Reeding, Riting & Rithmetic: A NCLB dynasty

[Cap Ologist]

I've wanted to do this for several years, but have never gotten around to actually doing it. I teach 4th grade in a Texas public school in the DFW area, and I'll do my best to chronicle the adventures.

Some background info:
This will be my fourth year teaching 4th grade. There are 7 other teachers (all ladies) on my grade level team. Four of them (Gail, Deb, Cora and Fay) have been teaching 4th grade for at least 10 years, another Anna has 2 years experience in Sp. Ed and 1 year of 3rd, Beth has 2 years of 3rd grade, and last is Ella who is in her first year of teaching.

Beth was 3rd grade's team leader last year, and they essentially mutinied against her due to how she acted. She was from all accounts lazy and would tattle to admin on her team. Needless to say, I'm not thrilled to work with her.

Gail is by far the best teacher on our team. She was my mentor teacher my rookie year, and she lives and breathes teaching. She's the teacher we all loved and hated because of how much she expected from us. Deb, Cora and Faye form what I call the Worksheet Brigade, their idea of teaching is for kids to read out of the textbook and do busy work.

So far, Gail and I have drawn Ella into our way of doing stuff as much as possible. I just got an email from our principal asking me to mentor her this year, so she's pretty much stuck doing things our way. She and Gail are very similar in that they're both very structured, very organized. I can spell structure and organized, but that's probably about it. Gail and I work really well together because we complement each other's personalities and styles. We have been in charge of planning the math program for fourth grade, and are hopefully going to have the stuff published this coming summer.

Ideally, the others would plan other subjects, but when their lesson plans consist of "Read page 38, do Worksheet 38", it leaves a lot to be desired, so we've planned together for every subject during my time there. Our principal has decreed that we spend time together as a team this year, but I don't see how it's going to be anything but a lesson in futility.

So this week was the first chance we had to get back in our rooms, though I did sneak in to my room and work for a few hours last week. Yesterday, I was at school from 6:45 a.m til 4:45 p.m, then again today from 6 a.m. to 4:45 p.m. My first objective was to clean out all the junk I've accumulated and have tossed out about 5 large trash bags of stuff. My shelves and cabinets have some semblance of order, so I turned my attention to my classroom library at the end of the day.

I have to go through each book I have (probably about 1,000 or so) and find the reading level of that book, and then label it. I probably got through 150 books today, so I'd imagine that much of tomorrow will be spent finishing and perhaps even part of Thursday depending on how it goes.

My plans for this are to give a behind the scenes look at what goes on in a public school, show how NCLB "could" affect a teacher's view of their class as well as providing 'Funny Kid Quotes".

Our first "Funny Kid Quote" happened my first year. We were learning about adaptations and I let every kid pick out an animal to study how they've adapted. After they researched the animal, they had to make a short presentation to the class. One guy stood up and said, "I'm now an expert on beavers."

[Izulde]

That's awesome!

Really looking forward to this dynasty. I could never teach anything below high school, but this is gonna be interesting to read.

[chesapeake]

Cap, I am very interested in following this dynasty. One word of caution -- even using initials for co-workers and kids probably isn't enough if they are accurate initials. I fully recognize that the odds of someone you know reading this and getting upset about something is between slim and none.

[Cap Ologist]

@Izulde: I didn't think I could teach below high school either, a friend of mine became the principal and asked if I wanted to go, so that's kind of how I got there.

@chesapeake: Even though it's doubtful that anyone I know would find this, and only 3 or 4 people on this board know what school I work for, I'll change the initials to pseudonyms.

[Cap Ologist]

Got to school today at 6 a.m. with a bag of blueberry donuty cake things for the custodian who has been letting me in early. We're not supposed to be there til 7:30 a.m., so I really appreciate the extra 90 minutes of time I get without anyone bothering me. They kicked me out at 5:00 p.m. so they could set the alarm and go home themselves.

Today's task was to organize my classroom library. Our school takes part in a program called Reading Counts, a software that has about 30-40,000 books that students use to take tests after they've read the book. They have goals they have to meet throughout the year, so they're always wanting to know how many points each book is worth.

I spent yesterday afternoon and today, looking up every book in my library to find the reading level and amount of points the book is worth, and then making labels to put on the front cover of the book. I think yesterday I estimated I had about 1000 books, I've got about 600-700 done.

