Annnnnd We're back!

We had our back-to-school night Thursday and our first half-day of school yesterday. I don't feel ready to be back at work, but here I am, making desk assignments and trying to figure out what happened to summer.

I've noticed I have a surfeit of blond boys and small, dark-haired girls. They all look alike so far. Also, even with some low-ability special ed students, this looks like it will be a higher-ability class than I've had the past few years. They actually looked longingly at my bookshelves. I do have four exceptionally zippy boys, but that's nothing compared to the nine I had 2 years ago. That school year proved that I can live through anything.

My schedule is not for the faint-of-heart. I teach nonstop from 8:45 until 12:10. During this time I'll teach reading, writing, math, and language. Students will complete spelling assignments as morning work, leaving only science or social studies to be taught in the afternoon. I'll have to teach them during the last half-hour of the day. Lunch, recess, learning lab/Title 1/math centers, specials, and PE all come before I'll have instructional time again.

So, here's to a year good teaching, good students, and parents who won't go so far as to purchase/purloin tests for their students. I'm excited about the possibilities.

Wow--Where have I been?

I don't even know where to begin. Let's see if I can recall some of the highlights of the past 5 weeks:

1. Staying a half hour later, while beneficial (got that math curriculum TAUGHT!), proved to be really taxing. I was simply too whopped to blog during that time.
2. State testing came and went. I am hopeful that my students will show progress. We worked hard all year, and had a really great, productive review courtesy of the state--they used grant money to give us practice books that were, in all ways, similar to the test. Same number of questions. Same SPIs. My students' test anxiety was nil--they literally had seen a version of the state test.
3. I thought my days would be less hectic after state testing, but I was so wrong! I've had to submit my writing portfolios to the principal twice since then (not just me, everyone). If you don't know from writing portfolios (too much RHONY), let me tell you that they are a time-consuming pain in the tooshie. Writing pieces have to be scored with a rubric (6 Traits) and meaningful comments should be made on each and every story. And we're still not done. We would have finished this week, except for one small thing:
4. We had a major flood in my state and have missed an entire week of school. In May! For weather!?! Unprecedented. My city is downstream from Nashville--we got all of their floodwater a day or two later, plus all of our own. The dams on the Cumberland River were wide open (or overtopped!) and we have had severe flooding. Forget the 100 year flood plain--we had a 500 year flood. I can't articulate how devastating this has been for our state--it's just plain stunning to see the Titans' stadium flooded and a portable classroom floating down the interstate on the television. My son's piano teacher was distraught to learn that the Steinway at the Schermerhorn concert hall in Nashville was ruined. She had actually attended a concert there the night before it flooded. So many people have lost everything and have no insurance. You can't get flood insurance unless you live in the 100 year flood zone. Those outside the zone are ineligible. Hopefully, FEMA will help them out.

So, we go back to work on Monday after a week off. We have only 10 and a half days of school left and a ton to do. It's going to be a hard two weeks.

Now I can worry

I've read with sympathy and horror about school district woes across the country on the teacher boards I frequent. Some wrote of projections of 45 students in classrooms next year. All wrote of massive layoffs, going deep into their ranks--as deep as the 8th year of experience or more. So far, in my state, not as much as a peep. I seem to recall our governor being stressed about the budget, but promising education would not be affected.

My local newspaper today had a different story. Locally we're facing an 8.1 million dollar shortfall, due to incorrect enrollment predictions (down by 400 students), using part of the mandated 3% reserve to balance the budget previously, and the Lord only knows what other reasons. Additionally, they project that they'll have 7.9 million dollars in unfunded requests for the coming year's budget. They say they'll cut programs but try to leave classrooms alone.

I wonder which programs will get the axe. I'm hoping literacy coaches are the first to go--I don't think it's an effective use of funding to have a busybody running around the school, trying desperately to make herself relevant. Curriculum advisors are fairly useless, too, at least the special ed one I've met seems to be. The math, science, and reading/language arts ones do work hard--part of their job is overseeing the writing of our benchmark tests. Even if I can happily do without all of these folks, their salaries don't come close to being $16 million, so what else will get the axe? A new language series to replace our 6 year old one? I can live with that. Language doesn't change that much over 6 years. But after these, the cuts become harder to bear.

What I fear is that art and music classes will be eliminated. The daily PE classes at my school may have to go to 2-3 times per week. We don't have that much extra in our budget--years of no new property taxes have cut us close to the bone. Besides the effect this will have on these teachers, I worry about how it will affect students. We will truly become test-teachers when we eliminate art and music because these are the only classes where creativity is encouraged (or, alas, even allowed.)

I never had an art class in school. There wasn't one in elementary school, and I was never able to get in the one in junior high school. I had 2 music teachers in elementary school. One was a woman who would show up every now and then in our second grade class. She would begin each song by blowing in a pitch pipe and we would sing, reading the songs from a song book as we did. I remember we sang "A Froggy Went a Courtin'". I had another music teacher in fifth grade, a man. He hated rock 'n roll but loved jazz, and we were afraid of his short temper. I don't remember anything we sang. He came about once a month and terrified us.

Today, I can't sing a lick or draw very well and I wonder if I would be more musical or artistic if I had had a weekly art or music class. I like to draw, however poorly I do at it, but there's a lot about perspective that I never learned. I'm so incompetent at singing that I don't try it at all. :(

Okay, it's become a long post, but I'm worried that we're shortchanging our students. Heck, even before the rumors of budget cuts came, I was worried about our students. The joy of learning has been sucked out of so many classrooms as we concentrate on the damned test everyday, all year long. We begin preparing for it the very first day of school and don't stop until the day before the test. We begin preparing for the next year's test by pre-teaching content from the next grade level the week after the test is taken. There is no down time, no respite. We are a nation of testing teachers and our students are all test takers. Not scholars. Not excited learners. Test takers. It sucks.

