An Interview at Last!

I head out for an interview tomorrow. I am very excited. Nervous too, but mostly excited.

I made the decision to start applying to other states this spring. As a married mother of a teen, this is not a choice I made easily. I have applied in the state, to no avail. I figured I had best begin looking "outside of the box", with the box being my home state. After two years of searching, I wondered if I was just not looking in the right places. So I expanded my search. Yes, I did get a bunch of rejection letters from other states, too. Actually, I sadly discovered that other states & districts are better at responding than ones locally. Go figure. And other states have plenty of "highly qualified candidates" to choose from as well.

So when I got a phone call from Tucson, AZ, for a 5th grade position, well, you can imagine the thrill.

I have had to wait until the end of the month for the face to face meeting. Which has given me time to plan, prepare, rethink, and sweat it.

I head out to the airport tomorrow morning. I will arrive in 104 degree weather, pick up a car and check out the school location, look at an apartment complex, and wander around the city a little. Then I get to wake up early, check out of the hotel, and arrive on time for my interview. I will have a chance to check out the school, and then head to the airport and fly home.

When will I find out? How will I interview? Will I say the right things? Am I ready to move away from all things familiar?

I don't know the answers to all these questions bubbling up. My friends are excited for me. I have been wished a tremendous amount of luck. I have faith in myself. I have had a friend prep me. What happens next... is what happens next.

The Latest "Must Have" for Teachers

I have been working a lot recently, which of course pleases me to no end. The classrooms I have been working in have student teachers who are doing their solo teaching. This makes for an easy day for me. I tend to establish myself outside of the classroom, so that the student teachers don't feel like I am hovering - one less pair of eyes watching their every move. But I am always close by so that they can poke their heads out of the door and call me in for help as needed.

Anyway, I have been doing some reading assessments for teachers. These are required by the district at the start and end of every year, and are supposed to show growth in reading. It starts with a running record (the student reads aloud, we note every error, and it is timed), and then we include a summarization and ask a few questions about the passage. (Yes, there is more to it than that.) I have done these for the past four years, using a couple of different programs. (Not Rigby or DIBELS).

So yesterday, my mentor teacher said she had a combination stopwatch and calculator. I realize this doesn't sound like anything much, unless you're a teacher who does reading assessments. Fountas & Pinnell, the reading goddesses, have developed what I call the "stopulator": it times the student, then you input the number of words read, number of errors and self corrections, and it calculates out the words per minute and the accuracy rate. SO COOL! No more looking up the equation for figuring this stuff out - YAY! I used it yesterday and flew through the calculation piece quickly and easily. Love it.

If you do an online search for "Fountas and Pinnell stopwatch", it will come up on Heinemann's website. It runs about $25, but is well worth it in saved time.

The Work Week

Yay! I worked last week. I spent 4 days in classrooms. One day I spent applying for positions, which is still work, just less enjoyable than teaching.

Monday I worked for my mentor teacher. She is trying out a great reading assessment program that I was able to read up on and use with her students, one at a time. Using it to analyze student progress and ability is terrific practice.

Tuesday I worked at the last minute for a 4th grade teacher who had 31 students in her class. Now, 14 of them were ELL students, another 5 of them were SPED, and 3 more of them were on daily behavior plans. They were pretty good kids, and certainly helpful when it came to questions about how they did certain things. And then we got to the math lesson. It was a Bridges (curriculum) lesson that was a continuation of students understanding the patterns of add and even numbers. Then there was this graphing activity. I could not make heads nor tails of the lesson - and I had the teacher edition! I finally gave up trying to teach it and ensured that the previous lesson had stuck. I don't think I have ever not understood how to teach a lesson from a curriculum. This one just made no sense to me. The rest of the day went alright, but I went home so frustrated I couldn't figure out that one lesson. It still nags at me!

Wednesday was the day I spent cruising the 'net for jobs and writing essays. I guess it's good that I am finding jobs to apply to, I just wish they were more local... although a couple were in districts in the area, so that was nice.

