Bring a little holiday cheer to Leland, MS!

My friend was driving me to the airport to catch my flight back to MS over Thanksgiving break and we started brainstorming goals for me to have over the 3.5 week period between holiday breaks.  We settled on me celebrating the holidays just like I would if I was back home.  And thats what I have done :)

Everything from my classroom to my house to my bedroom has a little bit of holiday cheer.  Do others appreciate it? Who knows.  Do I appreciate it? EVERY DAY BABY!!!  I have always loved the holidays.  As a kid I loved the presents on Christmas morning but as I have grown older, I realized that its the days leading up to Dec 25th that are amazing.  Its the Christmas music playing on all radio stations.  Its the sense of giving rather than receiving.  Its all the fantastic smells and flavors coming out of the kitchen. And of course it’s the family that surrounds you. THATS why I love the holidays.

My classroom has a christmas tree on the door and tinsel in the room as well as a garland.  Yes I did say a christmas tree!!! We have one in our cafeteria as well. Hell we said the Lords Prayer before our last soccer game but hey thats another blog...Anyways I love it.  And the kids seem to enjoy the holiday cheer too.

My house has some snowmen that light up.  Some window cling pictures.  And of course lights!! One of  my neighbors commented on how I really "went all out" for just a few days.  Well to me, it was really important to do so.  Even if I am far away from home in a new place with an incredibly hard job, I am determined to keep this the same.  Its all part of not allowing school to completely consume me.  It has been fun and I suppose it has made the time go by SLIGHTLY faster.  My neighbor has even told me that my bedroom lights need to stay up all year round.  

What has this taught me? The holidays will pass but I will need to pick up something else to consume me for a bit.  Something not teacher related at all.  And by doing so, it will make life a little more bearable.  Ideas so far: bike riding, volunteering…  

HAPPY HOLIDAYS TO ALL!!!! 

A Day In My Life

Have you wondered what I am actually going through? Well here is a brief view into my day to day life.

When on Duty
545 WAKE UP
7:00 Arrive to school
745 Enter WWIII in the cafeteria aka my duty post.  This has got to be the world's worst duty post.  I am all alone with about 200 kids with their tshirts untucked and their ids not on.  Duty puts me in a horrible mood.  My day starts off on the wrong foot.

When I am NOT on Duty
630ish WAKE UP (WOOHOOO!!! be jealous!)
745ish Get to school and chill in my classroom until homeroom starts


EVERYDAY
830 homeroom starts - Besides my duty post, homeroom is the WORSE party of my day.  I suppose you can say its a good thing that its at the beginning at that it only lasts 30 min but UGH its horrible.  The worse part of it is that there is no grade so there is nothing to hold over the kids heads.  They refuse to do any work.  I can't even play the news on a tv because oh wait I DONT HAVE A TV IN MY ROOM.

9am -BEST PART OF MY DAY = my planning period.  For 90 full minutes I am on planning.  I turn up the music and relax before the day really begins.  Yes some days my planning is taken away by random meetings but I am generally prepared for the day before 830 am.  I usually do some planning or grading or post thing in my room during my planning period.  Its delightful.

1040am - 2nd Block begins.  This bright kids can't get it together.  They are 15 years old but can't control their mouths.  Its the rough truth.  I get them quiet and I am halfway through my next sentence and they are talking again.  Its horrible.

1215pm - 3rd Block begins. I have grown to love these kids.  I rarely show it and I doubt that they would say that I even like them if you asked them.  The thing is they are bright. Really bright.  They just have a few kids that want to act a fool.  But once I calm those kids down (or they fall asleep) they room is in harmony and learning actually occurs.  I am more likely to do fun things with this class.  It hasn't always been like this though.  It was really rough for a long time...

220pm - FOURTH BLOCK.  By this time I am tired.  My feet hurt.  My head hurts.  My throat hurts.  But the thing is the kids are tired too. We have sort of reached an understanding: they be quiet and I wont yell.  When I don't yell, I am relaxed and I crack jokes.  Its a nice understanding.  Sadly its not like that every day in the classroom.

