A New Hope

It doesn't take long when you realize things are out of balance that things tend to balance themselves out. For me it was simple. Get the college classes over with and get back in the classroom....it took two days of being with my 6th grade class to get me back to being more like myself. Yup, there is nothing like college course work to take the life out of you. Although my ramblings from last blog weren't for not; I was right in noticing that I had been replacing school work with keeping in touch with people around me.  Coming to this realization is great for me, but it comes with a sense of hesitation as I am about to embark on the journey that is the "student teacher".  I will learn why teachers get so frustrated with the system they work inside of and why they feel so taken advantage of as workers in our society.  Tonight I list out the top 10 things that I look forward to discovering during my days as a student teacher.  Ladies and gents.....LETS BLOG!!

1)  When do we get a chance to prepare?  Teachers have 6 and a half hours of teaching each day and probably 30min - 1 hour of meetings on top of that.  I know that I have spent three hours brushing up on my "rock cycle" knowledge this weekend while planning a lesson for Monday afternoon.  I know that I'll also put in  a couple hours planning for a math lesson on writing equations using variables.  There is a 100% chance that I'll put in over 5 hours of work for two of the 6 classes on Monday.  Then I will have to do the same for Tuesday....and Wed.....and Thurs.......oh yeah and Friday.  I might as well think about reading and writing, maybe some Social Studies....and also art.  Because we all know art projects take little to no planning.......right?  This time is spent planning assuming everything will go just fine....then little Timmy scraps his arm and starts crying in the middle of class, or the secretary calls 10 people from your class back down to the lunchroom because they didn't clean up properly.  20 minutes I loose in the classroom......and people say teachers get paid too much?  $30,000/year to work 80 hour weeks AND be told by society that I'm not doing good enough?  Now I'm griping, but it doesn't seem fair. 

2)     How to create a classroom library.  I definitely don't want a generic cart of books in my class with Beverly Cleary and the like.  But I do want books kids like to read.  I think I'll create a list of books students have already read (outside of school) and see which ones show up the most.  Then I'll go get those books.  Seems easy....but I doubt it will be.

3)  Bored are you?  I've always thought of myself as a laid back, and somewhat humorous and entertaining person.  I've taught about 15 lessons so far to the students and it come across dry and boring.....it is weird, but somehow I need to discover how to bring myself into each and every lesson.  I might just speak all day in the voice of Alex Trebek....maybe not.

4)  Field Trips!  Holy responsibility Batman.  You take on millions of dollars in liability every time you take your kids outside the walls of your institution.  Why on earth would anyone take that risk for a couple hours at the zoo, aquarium, or Old Country Buffet?  What? 



5)  How much weight will I gain?  Knowing the amount of hours I'm about to spend planning out lessons (notice I haven't mentioned grading yet?), it is clear I will be about 50 - 70% less active than what I had been up to that point.  This should in fact have a direct impact on the amount of pounds I weight here on earth.  I say 24 lb increase.  I guess you'll just have to trust me on this.

6)  How sick will I get?  They say your first year in the classroom is the worst when it comes to illnesses, but I've been lucky thus far in that I have yet to gain any illness over the course of 8 months in the classroom.  We'll see now that it comes to 8 hours a day in front of the little rowdiness makers.  I guess that would give me more time to plan:)

7)  Can I get 30 students to do what I want?  This I can't wait to discover.  So far it is hit and miss.  If I can find something that I know they want (B-Ball game at recess) then it is easier.  But when I'm struggling to keep their attention on a lesson that I spent hours putting together, the last thing on my mind is what can I hang over their heads".

8)  How much music/video production will I be able to accomplish?  I want to produce something that I can take with me to show that they had a great time and got something out of the time they spent with me as a teacher.  School districts are pretty strict with what they allow and don't allow when it comes to capturing students on film in any way shape or form. 

9)  Will I eat lunch in the teacher's lounge?  This is the age ol question for teachers.  The conversation in the fabled lounge has a 97% chance of sounding intensely negative as the words "Shafted and screwed" seem to find their way into every sentence uttered within the confines of the room.  It will be fun to walk in, hear this and simply start whistling Uncle Remus toons, but as of now I figure no one would notice.

10)  Will I be the teacher I saw myself being two years ago?  This is a touch one as I saw myself teaching students how to be happy in the life they find themselves living right now.  I have become learned in the politics, the curriculum, and the bureaucracy of teaching, and it isn't pretty as teachers truly are treated with little respect by the districts that support them and the parents that depend on them.  I recognize all of this going into it so I can only do my best to stick to my guns and make sure I'm doing what I want to be doing in the classroom.  Afterall, that's what I'm planning to teach my students!!