Thursday and Friday I worked for a teacher who had a student teacher in his classroom. Evidently they had gone on their Lewis & Clark field trip to Astoria the previous day and it had poured down on them all day. Yes, an authentic Fort Clatsop experience for the kids, but miserable, too. So the plan was for a pretty quiet, nothing academically new, day. The student teacher left just before math in the morning, and the classroom has the lowest ability group. It was thankfully small, and the kids were supposed to cut out a bunch of pre-printed arrays. There was an instructional assistant in the classroom as well, and evidently she was unwilling to allow the students a simple day of cutting without any learning... so she stopped the cutting and insisted on teaching the kids a word problem - that they did not understand, and then had to do for homework. Huh. The rest of the day went fine, and the following day, the student teacher returned, feeling refreshed. I mostly sat in the back and read a book on teaching persuasive writing, and then created a unit lesson.

It was a satisfying week. I will be receiving a paycheck. I was given the opportunity to try out a reading assessment and make my own observations. I was reminded that I don't always know how to teach a lesson, so I had to improvise. I taught a day, and I spent a day doing the other thing teachers do: plan with thoughtful care and focus.

OK, so it wasn't perfect - because I wasn't in my own classroom - but it was as good as I can hope for, at least for the time being. And yeah, I still want to teach in my own classroom. these experiences just confirm that.

Kinder Kinders

Spent the day with two half day kinder classes today. The morning went really well. The class was wonderful. Kids were ready to follow directions and listen. Yes, they behaved like kids that young are expected to. But they also followed directions. They didn't run in the hallways. They were quiet when asked to be quiet. They raised their hands. They helped each other, said they were sorry when they needed to, and made my morning fly by.

And then the pm class arrived. Oddly the kid who was stuck to his mom's side when I came to the front of the school to pick them up turned out to be the best kid in the class. Followed directions, the whole bit. Think he must've been meant for the am class. The pm class could not all be quiet at the same time to save their lives. Thye were unable to follow directions - no doubt because they were talking - or to treat anyone with respect. I'm talking basic respect here, after all I know it's kindergardners. One kid had a comment about everything I said. 'yeah, yeah, yeah, we know.' And he ran in the halls, jumped onto and off of a chair, annoyed the kids around him in line, and stole a kid's paper and replaced it with his own that had been written on. Yeah, that's just one kid. And every time I spoke with him about his "choices" (that's what we call them, you know, choices. But that's another blog post.), he said he knew that he wouldn't treat his regular teacher like that. Thanks, kid.

What would have been nice is if the teacher had bothered to warn me that she had the devil incarnate in her afternoon classroom. But no, no such warnings were issued. It would have been nice if the kids knew how to treat "guest teachers" (another silly euphemism). It would have been nice if this kid's parents had bothered to parent him. Or if he'd stayed home from school today.

What a day. Glad to work, don't get me wrong. But it amazed me (really, it did) how two classes in the same day could behave SO differently. Yet another lesson learned as a substitute teacher. When I got home, I had an e-mail request to work for a 4/5 grade class. Yes, please.

Hope and Faith

After much soul searching, I decided to start applying to positions outside of this state. Oregon is not willing to support education in the way it needs be financially supported, so students and new teachers are getting shafted. It is dismal, and seems to get worse every year.

I recently applied to several positions in a small town in Wyoming. When you have submitted close to 200 applications, it is difficult to get excited about the positions anymore. But this one seemed different, and held a lot of potential. I sincerely wanted the job, and felt like I would be a great fit. I researched the area, examined the curriculum, checked into potential residences... I was full of hope, bursting with enthusiasm.

I touched base today with the secretary to see what the status was. They are hiring 9 people, and I wasn't even considered for an interview. Oh.

Hope can be so cruel.

It is so brutal to be refused again and again and again. Yet I am told by the professionals I work with not to lose hope, that I am a great teacher, to keep trying, that it's just the economy, that things will turn around. Not one of those phrases helps me pay bills or provides me with the same feeling I get when I am teaching. But they all give me hope, which is then dashed when I dare to entertain it.

