today's Read Aloud that I interrupted it to call my assistant principal, feign normal behavior while she was watching him and then begin throwing things across the table and finish it off by barricading himself under his sweatshirt inside the closet? This after a morning in which he, for no apparent reason, cocooned himself inside his sweatshirt and crawled underneath a table from which he would occasionally emit a loud groan, squeak or meow. (Yes, a meow.) Evidently this didn't garner the desired attention, because he emerged only to fake hitting his head on the table and collapse on the floor again. He topped off the afternoon by randomly spinning in circles. A telling anecdote: During Read Aloud, we were discussing what it means when someone can't be trusted, and Julio stood up and yelled, "Like me, when I tell lies!" After school, when I personally delivered him to his mother to tell her what a terrible day he'd had, what did Julio do? He lied.

Hidden talents

2010-04-26T17:14:00.002-04:00

Kiri at Elbows, Knees Dreams asked me to participate in a meme about my "hidden teacher talents" -- you know, those astonishing feats of superteachery we can all perform that don't exactly line up as bullets on a resume. Here are mine:

I can distinguish between a child doing the "pee dance" who actually has to use the bathroom and a child doing the "pee dance" who's just trying to convince me he has to go to the bathroom.
When a child slams his book/folder shut and triumphantly exults, "I'm done!", I can tell whether or not he is, in fact, actually done.
I can, on the spot, come up with about 30 more things for children who are "done" to do.
Out of the 28 children on line behind me, I can tell which one is squeaking his hand on the banister, which one just jumped down the last two steps and which one is surreptitiously whispering to the girl in front of her.
I do an impeccable Toad voice in my read aloud of Arnold Lobel's Frog and Toad books.
I can instantly feign shock and awe in response to a child who believes he is imparting new information, even if what she is actually saying is, "Miss Brave, did you know that birds have wings?!"
I have mastered the "I was just checking to make sure you were paying attention" response to students pointing out my mistakes.
I can make chores seem like such a special, precious task that children are practically begging me to let them organize things.
I know where in the room my naughty kids are at all times and can instantly sense when they are up to no good.
I can get an auditorium full of hundreds of children to quiet instantly just by clapping my hands.

April showers bring May changes

2010-04-26T14:58:00.003-04:00

Oh, it's been a rough couple of weeks. Through some combination of spring fever and general boredom, it felt like my class was starting to come apart at the seams, tattered by frayed nerves and overworn patience. All of a sudden we were sniping and tattling and whining, problems we never experienced earlier in the year. Apparently one of my male students exposed himself (yes, that kind of exposed) to another student in the cafeteria, to which the other student responded by calling him "gay." And if I dried one more set of "she said she's not my friend anymore" tears, I was going to lose it.

On the morning of a recent field trip, I decided to give everyone a fresh start by changing everyone's seats, which had zero effect. On the field trip, we visited a restaurant where I was appalled and embarrassed by my class's behavior: bouncing up and down on the booths, crawling underneath the tables, flicking straw wrappers. I thought back to our very first field trip, to the farm, and how my excited, wriggly new second graders were able to contain themselves as they stood in two straight lines and waited to pet the animals.

When we got back from the field trip, I knew we needed a bigger change. When I asked the class if they felt like it had been hard to learn lately, they nodded vigorously and hands flew up around the room, eager to explain why. "Sometimes people are talking a lot and it makes it really hard to concentrate." "I keep looking out the windows and thinking about how nice it is outside and how I want to be outside playing instead of in school." (Honesty is the best policy, right?)

I came up with a points system in which I conspicuously walk around with a clipboard, adding or subtracting points from each individual student. Ten points gets you a trip to the small prize bin, twenty points the larger prize bin, and so on to more coveted rewards like fifteen minutes of free time or computer time. I'm fairly pleased with the results so far, if only because it justly rewards the kids who always do the right thing and always have to listen to my lectures to the whole class even though they always follow directions...and it does seem to have inspired those kids who are "on the fence," behavior-wise, to shape up. But there's still three or four kids (Julio among them, of course) who gain and lose the same one point over the course of the day and have yet to inch above three points even while my superstars have already collected their first rewards.

So today we took another field trip, and my class was overall much more well-behaved than they were on the last one. After we returned to school to eat our lunches, finish the last few satisfying chapters of James and the Giant Peach and pack up, I rewarded them with perhaps the most valuable prize of all: free time. And I was amazed: Whereas in the course of independent reading or writing or math time I usually have to ask them to quiet down multiple times, during free time I didn't have to say it once. Some kids were playing Hangman or Tic Tac Toe on their slate boards, some were drawing at the carpet (and managing not to squabble over the crayons and colored pencils), some were reading together at their seats, but no one was yelling or shouting or screaming.

Obviously, it wasn't complete silence -- the kind of silence I expect during independent reading or writing or math work -- but it was also quieter than it is during math game day or science groupwork. One of my devoted helpers took it upon herself to rearrange the schedule for tomorrow and then helped me post up the teaching points, while another begged me to help organize the classroom library. Several kids drew "you're the best teacher" cards. A number of boys chose books from the math bin, which we almost never get to read from because we're too busy trying to squeeze in all the components of Everyday Math. Others chose old favorites we read aloud at the beginning of the year, like Wemberly Worried and How Full is Your Bucket? For Kids. Some of them used our class stuffed animals to act out Mo Willems' The Pigeon Wants a Puppy.

It was -- dare I say it? -- peaceful. And it got me thinking about how I can better incorporate free time or "choice time" into our overworked, overstressed, overstimulated days.

Goodbye vacation

2010-04-06T12:45:00.003-04:00

As usual, it's here too soon: the last day of vacation. The upside to my vacation is that I hardly dreamt about school at all (which I'm horrifically guilty of doing on vacation) and barely talked about school (also guilty). The downside is that I consequently did very little work for school, either. Just before the vacation, I received my teaching points for our new reading and math units (which are written for us by our literacy coach). The reading teaching points made me cringe so much that I couldn't even look at the writing ones until the next day, at which point my jaw dropped: They are literally the exact same teaching points we used for our unit in September. Two words have been changed in each one, to replace the theme of September's unit with the theme of this unit, but other than that, they are exactly the same.

(1) Did anyone in adminstration actually approve this? If so, how and why?
(2) What exactly does our literacy coach do all day, if she's just copying and pasting stuff from old units and passing them off as new units?
(3) Why must I always teach what my literacy coach and administration order me to instead of what I want to?

Although administration must feel differently, I am not stupid, and my students are not stupid, and we all know this means we are actually teaching the same unit over again, which is ridiculous on about eighteen different levels and I refuse to do it. And yet, over the vacation, all my badass plans to rewrite the unit evaporated, because...it's April and I'm already burned out? I wanted to have a life outside of teaching? I am lazy and incompetent and don't care about what's best for my students? You be the judge.

Maybe it's because I've come down with a cold just in time to go back to school, or maybe it's because next year's preference sheet is already out and I'm pondering what I'll be doomed to teach next, but I really, really don't want to go back to school tomorrow.

The latest in the saga

2010-03-25T17:54:00.003-04:00

Do readers of this blog feel like they're tuning in to an educational soap opera?

Anyway, I met with Julio's mother this morning. She asked if she could come into the classroom a few times a month to sit with him, to see if that would help him focus. I said I would have to run it by my assistant principal. She promptly nixed the idea, saying it would be "disruptive to the other students" (evidently she's in denial about how disruptive Julio is all on his own...!). I mean, I get that, but as diplomatically as I could I said, "I think Julio's mom is just wondering, now that he's on this waiting list for placement, what services we can provide him here and now. Because he's not getting any services right now."

My AP agreed with me that Julio is indeed getting no services, and then beat the same hasty retreat that she does whenever I start asking those kinds of pesky questions.

Meanwhile, one student went home with an asthma attack, another went home with an allergy attack, the nurse called me 17,000 times today, and then we were all called into an "emergency UFT meeting" after school during which we learned that evidently 8,500 of us are about to be fired.

Good times!

The balancing act

2010-03-23T19:50:00.004-04:00

One of my recent posts about Julio generated a flurry of discussion in the comments about the nature of collaboration, the role of students and teachers and the general fairness involved in pairing or "buddying" up students with special needs with other students. One commenter felt that I didn't display enough concern for the rights of the other students in my classroom, and I defended my position, which was basically: I'm trying to do what my mother taught me, which was to do the best I can!

Today we had a very, very difficult afternoon. Julio had not had a good day: yelling, singing, humming, tapping, taking his chair wherever he pleased, pulling his jacket over his head, etc. During math, I gave this direction to the whole class: "Take out your slates and your markers. If you can't find your slate or your marker, take out your notebook and a pencil instead. If you can't find your slate or your marker, take out your notebook and a pencil instead." Notice how I repeated this last part when I noticed kids starting to get up and wander around the room to look for extra slates or markers.

Julio had forgotten his marker. And I had forgotten to Pick My Battles. So as he got up from his seat to snag a marker after he had very specifically been told not to, I took the marker from his hand and asked him to take out his notebook.

Right around that time, Julio transformed into the Hulk. I'm familiar with Julio's Hulk routine, so initially I wasn't impressed. Basically it consists of rattling his desk back and forth as if he's threatening to tip it over. Occasionally he does tip it over, and then he goes full-on Hulk, grunting and groaning loudly as he tries to pick it up.

So there I am, trying to manage (1) the Hulk and (2) the math lesson. Briefly, it seemed as though the math lesson would win out. To Julio, I said, "I understand that you're upset, but you're choosing the wrong way to get my attention, so I'm not giving you my attention until you can choose a better way." To the class, I said, "If this dime is one whole, and two nickels can make a dime, what fraction of the dime would one nickel be?" The class is also familiar with Julio's Hulk routine, and although some of them were kind of eyeing him suspiciously out of the corner of their eyes, they were on the whole admirably focused on math.

Just as Lonny was about to offer a well-reasoned answer, the Hulk brought his desk crashing down on top of his leg. At which point the Hulk transformed back into Julio, a seven-year-old boy rolling around on the carpet clutching his leg and screaming and crying about how he had just chopped his leg off.

I immediately called the office and asked them to send someone upstairs, and then I told the class that we would have to change direction for a few minutes. I asked them to take out their math journals and work on math boxes instead. Lonny dropped his head back and said, "Aw, man! But I knew the answer!"

Eventually Lonny did get to offer his answer, after the security guard and the assistant principal led Julio away to the nurse, before I had to fill out the incident report and accident report and make the phone call home to Julio's mother. But I've been left grappling with all the questions raised by the Hulk, chief among them what can I do to make the rest of the year bearable? At this point, Julio is on a long waiting list for a seat in a self-contained class. When I call his mother to tell her what he's been doing in class, I'm not telling her anything she doesn't already know. My assistant principal is sticking to her "Document everything and call his mother" mantra; I have a 5-page single-spaced document of Julio's transgivings on my computer, and no one ever looks at it but me. Obviously I need to be more proactive and do a better job fighting for my students -- all of them-- but I hate casting myself in the role of agitator when at the moment I just feel overwhelmed.

Is my anonymous commenter right? Am I dooming my students to a lifetime of fearing impulsively violent classmates and being cast aside while emergencies like this one continue to build? Why, in a school where we've had to call the police and ambulances for disruptive students, do we still not have a crisis plan in place for these situations? Why does my assistant principal call me to nitpick the reading levels of my students but not to find out if my desk-flipper is flipping any desks over today?

Too many questions. Not enough solutions.

Get out and stay out

2010-03-17T18:18:00.002-04:00

I was dreading yesterday's parent/teacher conferences. We usually hold them on a Thursday, so that at least when I get home all drained from the hours of talking, the next day is Friday and I can roll out of bed like a zombie knowing that the weekend was in sight. But this time around, it was a Tuesday and it was bound to be the Longest Week Ever.

We have a two and a half hour break between the afternoon and evening conferences. I usually use that time to catch up on a buttload of work that might otherwise never get done were I not virtually forced to spend an extra two and a half hours in my classroom -- during November's conferences, for example, I single-handedly rearranged all the furniture in my classroom and have been much happier with the new layout.

Yesterday I was planning to grade and organize all my math tests and goals for our upcoming unit on fractions. At 3:10, I was settled in my room with my green pen, my hole puncher, my math binders (I now have two, since my class can't fit into just one) and a thick stack of papers.

At 3:15, the principal got on the loudspeaker and announced that due to last-minute budget cuts, no staff would be allowed to remain in the building from 3:30 to 5:30. "Please don't make security come upstairs and get you," she said. (My school, by the way, also will not let teachers into the building one half second before 7:00 am. We all gather outside shivering in the cold in front of the locked school doors. Because, sure, when you have dedicated staff members who are willing to be at school at the crack of dawn, you don't want them coming into the building early!)

I was so aggravated. I threw my giant binders, and my hole puncher (!), into my teacher tote and jumped in my car to drive home (at least I could drive home -- I'm sure there were dozens of teachers who had no choice but to hang out at some neighborhood eatery for two hours). I printed out my goal sheets at home and wrapped up whatever filing I could before it was time to head back to school.

And then, today, I got observed in math. (For those of you who may be wondering: Yes, my school is still blatantly flouting the union rule that says teachers must receive written notification of a formal observation. Our observations are total surprises. Surprise!) After I was at school until after 8 pm last night for conferences, on a day when I got kicked out of the building for two hours during a time I would normally remain in my classroom doing work. And my math stuff was not nearly as organized as it would have been had I not lost all that time. (Exhibit A: I accidentally left the hole puncher at home, a vital tool for organizing my endless binders.)

My kids behaved like buttheads in front of my AP. Oh, and today is still only Wednesday. Oh, and on Thursdays after lunch I get to teach fourth, fifth, sixth, seventh periods and extended day (that's 10:55 am to 3:15 pm -- 4.5 looooong hours) without any preps, push-in relief or one freaking second to use the bathroom.

Oh, joy.

Denial: Not just a river in Egypt

2010-03-06T09:30:00.002-05:00

Well, as expected, the honeymoon is over. Not only my terrific honeymoon, but Julio's honeymoon. Yes, Julio has officially started to lose his mind, which means that I am losing my mind as well.

Here are some things that present themselves as very big clues to me that Julio is not in the right classroom environment:

During a mini lesson, he got up from his seat and began conducting an invisible boxing match with an invisible opponent. He danced around the room, punching the air.
During a read aloud, he suddenly began grabbing his head, wrenching himself from side to side, throwing his body out of his seat. When I asked him what was wrong, he said he was having a "nightmare."
When he is working independently and gets frustrated, he starts pounding on his desk and punching himself in the head.
He has started singing, humming, pounding on his desk, kicking at his desk, and grabbing his desk and shaking it aggressively, all during what is supposed to be a quiet working period.
The other day, he got upset, so he took everything out of his desk, hurled it to the floor, and then flopped himself on top of it and lay there.

I assigned him a "buddy" whose job is (a) to help him find things in his desk (because whenever I ask the class to take out a certain book or folder, he yells out, "I CAN'T FIND IT!" and starts taking everything out of his desk and throwing it to the floor) and (b) to remind him what he is supposed to be doing (because every time we're supposed to be working independently, he yells, "I DON'T KNOW WHAT TO DOOOOOO!" and starts up with the punching himself in the head and shaking his desk around). And God bless her, his buddy has taken on that role and more -- whispering "Julio" and pointing to his sticker chart when he starts humming and/or singing and fidgeting, showing him what page to turn to, etc. The day that he threw everything out of his desk and then threw himself on top of the carnage, she got up without a word and began helping him return everything to his desk. That's when I realized: Carly is his para. I have a special education student sitting in my general ed class of 28 students, and he has a 7-year-old acting as his para because Mom continues to live in deep, deep denial.

