Wednesday, September 23, 2009

And We'll Have Fun Fun Fun...

When my principal first switched me to social studies at my school, I was not especially happy with him. I had spent a whole year struggling to get a handle on how to teach reading and writing to middle schoolers, and now he wanted me to throw that all away ?!?!?! Not to mention the fact that I had to study for and take another Praxis test.

But now I'm starting to think this is the best thing EVER. Teaching social studies is (more or less) awesome. My kids aren't tested, but I wish they were, since they're so enthusiastic about stuff in my room. Not necessarily the parts of class where we take notes, of course, but I get to plan so much fun stuff for social studies. Today, I had more kids engaged in latitude and longitude game than I ever have before- we were racing in teams to track Carmen Sandiego (complete with some Rockapella background music...) across the globe, and kids were literally falling over each other to give me the correct answers and be the winning team. Talk about awesome! Well, maybe not the falling- we had to put a stop to that pretty quickly. We were supposed to have an assembly during class this afternoon- and the kids were actually glad that it got canceled because they wanted to finish the activity! Seriously, this is awesome. This is what teaching is supposed to be like.

And next week, my 8th graders are going to put the colonies on trial to see if they allowed as much religious freedom as we would expect they would based on their reasons for their founding. I am super-excited to get to that lesson next week- which makes me excited to go to school- which makes me happier all around.

Obviously, not every day gets to be this awesome, but its so nice to have the ones that are :) My kids can definitely get excited about education- you just have to find a way to make it worth their while.

Saturday, September 12, 2009

First Week Down!

Well, we've officially made it through our first week of school for year two of TFA. Let me tell you, if you had come up to me on September 12 of last year and said that this is where I would be in a year, I would have laughed at you (through the tears, clearly). Last year at this time, my roommates and I were spread out all over the dining room table, frantically trying to figure out what we were going to do the next day to keep our students from killing each other (forget keeping them in their seats). In between panic attacks, I spent a lot of time being really really upset and thinking about finding a new job in the tanking economy.

What a difference a year makes! Today, the first Saturday of the school year, my roommate and I started the day at the coffee shop down the street to get some grading and lesson planning done, came back here, watched this week's episode of Top Chef, had lunch, got the rest of the posters we have hanging around hung up, cleaned the kitchen, and then did a little more planning and relaxing. I'm lesson planned through next Monday, and all I have to do tomorrow is create/modify the worksheets that go with those lessons. Tonight, I'm going out dancing for a friend's birthday. Life seems pretty good right now :)

Of course, that was only week 1. Next week it will be time for the students to test me. But I'll be ready- this year I'm in control of my classroom. Now if I could only get used to waking up at 5:30 instead of at 9...

Tuesday, September 8, 2009

Day 1: Check

Day 1 of school is down. It's going to be a good year- I feel way more confident than I ever did and I just had an amazing conversation with a parent. I got a text from my TFA program director (kind of like a mentor) this morning wishing me good luck and saying this was my year. I really think he's right :)

Tuesday, September 1, 2009

The SDP should be a scary movie

Forget his reality show; Tony Danza ought to be making a horror film about the Philadelphia School District. Today was the first day of school for teachers, and inevitably all the roommates have arrived home with horror stories about new developments at their schools as of today. My roommate who teaches 9th grade English might have to cover a period of Spanish because there might not be a teacher hired for that position at all this school year. My roommate who teaches Spanish might have to cover a period of corrective reading (or corrective math...who knows which?), for which he has no training. On top of that, in all the high schools, students will be re-rostered after about 2 weeks of school once they have taken tests to determine whether they need to be in a corrective reading or corrective math class (which essentially is the curriculum used in special ed classrooms). My roommate who teaches 7th grade English won't have a curriculum until October, and is expected to just work with week-to-week "themes" until then. I just found out we will be doing gendered classes, meaning I will see all my boys in each grade in one class, and all my girls in each grade the next day, which means that in some classes I will have many more students than I have desks due to disproportionate numbers of girls versus boys. Even my roommate at a relatively awesome charter school is now on a cart in 3 different classrooms at his school.

And the kicker? Because they don't "have the funds" to post to hire a new English teacher at another friend's high school, she now has classes that number 65 (at least) on her rosters. They hope to have the classes down to "normal size" by October- based on massive truancy, I suppose...

Just how do they expect our kids to learn in this logistical mess?? When this is the best the educated, intelligent adults who are supposed to be running things around here can do, what can we hope for for the students who are stuck in this system?

However, not all hope is lost. Almost all of my roommates are currently working through ways to problem solve these new challenges- if we could all approach challenges in teaching, even ones that seem insurmountable, like that, we would eventually make the widespread changes we so desperately need around here. Here's hoping that at some point I'm in a position with enough power to say that and have it mean something.