One of the things I'll do the first week of school is have every student take off one of their shoes and put them in a pile. Then I pick out a shoe and try it on, and we talk about why it doesn't fit. Then we talk about how some books fit us, and that everyone has a different reading ability, everyone has different interests, etc and how one of the ways we can find a book that fits us is by paying attention to the reading level. So, that was the reason behind the madness.

Tomorrow is my last free day in my room. My little sister graduates from college Friday, so I'll be heading out. I should be in pretty good shape, I just have to reshelve the books in baskets, label the baskets and arrange desks. Then next week after hours of boring/useless inservice, I can do the minor things that pop up. Hopefully my digital camera will be working tomorrow and I can take some pictures of my room.

Ella's mom brought her daughter up to school today, who'll be going into 1st grade. Her mom was so funny, she kept calling all of Ella's family to come up and check out the room. So one of the people who came up was Ella's younger sister, who is probably about college age. She tried to sit down at one of the student desks, and immediately commented on how uncomfortable they must be for the students, until we pointed out that we have 9 and 10 year-old students who are just a bit smaller than she is.

[Cap Ologist]

Pretty uneventful day at school, another 6 a.m. to 5 p.m. day. Finally got the books regrouped in labeled baskets. Now I want have to answer the million questions daily of "What level is this book? How many points is it worth? Then I worked on outlining the procedures we'll go over the first day.

Anna was at school, and I'd forgotten how super perky she is. I heard her in the hallway giving out grade level hugs. She came into my room, arms outstretched and said "Give me a grade level hug." I told her that wasn't happening anytime soon.

Ella's computer cover came lose, and she submitted a work order for it to be fixed. The tech stopped in my room to chat and mentioned what he doing for her. I gave him a bright blue roll of duct tape and told him to take it to her room to act like he was going to use. Ella is very OCD, so I knew she'd react well when he started using it. I went in with a box of random stuff for her so she wouldn't get suspicious. It was hilarious to watch her try to be polite while dying inside at the thought of blue duct tape wrapped around her machine.

I spent the afternoon doing random tasks, nothing terribly exciting or noteworthy. I'm gonna crash on the couch for an hour, then I'll head out of town for my little sister's college graduation and my last free weekend until school is out for the summer.

[illinifan999]

I remember when we had to do something like that. I picked Tom Clancy's Executive Orders, aced the test and because it was worth so many points I didn't have to read another book for the rest of the year. For class anyway.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by Cap Ologist

Our school takes part in a program called Reading Counts, a software that has about 30-40,000 books that students use to take tests after they've read the book.

{minor parental flinch}

I don't want to sidetrack things on something so minute (and I think I've commented on the program on the board somewhere in the past at least once already) but I did have the immediate flash of recognition when you mentioned the name brand. Never did figure out the logic behind the level assignments for certain titles (both too high & too low instances), couldn't even begin to justify some of them really. And neither could anything I found on their website, nor the paperwork sent to the school for educator use, nor could the program coordinator at the school. Basically we just had to suck it up & deal because no one had any answers to what most admitted were reasonable questions, which was a little rankling to me as a parent trying to be involved. I came away from two years with it feeling like it was a great money making scheme for Scholastic, wrapped in an ostensibly good idea, but with serious questions about whether some decisions about the books were based on literary or monetary merit (i.e. what can we sell most). I did see something that might be encouraging while looking at their website while composing this post Additionally, Scholastic Reading Counts! recently replaced thousands of GRLs in its database to make them consistent with the scores in the Fountas and Pinnell Leveled Book List, K-8, from Heinemann. Maybe that helped with some of my concerns, who knows,not my problem any more.

Most relevant comment I can make here though, better than the brief sidetrack, is that I think it's probably a good sign about being hmm, let's call it "casually specific" like you were in mentioning the program by name instead of just a generic "reading program" description. I think you'll probably be surprised how many things over the course of a year that will have immediate recognition with parents.

[Cap Ologist]

It was the best of times, it was the worst of times.

I spent Monday in a workshop about how to better integrate reading and writing, and it was by far the best workshop I've ever gone to. Honestly, that really isn't saying much. It's surprising how many poor presenters there are in the teaching ranks. Monday's workshop was a good blend of theory and practical ideas on how to implement them. That was the best of times.