So the guidance counselor and I sat down with Mom for what I can safely say was the World's Most Awkward Parent Meeting. In it I tried to talk gently but firmly about how Julio struggles and will continue to struggle in my class because it's not the right environment for him. I told Mom that Julio knows what he needs and asks for it: He asks me to turn the lights off because it will "relax" him, he asks me to take breaks for walks around the room, he asks me for much more individual attention than I can give him because there are 28 students in our class instead of 12 and only one teacher instead of two adults, which is what he would get if he were in the 12:1:1 class that his hypothetical IEP recommends for him.

Mom categorically does not want him in special education. Mom thinks he would "fall behind" in a special education class "with other kids like him." I think Mom is falling prey to the stigma that says that special education = dumb. I tried to explain to Mom that this isn't an academic issue, that Julio is very bright but isn't getting the services he needs. I said that, if he were to be in a special ed class, when he goes to third grade (the first "testing" grade), he would still take the same test as everybody else, but he would get to take it in a calmer environment with modifications that would hopefully prevent him from punching himself in the head.

Mom said that she didn't realize he hadn't been "behaving" and had just taken all his toys away from him. I told Mom that I knew she and Julio discussed good behavior at home, that it wasn't like anyone thought his behavior was a reflection on her parenting, and that she could take all his toys away from him but it wouldn't help his behavior because he can't control himself. I said that Julio tells other kids that he can't control himself, that he knows how he's expected to behave but he just can't do it. I said that his opinion of himself is starting to suffer because he feels like he's constantly letting other people down with his behavior, because he's always promising to behave but then he can't do it.

After an infinity of talking, the guidance counselor asked Mom what she thought of all this. That's when we experienced one of those long, awkward, crickets-chirping silences.

Oh, and did I mention this meeting took place after we returned from a field trip? I happen to have the most motion-sick class on the planet, and on every trip we take I have at least two pale and sweaty kids in the front of the bus leaning over barf bags while their seatmates anxiously monitor them for signs of vomit. On this particular trip, Felix, eyeing his seatmate, said to me, "If I smell throw-up, it makes me throw up." Me: "She's not going to throw up, honey. We're so close to school." Felix: "But if she throws up and I smell the throw-up, I'll throw up." Me: "Then if she throws up, you'll hold your nose."

So we were literally a block away from school and I thought we were home free when one of my parent chaperones abruptly jumped up and asked the bus driver to let him off. Initially I thought that since we were stuck in traffic so close to school, he figured he'd just let himself off. That is, until his son, whom he'd been sitting with, glumly pointed to the floor of the bus and said morosely, "He threw up."

Yup, my parent chaperone had ralphed onto the floor of the bus. And do you know what happens when you're on a bus that's lurching forward and there's liquid on the floor? That's right, it oozes forward. So the girls in the seat in front of the vomit in question began shrieking, "It's coming toward us!" Meanwhile, his son was left holding this giant water bottle that they'd brought along, and he continued, "And he was throwing up into the water and now I can't drink any more water."

An eternity later, we arrived at school. My motion-sick friends shakily let themselves off the bus. Everyone was tired, starving and -- judging by the unmistakable severity of the pee dances taking place on the sidewalk -- desperate to use the bathroom. As we wearily made our way to the door of the school, the bus driver began honking at me.

He rolled down the window. And he handed me -- can you guess? -- the giant water bottle full of my parent chaperone's upchuck.

TGIF, everyone!

Legend of the snow day

2010-02-26T13:28:00.003-05:00

When my students returned from lunch yesterday, they noticed I had posted an "extra homework assignment" on our announcement board.

"Extra homework!" exclaimed Michelle, outraged.

"Read it," I encouraged.

"Sleep with your pajamas inside out and hope for a snow day," she read. Her mouth dropped open and she turned to me. "You're crazy!" she said.

Who knows where the legend of the inside-out pajamas (and don't forget the spoon) came from, but I am proud to announce that I participated last night -- in fact, Mr. Brave complained that he rolled over in the middle of the night and got jabbed with the spoon (I had neglected to read the part where the spoon goes under your pillow). When my alarm went off at 5:30 this morning, and I in my inside-out snowflake pajamas trudged into the living room, Mr. Brave was waiting for me.

"Don't get too excited," he said, "but I think they might have just closed the schools."

The announcement came, he said, exactly as my alarm was going off. And after I returned to bed for another three glorious, snuggly hours, I ascertained through Facebook that a number of my co-workers had participated in the exact same ritual: inside-out pajamas, spoon and all.

"You can all thank me on Monday," I posted. Until then, I wish all my hard-working educator colleagues a well-deserved three-day snoweekend!

Return of the busy

2010-02-22T17:02:00.004-05:00

I realize whining is undignified, but...going back to school after one's honeymoon is haaaard. Every time I return to school after a vacation, I'm faintly stunned by how much work I seem to do every day. Like, "Is it always like this? Am I always this busy and overwhelmed?" And alas, the truth is, yes. When I got to school, I rotated the classroom jobs, printed the week's homework sheet, straightened up the desk I had left a wreck last week (honeymoon = running out of school on Friday as if my behind was on fire), put together a folder of copies I needed to request, and prepared my social studies lesson on the three types of resources. During my prep, I filled in math grades on the sheet we send home to parents, filed the tests away in my binder, and added to our growing science bulletin board. At lunch, I managed to unearth Volume 2 of my math teacher's guide, wrote up the next unit's vocabulary words for the math word wall, prepared my reading mini lesson, and spoke with a parent on the phone. After school, I wrote up tomorrow's schedule, graded all the math mid-year assessments, filled in the master class rubric, stored away all the old math journals, looked over tomorrow's science lesson and Comprehension Toolkit lesson, briefly previewed all the teaching points for our next units in reading and writing, and stood on a chair leafing through giant stacks of paper to weed out the paper we'll need for our next writing unit. Tonight, I'll need to make copies of the math pre-test and choose goals for the next unit that align with the standards, and that's on top of the work I did yesterday (which I swore I wasn't going to do while I was still on vacation), grading the last unit's math tests, grading the Writing on Demands, getting my copy requests ready and reading through the "job applications" (when it's time to switch classroom jobs, I make them fill out a job application telling me which job they want and why they're qualified for it). And all that is on top of, hmm, the regular classroom day: Julio taking his shoes off and singing "We Will Rock You" during our math test, Joy crying all morning with homesickness, Jason complaining that Anita gave him a wedgie, Danny moaning that he feels like he's going to throw up.

Is it always like this? Am I always this busy and overwhelmed? Yes.

The best parts of my day had nothing to do with real schoolwork, but with listening to my little friends talk about their vacations. Manuel said he had gone skiing for the first time and fell, tumbling down "like a bowling ball." A number of them claimed they had gone to water parks, which I'm still puzzling over. Rosie said she had played Frisbee with her brother, and when someone asked what a Frisbee is, Manuel (who does not normally talk like a human dictionary), said, "It's a small disc for throwing or tossing." We read a non-fiction passage about sand castles and I pulled out a laptop to show some examples of amazingly elaborate sand sculptures. They went nuts. One of my most polite, well-behaved girls actually said, "Dang!" and I heard a few kids say "O. M. G." (Just like that. O. M. G.)

But still, it's back to work, midway through the school year. O. M. G.

What about Mr. Brave?

2010-02-12T19:08:00.003-05:00

Behind every stressed-out teacher trying to hold it all together, there is (hopefully) someone at home who is sympathetic. For me, that person is Mr. Brave (formerly known as the soon-to-be Mr. Brave). Mr. Brave has helped me grade math tests, hang backing paper in my classroom and transport school supplies. He gets outraged on my behalf when teacher-haters start their teacher bashing (you know: "All that vacation! Days that end at 3 pm!" PSHHH), brags to his co-workers about my feats in the classroom (actually, it's more like, "At least you don't have to deal with kids peeing on the floor like my wife does") and lectures me on the importance of properly teaching mathematics.

Somewhere in between the insanity of my first year in the classroom, Mr. Brave and I managed to have an outrageously fabulous wedding. With all my co-workers popping in to offer their congratulations and peek at photos, my class was aware of our nuptials, and Mr. Brave inevitably arises in any conversation about my personal life. If I say I went to the supermarket over the weekend, they ask, "Did Mr. Brave come too?" If we're talking about birthdays, they ask, "When is Mr. Brave's birthday?" When someone draws me a picture and leaves it on my desk, Mr. Brave is often included. (My favorites above!)

I'm thinking about this now because Mr. Brave and I just returned from our equally outrageously fabulous honeymoon, and I am feeling very little desire to return to school tomorrow. But, even though they've never met him, my students have managed to see Mr. Brave exactly the way he is: as a terrific guy who cares deeply about their teacher.

Experts

2010-02-10T10:01:00.003-05:00

For our next unit in writing, we'll be doing "expert projects." The idea is that the kids choose something they consider themselves to be "experts" in (video games, drawing, taking care of dogs) and write a little book all about that thing. It's really fun and I'm looking forward to modeling my "expertise" in running.

Our genius administration decided that, just as we give pretests in math, we should do a kind of pretest for this unit. This is known as "Writing On Demand," and in the past we've given the kids one full period to write a complete "small moment" story and then grade them on it. This time around, though, we were supposed to instruct them to write an expert project book, which seemed a little ridiculous. We were e-mailed a rubric for grading, which I'm still not entirely sure what I'm supposed to do with, given that it seems fairly obvious that their 50-minute Writing on Demand effort will be far inferior to what they could produce in a month-long unit. That's a lot of extra grading for a "duh!" effect.

Anyway, though, I was pleasantly surprised at the quality of what they were able to produce. 95% of my class did this same expert project writing unit in first grade, so they were able to draw on that knowledge and include some nice effects. Here is a sampling of my favorite excerpts!

"I know all about reading in reading you need a book to read and when you are dune with the Book take a nuther book out. if you like reading a lot you can read allmost every Day or allmost every year."

From an "all about babies" attempt: "Then she did poop my grandma had to clean her butt. With baby whips." Baby whips? Ouch!

"Do you want to run fast. like sonic then try as hard as you can. Whare Jordens, Nikes, Levis. then if your in a race you can do it. Now let's get started step one...get one of thease Jordens, Nikes, Levis & try hard to run with them step two try to get style's on your shoes step three run & what i mean by run is run super super super fast or maybe you might be even faster."

"People love run because they don't want to be fat."

"Rule to not get bitin by a shark: Do not bring jreley to the bech." (If anyone can help me decipher what he means by 'jreley,' I would love your assistance.)

"The play station game is the best first I am going to show you the best game ever that goes with the playstation you need to buy it. It looks like this and in the next page I am going to show you how to use the control. In the beginning the X is for racing square is to slow down of course you don't want to do that because you race with challanger."

"I am a expret at singing frist you have to do vace warmups unlless you are doing jazz. then you pick out a song to sing or you could make one up. Then you sing! Last if they like you you could have a chance at being a star at singing!"

"I'm a exbrt at reading I can read up side down, with my eyes clowes." Really?

And now a sampling from that small section of my class that kind of really knows what they're doing:

"To make birthday cake First you need all of the ingredents. You need flour, eggs, cake mix and milk. Then mix it all together. Then put it in a pan. then take it and put it on a tray. Then make the frosting. use whatever kind of frosting you like for example chocolate. Then when you mixed it all up put it in the oven until 9:00. When your done share it with your family and decerate it."

"I am a expert at art if you want a big painting you use a fat brush if you want a small painting use the skinny brush you should use ole you pass stell [oil pastel]. you should only use crayola crayons you should use the paint brush lightly so you don't wast the paint. you should use pencils before you use crayons because you can mess up. use the crayons lightly so you don't mess it up do all thees tips and you will draw grat."

"I am an expert on how to make peperroni pizza. all you need is cheese peperroni and some tomato sause. first you need to put the tomato sause on the pizza. then put the cheese on the tomato sause. then if you like peperroni pizza you can put the peperroni on the pizza. then you can put it in the oven or in a microwave you put it for two minets and then take the pizza out of the oven or the microwave. you now have a really good pizza now you can eat your fantastic pizza."

"I know all about swimg it is very simple and esay. I will tell you what you need. The first thing is to put on a pair of Goggles. The secend thing is a swiming cap some pools are very clean and they don't want hair in the water. Third thing is a bathing suit you can't go swimg without a bathing suit. This is how you swim you put your figers together and kick your feet strait if you don't you will sink and go noware. When you want to flaot you could move your hands and feet how ever you want. If you don't learn how to flaot it is go to be a problom. Another thing about floating is to relxt at then you will sink into the water. When you float backwards you have to put your chest up high. if you don't you will sink deep down into the water. and you have to relax. you have to put your head up for it could be looking up to the sky and you will not sink. this is how you swim." Can you tell this one was written by Leah?

100 acts of kindness

2010-02-09T19:07:00.004-05:00

After I found out that the 100th day of school wasn't going to be the extravaganza it has been in years past, I had to come up with a way my class would commemorate the occasion. Some teachers ask their students to do projects where they bring in 100 of an item, but I honestly didn't want my classroom cluttered with collections of 100 coins or crayons or toothpicks in ziplock baggies. So I decided to make that an optional project, with a note on the homework sheet that says children who do participate will be "eligible for a special prize."

I am giving a 100 days homework sheet with very simple fill-in-the-blanks: "I wish I had 100 _______. I could eat 100 ______, but I would never eat 100 ______." My favorite one is "Miss Brave has told me 100 times to _______." (I gave the class a special preview of this one, and one of my chattiest students shouted, "Be quiet!" Ding ding ding, we have a winner!) I also have a few activities for us to do in class that shouldn't be too taxing: Write the letters in your name over and over in a grid with 100 squares and then color in the first letter to see what the pattern looks like; count up the tickets in our class ticket jar to see if we have fewer or more than 100; lick a lollipop 100 times and see what it looks like, etc. But everything else I found online seemed too expensive (I spend a fortune already on school supplies, am I really going to buy 100th day glasses?) or too complicated (each of the 28 students in my class is going to make a necklace with 100 beads without making an enormous mess? yeah right).

Then I found this great lesson plan, for which I can't take credit, about collecting 100 acts of kindness in honor of the 100th day of school. (The lesson plan ties in to Martin Luther King, which I didn't explicitly do.) So I set up this giant posterboard with a grid of 100 numbers on it. I printed labels (which I bought at Staples) that say, "I caught _____ being kind! Here is what I saw." Each label is the size of one of the numbered boxes on our posterboard. On Monday, I told the kids that we were going to be "kindness detectives" and try to catch each other (along with our teachers, friends, family members, etc.) in the act of being kind. We talked about how all the little things we do for each other every day (like lending someone a pencil or helping someone pick up something they dropped) is an act of kindness. Then we got the ball rolling by writing about a time when we were kind to someone else. (I wanted to get all the "I did something kind!" stuff out of the way right off the bat, and for the rest of the project they are not allowed to catch themselves being kind.) Anyone who is "caught being kind" gets to wear a smiley sticker that says, "I was caught being kind!"

I was a little nervous about how they would react to all the touchy-feely kindness stuff -- for young kids, my class is usually a pretty skeptical group -- but I have to say they are doing a fantastic job. We are up to 82 acts of kindness and counting -- everything from lending someone an eraser to sitting with someone who was alone. Jason -- who says things like, "Move it, sissy" to other boys in the class -- has been caught being kind multiple times and has been thrilled to pieces about it. Ariela, who is always kind to her classmates and who has already been Student of the Month, told me with a shy and proud smile that she had seen her name on the "kindness board." During our science experiment, when I against my better judgement trusted my kids to be able to pour dirt/rock mixtures into containers, I witnessed Bryce (the king of personal space) and Felix working together: "You hold the cup still! I'll pour!" When they were done, they said, "Yay, we did it!" and gave each other a high five. I swear to you, it was like an afterschool special. I "kindness boarded" them myself for that one.