Joke of the day:

Teacher: I told you to stand at the end of the line?
Pupil: I tried, but there was someone already there!   

Cheerio

Point Break



Besides being one of the most defining movies of my teenage years, the movie above also describes the overwhelming feeling of this moment, right here, right now.  Today I finished the college coursework for my teaching certificate...today I leave college classes behind and begin full time student teaching.  I walked out of my last class today and the weight of the world seemed to hit me like a ton of bricks. 

I hear stories of my classmates achieving great successes, and yet melting down.  I see news reports of state budget cuts that will cut education spending more than ever before.  I feel the pressure of expectation.  I taste the dry mouth of trepidation as I prepare myself to finally move forward.  I smell the uneasy aroma of frayed nerves. 

My senses have always led me in the right direction, so why do I stress?  Why do I have more questions than answers?  Why is it so hard to stick to the beliefs that led me to the place where I currently reside?  I sit on the precipice of Point Break; a defining movie of years past....a defining moment for me now.    

I have my pals Raef Esquith and Lawrence Kolberg.  I have my friends the six strands, Bloom's taxonomy, and ol man Piaget.  I have my stalwart Reggie Routman.  I have the best 36 cohort members in the world to lean on; and I have a family who needs me home.  I have this blog to post my thoughts as fast as my brain can produce them.  I have a Master Teacher who is tops in the business.  I have musicians that play guitar with me whenever I get the feeling.  I have a lot of resources at my disposal..........but something is missing.

In all the hubbub, business, chaos, and school work that was the past 6 months, the compass that was guiding my path began to veer off course.  My instincts, my senses, seemed to waiver in their effectiveness.  Things that had once come easy to me now were misfiring all around me.  I plowed on believing it was just a funk; that I would break out of it if I could just make it over the next dune.  School work began to suffer, my health began to suffer, and most importantly, my relationships began to suffer.  It is at this point where I wish I could close my eyes and wake up to see my own Vanilla Sky.

At what point did I transition from the confident person who knew what he wanted in life to the person who seemed to not be able to make a decision to save his life?  Unlike the movie Vanilla Sky, I am able to go back in time and relive the past as reality....not in a planned out dream.  

So, as an aspiring amateur movie producer, I declare what hit me earlier today might have been the weight of the world, or it might have been my senses recalibrating the priorities of my life.  To me, seeing the movie "It's a Wonderful Life" when I was 10 years old set the tone for how I was going to live my life.  "No man is a failure who has friends!"  Plain and simple....RELATIONSHIPS are priority one.  I let myself believe that school was more important than the people in my life, and I don't plan to continue in this false reality.

It seemed so simple when we were growing up.  When you met someone that laughed at the same things you did, enjoyed the same experiences you did, and thought about life the same way you did; you became friends!  When you are all grown up responsibility clouds these possibilities.  We become afraid of losing what we think we have instead of gaining what we know is real.  In movies and books it is called "following your heart".  I call it trusting your senses and doing what brings happiness to your heart. 

Thanks Blog.  I think I know what to do now.

The purpose of this blog was to recenter, refocus, re-align, recalibrate, whatever you wish to call it.  I feel like I know the people I want in my life and I know the relationships I want to cultivate.  I also know that I will have the chance to make a HUGE difference in the lives of 31 lucky students in the very near future.  I am getting a second chance at this, there's not a chance in H-E- Double Hockeysticks I'm going to lose this opportunity.  Point Break?  Condition Clear!!

Cheerio

Bye Bye iPOD Touch.....Buh Bye

After using this revolutionary device for the past three months in the classroom, I'm not convinced it will be the most efficient method of increasing technology awareness in the classroom.  My opinion was pushed towards this frame of mind when each student in my class received a Netbook (from a district grant) allowing them access to a personal computer throughout the day.  Immediately we started doing art, math, social studies, and even reading right there on the computers.  It seemed so easy to integrate school work onto a netbook as most kids were used to how the software worked.  It wasn't so easy getting kids used to the iTouch.  With that in mind I doubled my efforts over the last two weeks to see if I could find any other uses for this grand device.  Here's my list:

• Voice recorder to build a story.  Get a pupil to record the first line of a story, pass it to the next pupil to listen to and add to, continue with each pupil adding a part until the story is complete. 
• Collect Data With Google Forms
• Create a Google Form and email it to your iPod Touch. When you click the link, it will take you to the Form formatted for the Touch, with multiple choice scroll menus, text boxes, etc. Use the Touch as a handheld data collection device that automatically populates a spreadsheet with your data.
• Conduct Assessments with online Polls
• Using Poll Everywhere students can access polls online and vote for the correct answer. Poll everywhere is FREE for up to 30 users per poll. Additional users can be added at a fee.  Using Assessment Apps like qWhiz, ResponseWare, Teachers Pick, iResponse that work like traditional clickers.
• Probability and Percentages
• Install the free app "iChoose", which has coin toss, dice, cards and other options for random outcomes.  Students play for a fixed time and tally their results. They then calculate the percentage of each outcome using the iPod calculator and compare their results with the whole class data, to show after many trials experimental data approaches theoretical probability.

