It’s on my mind, too, as I pray for a second take with kindergarten  (so much I’d like to try to do again, improve on), yearn for the supposed so-much-betterness of the second year, and mostly wonder, wonder, wonder what’s in store. It seems like a chance to start fresh; the clock resets back to 180 days.

Throughout the school year there are so many chances for fresh starts, though. How many times did I wait for a new grading period to implement a new procedure, or even just wait for a new week before introducing a new instructional concept? It makes sense, but

Every morning my class chants our motto, and then this refrain: “There is no time to waste! Our work is never done!” This truth weighs on me and yet I feel unsatisfied with the degree of urgency that I’ve mustered in my classroom and in myself this year.

It’s exciting to be done with our testing (oh, yes, the standardized tests of kindergarten) and pretty much done with our basals / textbooks, and we’re really focusing on hitting those skills that the kids will need to have the most solid grasp on for first grade success – sight word fluency, number sense, things like that. I can’t believe I have to send them on in 31 days (and a summer)! And it’s crunch time to make sure I’m sending them on prepared.

With all the talk of next year I want to make sure that my parents and students are all still focused on the present – we’re not done! We have to make a bit more headway to the class goals, and there’s a field trip in store, and all kinds of end-of-year activities to throw off my teaching schedule and keep everyone riled up.

I leave you with a gem from Monday: We were making sentences with one of our new sight words, “day”.

My example: “What day of the week is it today?”

Student example: “Day is going to play outside in the park.”

sigh. he meant “they.” another sigh.

D- has stopped throwing chairs! J- and L- are off their one-tantrum-per-day run! T- knows all his letters! Woohoo!

But: K- is getting worse, falling further and further behind. J- has still not started speech therapy (it’s been “in the works” for months) and still can’t pronounce most letter sounds. I need to figure out how to use more technology in my room. JW’s mom wants him tested for learning disabilities. Now that most of the class knows letters, it’s on to sight words and blending and reading and the work is never done!

I feel like I’m playing whack-a-mole, that arcade game where the little moles pop their heads up and you have to hit them with a foam hammer. I think there are some games with alligators instead of moles. You get one and another pops up in the other corner. You get that one and now it’s two more at a time! The moles in this analogy are Classroom Issues – not children, of course – and my hammer-wielding arm isn’t too tired yet but perhaps at risk of a repetitive strain injury?

I actually like that there is always more to work on, and I feel incredibly relieved that my “moles” are more academic and less behavioral now. But in my class of 24, it seems like I’m always at risk of not giving a particular student all of the attention that he or she deserves. Some demand it (tantrums) and some are in most obvious need (developmental delays), but really all need that tailored support, enrichment or remediation, differentiated homework, morning hug, lunchtime conversation. And as I “whack” away, I have to remind myself to prioritize, keep a global perspective, and yet, not let that one get past me!

On a different note, I finished giving the Diagnostic Reading Assessment to all of my kids and now have official reading levels for them, so we’ll be using my leveled classroom library to build those reading skills. The goal is for all to be at or above a first grade level. One is there already! It’s pretty exciting to see them reading and I am loving our school-wide implementation of DEAR time (Drop Everything and Read). In kindergarten it’s kind of Drop Everything and Tell Yourself a Story As Quietly As You Can While You Look At the Pictures, but that’s a start. They love it, too, and I am going to spend the second semester amping up a love of reading and writing that will hopefully stick with them through the rest of their school years.

I leave you with a treasure from the reading assessment:

Me: “Point to each word with your finger and read the story to me.”
Actual text: “The ball is red.”
T- reading: “What else is red? Oh, a ball that a boy kicks. He is getting it into the goal. I like to play soccer.”

Straight from the mouth of one of my kiddos, while we were working after school on writing our names with play-doh. I felt a wave of contentment with my job and my life for that moment and thought there was no place I’d rather be than at my kidney-shaped table after school with four munchkins. Then I wondered if he was pointing out that it was fun compared to the rest of our time together, and sighed, and considered infusing more play-doh into my daily routine, and decided it really does have to be only an occasional thing. It takes a long time to guide twenty-three kindergarteners through each of their names. Some of them have long names! Hey! Stop making play-doh guns!