I love this project -- which, by the way, I researched in my own time and bought my own materials -- far more than I have ever loved (or even liked or merely tolerated) any of the boring, repetitive, droning, rote learning teaching points that are supplied to me by my administration. I don't have any way of checking it off on a checklist, or of entering into a data field, but to me it's still a lesson that's valuable, and I'm so glad I've taken the time to teach it in my classroom.

More fishiness

2010-02-05T18:01:00.003-05:00

Last year, when Julio was having problems in first grade, his mother apparently told his first grade teacher that he had been diagnosed with Attention Deficit Disorder, but that she didn't want to medicate him so she was seeking a second opinion. Which she's entitled to, so fine.

Then, during another meeting, she changed her story and denied that she had ever said anything about him having ADD.

When Julio left our school for his new school, where they convinced his mother to get him evaluated, the IEP they wrote for him classified his "diagnosis" as OHI, or Other Health Impaired. When Julio's mother brought him back to our school, our social worker asked where that classification had come from. Julio's mom claimed that she didn't know, that he had no health issues.

Just out of curiosity, I Googled OHI. Because I know that children who require special services because they have chronic illnesses are sometimes classified OHI, and I wondered where Julio would fit into that.

Well, duh, it turns out that "the most frequent medical conditions under which students
qualify for services as OHI are attention deﬁcit disorder (ADD) and attention deﬁcit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD)." I swear upon my teaching license that this child clearly has ADD and his mother is covering it up.

It's such a complicated situation, because there's still such a stigma about having your child "labeled" or "classified" as "special ed." And obviously, not all children with special needs have the same special needs. In our self-contained second grade, we have children who are non-verbal except for their echolalia alongside children who are reading on a third-grade level. In whatever 12:1:1 classes Julio's mom was presented with, she saw children with severe MR and autism and felt that her son didn't "belong" with those children because he's academically not that far below grade level. But regardless, I feel strongly that he has a special need and would benefit from special services. I just wish his mother would give it a chance.

Julio's first day

2010-02-05T17:04:00.003-05:00

I jumped up and down when Julio left us in early November, and when he came back yesterday, I spent the afternoon in my classroom sobbing into my conference notes. The guidance counselor gave me a pitying look. "I'm so sorry," she said.

That ought to give you an idea of what I was in for.

After I dried my tears, though (I cry in fear of seven-year-olds and I am not ashamed to admit it!), I had to develop a plan. I didn't even have a chair for him, for Pete's sake. (FYI, my assistant principal phoned my classroom three times this morning looking for my class reading levels -- which, by the way, I personally handed to her last Wednesday -- but mysteriously did not find the time to say one word to me about Julio's reappearance. Nice, right?)

My students sit at tables, not individual desks, and I had already decided that being the fifth student stuck on the end of a table already crowded with four other students would be too overstimulating for him, so I set up an extra desk, facing the meeting area, so he would have a built-in spot. (That desk used to be William's old seat, but rather than becoming the throne of shame that I feared it might, it was so coveted among the rest of the class after William left that I finally repossessed it for myself. They're so on top of each other that everyone wanted that desk as an island of solitude to themselves, and everyone was jealous of Julio when they saw where he would be sitting.) I went digging through the closet in search of Julio's old books (some of which I had given away to other students but all of which I had at least had the foresight to keep rather than throw away like I wanted to). I rustled up a sticker chart and taped that sucker right to his desk. I took one of the rectangular prisms we use in math and taped index cards to three of its sides. One side says, "I am working. Everything is OK!" One side says, "I am upset. Please leave me alone." And one side says, "I have a problem. I would like to talk about it."

Just before lunch, Julio rotated the prism so the "problem" side was facing out. I went over to his seat.

"I want to eat lunch up here with you," he said. I considered it. I eyed his sticker chart, on which he had already earned one sticker for playing nicely during math game day.

"How about when you earn five stickers on your chart, instead of computer time, you get to have lunch with me?" I suggested. He nodded happily.

Was he a complete angel? No. He still can't sit still, or keep himself from making noise at inappropriate times, or keep to his own personal space on line. He's already gravitated towards friendships with some of my more unsavory students. At the very, very end of the day, when we were just about to put our coats on and escape into the weekend unscathed, he chose to jump up from his desk and do the macarena, to the amusement and delight of the rest of the class. He's obviously in his honeymoon period, testing the waters to see how much he can get away with before he snaps.

But it could have been worse. And at least, going forward, I have a plan.

He's baaaack

2010-02-04T16:57:00.002-05:00

Julio is back.

Not just at my school. Ohhhhh, no. Julio is back in my classroom.

I am so enraged over this entirely f-ed up situation that I can barely calm down enough to post about it.

Quick review. Julio has severe behavior problems at my school since kindergarten. By the time he gets to me, in second grade, his mother has decided that it's probably the school's fault, so she transfers him to another school. On his first day at his new school, Julio gets suspended. New school pesters and badgers Julio's mother until she finally agrees to have him evaluated. The evaluation recommends that Julio go to a self-contained, 12:1:1 classroom. Julio's mother loses it, refuses the IEP, and dumps him back in my school, where for reasons that are completely beyond me, they decide to put him back in my class.

There are six classes in the second grade. One of them is a self contained special education class with one teacher, twelve children (which means they're full) and four paras. One of them is a CTT class, with two teachers and a mixture of special education and general ed kids. One of them is a SETSS class, with one teacher, a para, and several children with IEPs who receive special education services. One of them is an advanced ESL class with a para. One of them is a beginning ESL class. And the last class is mine.

Let's see, should we put the boy with the IEP recommending 12:1:1 services in the CTT class, where he'll have a special education teacher? Should we perhaps place him in one of the two classes with paraprofessionals, so at least there will be another adult in the room with him? Or should we just dump him back in Miss Brave's class with 27 other students and hope he doesn't burn the school down?!

I get that his mother didn't sign the IEP, and therefore it's kind of like it doesn't exist. But, hello, just because the emperor thinks he's got a fabulous outfit on doesn't mean he's actually wearing any clothes. Julio was evaluated by trained professionals, and trained professionals think he needs the support of a self-contained classroom, and just because his mother lives in denial doesn't mean the rest of us should just ignore the problem and hope it goes away. Let's be clear on the details here: self-contained class = a maximum of twelve students with one teacher and at least one paraprofessional. Our self-contained second grade has twelve kids, one teacher and four paras. That's five adults in the room, nearly one for every two kids. My class = 28 students and just me, or: a ratio of 1:28. Are you kidding me? How is this allowed?

No one -- and I mean no one -- gave me a heads up, either; I went to pick up my class from lunch (i.e., not even the beginning of the day) and there he was. They literally dumped him in with the rest of my class while I was at lunch, and no one had the decency to warn me.

I've gone from being fired up to being depressed. How am I going to get through the rest of the year now? And what about my rights and my students' rights and Julio's rights -- not his mother's?

100 days

2010-02-03T20:35:00.004-05:00

For years, my school has made a huge production out of the 100th day of school. Instead of following our regular old TC reading-writing-math schedule, our classes were treated to a smorgasboard of fun 100th day activities. To really understand what an undertaking this was, you have to understand that my school builds in very little time for fun, by which I mean no time at all during which any fun activities are ever supposed to take place. Like, one year on St. Patrick's Day a fourth grade teacher gave her class some shamrock graphing activity to do during math, and her assistant principal happened to pop in and observe the shamrock graphing activity taking place, and she sternly ordered the teacher to stop said shamrock graphing activity and resume her regularly scheduled non-fun mathematics.

But I digress. Anyway, so our 100th day of school was a day of actual enjoyment. We licked lollipops 100 times, we did 100 jumping jacks in the gym, we made shirts for the kids to wear with 100 handprints on them (well, I did not do this, but some very ambitious first grade teachers did). We did not sit in our classrooms with our legs folded criss-cross on the carpet while our teachers droned on in mini lesson after mini lesson; rather, we roamed the school in packs, attempting various feats of mental strength involving the number 100!

Unfortunately, of course, all good things must come to an end, and the teacher who used to coordinate our 100th day of school extravaganza is no longer with us. So today I received this hilarious missive from my assistant principal:

On Friday, February 12 we will be celebrating the 100th day of school. On that day you will be paired up with another class on your grade for one period. During that time we are inviting you to participate in a math game/activity. We are asking that you collegially decide what game/activity you wish your students to play and what period of the day to facilitate this arrangement. Below is a list of teacher teams and your room assignments.

Hmmm, so, let me get this straight. In my itty-bitty classroom, which is already overcrowded as it is with 27 students, you would like to invite me to invite 27 more students? And you would like to invite me and these 54 students, who are now crammed into my teeny-tiny overheated classroom, to play some sort of "math game/activity"? (Thank you for bolding that, by the way, otherwise I might have missed it!) And you would like me and the other teacher, in our massive amounts of free time, to decide on a game or activity that will hold the attention of our 54 students on the Friday before vacation while they are all stuffed into my immensely warm and crowded classroom?

First of all, I'm not even with them on the 100th day of school thing. I have been counting very carefully (and not because I'm torturing myself, either -- every single morning we talk about what day of school it is and how many tens and ones go into that number), and I could swear that Friday, February 12 is actually the 99th day of school and that someone at my school is faking it so that we don't have to hold our "celebration" on the day we return from the break. Can any other NYC public school teachers corrorborate either side on this?

Second of all: bummer. The only glimmer of hope comes at the end of the memo, in which we are "further encouraged to plan other activities within your classroom to celebrate this day."

Sold!

Replacing us

2010-01-31T11:50:00.002-05:00

About a month ago, there was a big brouhaha over this article about substitute teaching. Most teachers (the non-substitute ones, that is) agreed that the author had some valid points and some invalid ones, and everyone wanted to address the issue from their own perspective.

I'm late to the party, and most of my issues have already been admirably covered by Mrs. Mimi and by Mildly Melancholy, but I just wanted to add a few thoughts of my own.

The article's author is "angered" at how many teachers are absent on any given day (er, except if they were in school, then you'd be out of a job, wouldn't you?). Teachers, she claims, "are most likely to be absent on Fridays, followed by Mondays."

This is an issue I can address from personal experience -- and it's not because teachers are party people who want a three-day weekend. Rather, it's the opposite. My first year teaching, I was out sick five times, most of those on Friday or Monday. And it's because I got sick (from a roster of 400 elementary school students carrying hundreds of millions of germs), but I continued to dddrraaaaaaaaaggg myself into work day after day until I was so sick by the weekend that I had no choice but to call in Friday and/or Monday. Sorry to burst your bubble there, sub!

One of her suggestions is that administrators "should check with their subs during the school day." This sounds like it's coming from someone who's never actually worked full time in an actual school. I'm not the World's Biggest Fan of my administrators, but I will tell you this: They are busy people. On any given day, we have state testing going on, or our suspension room is in effect, or inquiry teams are meeting, or there are grade conferences, etc. Checking in with substitute teachers? Is the least of their concerns.

My favorite part is when she says, "Principals should also try to arrange for other teachers to use their prep time to fill in for absent colleagues." Hi, that was my nightmare last year and I did not like it one bit. And guess what, those teachers didn't leave very detailed plans for me, either, but I sucked it up and dealt with it because I am an intelligent human being.

Last, she wants unsuspecting parents and educators to know "that too many teachers are leaving their children’s education in the hands of unskilled, untrained stand-ins." Okay, well, first of all, that's the district's fault, not mine. If the district is going to hire people as substitute teachers without requiring them to have any formal teacher training, does that mean I should refrain from calling in sick because God forbid my class have to spend the day with one of these "unskilled, untrained stand-ins"? Please, I have enough things on my mind already. Second of all, speaking as someone who's both subbed and had other teachers sub for me: When you're subbing, that day may feel like the longest day in the world, but in reality it's usually just one day out of a week or a month or a year. Most teachers I know are just happy to come back to a classroom that's not in complete shambles and the absence of accusatory notes from the sub on her desk. No teacher I know would leave an absolutely essential or vital lesson plan in the hands of a sub, even if they knew it was going to be a competent person, just because when something is absolutely essential or vital, of course you're going to want to teach it yourself.

I'm writing this as I'm sick at home with a cold, and will I call in sick tomorrow? Probably not, because I've managed to schedule three parent meetings for the morning that I don't want to cancel. Oh and also because, like the vast majority of teachers I know, I'm pretty dedicated. Don't forget it.

Read aloud time

2010-01-29T21:45:00.005-05:00

One of the areas in which I've been striving to make my teaching more thorough is our read aloud time. In our schedule, read aloud time is paired with science and social studies, and because my class has been so successful with science and science typically takes the bulk of the period, read aloud time has sometimes gotten the shaft. And while I've managed to read my students a whole lot of what I consider classic children's literature (including nearly everything by Kevin Henkes and Cloudy With a Chance of Meatballs before it became a movie), there's never been any kind of structure to our read alouds. I stop and model, we turn and talk, blah blah blah, but it's been lacking the substance I feel that read aloud time deserves.

So recently I showed my students how to set up their reading notebooks with "frames" in which they could stop and jot their thoughts during read aloud time. I modeled how when I was having a thought about what we were reading, I would stop and jot it in one of my frames, being sure to put the date inside the frame and the title on the top of the page. I modeled abbreviating the names of the characters and of my thinking (like "C" for a connection I was making). Then, as I read, I would stop and ask them a question: "What do you think will happen next?" or "How do you think this character is feeling right now?" and ask them to jot down their answers. Let me tell you, there is hardly a lovelier vision for a teacher than the sight of her 27 students bent over their notebooks, carefully scribing their thoughts instead of screaming them out for everyone to hear.

Now I'm easing them off the prompts -- I still ask them to stop and jot in response to a question, but I'm also encouraging them to jot whenever they have a thought instead of waiting for my direction. This way everyone is jotting at some point, but I've caught sight of Leah scribbling away and I know she's doing more than what's being asked. Since I ask a lot of predictable questions, some of my students have started jotting down their predictions and their thoughts before I ask.

What's really helped this to grow is that we've been consistently reading the Frog and Toad books by Arnold Lobel. I adore Frog and Toad, and my students do too. The Frog and Toad stories are simple, funny, touching, and full of lovely little messages about friendship -- when Toad is sad because no one ever sends him any mail, Frog sits on the porch with him feeling sad too (before running home to write Toad a letter); when Frog tells Toad that he looks funny in his bathing suit, dignified Toad answers, "Of course I do," and marches home with his head held high. The characters are consistent, but never boring -- downtrodden Toad prefers the comfort of his warm bed, while adventurous Frog is always trying to get him up to enjoy the outdoors. Today I read "Down the Hill," in which Frog wants Toad to go sledding with him. Toad demurs, protesting that he has no winter clothes, but Frog is one step ahead of him: "'I have brought you some things to wear,' he said. Frog pushed a coat down over the top of Toad. Frog pulled snowpants up over the bottom of Toad. He put a hat and scarf on Toad's head. 'Help!' cried Toad. 'My best friend is trying to kill me!'"

By the time I got to the high point of the story -- in which Frog falls off the sled and Toad, unaware that Frog is no longer behind him helping him to steer, chatters on about how much he is actually beginning to enjoy winter, until he realizes that he is "ALL ALONE!" on the sled -- my class was in hysterics. What a sweet sound to start the weekend.

Promotion, complaints and funny stories

2010-01-28T19:04:00.003-05:00

Okay, kids! Here's what's on Miss Brave's agenda today:

1. shameless self-promotion;
2. complaining;
3. funny stories.