This was assembled from several online sources.  I was curious to try a couple of them with my class, starting with the online poll.  It seemed easy enough, but unless you had 30 iTouches, it was going to be cumbersome handing the device around so everyone could be polled.  One thing I was able to do is get a group of ten students together and have them use the voice recorder to build a story.  It started out slow but when we played the story back they all got excited to hear their voices.  Of course, they wanted to do it again, and again.  Some of the stories were quite creative, it reminded me of  Mad Libs when I was a little tike. 

In the end, if a classroom has a chance to get a device in the hands of each student then by all means make it happen.  ESPECIALLY if they come in conjunction with a netbook.  The possibilities of increasing a students organizational skills with a netbook and a portable device would be huge....assuming of course they have been given strict expectations about what they are for and how they are to use them.

I very much appreciate the chance to play around with the IPOD Touch, and I will certainly miss the little bugger!!

Cheerio

The All Important "What did I learn" Post

Before I get started I'd like to say that our professor this quarter was one in a million.....no a billion!  She waxed poetic about what life will be like for us in the classroom, she gave motivational speeches with passion, and she used playing cards in class.  Now, to me, this is a world class educator with nary a selfish bone in her body.  Most importantly though she held her ground against one of the largest cohorts that has come through the system in a long while...and even got us to be quiet a couple of times.

So what did I learn this quarter? 

Well, the most important thing I learned with math is to stick with it.  For me, teaching it was the tough part.  I spent two weeks teaching math to my 6th grade class and they felt more confused after my teaching than before.  Here we are at the end of the quarter and I've been banned from ever teaching math again in that classroom.....wait, that was just what I thought was going to happen.  The truth is I talked to the kids about some of the things I was learning in our college math class, such as Miras, and the awesome website gapminder.com.  They realized I actually know what I'm talking about, and sure enough they began to listen.  With the gapminder discussion we were able to pull some data from one of the graphs and the students were able to come up with their own thoughts about what the numbers meant.  It was a treat watching them use their life experience to wonder what might be going on around the world.

On that note (cool things), we learned a plethora of neat tools that will help us in the classroom:

• Gapminder and Miras have already been mentioned
• The Data and Story Library
• This awesome website is used in conjunction with another piece of graphing software we were introduced to called Fathom.  It is pricey, but the students get to use a virtual manipulative concerning shapes of all sizes and forms.
• Tangrams!!  These little buggers cause a good size headache one afternoon as I spent 10 minutes trying to figure out how to make a square out of a bunch of other shapes.  It was like in Apollo 13 when Ed Harris said "I suggest you gentleman invent a way to put a square peg in a round hole": 

To make it worse we then were asked to make a dinosaur out of the shapes.  Yes, based on the trouble we 37 adults had putting it together, I think it is fair to say middle school students will have just as much of a challenge. 
• Tinker Plots:  More headaches waiting to happen, but this time virtually.
• wolframalpha.com:  I told several teachers about this math information site and all had the same reaction, "I don't want the kids getting the answers".  It is a great check up for them, and quite a learning tool if you can make sure they understand that the numbers are just answers, but ideas.

We did read a bunch of articles to help us think about how students see math in our classrooms and like the psychologist I will never become, I was intrigued most by an article we read late in the quarter dealing with how students see mathematics.  One option was that students feel they must be "obedient" to math as the rules are not to be tampered with.  You could make the case 10 + 10 is always 20 in our realistic world.  But you sure can confuse a computer programmer with that speak as they are used to base 2.  The main idea I took from the piece is that students who fell obedient to math are almost certain to steer clear of it after they graduate.  These could be students with phenomenal math brains who are stuck thinking math has reached its limits.  They know all the rules by heart now so what is going to be exciting about a career in math?  This idea made sense and basically yields us as teachers to prepare ourselves to show our students that math is dynamic and can be used to solve a lot of the worlds problems.

Now if it could only solve the problem of my grades and West-E Test scores.  Oh yeah, I get to do that!

Thanks for the great quarter.