350pm- First bell dismisses students

355pm- FREEDOM - but my day does not end here of course

4-415pm - my door is open for any extra help a student may need in math

430pm - I am changed and at the soccer field.  I became the head coach of soccer a month ago.  It is a blessing and a curse and not just because it gets me out of school meetings :)  I love doing something non-school related especially since its one of my true loves.  BUT there have been so many headaches along the way.  I am still really glad I accepted the position though.

7pm- Arrive home. Done? I think not.  I need to plan/grade for the next day.  This is why Sunday is so important. If I dont plan thoroughly on Sunday then during the week,  after my long day, I have to come home and plan.  Thats no fun.  So I make sure I am good to go Sundays.  Then when I get home I can just have fun.

945-1045pm SLEEP.  When I started this job, the one thing I refused to give up was sleep.  I average 8 to 8.5 hours of sleep a night.  I am very proud of this fact.  Few people sleep this much.  I just don't think I would be able to function without sleep.

Thats me in a nutshell.  Clearly this is just a rough outline.  I missing lots of details.  Now looking back over this and actually reading how I describe my day, I am not quite sure how I end up in such a bad mood so often.  But I think its a lot of small things that add up throughout the day.  And the constant backtalk/general noise from the peanut gallery as I try to speak.  Its really tiring.  Yet I wake up and do it again.  I give myself a pat on the back every morning for just rolling out of bed.

Not just reading, but COMPREHENDING.

That was the theme of chapter three in the textbook.  I appreciated this chapter.  I have noticed this problem a lot even in my classroom - not just reading words but understanding what all the words mean.  I can't imagine how it must be to teach English where that is constantly the problem.  In my math class, students are constantly taking notes, doing examples as a class, but when it comes time to do them by themselves, they freeze.  They can't do it solo.  This is an issue that I am currently struggling with and I feel as if most new teachers do.  Thus I was excited to read the chapter.  Perhaps there would be some useful pointers that I could actually implement!  Perhaps there was some small tid bit that would change the way I am teaching in my classroom.  Sadly, I was yet again disappointed by this book and its lack of focus on how math teachers can implement these strategies in their classrooms. 

            The most useful part of the chapter discussed what skilled readers can do: preview, summarize, use clue words, pointer phrases, etc.  These are all the things that my students SHOULD be able to do.  But most struggle with them.  Another one that I thought of was pulling out the main idea or the bigger picture.  Connecting one topic with another.  I often get tons of complaints from my students regarding the fact that I move onto new things each day.  But really it’s all the same.  There is a theme per unit.  I am fully aware that this is the fault of the teacher, however, I am not sure how to fix this.  We discuss our agenda for the week each Monday.  We discuss the unit before it starts.  I come up with sets so that it can relate to their lives.  And yet its not all good enough because after working on it for 2 weeks, I still have students that don’t realize that when they are talking about slope-intercept form, they are talking about a line!!!!

            And here in lies the problem. What do I do? I feel as if I was not given many, if any at all, strategies to fix this problem!!! Now I realize that my students don’t know how to read the notes they are given (sometimes I truly wonder what the point of notes are…why not just do example after example because none of my students ever reread their notes…) BUT what are my options?  There were suggestions such as think pair share, which I have tried occasionally.  Each of you do a problem, then turn to your neighbor and see if they get the same thing.  But yet again, my students don’t see the point of this.  They aren’t working together to solve the problem.  They first do it individually and THEN they share.  Its that damn big picture issue again!  I need to start visually showing my objectives on the board with each subtopic below…perhaps that’s what I will do this week.  Ready. Set. Go.

Reading in Math.

So one of the grad classes I am taking is about reading in your content area. Yeah I know what you are thinking because I have been thinking it the whole time – “Reading in math? What? How does this class apply to whats happening in my classroom?”  Well I don’t really have an answer for you.  I am still trying to figure that one out for myself.

I just finished reading chapter four in a book we were assigned.  It had some pretty useful things in it but again, I am not really sure how to apply.  Better yet, I am not sure why I need to apply them.  The chapter was giving me various ways to assess my students literacy ability and ways to get to know them, which would have been better read at the beginning of the year.  I suppose I am just stuck on what I do once I assess my students.  Yes its true that there are basic sentences to read in my class.  Yes you have to read word problems. And yes you have to be able to read the test.  I still don’t see the value of assessing my students reading ability.  There are key words in math that my students pull out.  Even my SPED students can pull them out.  Perhaps its just because I don’t have anyone who is severally behind in reading?