Yes, in that order. It wouldn't be a Miss Brave blog entry without the complaining and the funny stories, but the shameless self-promotion might be a new one for me! I was honored to be interviewed at findingEducation's Digital Teachers' Lounge; you can read the interview here! They asked me some really thoughtful questions and I enjoyed answering them. They're now looking for middle school teachers in order to survey middle school students, so if you're an NYC middle school teacher, click here to find out how you can help the project.

There, that wasn't too bad, was it? So let's move on to the juicy stuff: the complaining. At a time in the year when I feel as though I should feel relatively settled in, I'm actually continuing to feel more and more overwhelmed. Maybe it's because I'm striving to take things more seriously instead of merely trying to survive the day -- we've always been expected to do two strategy lessons during each major subject (reading, writing and math) in addition to a mini lesson, but in the beginning of the year I was lucky if I could even get to one. Now I'm truly making the effort to fit in two, and I'm sure it doesn't surprise you to learn that it's a lot of work. And it doesn't always happen. Just the other day we had writing first period, where time always gets shaved off for unpacking and announcements, and then as we were dispersing from the mini lesson (which itself was interrupted by a visit from my assistant principal) I happened to notice sneaky things going on with Frick and Frack, and while I was dealing with that, my AP came back to speak to another student about something that had happened the day before. Things like that happen every day -- they're the rule, not the exception -- and I wish my administration would just roll with it instead of honestly expecting two strategy lessons out of us.

Or maybe it's because we continue to make changes to our curriculum that are difficult to keep up with. At a meeting last week, we were informed that we'd be using this new program two days a week during word work, we were given one hour of professional development in the new program (half of which consisted of watching a pointless video that was obviously filmed in some sort of blissed-out Montessori classroom where the teacher had transformed the entire room into a jungle and the kids concluded their share time by saying to each other, "Are there any comments, compliments or connections?") and then ordered to begin the new program in two days. Last year, during reading, we were always expected to do one guided reading group and one strategy lesson. This year, they decided (who's "they"? who knows?) that we should do two guided reading groups. Now, they want us to go back to doing one guided reading group and a strategy lesson, but with the added twist that everything we teach has to be (a) goal-related and (b) taught over a three-day period. So if I want to teach "inferring characters' feelings," or "synthesizing information in text," I have to come up with three different ways to teach it. Which is fine, but it's just...never-ending. I still feel like I do an enormous amount of preparation for every single day...and when that day is over, I know I have to do it all again for the next day.

Or maybe it's because we're in that January rut where you start saying to the kids, "It's January! We've been in this classroom since September! And yet you're still calling out! Raise your HAND!!!!!"

All right, enough complaining. On to the funny stories!

If you ask any teacher whether they've ever found themselves in a situation that caused them to simultaneously think, "I can't believe I went to graduate school for this" and "No one taught me how to deal with this in graduate school," the answer you're going to get is "Abso-freaking-lutely." I had one of those moments recently when I was walking my class upstairs and one of my students got his whole arm stuck in the stair banister. There we are, all 28 of us, with me trying to coach him out of it while simultaneously wondering whether I'm actually going to have to send two students to the office to announce that we need help because someone is stuck.

I got him out.

Next: My extended day students have developed a fondness for the quiet game. (I know, I can hardly believe it either.) Every day as we're putting our coats on and I'm telling them to calm down for the 68th time, they ask me if we can play the quiet game on the way downstairs. Their favorite aspect of the quiet game is that I deviously attempt to make them talk: "Hmmmm, Felix, do you have any plans for the weekend?"

So today, as usual, they decided to play the quiet game, except that Julisa announced that she wasn't going to play. Julisa is one of those students who's not technically an ELL, except that she's totally an ELL. But she's really come a long way recently in how comfortable she is conversing and explaining herself.

A moment later, Julisa decided, "I'm going to try to make everyone talk!" She pranced around the room from student to student: "David...why are you wearing glasses? Dora...do you think I'm pretty?" The other kids just stared back at her, their lips pressed tightly together, shaking with silent giggles. I was watching her when it clicked: She's doing me!

Miss Brave in the Sparkle Days

2010-01-22T16:32:00.003-05:00

Yeesh! Where do I begin? In one day I've collected enough stories for a week's worth of posts.

Let's start at the top. And by the "top," I mean the head. And by the head, I mean "the head full of wriggling, squirming, itchy creatures that have apparently invaded my classroom." Yes, that means what you think it means -- lice has come to Miss Brave's class! Apparently Julisa's aunt e-mailed our parent coordinator that Julisa has been complaining of an itchy head since the winter break ended (which, by the way, was three weeks ago, thank you for waiting three weeks to tell us). So two school aides came up to my classroom to check my kids' heads for lice. (While they were taking a math test, by the way.) Introducing them was definitely one of the weirder announcements I've had to make to my class: "Boys and girls, we have some visitors in our rooms, and they're going to be taking you out into the hallway to...look at your heads." (Cue confused faces from the class.) "It's not going to hurt, and they're not going to do anything to your hair, they're just going to...look at your head."

Apparently lice is not a phenomenon with which my students are familiar, because at that point only one person whispered, "Ew, what if someone has lice?"

Anyway, there was a brief scare at one point when the school aide confided that poor Dana appeared to have a head full of nits, but I think they turned out to be dandruff. I have now been assured that my class is lice-free! Which doesn't stop my own head from feeling like it's crawling. Ew.

At lunch, I worked on my "promotion-in-doubt" list. I've just been informed that I have to designate Amhrita as promotion-in-doubt, even though she just moved here from Nepal. She's not "technically" an ESL student because she attended an English boarding school in Nepal, and in order to make room for more new arrivals with no English they transferred her out of an ESL class into my class. But seriously? She's an ELL. She's a sweet, polite, enthusiastic kid, and she's not hopelessly below grade level, and I just think it's kind of unfair to threaten to hold her over when maybe she just needs more time to adjust to moving to the other side of the world.

Next. During social studies, the guidance counselor poked her head into my classroom. Now, she is a lovely woman, but I have seen a lot less of her since William and Julio departed, which is kind of the way I like it. No matter how lovely she is, nothing good has ever come of having the guidance counselor poke her head into my room (except when she comes to reward my Student of the Month). But anyway, she came with news. Juicy, twisted, horrifying news. Apparently Julio's mother showed up this morning and wants to re-enroll Julio at our school.

Okay. Let's take a minute and revisit the story of Julio. Since kindergarten, Julio has had massive behavior problems. He was like the first six-year-old ever to be suspended. In first grade, Julio was diagnosed with ADD. His mother didn't like that diagnosis, but instead of getting a second opinion about why he might be exhibiting such grossly inappropriate behavior at school, she just pretended the diagnosis didn't exist. By the time he got to second grade in my class, he was wetting his pants (and my entire bathroom floor) repeatedly, threatening suicide, drawing pictures of violent shootings and stabbings and anal sex, screaming curse words, and throwing chairs. Literally throwing chairs!

I met with his mother. The guidance counselor met with his mother. The assistant principal met with his mother. Her response was to transfer him to another school. Where, on his first day, he cursed at and hit another student.

Somehow, in the time that's elapsed since that happened in November, his new school convinced his mother to sign an IEP that places him in a 12:1:1 classroom. I have no idea what his classification is, but I wouldn't be surprised if it's "emotionally disturbed." So what did his mother do? She showed up at our school, crying, claiming she didn't realize what she signed. We don't have a self-contained placement for him, but apparently she has the right to "cancel" his IEP and re-enroll him at our school. (Are you wondering what his zoned school is? Julio and his mom were staying with his grandmother and commuting to our school. She transferred him to his new school by listing his address as the grandmother's, but she's now claiming that they never actually moved, they just pretended to move in order to get him transferred. Which I know personally is a lie because Julio is a fairly bright kid and he told me what neighborhood he lives in.)

First of all: No backsies on this kid. Second of all, I think this is the first time in my teaching career that I've literally been this angry at a child's parent. I mean, there's denial, and then there's just doing the wrong thing for your child. You can't yank this kid around like a yo-yo just because you disagree with pretty much every teacher, counselor, principal and social worker who's ever assessed him. That is not what's best for him. It's one thing to have doubts about giving your child a "label," or placing him in an environment where he's not going to thrive, but it's another think to totally ignore the fact that your child is in pain, he is angry, he is disturbed. I'm not talking about a kid who used to get mad at other kids and impulsively reach out and pinch them, like Jason does. I'm talking about a kid who used to bang his head against the wall and then throw himself onto the floor in the corner of the room and curl up in a ball and sob. Even Julio knew that he had a problem, that he didn't react like other kids, that he couldn't control his anger and his frustration. None of that is going to change by sticking him back in a general ed classroom at our school (as if his two and a half years here did him a lot of good), and it's obviously only going to get worse as he gets older!

Whew. And now to switch gears a little. The other day, when I picked up my class from lunch, two of my boys were sitting off to the side by themselves. This is like wearing a giant sign on yourself that says I AM IN TROUBLE. Listening to one of my students try to explain how they got into trouble when I wasn't there is like Rashomon. "All I did was tell him to go in front of me!" "Well he was waving his hand up in the air and it looked like he was going to punch me and then they made us sit over here!" Okay, um, what? I still have no idea what went on. Anyway, my class was scheduled to be in the auditorium for three periods in a row while I was at a meeting (one thing I do not miss about being an out-of-classroom teacher is those ridiculous mass preps), so when we got upstairs, I geared up for full-blown Lecture Mode. You are representing our class. You want other teachers to want to spend time with us. You understand that our rules are the same whether we're in the classroom with Miss Brave or in the auditorium with other teachers. Then I had this funny conversation with some colleagues:

Me: "Ms. M, let me know how my class is when you're in the auditorium with them, because I told them they could earn compliments from you."
Ms. N: "Oh, me too, if they behave with you they'll earn a check."
Ms. J: "I just told them they better not make me look bad or they'll regret it for the rest of the year."

Heh, everyone has their own style. Anyway, my class happily received a good report, so up went the compliments.

Then it was Shaina's birthday. Shaina is a great kid, mellow with a good sense of humor. After we ate the cupcakes and drank the juice she brought to share with the class (with most kids calling out, "Thank you, Shaina!" without me even having to remind them), she asked if she could go offer one of the extra cupcakes to her first grade teacher. (See? Such a good girl.) As she was leaving, Bruce ran up to her and said, "Tell Mrs. C I say hi!" which I thought was cute. While she was out of the room, the rest of the class decided they wanted to surprise her by bursting into the happy birthday song when she returned. (Then they decided we should turn off the lights and "hide," to which I was like, uh, no. Where would we all fit?) And so they did. A bunch of the girls had been busily decorating cards for her while they were supposed to be packing up, which I pretended not to see because, well, I thought it was sweet and she deserved cards.

Then it was time to pull a ticket from the ticket jar. When my kids are behaving, I hand them a ticket on which they write their names, and then they drop it in the ticket jar. A few times a week, I pull a ticket from the jar and that person gets a prize. We've had a problem in the past with s-o-r-e l-o-s-e-r-s who act poorly when their name isn't the one called, so I've been trying to instead encourage celebration for the person whose name is called. (Because, let's be honest: Alex has about twelve times as many tickets in the jar as the rest of you knuckleheads.) Anyway, when I pulled Lyle's name from the jar today, everyone started calling out, "Congratulations, Lyle!"

I'm not even going to be glib about this: I was so pleased. And to celebrate their celebration of Lyle, I gave the whole class another compliment.

So what's up with Miss Brave in the Sparkle Days? Henry and Mudge in the Sparkle Days is one of my favorite Cynthia Rylant books in the Henry and Mudge series about a boy and his dog. In it, the "sparkle days" are what Henry and Mudge call the days of winter, when everything seems to sparkle.

Despite everything that happened this morning, we had a lovely afternoon. Today was a sparkle day.

Two nice stories

2010-01-21T16:30:00.002-05:00

Remember Azul? When he became my student in September of 2008, he was a B reader who had just moved to the United States a few months before. I saw him in the hallway today at school and asked how he was doing in reading. He told me that he's now a level L! From B to L in a year and a half. Amazing.

Today with my small extended day group we were answering some questions that asked us to circle the word that didn't belong. I was trying to get the Sesame Street "One of These Things Is Not Like the Others" to play on our computer, but our school network naturally blocks YouTube, so I had to settle for reading the lyrics today. One of my students was bouncing and bopping around as I read them, and the boy next to her turned to her and sternly admonished, "This is not a dance party!" Heh.

Is this a backhanded compliment?

2010-01-19T18:45:00.003-05:00

A letter to me from one of my students:

"Dear Miss Brave,

You are the pretty's woman in the wold and you are the Best teacher in the wold and it's fun learning with you. Miss Brave why can't you take [a] brake from us some time Miss Brave and let a other [teacher] to teach us one day please."

Underneath a picture of me and all 27 kids in our class (represented by tiny stick figures), it says "look in the back"...the back is a heart that says "Your the best best best teacher ever ok."

Okay!

Science and social studies

2010-01-15T15:16:00.002-05:00

At my school, we're so hyper-focused on reading, writing and math that science and social studies toooootally get the shaft. Which is unfortunate, because taking a strong interest in a particular area of science and social studies is often the catalyst for progress in reading, writing and math.

One of the things that's surprised me in my first year as a classroom teacher is how much I really enjoy teaching science. Science was never my thing when I was in school, but as a teacher I get to see the "Eureka!" of discovery on a daily basis, which is pretty cool. We use the FOSS science curriculum, and unlike Teachers College, I can honestly say I love it. (And my students do too.) The kits come packaged with almost every supply we need, which is fabulous because it means I don't have to run around trying to find plastic cups or clothespins for our experiments. All the lessons are hands-on, and they tend to surprise me even more than my students. There have been many times when I reviewed a lesson ahead of time, rolled my eyes and thought, "My kids will never be able to do that" -- but then they can! I usually test out the lessons ahead of time so I'll be able to demonstrate them for my kids, and half the time my kids can make the experiments work better than I can.

In our current unit, we're studying rocks. This has been great (albeit slightly messy -- the rocks come all dusty and then we have to drop them in water to see what happens, which creates puddles), especially because of all the rich vocabulary we're getting to use to describe our rocks. Even though I don't technically have ELLs in my class, many of them speak other languages at home, and I'm noticing that they lack vocabulary for description. So we have a growing "rock words" wall where we're collecting words like shiny, bumpy, dusty, chalky, sharp, flat, smooth, rough, and so on.

Recently, after a few days of observing different kinds of rocks under a microscope and how they react in water (FOSS came with enough rocks for each kid to get their own bag of rocks and a mini microscope -- brilliant!), I got to "reveal" the names of the rocks and their origins. When they found out they'd been handling three different types of rocks that all originated from various stages of a volcanic eruption, they were awed. Then I brought in photos of my visit to Kilauea, the Hawaiian volcano. We could see the types of rocks we were studying in the photos! It was pretty neat to see the progression from talking about "the reddish rock with the holes" to talking about "scoria."

But of course, volcanoes will hold anyone's attention; social studies is a little trickier. This week, we took a break from studying map keys (boring) to discussing Martin Luther King, Jr. I'm like 99% sure that they have to have learned something about Martin Luther King in first grade, but none of it seemed to ring a bell when we started our discussion (except for the fact that he was shot and killed -- that everyone always seems to remember and wants to talk more about).

I started out by saying that just like we have rules in our classroom, our country has rules called laws. And there was a time before we were born, but not very long ago, that some places in our country had laws that said that people who had black skin couldn't go to school with people who had white skin, or ride the same buses, or drink from the same water fountains. Their reactions to this ranged from shock to outrage to puzzlement (how could that be the law?). We talked about how laws can be unfair: I asked them whether it would be unfair if I made a rule in our classroom that only children born in February could be allowed to use our bathroom. Then I asked them to think about how they could convince me to change the rule. Because this is where the boys start saying grandiose things like, "If someone told me I couldn't go to the same store as other people, I would just punch that person in the head and run inside!" I said, "If you thought the new rule was unfair, and you decided to run up to me and kick me really hard so that I would change the rule, do you think I would feel like changing my mind because you kicked me?"