Fun is not the first word I’d use to describe my teaching experience thus far. Maybe: tiring, frustrating, confusing, degrading, heart-breaking, self-esteem-blasting, educational, thought-provoking, rewarding. We had a good week in room 514 and I hardly dare say that I think things are looking up; it finally feels like we’re on solid ground and ready to actually make real gains rather than tread water in there (or thrash around).

I am working, though, on having more fun through my day. My kids read my mood amazingly well, and my management skills suffer tremendously when I let myself get frustrated. I have to remember so that they can understand: when I administer a consequence or reprimand it’s not because I’m upset, it’s because they made a wrong choice. A wrong choice that can be corrected! See? everything’s okay!

We have a three-day week coming up and I’m so looking forward to getting home for Thanksgiving. I’m ready for holiday cheer and actually cold weather (come on, Miami, what is this?! well, okay, it’s kind of nice) and snowflake decorations and family and friends. But goodness, the school year is starting to seem short! I’m thinking about where my kids are now and where I want them to be by June. We have a long, long way to go still.

Crunch time starts now.

After Thanksgiving.

The windows in my classroom face East, so I can see the sun rise from there.

When I take deep breaths I figure that everything will probably be okay. Some day. Maybe soon-ish? When I take deep breaths I remember to eat, and sleep some, and catch up with friends, and buy vegetables.

The rest of the time I sort of panic, thinking up new strategies for each day, eating pizza, pizza, sleeping on tangled sheets, stepping over piles of paperwork, sitting on the floor hunched over one thousand things I need To Do, spending too much money at Target, forgetting about homework or the Do Now until the last minute, angrily passing out lunch cards in the cafeteria.

This is melodramatic, but I wrote that first half a little bit ago, during a rough week, and I don’t really drink coffee and beer at the same time. Today things are better. So, it’s been kind of up and down. I miss the distinction between rough draft and failed attempt. Bad days have been feeling like The Most Awful Day Ever and it’s hard to see them, in the moment, at least, as part of the process. That learning curve? We’re talking line of best fit. More of the points than I’d like fall below.

And I really want help! I’ve been turning to people all over the place. And honestly, I’ve been getting it. Not quick fixes or miraculous solutions, but strategies and advice that I can put to use. It’s just that sometimes it’s awfully vague. And contradictory. Or unrealistic. You know. And sometimes that one piece of unsolicited advice is just enough to break my camel back.

Anyway, at the end of the week – if perhaps not every day – there are the reasons I’m still glad I’m here. Some of my kids have mastered the –at family (cat, rat, bat, sat, mat…) and are actually reading, really reading, now. Today I very much enjoyed watching them rock out to the sight words song: T-H-E, T-H-E! My former 3^rd and 5^th graders give me big hugs whenever they see me around the school. Differentiated Instruction centers ran more smoothly than ever. No chairs were thrown this week.

It is the start of the second quarter. Let’s say I’m warmed up, and ready to go.

“What’s that, you say, loyal reader?” (I know there’s only about one of you!) “Weren’t you just switched to third grade, Miss O?”

Why yes.

And now I’ve switched again.

As I take a break from prepping for my 8th day of kindergarten, in the seventh week of school, in my third classroom and with my third set of kids this year, I can only sympathize with P-. I, too, want to be good. And right now, I’m not. It’s frustrating, maddening, to feel like my best is still a disservice to my kids.

My 22 five- and six-year-olds, including the sibling of one of my former 5th graders, have already kidnapped my heart. They’re cute and energetic and curious and playful, they’re easily excited about what we’re learning, they’re loving and give me hugs randomly in the middle of the day. But they’re also so far behind. I have a handful who barely communicate, and about a third can write their names in a recognizable way. It’s week 7 and they’ve had a substitute for most of their schooling so far. While kids in some neighborhoods come in to kindergarten knowing how to read, I’m pretty sure that some of mine have come in never having held a book or been read to.