I am not a particularly religious person. I figure it is a personal decision, and everyone finds the belief that fits them. For me, I believe that there is a plan for me, a path to follow, and that things happen for a reason. Maybe I didn't get the job in another state because there is one waiting me closer to home. Maybe I would have been miserable there. I won't know the "maybe" until the plan plays out. So I have to maintain a sense of faith.

The great thing about faith is, you can always say that things haven't played out. You can procrastinate the results. And in that way, you can maintain your faith in a way that hope cannot. Your hope gets squelched periodically, and just about that time, your faith in the future grows just a little bit more.

I don't know about my faith or hope in Oregon's future. But I suppose I have to maintain my own.

More than a Number: Why Class Size Matters

More than a Number: Why Class Size Matters Check out this article. Amazing information on class sizes.

Thoughts on Recent News Stories

Maybe you have seen a couple of recent news stories that hit the TV news magazines recently. One was some video from Australia of a smaller boy taunting and then punching a larger boy, followed by the larger boy picking up and body slamming the smaller boy. The other was a news story that there is a publisher that has released what I would refer to as a "politically correct" version of Huckleberry Finn by Mark Twain. I have been unable to stop thinking about both of these stories as they pertain to my line of work. The first story involves a clear case a bullying. Or maybe not so clear. I did not see all of the followup interviews, but the larger boy claimed to have been bullied all his life and said he had just lost it, or words to that effect. (Note I am not using quotation marks here.) Then the other boy claimed that he too, had been the subject of bullying all of his life. My first question was of course, where were the teachers, the adults? Then the public outcry (that was reported on TV) was that people really supported the larger boy for standing up for himself. Really? People are congratulating this kid for body slamming another kid? OK, based on the video image only, sure, it looked as though the smaller kid "started it", and certainly is caught punching the larger kid in the face. But the reaction that physical retribution is indeed the best way to handle this situation? Ummm, I don't think so. Whatever happened to walking away? Obviously I don't think he should have been bullied in the first place. I have to wonder if the parents or schools have no-bullying rules in force. I mean, what is going on? I don't know all of the backstory or details, but I have to think that some other result could have occurred had someone known about all of this bullying behavior. I wonder if I supervise my kids enough, if I am watchful enough, if I am intolerant of bullying enough to prevent this from happening at my school. So as I begin another long six months of checking for open positions and applying for potential jobs, this is one more thing that I know I have to be firm about from the start of school. Now onto Huckleberry Finn, 2011. New South Books decided that since books like Huck Finn were being avoided in classrooms, they would republish it, changing the "n-word" (no, I don't say it) to "slave". Is this really necessary? First of all, changing an author's words in a book that has been in publication since the 1880's, seems wrong to me. Books are not about agreeing with the author or subject, they are there to spawn thoughts and conversation. Secondly, who is New South Books to tell me what I can and cannot handle reading? I don't blindly walk into a book store, not peruse the book, and buy it! I pick up books by authors I enjoy, books about subjects I am interested in, books that may challenge me, but I typically have done the smallest scad of research before I start reading. Third, how did they decide that "slave" is the best synonym for "n----r"? Didn't Twain use the word to reflect the sign of the times? Wasn't that verbage pretty common in the day? Using the word "slave" seems like a title, like a sign of respect, when you place it against the "n word", which is purposely derogatory. Granted that kids nowadays have probably all heard the word if they have listened to rappers, so that generation does not have the highly negative connotation with this word that older generations like me might have. And finally, if I was thinking about teaching this book, I would think about how the contents of the book would assist my students in learning. How would this book (or any book) help my students understand the essential question of this unit of study? And, I would also think about how students might feel with the verbage in the book. Is my class mature enough to handle it? Are there some students I am concerned about? In the end, I would certainly see if the materials I am choosing for my class fit the lesson and the students. Just like I do with any materials. The New York Times wrote an interesting article about the revised Huckleberry Finn: http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/07/books/07huck.html