So then I explained how Martin Luther King tried to use words instead of violence to change people's minds. Jason remained unconvinced, and in fact is probably at home right now plotting how he will achieve whatever he wants in life by brute force. But anyway. We listened to a very brief part of the "I Have a Dream" speech: "I have a dream that one day my four little children will live in a nation where they will not be judged by the color of their skin but by the content of their character," and we talked about what it means to "judge" someone. We read the fantastic Martin's Big Words, and talked about how the things he said were "big words" because they were words that got people to change. Then they wrote their own little "I have a dream...I can help by..."

Jason's dream was peace on earth, but he couldn't think of a way that he personally could help acheive it. I was like, "Hmm, maybe you could start by not calling Felix a crybaby so I won't have to pull the two of you out of the classroom on my prep to discuss how we respect our classmates by not making them feel sad."

Happy weekend, everyone!

Puzzling but true

2010-01-08T15:56:00.004-05:00

The more I think I know my kids, the more I realize I can never predict what they'll get and what they won't. Twice in the past week, I've been teaching about a concept in a lesson when I realize it's come up before -- only I can't remember when or in what context. And both times, my class has lit up like a Christmas tree with children reminding me what we've learned.

The first time, I was teaching a reading lesson about how readers can infer what their characters are feeling by paying attention to body language. I mentioned that we had talked about body language before. "Oh yeah!" someone said. "Like in The Nutcracker, they use body language to tell the story instead of words." I had to give myself a big Duh, Miss Brave. Before the vacation, we took a field trip to see The Nutcracker, and I spent a long time talking about how the dancers' body language would tell the story in lieu of dialogue. We even practiced acting out some scenes from the book I read them (using body language, of course) before we went to the ballet.

The second time, we were reading an article about the invention of the Ferris wheel, which some kids were finding a little confusing because the article jumps from a paragraph about the London Eye to the invention of the first Ferris wheel in 1893. I was encouraging the kids to pay attention to the time shift, and I reminded them that we had recently read a book in which the author goes back in time to tell us about something that had already happened before the beginning of the story. Only I didn't tell them what book it was, because I couldn't remember! All of a sudden, I had kids calling it out to me: "A Chair for My Mother!"

Are my students smarter than me? Do they just have better memories than I do? Why is it that they can make these connections about things we learned weeks apart, but they can't remember to take their lunch money out of their schoolbags when they unpack or what page in their math journals I just asked them to complete? It's like there's some special trapdoor inside the seven-year-old brain that automatically gets rid of the last directive out of the teacher's mouth. In any case, I'm lucky they retained anything, so I'll take what I can get.

Money matters

2010-01-07T17:42:00.003-05:00

We recently went on a (free) field trip to a bookstore. I had 26 kids with me, and 21 of them had brought money to buy books. Some had as little as $5 (thank goodness for the store's 20% discount and tax exemption), and some had as much as $20. (They can't really conceptualize how expensive books can actually be, and they're still not really clear on the concept of "getting change," so a lot of the kids with $20 bills were running around holding four books and attempting to find just one more that would bring them up to a grand total of exactly $20.)

Bryce was one of the lucky $20 kids. He is not normally a kid who likes to share (in fact, he typically flies into hysterics if someone so much as picks up his pencil by accident), so I was surprised when he spontaneously announced that he was going to buy a book for his partner, Dana. Dana is sweet, thoughtful, wants to be a teacher when she grows up, and comes to school about a half-hour late every single day. As I watched Bryce walk around juggling half a dozen paperbacks, I worried he would change his mind.

Then Mario started asking me about the price of various books, which was odd because he hadn't brought any money with him. Apparently Jason had told Mario he would give him $4 for a book. Jason is notoriously unreliable, and I was getting concerned about the whole transfer-of-money thing. On the one hand, I didn't want to tell Bryce and Jason they couldn't buy books for their friends. (Although I'm pretty sure Jason's gesture was purely mercenary -- he was finished using his money on the books he wanted, and it's not like it was his own money that he was saving for anything, so he let Mario have some.) But on the other hand, I didn't want the kids with $5 clamoring for extra money from the kids with $20, or the kids with $20 lording it over the kids who hadn't brought anything.

In the end, Bryce did buy a book for Dana, and Jason did buy a book for Mario. That left three students with no money, whom I quietly took aside and allowed to choose a book. So everyone in my class went home with something. And thankfully, I didn't hear any bribery or bargaining going on, at least until we got back to school and Kyle started divvying up his new Captain Underpants books.

On an unrelated note, I love field trip days, because they let me get to see the best of my class. (i.e., my students are surprisingly enjoyable when I am not forcing the workshop model down their throats!) On our last trip, someone threw up on the bus, and no one near him said "EWWWW! GROSS!" or made fun. They get ridiculously excited about the mundane things they can spot out the window ("MISS BRAVE! I SEE A DUNKIN' DONUTS!!!"), like little sponges slurping up the outside world. When we get back and eat our lunches, they munch with sighs of satisfaction like their sandwiches are the best thing in the world. (Actually, since they're used to eating lunch at 10 in the morning and it's usually 1:00 by then, they probably are! Also, today a girl brought two donuts as her lunch. Yuck.) My dream student Leah always holds her partner's hand for safekeeping (because she's just that responsible). On our trip to the bookstore, the bus ride back to school was a low hum of excitement over everyone's new books, and when we pulled up in front of school, my most adorable student looked up in happy amazement. "Miss Brave," he said, "me and Tara were so quiet! We didn't even talk, we were just reading our books."

Oh, man, don't you wish every day could be like that?

Differential

2010-01-05T20:35:00.002-05:00

In addition to the sixty lessons I am dutifully planning (ahem) each week, I'm also supposed to be taking notes on all the strategy lessons I'm doing with my small groups during independent working time in reading, writing and math. I have a sheet for every student in each subject that lists their three goals for the unit, and every time I meet with that student for a strategy lesson, I fill out a little box with the date, my teaching point, my observations of the student, other "things I notice," and whether the student has "mastered, attempted or not mastered" the teaching point.

So, let me break it down for you. Let's say I have five students who share the common goal of developing strong conclusions to their stories. And my teaching point for the strategy lesson is "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." That means for each one of those students, I'm taking out their piece of paper and writing that same teaching point in the little box. "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story." "Writers develop strong conclusions by writing how they felt at the end of the story."

Did that just drive you crazy to read that five times? Imagine how I feel writing it five times. I feel like Miss Brave the Trained Teacher Monkey, that's how I feel. Not to mention that I still haven't figured out how to write notes on my observations and other "things I notice" of five students while simultaneously trying to, you know, teach the lesson. Plus, keep in mind that this is one strategy lesson, for one subject, and I'm supposed to be doing two strategy lessons per day in three different subjects, which means that if each strategy lesson has five students, and I'm doing six strategy lessons a day (in an ideal teaching world, of course), I'm filling in little boxes of observations and things I notice and teaching points thirty times. Per day.

The point of all this is that I detest that sheet full of boxes that we use for writing, so I attempted to redesign it to make it work better for me. I basically took the same sheet we use for another subject, which is slightly more manageable, and modified it for writing. Then I sent it off to my AP in a groveling e-mail in which I asked permission to use my sheet instead because I thought it would work better for me. Note italics.

First let's set aside the small indignity that I had to ask permission to modify my own note-taking procedure (hello, Miss Brave the Trained Teacher Monkey). My AP e-mailed me back that she would bring it up at the next cabinet meeting (um, whatever that is) and get back to me.

Rrrrrghhh. It literally has to go before a committee before I can use it, and if the committee decides it's a good redesign, they will probably foist it upon every teacher in the school. One of my co-workers recently redesigned our reading sheets, and she said it took about a month before her design was "approved," and when it was, it was handed down to us like Moses receiving the Ten Commandments -- this was The Reading Sheet We All Had to Use.

As my colleague dryly noted, "They want us to differentiate instruction...but they don't." Seriously, all I'm trying to do is organize my own way of collecting my own data in order to drive my own instruction, but God forbid I'm not doing it in the same little boxes as everyone else. I'm starting to feel like that dude in Network.

A better way

2010-01-04T19:09:00.002-05:00

Aaaaaaand we're back! I left my house this morning at 6:20 am and arrived at home this evening at 6:30 pm. In between, I saw zero hours of daylight and spent nearly eleven hours straight in my classroom, punctuated by brief trips (avec class) to the cafeteria and (sans class) to the bathroom. (I read Julia Child's My Life in France over the vacation and still have Paris on the brain. In fact, I kind of wish I were there right now. Ah, c'est la vie.)

I thought I had done a good job preparing my classroom for January, and I had -- I had already (sneakily) changed over my calendars and set up the schedule. So this morning all I had to do was switch around the jobs, fill in my teaching points, print out the homework sheet, put reading logs and newsletters in the mailboxes, return the math tests, take down the chairs, pull out the new Fundations materials, take out the pre-tests, set up the unit overview -- deep breath -- you see where this is going.

Then the kids arrived. Welcome back, I had a party, I made goo, I went to the history museum, I exploded confetti, you cut your hair really short this time Miss Brave, when are we going to use the computers, next week is my dad's birthday, is the trip this week, etc.

Then the kids left, and I spent what felt like a zillion hours filing and organizing papers and grouping my kids by goal for strategy lessons, which is pretty much what I feel like I spend every waking minute of my teaching life doing. Like, did I plan any concrete lessons for the immediate future (i.e., tomorrow)? No. I spend soooo much time grouping and organizing my kids that by the time I've figured out what strategy lesson I'm going to teach them, I have no time or motivation to actually plan the lesson. Which is completely backwards, no? There has to be a better way.

I've mentioned before that we're expected to make sure each of our students has three goals for each unit in reading, writing and math. While students are working independently after the mini lesson, we're supposed to meet with two small groups for strategy lessons to help them meet these goals. What I've generally done, at least for writing and math, is create a monthly "pool" of ten goals for the class, from which I select three for an individual student. The kicker is that each goal has to be addressed three times (our lame-ass motto is "Three days, three different ways"). So, for those of you keeping score at home, that's ten goals, over three days each, hmmmm, poof, thirty lessons! Miss Brave, you may be asking, are there even thirty days in a unit (which is usually a month long)? Well, no, there are not, hence my valiant (and often futile) attempts to meet with two strategy groups per day. But guess what, sometimes it's last period and three-quarters of my class leaves for early dismissal, or sometimes it's first period and it takes seven-year-olds too long to unpack, or sometimes there's a fire drill, or I have to send someone to the nurse, or -- you see where this is going.

Meanwhile, in the car on the way home, I was boggling my own mind with the sheer volume of lessons I'm supposed to be planning. In reading, writing and math, I teach a mini lesson, and two strategy lessons, each day -- that's like three lessons per subject, or nine altogether. Plus word work, science or social studies, and a read aloud -- that's another three. So twelve altogether. Multiply that by five days in a week and that's sixty lessons a week.

I'm exhausted just thinking about it. Which is why I'm going to go eat my Monday night sushi and not think about it until it's time to get up and do it all over again.

Back to school

2010-01-02T14:40:00.003-05:00

I have heard stories about teachers who miss their students over break and look forward to getting back to school, but alas, I am not one of them. I was touched to receive several more thoughtful gifts from my students (some of them appealingly edible!), including a surprisingly fashionable earrings-and-necklace set from Arianna (who had also happened to stay up half the night hand-writing cards for the other students in the class), who presented them to me like this:

Arianna: "Miss Brave, I got you a gift. Guess what it is."
Miss Brave, looking around at the frantic hustle and bustle of morning unpacking: "Um, I don't know, sweetie, that could kind of take all day. Is it...a block of cheese?"
Arianna: "No. I'll give you a hint. It's for your ears, and your neck."
Miss Brave: "Ooooh, is it a pair of shoes?"

Heh, heh, I crack myself up.

The last day of school before vacation was our best day in school yet. My two most irritating troublemakers were absent (a gift in itself!), along with several other students, and it also happened to be Pajama Day and Bring a Stuffed Animal to School Day. I wore my snowflake pajama bottoms and my panda bear slippers, which were received with fantastic shouts of glee by my class. While they were at gym, I played Santa, setting out gift bags filled with small treats: a pair of gloves (two pairs for $1 -- thank you, Target), candy canes, pencils and a miniature tub of Play-Doh. After gym, we lined up outside the door and I very seriously gave instructions about packing up. As I sent them inside to discover their little gifts, I felt like the Grinch when his heart grew three sizes -- they were swooning with joy, hugging their pencils to their chests (I believe I literally heard someone utter the words, "A lead pencil, just what I've always wanted!"), swearing they weren't taking their gloves off until bedtime, and thanking me spontaneously. It was pretty fabulous -- well worth the loooong afternoon I spent at Target loading up my cart with 27 of each item (several people mistook me for a Target employee shelving items) and the small fortune I spent on all the trinkets.

Naturally, I managed to dream about school several times during the vacation; as always, I dreamt that I was late to school (school starts at 8 am. I arrive before 7 every morning. I am never, ever even close to being late for school). Other than that, though, I spent less time than I had planned getting organized and doing work. My assistant principal is collecting our writing and math binders in the next few weeks (major eye roll), and I had wanted to double-check everything in my binders to make sure it was all copacetic, but of course I lugged my gigantic binders home and left a lot of the individual student papers I need to file inside them at school. Our current reading and writing units end next week, and as I haven't received my checklists for the next one, there's not much I can do to prepare. One of the most frustrating things about my school is that my teaching points for each reading and writing are literally placed in my mailbox (usually approximately one day before the first day of the unit); I have zero input into the shape of the unit itself or any of the individual teaching points we use.

I did spend a long and puzzling Tuesday morning trying to get my math stuff up to speed. In my first year as a teacher, I taught writing, and in my second year as a teacher, I taught reading. Math (a subject I've never liked) is still my weakest area as a teacher, and it doesn't help that my school no longer has a math coach.

We use the Everyday Mathematics curriculum, and while I appreciate its methodology, it can be a little overwhelming to follow. It's like some mad mathematician outlined every single thing that second graders need to know in math and dumped it all together in no discernable order whatsoever. Like, one day we'll do temperature, and the next day, estimating costs. And nine times out of ten, the assessment for a particular lesson or unit doesn't align with what was being taught. Like, I'll teach a lesson on telling time, but the "secure goal" I'm assessing that day is whether students can correctly record tally marks. Or, I'll teach a unit on all these various concepts, and then the post-test will assess their ability to count by 5s, a skill that wasn't really addressed in the unit.

The philosophy is of a "spiraling curriculum," which I understand makes sense in the real world because everything in the real world is mathematical and it's not like mathematical concepts come in a vacuum, blah blah blah. But all the jumping around is still confusing. And my school's new push for strategy lessons is to give each student a goal that is addressed "over three days, three different ways." So it can be hard to come up with three different ways of teaching a particular mathematical goal that doesn't just end up confusing everyone, especially when some of the things that Everyday Math asks students to do is just, in my opinion, unnecessarily complicated. So I spent some time outlining strategy lessons for our next unit.

I do have to say that, even though I remain dissatisfied with my job, when I think about where I am mentally compared to last year at this same time, this feels better. I don't know if it's because I no longer have to deal with the frustration of endless coverages and schedule changes, or if I'm just doing a better job mentally "checking out" of all the bullshit of work when I leave.

I'm not ready to go back...but go back I must. And I will.