Le Sigh

I have my own teacher website. (I'm not going to link it here in the interest of privacy--I want to be able to rant and if you know who I am, I won't be able to.) Mostly my website is the same as others--lots of helpful links for parents and colleagues. I have uploaded some things I've made for reading (a brochure-type thing) that have proven wildly popular. I'm not over-exaggerating, either.

I get several emails each week about the brochures. They're simple things, really, just a brochure that has three panels on each side. It has five questions that I took from the "guide on the side" of the teacher's edition and spaces to write the answers to the questions. Some unknown genius teacher came up with the original format, but it's easy enough to copy (steal!) and implement on one's own time.

I'm happy to share. Teachers should share, especially if they have better ideas than mine. I did the first 4 units (20 stories from the basal, folks--20 stories!) and then intended to do the rest as I needed them. But now, since Rotney's family obtained a copy of the assessment book and I've decided to drop this series in favor of the previous one, I'm not doing any more of the brochures. Mostly, because I'm busy reinventing the wheel as I try to come up with activities without the benefit of a teacher's edition. Partly, because I'm still mad about the whole assessment book mess.

Now comes the part with all of the emails. Ever single email that I get thanks me for the first four units and wants to know where the other two are. Begging. Pleading. Driving me crazy. I finally stopped answering them. That made me feel guilty, so I finally put a notice up on the website that this is all there is or will be this year.

I feel so relieved that it's all over. And, folks, these brochures aren't difficult to do. It takes time, a laptop, and a basal teacher's edition (ask Rotney's family for that last one--I'm sure they can get one for you!)

Fridays

Doesn't everyone love Fridays? We look forward to them all week long. We celebrate Wednesdays because we're now over the hump of the week, on the downward slope to the inevitable here-it-is-again Friday. Sometimes I worry that I've got it all wrong.

Maybe I should embrace Mondays, with their manic business as I try to prepare for the week. My students are always glad to see me on Mondays. I think they're victims of short-term memory loss, but it's nice to see their smiles on Monday mornings.

Or Tuesdays, the day of the hated computer lab and the crazy teacher because once Tuesday is over, I have a week before I have to face Tuesday again.

Or Wednesdays, because it's Art day. Art lasts 10 minutes longer than other specials and that 10 minutes is GOLDEN.

Or Thursdays. Wait--I have Cooperative Planning Teams on Thursdays. CPTs are the highly-staged mock-cooperative team drill we have to endure weekly. Instead of waiting until Thursdays, we cooperate all the time--passing in the hall, in the mornings, through email--why have these stiff meetings? Also, Thursdays are faculty meetings and IEP meetings. Often I don't get one minute of planning on Thursdays and I actually have to stay 50 minutes later. Thursdays suck.

I've got it. I'll celebrate everyday that's not Thursday! So, here's to the first not-Thursday of the rest of my life. I'm going to enjoy it!

Hodge Podge

Having math twice a day is working out better than I had anticipated. My students are learning about perimeter and area--much easier concepts to grasp than (shudder) adding and subtracting fractions with unlike denominators. I taught and taught and taught that; I understand the "unlike" part--I intensely unlike anything to do with fractions now. Tomorrow we move on to probability. Hopefully this site, Math Live, will help. It has cartoons that explicitly introduce math concepts. I wish I had found it earlier this year, but it will help with the looming state test review.

There's not much going on. Rotney went home sick today; Moses went home sick yesterday. Both had stomach viruses. I'd be more excited about this, but my youngest felt fevered at bedtime and complained about a stomach ache--I may go in for a half day tomorrow and come home to spend the afternoon with him, if he wakes up sick or queasy.

There's a bit of a contretemps (I don't actually know how to say this word, but I know how to use it) about computer lab usage at work--2 teachers have signed up for the coveted end-of-the-day snowday make-up time for Monday-Thursday for the next month. Rather selfish, doncha know. If you knew one of them, you'd say rather typical. Some people. Of course, princiPal is out of town for the week, so it's going to fester for a while. Lovely.

Crunch Time!

Tomorrow we begin our Plus-30-minutes days of punishment. (You know what I mean--we've had so many snow days that they've added 30 minutes to our days until after our state testing.) It has been decreed that these 30 extra minutes will be devoted to Math, and one of the specials teachers or educational assistants has been assigned to every class during that time. I'll have my usual SpEd aide--she's fantastic and easily wins the award (if we gave one) for being the hardest working person in our building.

What will I do with this bonus time? CATCH UP.

I'm so far behind our math curriculum map that it's shaming. Especially since I helped make the darned thing.

It's not like I didn't know it would be impossible to stay with the map. Our standards have increased in rigor, and just by adding up the lessons that had to be taught, I knew we were screwed. But my princiPal doesn't seem to understand. I sense this because she's asked me many, many times why we, as a grade level, are so far behind where the map says we should be. She always gets the same answer(it's not possible!), but she's not happy about it.

I say she should ask the district math curriculum coordinator. It's her fault that we're not able to maintain the pace--she made us trim days off of units to add more days for review before the state test. What a dummy. I still don't understand the reasoning--trimming the days off didn't change the fact that those lessons needed to be taught.

Anyway, it's crunch time. I'll probably dream in mathematical symbols.