Not sure.  Anyways, the one section that I have been thinking about in the chapter was about standardized tests.  Seeing as I am an Algebra 1 teacher, I have feelings about this age old debate: teaching to the test vs not.  To me they can not be separated.  I HAVE to look at past state tests to see what material is presented and in what fashion and even what language do they use.  But I often catch myself teaching things and not thinking about the test.  I teach because its important for the kids to know certain things if they are in algebra, but at the same time there is this test that they must pass to move on.  Its definitely a balancing act but not a one of the other situation. 

That’s about all I got out of the chapter at this point.  Perhaps I will learn something new in class on Saturday?

Six Months Later: My first visit home.

Last weekend I went home for the first time since May.  I wasn't sleeping the nights before my trip because I was so excited.  I became very lax in my classroom.  Nothing seemed to matter except getting home.

Describing my feelings when I arrived in DC is just impossible.  I was overwhelmed with just seeing a city for the first time in so long.  AND it was raining. I haven't seen rain in months.  I missed the food.  I missed the general culture.  Then i got to see all the people that I love!! It was the perfect weekend.

But what I found most interesting was talking to my friends from home and college that just graduated.  Everyone was struggling in their own way.  No one really had it "easy."  It was oddly comforting.  Yes I may be in a foreign land with no friends or family.  I have some really low days - I mean low.  BUT so does everyone! Everyone is exhausted.  Everyone is struggling with this new lifestyle that seems very monotonous at times.  I guess I had never really thought of it before.  It gave me a new perspective on life.  The Delta can be a bit of a bubble.  You just forget that life goes on elsewhere!

When it was time to leave I wouldn't say that I wanted to go back, but I wasn't as devastated as I thought I would have been.  I sort of just accepted it and moved on.  Sadly that didn't last long...

I had Monday off which meant it was four day work week.  LONGEST WEEK EVER.  It was homecoming week and the kids were off the chain.  Every day this week all I wanted to do was jump back on a plane home.  The kids came back to school particularly horrible.  But the craziness of homecoming week just made things worse.  Good thing I had an easy unit to teach, but waking up and going to school each day was a real struggle.

Oh wait, and I am sick.

Five weeks until Thanksgiving :)

Functions, Functions, Functions!

I thought it was perfect that we used functions as examples in class the other day because I am teaching functions right now! On Monday I plan to use the Fun with Functions activity as a review before a quick quiz.  Hopefully my class will be able to handle the activity especially just coming off of homecoming week...

Anyways, in order to implement this activity, the key will be to deliver clear and concise directions.  Its basically a matching game but there are different parts to mix together.  It can get very confusing and I can see myself giving directions and then 5 minutes later having 20 children yelling at me saying they don't understand.

The benefit of this fun little activity? its not book work! Lately when my class pisses me off, I set them to work in the books. THEY HATE THIS.  I on the other hand love it.  Not copies and minimal management issues.  So this will be yet another opportunity for my kiddos to prove me wrong and show me that they can handle fun activities.  Plus I am giving a quiz the same day and this will be a good review.

let's see how this goes!

"Repeat after me!"

It sounds simple but it is easy to forget.  In class a few weeks ago we were told to remember to get the students to repeat instructions back to you after you have given them.  I remembered people telling me this over the summer, but as with a lot of things that we were told this summer, I seemed to just forget.  Anyways, following class, I started to make sure that I asked the class to repeat back what I just said.  In recent days I have been doing more interactive activities (mainly to keep me sane...) and I have started to make sure that I have my class repeat my instructions.

So why is this so important?  Because it does not matter how fun I make an activity, my students never listen to my instructions the first time.  Is this really an issue found only in the Delta? No of course not! The average student, hell the average American does not hear what you have to say the first time you say it.  Thus by repeating the instructions back, I am ensuring that the students are listening and perhaps if you didn't hear it the first time, then maybe you will hear it the second time.  Trust me, there is nothing more annoying than giving directions 10 times.  But also, repeating instructions help you to see if the students are actually comprehending what you are saying.  Perhaps there is a step that you left out or that was not clear. Then you can correct it before you let everyone go and everyone has the same problem.

It sounds silly, but yes, remembering to ask the children to repeat back the instructions was one of the most helpful things I learned from class the other day.