One day more

2009-12-22T16:21:00.003-05:00

There's no denying we got off to a rough start this year. But now that William and Julio have left us, we've evolved into a kind of cozy classroom community. Most of their transgressions are now frustratingly predictable: Kyle forgets to put his schoolbag in the closet every. single. day; David needs an engraved invitation to the meeting area when all of his classmates are already there; Viviana's loud, chatty voice pierces through every direction I give like a siren; Jason cannot resist the urge to insert explosive noises and mime punches in an effort to liven up every mini lesson. Even when my class is driving me up the wall with their chatting and their resistance to following directions, not a day goes by when I'm not thankful that chatting is the worst I typically have to deal with; I do not miss the days of peeing on the floor and jumping off tables and loud swearing.

And then there are times when it all comes together and I get to sit back in satisfaction and think, "Ahhhhh, Miss Brave's class." Last week, for instance, we arrived alarmingly early on a field trip and had to sit on the bus for a half-hour. We'd already had two students get carsick and we were in for a long thirty minutes of "Is it time yet? When are we getting off?" until I suggested we play a round of Guess What Character Miss Brave Is Thinking About. They asked me questions about the character -- "Is he helpful?" "Is he from a book by Kevin Henkes?" -- until someone finally guessed correctly, and then I gave someone else a turn. They were raising their hands, they were calling on each other, and when we finally got to go inside (and we had to wait again), some of them continued to play amongst themselves. It was great.

Last week, I received in my Department of Education e-mail a "Holiday Gift Memo" from the DOE's "ethics officer." The e-mail encouraged me to review the Chancellor's Regulation C-110 on conflicts of interest and reminded me that, as a city employee, I "may not accept gifts or 'tips' for doing [my] job" and that "teachers should only accept individual gifts from parents that are of a sentimental nature and/or of small financial value."

Apparently the over-gifting of teachers was a growing problem in the suburbs, where wealthy parents were competing to out-gift each other by lavishing upon their children's teachers gifts of spa certificates (!), Coach bags (!!) and Rolex watches (!!!). But in NYC public schools, when I read Mayor Bloomberg's admonishment to parents to keep it under $50, all I could do was roll my eyes. My students don't even pay for lunch. How could they pay $50 for a Christmas gift for a teacher?

Today, two of my students presented me with holiday gifts. One of them, Alaina, is new to my class and new to the country; the other, Marco, is my class clown, and handed me the bag looking like the gift had been entirely his parents' idea. No, it wasn't a Coach bag. It was better: a large tote bag (perfect for lugging heavy teacher manuals), with plastic slots on the front (the perfect size for sliding in photos of my class), and best of all, embroidered with my name. I now have my very own teacher tote with my name on it! Eat your heart out, suburbia.

Still too busy for a real update

2009-12-14T20:59:00.002-05:00

But in lieu of one, I present Kids Say the Darndest Things: Miss Brave Edition.

(1) I go to pick up my class Monday morning after the Thanksgiving vacation. Marco spots me and grumbles, "Aw, man, school ruined my weekend."

(2) It is time to line up on a Monday afternoon after a difficult Fundations period in which way too many students are talking, faking explosion noises, futzing around with the carpet or just generally not paying attention. Consequently, I am grouchy. One of my smartest and most well-behaved students bounces up to me and says brightly, "Miss Brave, it's a good thing it's time to go home, because I was about to fall asleep at the carpet!"

(3) We are discussing the vocabulary word "flood." Manuel raises his hand and says, "If there is a flood coming, you should turn your TV off, because I know that water and electricity are not a good combination."

(4) We use the FOSS science curriculum at my school. I think it's excellent and my kids loooove science. The materials for each unit come packed inside large boxes that I don't have room for in my classroom, so I store them in the bathroom we have inside our room. One day I am giving a science test when Bryce raises his hand and says, "Miss Brave, is our next unit in science going to be Pebbles, Sand and Silt or New Plants?" I was astonished. "How did you know what our science units were called?" I asked. He gave me a 'duh' look and shrugged, "The bathroom."

(5) We are working on a "realistic fiction" unit in writing, creating realistic but fictional characters and stories. On an extremely cold Friday, I remind the students to put on and close all their layers of clothing. I tell them it reminds me of the scene in Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse when all the students are buttoned and zipped and tied and snapped and ready to go home. Christian points out: "Lilly's Purple Plastic Purse is realistic fiction!" I want to kiss him.

(6) I am meeting with my five K readers for guided reading. We are discussing the word "busy" and I ask them to explain what it means. Jason says, "It's like, okay, Miss Brave, ask me if I want to play a game." I oblige: "Jason, do you want to play a game?" He answers: "I can't, I'm busy in a group with the teacher."

The day the animals escaped from the zoo

2009-11-23T18:04:00.002-05:00

In response to my last post, in which I confessed to jumping up and down as my two most notoriously troublesome students changed schools, one of my readers wondered: "What ever will you post about now?"

Oh, I don't know, how about the time there was a lizard in my classroom?!

Scene: Monday morning, second period. My kids are finishing coloring in some turkeys that a substitute teacher gave them last period. Everything is relatively, blessedly mellow. Then I hear a voice say: "Um, Miss Brave? There's a lizard!"

I look. My eyes see, but they do not believe. Actually, at first I think, Who brought in a toy lizard and dropped it by the door?

Then the toy lizard scurries across the floor. Then I think: A lizard? Seriously? Why me?

My kids are obviously more with it than I am, because someone started yelling out, "Call Mr. R and Mr. M!", our science teachers. So I did, but no one picked up in the science lab, and then while I was on the phone, one of my pull-out teachers appeared and tried to open the door.

Try to imagine, if you will, just for a second, what she might have seen. She's pushing open the door to our classroom, as she does every single day, only today there is a roomful of panicked seven-year-olds yelling at her, "Don't open the door!" and madly pointing downward at a creature she obviously cannot see.

Anyway, she got the door open a crack, and I explained the situation. To which she addressed my class at large: "Who is not afraid of the lizard? Maybe one of you can capture it."

Um, Mrs. C? I hate to break this to you, but there will be no capturing of any kind going on in my classroom by anyone under the age of 18.

In the meantime, the science lab is still not picking up, so I call down to the main office and say what might be my favorite opening line ever in a call to the main office: "Um, hi, it's Miss Brave. There's a lizard in my classroom and I don't know what to do."

Miss Brave: "I called Mr. M and Mr. R but they're not there."
Main Office: "Well, they did give each classroom a lizard."
Miss Brave (thinking: Is this some kind of crazy science experiment by our wacky science teachers? Did they legitimately just drop a lizard in front of my door to see how my class would react? I'm going to kill them!): "Um, okay, but it's running around on my floor."
Main Office: "I'll tell them."

Now envision the next few minutes: Kids screaming each time the lizard moved. Miss Brave yelling, "SIT DOOOOOWWWWWN!!!!" at kids constantly jumping out of their seats to see what the lizard is up to. Utter freaking pandemonium.

At last, Mr. M and Mr. R arrived. They grabbed the first thing they saw -- an empty drawer that had been housing the markers and crayons of the now-abandoned turkey project -- and wrangled the lizard. Once they had cornered him inside the drawer, they bizarrely grabbed the next thing they saw, which happened to be Felix's book report, and used it as a top.

"They took my book report!" Felix howled with glee.

"Felix," I said, "you are the only person who has a good excuse for not handing in a book report."

With the lizard gone, we debriefed. So far this year, my classroom has been home to a bee that refused to leave us and a ladybug that was the subject of much great fascination. My students were understandably delighted to have another up close and personal encounter with wildlife.

"First the bee, then the ladybug, now the lizard!" they chorused. "What's next, a bear?"

"I hope not," I said.

The lizard, as it turns out, had escaped from another classroom down the hall, whose members hadn't even noticed the lizard was missing. The next period, Mr. M and Mr. R arrived and noted, with mock seriousness, that of all the classrooms in the school, the lizard had chosen ours as his refuge.

"There must be good energy here," Mr. M said. My kids were eager to explain about the bee and the ladybug and the lizard and how we're apparently the animal-friendliest class in the school. Martin raised his hand and asked the science teachers if the lizard was cold-blooded, which they deemed an excellent question.

And later in the afternoon we began a thrilling composition about the escaped lizard. And that, my friends, is what I deem a teachable moment...and another adventure in the urban jungle of NYC public schools.

When it rains, it pours

2009-11-20T17:02:00.002-05:00

Julio has left our school.

I wish I could tell you I reacted to this news with the maturity and wisdom befitting my profession, but I am not ashamed to tell you how I actually reacted: by jumping up and down in the lobby after I received his discharge papers in my mailbox. Yes, really. To be frank, when his mother mentioned at one of our many conferences that she was considering transferring him to another school, I did very little to discourage her; in fact, I told her that different schools do in fact handle things differently and who knows how Julio might react to a change in his school environment.

Well, now we know how he would react: by punching someone and using inappropriate language on his first day at his new school, resulting in an immediate suspension. Oh, Julio. I know this is totally taboo, but I do not miss him, or William, one bit.

Life after William

2009-11-03T18:44:00.003-05:00

It's possible I may be suffering from PWSD: Post-William Stress Disorder.

As I mentioned ever so briefly in my last post, William has departed from us, to a special education classroom at another school. If I could say one thing to his new teachers, I would say, Please help him succeed where our school failed him for three years. If I could say two things, I would say, Please help him succeed where our school failed him for three years, and also, no backsies.

So here's the deal with my class minus William (who, by the way, had perfect attendance while he was in my class): It's like a whole new class. On the plus side, it's like a whole new class, but on the minus side...it's like a whole new class. It's like September 9 all over again. It's like I turned around to find 26 other children sitting in front of me to whom I had not been able to devote a single iota of my attention because I was too busy chasing William around the classroom and trying to get him to give up my stapler (which he enjoyed using as a machine gun).

Don't get me wrong, I am not complaining about this development, but I am a little surprised by it. Even though I knew that William was holding our class hostage and making our days agonizing, I'm still startled by how much calmer everything feels without him. And part of that is my own personal fault, not William's or my students' -- for a while there, I let him control my emotions and my reactions, and of course that trickled down to my class. I was tense and, quite frankly, on the verge of panic when he was in the room (What am I going to do if he doesn't stop throwing that ball at the wall? How am I going to get him to quit the name-calling?), and that vibe oozed around the classroom like poison.

But on the other hand, our class was defined by William and his behavior for so long that it's almost a challenge to adjust to life without him. (Well, for me, at least -- other than Julio, who of course terribly misses his partner in crime, all of the other kids have adjusted well to bidding him adieu.) Last week, we took our first field trip, and all I kept thinking the whole time was: Oh my God, we never could have done this with William. When we got back, my kids were surprisingly mellow as they ate their lunches ("This is the best sandwich ever!" one of them enthused dreamily), and then something miraculous happened: One of the first kids to be done eating asked if she could read a book from our collection of Read Alouds. I agreed. Then another kid asked, and another kid. Before I knew it, my entire class was gathered in small clusters at the meeting area, sharing books. Some of them were reading aloud to each other. Some of them were obviously practicing their own "teacher" persona. Some of them had their heads bent close together, giggling as they pointed at the pictures.

Nobody was fighting, nobody was grabbing, nobody was shouting, nobody was using hurtful language. I had been planning to gather the class together to discuss the trip, but I hadn't counted on this beautiful, wondrous thing happening. I literally just sat back and watched them -- I even snapped a picture -- and before I knew it, it was time to go home.

It was the first time my classroom felt like a community. And slowly we will rebuild, and hopefully it will feel that way again.

I definitely did not teach this in a mini lesson

2009-10-29T20:52:00.002-04:00

Today it was blissfully quiet in my classroom during reading. It was so quiet, in fact, that I was considering granting my class a much-coveted compliment (they have been stuck at 16 forever, while they need to get to 25 to earn themselves either (a) a popcorn party or (b) a Michael Jackson dance party. Yes, I said that).

I assumed it was quiet because William is no longer with us (do you hear that? It is the sound of a choir of heavenly angels singing...it is also a story for an entirely different post). As it turns out, I should have known better. It was not quiet because my students were so studiously reading their books, drinking in the vast store of knowledge that can only come from endless re-reads of Mr. Putter and Tabby Bake a Cake. No, it was quiet because they were using the post-its from their book baggies -- which are supposed to be used to mark important parts of their books and jot down notes, thank you very much, yes I did teach that in a mini lesson about how readers blah blah blah by blah blah blay -- they were using the post-its from their book baggies to write and pass each other notes that read, among other things, "Suck my balls" and "Have sex with me." (And, by the way, the only reason I know exactly what these notes read is because I had to go digging through the trash can, CSI-style, to retrieve the evidence.)

Excuse me, I teach second grade. I do not teach middle school or junior high school, and precisely for the reason that I did not ever want to rehearse a phone call home that included the words "Today your son wrote 'Suck my balls' and 'Have sex with me' on a post-it."

What makes the whole thing even grosser is that these notes were being passed to girls, like, now I have a case of seven-year-old sexual harassment on my hands, which does not jive very well with our class trip to the petting zoo tomorrow.

Meanwhile, you know how every class has those girls who are very precocious and very prissy and very bossy and know-it-all and can always be counted upon to Inform you (yes, that's Inform with a capital I) who was doing what? Well, my authoritative informants assured me that Julio was the culprit (naturally), but his mother angrily told the guidance counselor that it wasn't his handwriting. (Which means that he didn't write the note, he just passed it around and flashed it at my Informants, which isn't really necessarily any better but ensures that his mother will probably hate me forever now for accusing her son of being a budding pervert.)

But, having now added Handwriting Comparison Expert to my growing list of teacher skills, I know who the real author of the note is. Alas, the number on his blue card turned out to be disconnected. I sort of hope he's at home right now playing with his DS, because I suspect that once I get in touch with Mom, today will be the last he sees of it for a long, loooong time.

Every kid has a story

2009-10-27T20:11:00.002-04:00

Every kid has a story. That's something I have to remind myself constantly in my class, because -- even putting aside William (who remains in my classroom, despite assurances from virtually everyone in the school that he'll be gone "any day now") and Julio (whose mother just sent me a lengthy form to fill out from a psychiatrist, hallelujah), I have some naughty, naughty kids in my class. But, unlike William and Julio, there's usually some kind of motivation for their behavior, and that's where the stories come in.

Jason is one of those naughty boys. He's so naughty, in fact, that his articulation card clearly stated that he shouldn't be placed in the same class as Julio (see: pants-wetting, tantrum-throwing and overall violent behavior). Wonder of wonders, I ended up with them both, and while Jason started out the year okay, lately he's been acting up. And by "acting up," I mean that (a) the tattle turtle received an anonymous note that read: "Jason tried to punch me in the face at lunch, (b) Jason passed a note to another student that read "dum dum," and (c) somehow the words "Shut up, crybaby" were deemed an appropriate response to another student playing a math game.

Jason is actually very bright, but he's also extremely lazy and a total whiner. I'd been communicating with his mom via e-mail, but after he broke out the "dum dum," I broke out the phone call. "What did he do?" she said knowingly after I introduced himself, sounded exasperated and affectionate at the same time. After speaking with his mom, I realized I'm so used to getting a total blank response from William's mom and excuse after excuse from Julio's mom that I wasn't expecting an actual positive response from a parent. That's when I got the story. Of course, it doesn't excuse the name-calling and the refusals to do classwork and the bordering-on-rudeness, but it does explain it a little. Jason's mom wrote me a long note today in which she explained Jason's side of the story but also conceded that "you never know with kids who's lying" -- a parent who's willing to admit that her child isn't perfect! How novel! And now I know that Jason is getting counseling outside of school, and we have a plan to keep Mom updated via e-mail.

It's not easy teaching a class of 27 kids, but it's even harder teaching 27 classes of 1 kid. But every kid has a story.