Tuesday found me in another workshop that was essentially 3.5 hours of a lady rehashing stories about how important it is to be nice to kids so they'll learn. Could have been accomplished in 30 minutes, but no 3.5 hours. To make it even better, we were crowded into a cafeteria to sit in uncomfortable benches in a lunchroom where the AC wasn't working at first. Texas without AC is pure hell, not to mention being in a room with about 250 people.

Then after the workshop, we had to go back to our campus, and have our handbook read to us. My brilliant coworkers spent 30 minutes arguing over whether or not we should use hand signals in our meeting to get people's attention, to get people to stop talking, then we had to decide on what kind of hand signals we should use. At this point, I'm biting my lip so hard I'm afraid I'm gonna start bleeding soon. Also, at some point, I picked up my binder and hit myself repeatedly on the head.

Then, there was the reading of the handbook, where suddenly everybody becomes the most brilliant person in the world and they have to share their brilliance with the rest of us. Something that should have been done in under an hour took over 4 hours.

Today was spent in yet another useless workshop, this time for science. The presenters were absolutely horrible. Sadly, I couldn't find any flint to blow up the lab.

Let's see what else, oh yes. We also got to pick up our school purchased supplies to use in our classroom:

2 dry erase markers
2 yellow Post-It pads
1 box large paper clips
1 box small paper clips
1 box of staples
2 tape dispenser rolls

Yes, that is what I'm given by the school to start out the year. We do have a little bit of money that we can use to buy other stuff, but we can only buy from certain vendors, so it's far from easy to find useful stuff. I was fortunate to be able to spend a decent amount of my own money this summer on hands on/minds on activities, but not everyone is able to do that. The result of the meager budgets is that people use what little money they get from the school to buy worksheet books. Then, they chain their students to their desks and give them hands off/minds off worksheet after worksheet.

Tomorrow night, we have Meet the Teacher night. We've yet to get our class rosters, and if we're lucky we'll get them more than an hour before it starts so we can make a few personalized things.

It's been two frustrating days, and it's so easy how quickly the joy of teaching can get sucked out of you, and if you're not careful, you won't fight to get it back. So, for those of you who have kiddos, encourage their teachers as much as possible.

[Izulde]

Note to self: avoid teaching in Texas. (not that I would anyway

[Cap Ologist]

It's been a hectic first week. The first week can be incredibly dull and boring as it feels like all you do is teach them how to do things the way you want. We've managed to get started on a few things, but for the most part it's been more training than teaching. Last year, I rushed through the training part and it bit me in the ass most of the year, so I've tried to be much more deliberate this year.

My class so far is chatty, but for the most part I don't foresee huge behavioral problems from them. My problem will come from the student that is causing hell in another class, and they move him to my room sometime this year. I know it's coming, and last year I got a kid from a completely different campus. That part drives me crazy. If you're gonna give me the knuckleheads eventually, go ahead and give them to me day 1.

Our 'contract' day is supposed to start at 7:30 and end at 3:30. I've been at school by 6:15 a.m and have stayed past 6:30 each night except today, when I left 'early' at about 5 p.m. I'll probably be at work til 6 tomorrow night just to get lesson plans done and uploaded for next week. I also spent last Saturday working for about 9 hours with Gail mapping out all that we were going to do this week. We were quite ambitious with what we wanted to accomplish. I think it took Monday and Tuesday just to effectively go over what I originally planned for Monday.

In other news, I already had a minor skirmish in my room and I currently have 4 students home with flu-like symptoms and fever. I spent about every 30 minutes having my kids go wash their hands, put Germ-X on their hands and using Clorox wipes on their desks. The nurse jokingly (I think) offered to send masks to my room.

I haven't had time to pull all the demographic data for my class to know all my sub-pops that will count towards the state assessment tests. From looking at them, they all appear to be races that we have a big enough sub-pop that qualifies to be measured, but some parents strangely choose races that really make little sense, unless you're already looking forward to college scholarships and applications. Apparently, we have to abide by whatever the parent chooses when they enroll.

I'll update this weekend with what next week will hold in my classroom, I'm tired and borderline delirious, so I'm off for the night.

[JonInMiddleGA]

Originally Posted by Cap Ologist

In other news, I already had a minor skirmish in my room and I currently have 4 students home with flu-like symptoms and fever.

1 student (so far) out of 23 in my son's homeroom diagnosed with H1N1.

[Cap Ologist]

Just got home and ate dinner, had 7 kids out today with 2 confirmed flu cases. Gonna go shower in bleach for an hour or two, I feel like a walking germ.