I’m trying to stay focused and positive, trying to read up on early elementary strategies and familiarize myself with the curriculum. I’m trying to decorate the classroom the way a kindergarten classroom should be and put into place the structures and procedures that we need to get through the day. All of this should have happened before the school year even started, but, here I am, playing catch up… again.

I could go on and on about the kids, the crazy days… but I’ll save that for the next post. Who knows what I’ll be teaching by then!

This week, I teach a new grade, with 32 new kids, a new classroom (in a different building), new curriculum, etc. After teaching middle schoolers and high schoolers in various programs and then 5th graders for a week, third grade feels like a different planet when it comes to their social development, behavior, and academic skills. Goodness! They cry, and have to be reminded to blow their noses!

The switch happened on Tuesday, so it was pretty abrupt and students and teachers alike have been slightly disoriented this week, I think. It’s all happening because of enrollment numbers – not enough big kids, lots and lots of little kids compared to what was expected. I felt pretty devastated at first (another vocab word; but seriously, I wanted to teach middle school originally), but I’m settling in now and feeling somewhat intimidated but also fired up about this new charge.

In my three days of third grade, I’ve had ups and down. I’m going really heavy on the reward system (“tickets for you! tickets for you! I love how you’re sitting up! tickets for you!”) but feel slightly guilty about  building the “work-for-praise” culture rather than the “love-of-learning” culture. But, baby steps, I suppose. We’ll transition to the intrinsic value of education one day…

Management has been rough, and I haven’t had any major management trials before this week. (I know, it’s overdue.) I need to hammer out an age-appropriate consequence system over the weekend. Like I said, they cry. A lot. And can’t sit still.

My first priorities: figure out skill levels to group homogenously and start differentiated instruction, call parents, have an extremely detailed consequence and reward system. Fortunately the state learning benchmarks are essentially the same, just somewhat simplified for 3rd grade as compared to 5th.

My brain is doing weird swings in the midst of overdrive to some kind of minimalism: just tomorrow’s lesson, just the most overdue email (just coffee). I need to work toward some kind of balance.

But first, tomorrow’s lesson…

I guess I should start off with an e-apology for missing several weeks of posting! In my defense I just got my internet service up and running, and I moved, and started a new job, and have been getting lost in Miami, and planning for class, and decorating my room…

But it’s all finally come together. I teach 5th grade reading, writing, and social studies, and met my kids today – the class of 2023, I want to call them. (That date sounds so futuristic; it’s when they should graduate from college.) It was a good day. The whole school focused on procedures and rules today so we can get off with a strong start in the management department. I have two classes but was with my homeroom for most of the day. The kids were on their first-day-of-school behavior, but that doesn’t mean I don’t have a good guess of who my troublemakers will be!

There wasn’t much real instruction between the paperwork and the school rules, but we talked about malleable intelligence (“Did you know? You can grow your brain like a muscle!!”) and how reading is thinking. We read a back to school poem and “Dream Dust” by Langston Hughes… we’ll be talking about dreams throughout the year, and how we can work toward them, so this was a nice little intro.

I don’t know my kids’ academic levels beyond their test scores from last year’s standardized tests (which are pretty telling in themselves), but there were a couple of heartbreaking moments from the beginning of the day: One student was writing his birthday on a survey that I gave them and asked me to spell ‘September’ for him. Another asked me how to spell ‘education’ and it was like one of those ridiculously transparent, symbolic moments in movies. This week we’ll get real diagnostic data on the students’ reading and phonics levels so that get right to work toward our goals.

It was a good day. I regretted wearing heels but might wear them tomorrow anyway. I need to plan for tomorrow and write their names out on clothespins (behavior tracker) popsicle sticks (cold calling) file folders (parent contact info) and starry name plates (assigned seats).

179 days sounds like a horrifyingly large expanse of time, but also somehow seems like such a short amount of time left to get our work done.