Friday cupcakes

2009-10-10T09:44:00.002-04:00

Yesterday, while I was walking my class upstairs with William at the front of the line (which is not where his line spot is, but you try getting him to stay in his place), he enthused to me: "We're going to have a party!"

"Where, in after-school?" I asked.

"No, in our class!" he responded, jerking a thumb to the back of the line. There was Arianna carrying three boxes of Entenmann's Halloween cupcakes that I had no idea were coming.

Now, Friday was Joan's birthday; Saturday was Arianna's. A few days before, Arianna had said to me: "My dad asked if the class could sing happy birthday to me, but I don't want to take away from Joan's birthday."

My hardened, blackened teacher heart melted, and I assured her we could sing to both of them. But I had not been forewarned about the cupcakes.

Arianna is a holdover; she was in my reading group last year. She is a quiet, sweet little girl who tries very hard, has low self-esteem, and giggles when I tell jokes to the class. Naturally, I adore her. I get the impression she doesn't necessarily get pumped up by her family at home, so I was surprised they went out of their way to send her in with birthday cupcakes. Here was the problem: There were 18 cupcakes for my 27 students. (Well, 25...thank goodness Julio was absent and William was with a pull-out teacher, because the day might have ended with a food fight instead of singing if they had been there.)

That's why, seventh period, I found myself sawing through the gooey cupcakes with a plastic knife. Robert gave each student half a paper towel, Tanya collected all the garbage, and I handed out baby wipes so everyone could clean their frosting fingers. Then a student from across the hall popped in to offer me a cupcake from her birthday party. When she proffered the box of cupcakes, I nearly fainted: They were from Magnolia Bakery! You bet your sweet frosting I took one.

As we all settled in to eat our cupcakes, my students started venting their complaints about William: "I know why I can't behave," Jose said sadly. "It's because William keeps saying mean things, and I try to ignore him but he keeps saying them, and then I just get so mad!" Melinda agreed: "When William keeps coming to my table and bothering us, my brain just gets so angry and I just have to say something to him."

And I really can't blame them. They're seven years old. It's hard. Even I can't control my anger at William sometimes. How do I explain to them that William is angry, and frustrated, and compensates for that by trying to bully them? How do I explain that William is obviously not in an appropriate setting, that we're working to find a better environment for him?

All I know is, for forty minutes on Friday afternoon, I got a taste of what my classroom would be like without William and Julio. And oh my, it was sweet.

This is why I wanted to stay a reading teacher

2009-10-08T21:12:00.003-04:00

We just finished our first unit in math, and I feel like a dismal failure as a math teacher. I have 16 students in my math group. From the pre-test to the post-test (they have exactly the same questions), 6 of my students got exactly the same score (usually because they got exactly the same question wrong), 6 went up, and 4 went down.

I despise math.

Counsel

2009-10-08T19:02:00.003-04:00

Yesterday afternoon, very close to the end of the day, Julio had an accident. He was already in the bathroom when it happened, so I figured (a) he had waited too long to ask me to go, (b) he was fooling around in the bathroom and underestimated how much he had to go, or (c) he had trouble getting his belt undone and ended up wetting himself. Anyway, I called downstairs and the office called his mother, and because it was so close to the end of the school day, his mother just took him home. There was an awkward period in between when he wouldn't pull up his wet pants and come out of the bathroom, so he simply stayed in there with his pants down, only he wanted to hear the story I was reading, so he kept sticking his head out of the bathroom, which of course caught the attention of some of the girls, who squealed, "Julio has his pants down!" But eventually Mom showed up and I figured that was the end of it.

Today, Julio had another accident. Again, he was already in the bathroom. But this time, he peed all over the bathroom floor. Again, he wouldn't pull up his wet pants and come out of the bathroom, but today, he started wadding up toilet paper and throwing it out of the bathroom. When I confronted him, he flat-out denied it, and then -- maybe in a misguided attempt to get rid of the evidence? -- he stuffed the toilet paper in his mouth and started chewing it.

So now we have the pants-wetting, and the violent and sexual pictures he's been drawing, and the fact that when he gets angry he bangs his head against the wall and says things like, "I'm going to kill myself." Last year, when he was in first grade, he scrawled a racial slur on the hand of the only African-American child in his class. And every day, when I pick up the class from lunch, I hear, "Julio punched me, Julio kicked me, Julio spilled milk on me."

Mom promises she's looking into getting him counseling. But in the meantime, I can't hold my breath.

The pencil problem

2009-10-06T18:36:00.003-04:00

My classroom has a pencil problem.

Before the first day of school, in my adorable naivete, I supplied each table in my classroom with a table caddy filled to the brim with pencils, erasers, crayons and a pencil sharpener.

That was my first mistake.

Within weeks, all of those things had disappeared. The pencil sharpeners were broken. The erasers were missing. The pencils had been swept up by the janitor.

That's when the complaints started: "I don't have a pencil." "My pencil is broken." "I don't know what happened to my pencil."

Every afternoon, our pencil monitor sharpens pencils. Every morning, I sharpen a box of pencils. And by second period, all of those pencils are broken, or missing, or both.

Now, I have a few naughty children who simply snap them in half, or use them so inappropriately that they break. And I have those others who simply can't stop sharpening their pencils, even when they are sharp, so they sharpen them until they break or get too tiny to use.

But for the love of God, where are our pencils going? Do my students not know how to use pencils without pressing hard enough to break them? Why, every single day, do I spend half the day dealing with a total effing lack of pencils?

Yesterday, I put new pencil sharpeners on all the tables. This morning? They were all gone. According to many reliable student sources, the culprit was a student who was absent today. "He took all the sharpeners," they took me solemnly. "I saw him. He said not to tell."

Why do I have so many students who think it is acceptable to just take things that they want? I already have William dancing around the pencil sharpener, saying, "I'm going to break it!" I have William blatantly taking things right off my desk or snatching things right out of the hands of other students and then accusing them: "Shut up, you big fat liar! Who asked you? I'm gonna punch you in your head!" (Nice.)

And the one desktop pencil sharpener I bought (again, with my own money) has had a group of children crowded around it constantly, no matter how many times I explain that only one person at a time should be standing near the pencil sharpener.

I've been reduced to begging my students to tell their parents to send them to school with an ample supply of sharpened pencils (and really, is that too much to ask?) or at the very least a pencil sharpener. But I beg of you, other classroom teachers: How do you solve the pencil problem?

Opposite ends of the spectrum

2009-10-03T11:45:00.002-04:00

Sad but true: On any given day, 90% of my energy is directed toward making sure William and Julio don't burn down the school. Which leaves a paltry 10% of my energy for kids like Leah.

Who is Leah? Leah is your basic dream student. She is polite, conscientious and intelligent. She raises her hand; she never calls out. She always follows directions, and in a timely fashion. If I say, "Put away your social studies book, take out your book baggie and go to the carpet," Leah will always be the first (and often only) student there. Best of all, Leah does all this without fuss: She never brags about how smart she is, or yells at the other kids at her table to get their mess together so they can get a table tally. She just does what she needs to do in a totally mature fashion without any complaint. Even my other brightest students are in my face all the time, asking me for drinks of water (albeit extra maturely: "Miss Brave, my throat is really dry, may I please have a sip of water?") or trying to show off for me, but not Leah. That would be just so...beneath her.

Now, I know there are teachers who might find Leah boring. After all, she never kicks up a fuss; it's actually a treat to see her even smile, because Leah is clearly not in school to fool around, she's in school to learn. But I, for one, am thankful I have a Leah in my class. Leah doesn't get caught red-handed by the School Safety Patrol at lunch for drawing pictures of naked ladies. She doesn't have to be sheepishly returned to the classroom fifteen minutes after dismissal for managing to leave school without her backpack. She doesn't pretend to be shooting machine guns at the other students, or blow air inside her book baggie with her mouth hoping it will blow up and pop, or crawl underneath a table and pout when she gets upset.

She just tries her best, every single day. Thank goodness.

Options in October

2009-10-01T18:34:00.002-04:00

Whew.

First of all, I want to say thank you for the outpouring of support that followed my mental breakdown. Your comments were comforting and in some cases a lot more constructive than those of my colleagues' ("I'll pray for you" and "I'm going to throw some holy water at your room" were two I heard today...OK, I'm glad I'm not the only one who notices that my class is a 3-ring circus, but throw me a bone, people), and I'm touched to know that so many people out there were thinking of me and trying to help.

Now, the plan. We've put both William and Julio on a token economy system, where they can earn little cards that give them the privilege of going to the gym, the computer room, or art. And for William, at least, the last two days have been -- cautiously -- great.

Holy effing moly, did I really just say that? Knock on wood and cross your fingers, people. He raised his hand during Word Work. He sat up straight and flashed the quiet signal. And...this is the kicker...he successfully navigated a science experiment that involved using a sharpened pencil, clothespins, and a sharp, poky wire.

Last period.

After gym class.

OK, I just got chills down my spine, so I need to type that again slowly. I gave him sharp objects...last period...after gym class...and he was fine. He was better than fine; I started calling him "Professor William, the scientist."

That's the thing about William: He drives me to tears, and Xanax (oh yes, I said it), but every day I give him another chance. Today, during Word Work, he sat at his seat (the separate desk I set up just for him, with a little clipboard propped up next to him that says "William's Goals") and hollered, "I NEED HELP! I NEED HELLLLLPPPP!" And I thought: Ooooh, what an improvement! Because last week, he would have been tossing his Word Work book up at the ceiling and doing backflips on the carpet.

Of course, classrooms are full of yin and yang, and as William has been improving, his sidekick Julio has not. Today I had a long talk with Julio's first grade teacher after school. Our conversation revealed all sorts of interesting tidbits; the juiciest was that Julio has, in fact, been diagnosed with ADHD, but his mother doesn't want him on medication. Dear Julio's mother: For the love of God, give your son some Ritalin. I mean, I would respect her right to explore options other than medication if I actually thought she would, you know, explore options other than medication, instead of living in the gigantic bubble of denial she's created. Like, failing to show up for a meeting with me two mornings in a row because you bring him to school late every day? Doesn't really give me the impression that you're all that invested in how he's doing. And while we're at it, let's ask some other questions, like: Why does your son constantly draw pictures of people shooting and stabbing each other? Why does he shout curse words when he's angry? Why does he tell me he's going to kill himself? OK, seriously: Your seven-year-old threatens suicide when he's angry.

And he's angry a lot. This kid is not stupid. He knows he can't sit still, he knows he doesn't behave when all the other kids can. He's like an alcoholic who doesn't know how to quit because -- oh, right -- he's seven years old and needs more help than I can give him. Especially with 26 other kids in the class. One of whom is effing William! (Dear administration: What a fantastic idea it was putting these two kids together. Seriously, am I being punished or something? No love, Miss Brave.)

I would like to close with the unexpected, and much-needed, laugh I got last week when this happened:

Scene: Our classroom, dismissal. Chaos reigns. Papers fly. Schoolbags hit desks. A sweet little girl walks up to me and hands me a box of wipes.

"Miss Brave, my mom said to bring these in for the class."

I take the box. I say thank you. It is only when the day is over, and all the kids have gone home, that I retrieve the box to add to our collection. It is then I notice: They are not baby wipes. Or Clorox wipes. They are Preparation H medicated hemorrhoid wipes...and the box is half empty.

Ewwwwwww!

Hysterical

2009-09-29T18:19:00.002-04:00

I think I've reached my breaking point.

Crying in class? Check. Screaming so loud at misbehaving kid that good kid next to him jumps back in fear, while misbehaving kid continues to not care? Check. Resisting urge to actually physically harm misbehaving kid? Check. Slamming door to classroom so hard that stuff falls on floor? Check. Spending lunch period in classroom with door closed and lights turned off, hysterical? Check. Watching good kids cover their ears in futile attempt to avoid the commotion created by bad kids? Check. Conferencing with the guidance counselor about how one of my kids apparently drew graphic images of, like, anal rape in his notebook? Check.

This is not the kind of teacher I want to be, and this is not the kind of person I want to be. And I want out. Any readers out there want to hire me?

Dangerous minds indeed

2009-09-26T20:50:00.004-04:00

Ohhhhh boy.

William's behavior has escalated to the brink of complete insanity. Just to give you a small tasting of what our days are like, here are my notes on him from last week:

Jumping over kids on rug
Does handstands and somersaults on rug
Flips over backwards on rug
Squashes Samantha against the wall with his body at the water fountain
Goes into Julio’s backpack
Physically pulls a boy away from the closet
Says “Shut up” to other kids
Calls Jane a “dum dum”
Says “Suck my dick” repeatedly to Jonathan
Throws eraser at me
Makes post-its into paper airplanes and throws them
Pushes Jose with his body
Smacks his fist into his palm in someone else’s direction (as a threat)
Takes cards out of Mark’s desk
Throws ball around the room
Tries to block Julio from walking around him, then trips him on purpose
Runs in hall during fire drill, knocking Julio to ground
Throwing paper airplanes
Kicks over Jose’s schoolbag on purpose
Calls other kids “babies” and “liars”
Throws pencils and writing folder across the room
Keeps going into the closet, closing the door, banging the doors from the inside and screaming out loud chicken noises
Says “Big far liar” and “Liar” to other kids repeatedly
Says he wants to play with blocks and toys
Takes Jose’s hat and wears it around the room
Throws his own hat across the room at the garbage
Jumps on top of a desk and bounces backwards onto the floor
Goes into the closet and balances on top of books in closet
Says he hates the class and all the kids are “ugly”
Shoves Jose so that he falls to the floor
Shoves Julio into the closet

And these are only the incidents I've witnessed with my own eyes. Two parents came up to me at Meet the Teacher and told me their kids complain about William. Multiple students wrote notes to the tattle turtle about him. Meanwhile, my AP has plenty to say on the subject of what she expects to see during an observation, but remains totally mute on the subject of the total freaking insanity in my classroom. "Just document everything," she tells me. (Oh, the restraint it takes not to flip her the middle finger, shout, "Document this!" and leave the school forever.)

At one point, in desperation, I sent two kids to fetch the guidance counselor. What do I do, I asked her, when William is grabbing things out of other kids' hands, or jabbing pencils in the direction of their faces, or doing backflips on the carpet, or yelling out so loudly that I can't make myself heard? What do I do with the other 26 kids in my class?

She stared at me like I was speaking Chinese. Then she asked me if I had established any consequences for his behavior.

"Ooooh, consequences!" I felt like saying. "What a fantastic idea! I hadn't thought of establishing consequences for kids who beat up on other kids all day long!"

Then she told me to send home a behavior chart every day that his mother would have to sign, and set up a meeting with her every week if I had to. So...still no ideas on how this is fair to the other 26 kids in my class.

I told her that William frequently throws things around the room, and obviously he won't give them up when he's told to. Her advice for that? "When he's not looking, take away anything he's throwing and put it up high so he can't reach it."

OK. First of all, this is a kid who stands on tables, and who at nine and a half years old is about two feet taller than the rest of my second graders. Second of all, anything he's throwing? Is pretty much anything in the classroom that's not nailed down (and sometimes he even goes for the brass ring and tries for those things, like all the time he spends banging away at the broken pencil sharpener). We have these stupid old tennis balls on the bottoms of our chairs (to prevent them from scraping against the floor, because all the rubber tips fell off), and he takes them off the chairs and hurls them against the wall and the ceiling. He shoots free throws at the trash can with paper towels from halfway across the room (because naturally he visits the bathroom whenever he wants and spends time at the sink whenever he wants).

Oh, but what's worse than William's behavior? The fact that he's taking Julio right along with him. Last week, Julio managed to fit in outbursts of the F word and the "sh" word amidst his busy schedule of (a) playing Tic-Tac-Toe with William during my writing lesson, (b) eating chips in class, (c) emptying his pencil sharpener onto the floor and (d) teaming up with William for a loud and raucous duet of "I Kissed a Girl" (yes, really).

Am I the world's worst teacher, or what? Based on the fact that two of my 27 students are hysterically and completely out of control in my classroom, I'm tempted to say yes. And yet my students managed to learn how to use counterweights to balance objects in science, how to decide when to use the "ck" digraph spelling pattern, how to plan out a small moment story in writing and how to tell time to the nearest half-hour on a clock. And this past Friday, when it was inching towards dismissal and William and Julio were literally bouncing off the walls and all of our nerves were frayed, I plopped down in front of the rest of my 25 kids on the carpet and said to them, perhaps unwisely, "Can you believe how some kids act in our classroom?!" and they collapsed into shocked agreement, all on my side. "Can't we get through one day without giving you a sore throat?" one of them said plaintively -- and that came from a kid who -- if I didn't have William and Jose tearing up the class -- would be one of my behavior challenges.

Ohhhhhh boy.

Complimentary

2009-09-20T16:32:00.002-04:00

This just in: William hears like a bat!

It took a lot of pep talks and a little bribery, but with twenty minutes to go in the school day on Friday afternoon, William passed his second hearing test with flying colors (and made off with a cool toy of his choice from my prize bin, whereas all my well behaved students had to make do with "You get what you get and you don't get upset" -- sigh). Which is excellent news, because it means that the school psychologist can evaluate him, a process that will hopefully keep him out of my hair (William, I mean, not the school psychologist) for most of the day on Monday. Meanwhile, Friday was William's best day in school yet, by which I mean I did not once come close to crying while having to chase him away from everything in the classroom. In fact, he had an excellent, hard-working, quiet writing period, to such a degree that other students actually noticed and complimented him on it. Which brings me to...

Things Going On in My Classroom That Are Actually Going Right
1. Table tallies. All I have to do is say with exaggerated casualness, "Hmmmmmm, I wonder which table I'll be able to give a tally to for the nice way they're working now," and all of a sudden my room is a frenzy of seven-year-olds badgering each other to sit up straight, fold their hands, zip their lips, and get all the crap off their desks. My favorite part of table tallies is how frantically the kids hiss directions at each other: "Table tally, TABLE TALLY!!!!" as if the table tally were actually, like, some kind of cool reward. But I'm not complaining, because it works -- even on my chattiest table.

2. The compliment box. It's literally, like, a shoebox with a stack of index cards next to it, and the kids have free reign to write someone a compliment and leave it in the box. When I see a nice stack starting to pile up, I take some time away from our extremely busy academic schedule (shhh, don't tell my administration) and read the compliments out loud to the class. It's so sweet to see their faces light up when they hear a compliment directed their way, and it's especially nice to see who gets recognized: my very best behaved student, who deserves all the recognition she can get; and of course my naughty friends, who looked slightly awed when they realized someone had actually caught them being good.

Now, there are definitely times during the day when it's looking like the compliment box is getting out of hand -- like during writing time on Friday, when there were half a dozen kids standing around it writing compliments -- but want to know a secret? I kind of don't care -- after all, writing compliments is writing too, and goodness knows my class needs all the ego boosts it can get. What's even better is that my tattle turtle isn't seeing much action, while the compliment box is nearly always stuffed. The compliment box is definitely the very best thing I've had going so far.

The last 10%

2009-09-17T17:55:00.003-04:00

Let's lead off with the ridiculousness that I absolutely have to get off my chest: my running anecdotals on William's behavior! Here is just a small sampling of "Things William Does All Day" --

Rocks in my rocking chair
Shoves another student in the chest and yells, "Shut up!"
According to other students, says the "f word," the "d word" and the "h word"
Pushes past other students like they are bowling pins
Stands up on chairs
Hides in the closet
Throws himself to the ground, repeatedly
Rolls around on the ground
Somersaults
Cartwheels
Says, "Duh!" whenever someone else answers a question
Makes loud noises, randomly
Then tells other kids to shut up or be quiet
Fake farts
Throws index cards up in the air
Takes the caps off all the markers
Moves around all the magnets on the math word wall
Repeatedly sticks pencils into our broken pencil sharpener
Throws little bits of garbage at the other students and everywhere

In short, he is delightful! In the meantime, he has joined forces with another student, the closest he has come to a kindred spirit. This other student has, like, the worst case of undiagnosed ADD in the universe, and as much as I try to keep the two of them apart, somehow they always end up near each other. Actually, no matter where they are in the room, one of them will make a loud noise, and the other one will echo the same noise, and then my dominoes go falling around the room: first William, then Angelo, then Juan, then Kyle, then Jonathan.

Literally 90% of my energy every day is focused on these two boys, which is an epic shame because the rest of my class is perfectly lovely. Sure, I have some wrigglers and some whiners, and some kids who call out and some kids who have trouble focusing, but William and Angelo are the energy-suckers of the bunch. Meanwhile, the school pyschologist is doing his best to get William's referral going, but first the school needed to test his vision and hearing, and -- are you ready for this? -- William messed with them. Mr. D came back to report that the hearing test lady thought William was just being uncooperative. So I took him aside and we had the following conversation:

Miss Brave: "William, remember when Miss F came to test your hearing?"
William, smiling and looking away: "Yes, and I couldn't hear nothing."
Miss Brave: "Well, that's what we have to figure out, because Miss F thought maybe you were just being your silly William self and you weren't really giving it your best effort. So she's going to come back tomorrow and try again, and you have to give it your best effort, because if you don't, Mom has to take you to a hearing doctor and I don't think you'll enjoy that."
William: "Yes I will! It's fun!"

Seriously, though, if he fails the hearing test, Mr. D tells me it could take a long time to get him tested by a doctor -- a long time that he would spend in my classroom, doing worse than absolutely nothing.

When school closely resembles Office Space

2009-09-12T11:23:00.003-04:00

Remember this post when I revealed all the money I'd been spending on school supplies? Well, it's been three days, and I feel like I'm out of supplies. Out of supplies! Three days!

I put mechanical pencils in all my table caddies, which I knew wasn't the brightest idea in the world because what do hyperactive second grade boys do with mechanical pencils? They jimmy all the lead out until they're all empty. I bought three packages of markers, and after writing my 27 students' names one thousand times, the blank ink is drying out.

Yesterday, I broke almost every working printer in the school trying to print out copies of my homework sheet and reading log. First I caused a paper jam in the computer room, which led our high-strung technology teacher to start screaming. Like, literally screaming. Not at me, but just in general about our crummy technology. Then, I tried again in another room, which will remain nameless because I caused a paper jam there too (after four measly pieces of paper -- four!) and couldn't figure out how to clear it, and the printer was making really horrific noises and no one was around to help me, so I just switched it off and left and prayed that there was no trace of my print request in the queue.

I couldn't print in my own classroom, because the printer is broken. (And bolted to a huge table. And taking up valuable classroom space. But apparently I'm not allowed to ask to have the giant broken printer removed, because we're supposed to be using technology in our classrooms and it would look bad if I requested to have a giant broken piece of technology taken away.) I couldn't print in the library, because the printer was broken. I couldn't print in the other section of the library, because the printer wasn't hooked up yet. I couldn't print in my old office, because that printer wasn't hooked up yet. I couldn't make copies in the office across the hall, because the copier was broken. I couldn't print in my colleague's classroom, because she successfully petitioned to have her broken printer taken away. I couldn't print in my other colleague's classroom, because even though she has a printer, she can't get into her laptop cart.

Are we seeing a pattern here? Meanwhile, our literacy coach used to print out our monthly checklists for us and put them in our mailboxes, but apparently this year it's our responsibility to print them out ourselves. Except they're several pages long and need to be printed on legal-sized paper because we have to fit 27 names across the top, and I can't seem to find a single printer in the building that consistently works without giving me a minor heart attack during my lunch period. (During which I did not eat lunch, by the way, as I was too busy demolishing our building's crappy printers one by one.)

This year, we're using a whole new program to do running records. That means that the billions and billions of copies of running records we all made last year are now defunct. Seriously, I have a couple of trees' worth of useless running records sitting around. So we all needed copies of the new running records. Now, it would have been nice, and logical, if the school had automatically put in copies for us over the summer, but of course they didn't do that. Nevertheless, we got an email on the first or second day of school from our principal that read, "By Friday, you should be starting your running records."

Okaaaaaay. Um, with what? With what hypothetical copies am I supposed to be starting these running records? Aargh.

"Teachers have to be strong"

2009-09-11T22:25:00.004-04:00

"Wow, Miss Brave's strong."
"Yeah, teachers have to be strong."
--student conversation as I open a top window with one of those giant window poles

On the first day of school, when I walked into the cafeteria to pick up my class from lunch, their 27 faces lit up and I heard my name rising amongst the chatter: "Miss Brave! Miss Brave!" and I felt that rush of the pleasure of having my own class for the very first time.

On the second day of school, when I couldn't start my after-school program with my seven 50 minutes students because we didn't have our student books in yet and all the kids wanted to know "What are we going to do now?" and I was flat out of ideas, I got them to help me sort markers and Fundations tiles and do other jobs around the classroom (my classroom). They were so pleased and so eager to help -- "Can I have another job?" "I want to help too!"

Today, on the third day of school, William threatened to punch another student in the face. I took it as a threat against all of us, against the classroom community I'm trying to build. Later in the day, I found myself yelling -- at him -- for the first time. The rest of my new class was slightly stunned. William merely smiled.

A commenter on my last post suggested that I make William into a leader. Believe me, I tried. Because he's the tallest boy in our class (by about a foot), I made a big deal about how it was his responsibility to watch over the back of the line and make sure everyone was behaving in the hall. The next thing I know, 26 other faces are turned around in the stairwell, and kids at the back of the line are warning me that William is about to jump from mid-staircase. He loves to act as my helper, but he seems incapable of doing it without calling someone else stupid or making fun of his classmates. I gave him a teddy bear to hold onto during group lessons in the hopes it would keep his hands occupied; he used it as a weapon.

But then he came into school and bragged that he had brought in all his school supplies; and then he sat up straight and tall with his hands folded after writing more than a page in Writers' Workshop. But then he snarled "Duhhhh!" at other students who eagerly answered questions; and then he usurped my rocking chair, pushing it violently back and forth.

I have 27 second graders in my class. My girls for the most part are wonderful, good listeners and followers of directions. My boys are chattier than they should be, and a few of them are emotional and moody. But William by far receives the most of my time and energy, and I'd wager that he occupies the attention of my other students as well; when he's not harassing them, he's making them laugh; when he's not scowling at them, he's distracting them with his antics. He's 100% That Kid -- the kid that makes you think, "If only I didn't have That Kid in my class, my class would be perfect...other kids would get so much more attention without That Kid around...That Kid ruins everything!"

Since school has started, my 27 second graders have completely erased my appetite: good for my wedding dress waistline, bad for my mental health. By the time I got home today, I was in tears and tatters, which is always made worse when I realize that there is little to no chance that That Kid is at home right now crying over me.

But enough about That Kid. I have a weekend to live.

Obivously something wasn't clearly enough articulated

2009-09-08T16:28:00.002-04:00

We have these things at my school called "articulation cards." They're supposed to be used to place students in classes appropriately. At the end of each year, teachers rank their students academically on these cards. They also put down the names of other students from whom the student should be separated.

Today I got the articulation cards for the students in my class. Naturally, I have these two students whose articulation cards say they shouldn't be placed in the same class together.

We have six second grade classes; you'd think they'd manage to keep them apart.

Also, I spoke to my AP about the infamous William. She told me they had "difficulty placing him" (obviously), and "think [I] would do well with him" (doubtful). But, she hasn't heard from his mother all summer, like she was supposed to, so...basically, she's hoping he doesn't show up.

Sigh. If anyone out there has motivational suggestions for a third-time second grade repeater, I'm all ears!

Punching out...and in

2009-09-07T17:45:00.003-04:00

I wonder if there's a name for the condition in which one panics before the first day of school and finds oneself making endless return trips to Staples, forking over exorbitant amounts of cash for anything that might conceivably make the day go easier.

If there isn't, I'd like to propose to name it after me.

I already bought two packs of punch-out letters, but foolishly abandoned them at school. With a limited amount of time left tomorrow to get my room ready, and with many, many letters that still need to be placed on my walls, I found myself at Staples tonight, buying two more packs so I could punch out the letters beforehand. (Sidebar: Those letters are the devil. Way harder to punch out than I thought they would be. Arranged in seemingly random order. And when they only give you one W in a pack, and you want to spell out "Look What We Did," you're doomed right from the start!) I sent Mr. Brave off to Best Buy to purchase a new printer, because ours is always on the fritz and I foresee the need to print out many things in the first few days of school, such as the letter to send parents that I haven't written yet and therefore can't ask for copies of.

I bought a huge pack of mechanical pencils (on sale) in case the kids don't come in with pencils. I bought about 40 folders during the penny folder sale and am now contemplating asking Staples if they'll let me trade colors, since I bought my folders in a rainbow and then realized I should buy them all in the color of our writing folders, since they'll definitely wear out during the year and I'll need new ones. Then I started worrying about all the things I didn't see in my room: Where were all the dry erase markers? We're being told constantly that we're completely tapped out of money for supplies, so am I going to have to go back out tomorrow and buy tons of dry erase markers?

I have to say, last year, I was not this nervous about returning to school. And I'm 100% sure that if I were going back to the position I had last year, I would be cool as a cucumber right now, instead of panicking over my punch-out letters. Yes, yes, this year will be a grand new adventure, and yes, there's even a possibility I might like being a classroom teacher, and yes, this experience will be good for me even if I don't like it. But right now, I feel like every student in New York: I don't want to go!

Time for a back-to-school emotional breakdown

2009-09-04T18:55:00.002-04:00

It's been an emotional seesaw of a back-to-school week. First there was the nightmare of the backing paper; then I started to get a little excited about my room. Then I saw other teachers' rooms and worried that mine wasn't finished enough; then other teachers told me they thought my room looked great, so I felt better.

I was back at school again this morning, and my day was packed with errands. I was looking forward to relaxing and enjoying this last weekend before school. Which is why you should never, ever check your DOE e-mail when you're looking forward to relaxing and enjoying a weekend.

I got a memo about interclassing ESL students due to the results of the NYSESLAT. This happens every year at the beginning of the school year; ESL students get switched around depending on whether the NYSESLAT deems them "beginning, intermediate or advanced" ELLs. I have a holdover on my roster whom I had been expecting to be interclassed to an ESL class (I don't have any other ELLs), and he was.

OK, fine. But then further down on the list, I see I'm getting a new student. But not just any new student. My new student happens to be William.

Now, I had William in my AIS reading group last year. That's because William was in second grade last year. What's worse, William was in second grade the year before that. The 2009-2010 school year will be William's third year in a row in second grade. Put another way, William has been in second grade as long as I have been a teacher.

I don't think William belongs in second grade for the third year in a row, and I don't think he'll get anything out of it. At this point, I don't think William belongs in general education at all. Even though he's never been "diagnosed" with a learning disability of any kind, he's so emotionally broken down by being held over so many times that he's completely uninterested in anything I have to teach him. And then there's the other issues -- William is a big kid, and I just can't picture him next to my other students who were in kindergarten when he was in second grade for the first time. I already have boys on my roster to watch out for, and putting William -- who has a lot of anger and who last year hit, kicked and choked other kids -- just seems like a terrible idea.

Worst of all, he's being moved into my class from a CTT class. As in, a class with two teachers and a para that serves special education students? Most ridiculous of all, he's not even ESL, and neither is the CTT class, so I have no idea why they would do this to us.