Back to it…

I wonder what our kids think about the bulletin boards that decorate their halls, the ones that are sometimes more for their teachers than for them, with evening schedules and Teaching as Leadership mottoes posted across them. About the fact that almost all of us, when asked, tell them we will be teaching in a different state next fall. About the obvious divide between young teachers, who lead most lessons, and older teachers, who observe from the side or the back of the room.

If only the children knew that their teachers rode school buses every morning, returned home to dorms and lived all together at night, packed their lunches in ‘Teach for America’ lunch boxes every day. If only they knew we were the same age as their big sisters, that many of us were standing in front of a class for the very first time this summer.

That our responsibility is not just empowering, but often terrifying.

These are our best-kept secrets.

This week we have KIDS! which is the best thing in the world. My students are 7th graders in summer school because they failed or performed poorly in math, reading or both. This week has been full of diagnostic assessments, and many – but not all – of the students are definitely behind grade level. We have four weeks to make as much academic progress as possible (we have specific, targeted goals for each student).

This week I’m teaching math – we’re on a rotation, so next week I teach a literacy block. I’m remembering how much I loved math back in middle school! I like the logical sequencing of algebra… it was the calculus that threw me for a loop in high school. Today the class was pretty attentive during their order of operations lesson, although I did have to push them to raise their hands more and speak up. It’s throwing me off a bit that they’re quiet! A bit of a change from my classroom last summer!

Our class is small but we have boys and girls at a range of reading and math levels, several Special Ed kids, and a bit of a range in ages (and of course a range in sizes – it is puberty time, after all!)

Touching, heartbreaking, stomach churning: “Miss, can you help me? I don’t remember how to divide.” This from at least three of my students, who could understand that the order of operations meant exponents would come before division but couldn’t all tell me the square of four or twelve divided by three. How did they get to 7th grade without those basic skills? I love that they are asking for help, realizing their areas of weakness, feeling comfortable speaking out already. But we all have our work cut out for us.

Some are speeding through, though, and I need to watch the kids who seem to get it just as much as the kids who seem to be behind. And the ones in the middle! And the clock – the summer school day is shortened and we’re all pressed for time.

And that achievement gap.

I flew in to the City of Brotherly Love for the first time almost exactly one year ago, coming to teach middle schoolers in an amazing summer program called the Breakthrough Collaborative. Appropriately, now I’m back – this time for TFA Institute. I was placed in the Miami-Dade Corps and we’re all up in Philly with the corps from Baltimore, D.C., Delaware, Boston, and Greater Philadelphia for our five-week intensive training. Today was our first day, so we experienced the massive lines for the cafeteria and early buses (6:50am departure), and also got to visit our schools and meet our colleagues for the summer. It was a long day with lots of training sessions and no kids, who are the one’s we’re eagerly waiting to meet next week. In the evening we had a Welcome Ceremony with a particularly encouraging and inspiring address from Jason Kamras, who taught and continues to work in the DC Public Schools.

One of the Miami-Dade 2010 Corps Members gave me this advice for Institute when we met at Induction last week: “Be a sponge.” I’m here to soak it all in, take in as many tips and tricks and learn as much as I can. But it can’t be a passive experience. I need to seek out all of the guidance and resources that are available here, in this concentrated environment, for this limited time. I’m also here to make a difference for my summer school students, who will be 7th graders. Their academic futures are in my hands for the next four weeks.

So why the name of this blog? A quote by  journalist Sydney J. Harris that resonates with me:

“The whole purpose of education is to turn mirrors into windows.”

This post takes care of a lot of the basic background, so moving on I hope to share stories from the classroom, thoughts and concerns about my new profession, ideas, questions, quotes… whatever seems right when I sit down to type.

I’ll leave you with my latest “Why I TFA” – for good measure:

I teach for America because I know that today, “education” does not mean the same thing in all neighborhoods and all cities across America, and because I have seen, already and in my limited experience, how one moment of academic success can change a child’s outlook on their schooling and on their life. I want all of my students, and all children, to be able to dream big and achieve absolutely anything they want to achieve. I teach for America because I want to unlock the power of my students’ minds, and help them to not only defy but rewrite the expectations that our society has been complacent with for too long.