Here are some notes that were waiting for me on my desk this morning after my day off regarding the MIA PBJ:
Dear Ms. D,
Today at lunch when we were eating M-- told. Ms. P that someone from the boys "ate" his peanut butter and jelly sandwhich. Ms. P then told the Dean, so then the Dean gave all of us boys new spots to sit at, for the rest of the year till someone confesses the truth.
Sincerely,
D
Dear Ms. D
M-- is trying to get all of us boys in trouble for like no reason. Well it wasn't our fault that he left his tray like that. Plus the whole table was on the lef side no went near his tray... Now at 12:35 he said "he forgot".
Sincerely,
A
Dear Ms. D
Today at lunch Michael "lost" his peanut butter and jelly sandwhich then he told Ms. P who told the dean who asked us who stole it noone confessed so now we are with kindergarden. My opinion is that he probally ate so then he made an excuse to get another one.
Dear Ms. D,
I do not know who ate the PBJ sandwich. I think M-- ate it himself and he wanted more so he made up that excuse. But I am sure that no boy in this class ate that sandwich but him.
Sincerly,
J
Dear Ms. D,
Noboy ate M-- sandwich, I think M-- was starving ad he wants another sandwich. M-- said that h didn't ate breakfast.
Dear Ms. D,
M-- is telling a big lie. M--, I saw him eat his lunch and get another one but his excuse was that "somebody ate my lunch." Think, why would someone be so despret for food, that they would eat his germs? I don't even know why I at the kindergarden tables, I wasn't even at the table, I was at the girls table.
Sincerrly,
Sh--
Dear Ms D.,
I know it was not me because I hate pb and j.
Dear Ms. D
At lunch I went to get lunch. Then I sat down. I opened my Peanut Butter & Jelly. I grabbed a peare then I sat next to A--. I started eating. I probably ate my other sandwich by accident. If nobody took it I probably ate it.
Sincerely:
M--
Thursday, April 29, 2010
Monday, April 26, 2010
flash in the pan
When I got to school today I was totally caught off guard by the level of anxiety I felt over the test. I realized I'd made a mistake on the day of the practice test about some of the testing logistics (thanks in part to the extremely incoherently written memo we received about it), and before I even knew what was happening the situation had degenerated into panic-tears just before I had to go down and pick up the kids.
But if there's one thing I've learned it's that the show must go on, and if there's one piece of advice that has helped me do that, it's been "Fake it 'til you make it."
So I plastered on a big fake smile, mustered up some rah rah, sis boom bah, woo hoo game day show time spirit, and lied (convincingly, I thought) about my allergies acting up when they asked about my red eyes. (As they inevitably will - they never miss a thing, they are eager, almost, to discover cracks in the facade.)
And so the test came and went, in 45 minutes flat. Nothing more I could do. After tomorrow it's back to regularly scheduled programming. It's like an entire month of the year was just excised, surgically removed from the rest, like a cyst or a suspicious mole. You'd never know test prep even happened.
But if there's one thing I've learned it's that the show must go on, and if there's one piece of advice that has helped me do that, it's been "Fake it 'til you make it."
So I plastered on a big fake smile, mustered up some rah rah, sis boom bah, woo hoo game day show time spirit, and lied (convincingly, I thought) about my allergies acting up when they asked about my red eyes. (As they inevitably will - they never miss a thing, they are eager, almost, to discover cracks in the facade.)
And so the test came and went, in 45 minutes flat. Nothing more I could do. After tomorrow it's back to regularly scheduled programming. It's like an entire month of the year was just excised, surgically removed from the rest, like a cyst or a suspicious mole. You'd never know test prep even happened.
Sunday, April 25, 2010
Roots
As my family reminisced this weekend, my aunt spoke of things she had experienced during war times and the devastation thereafter – hunger, rootlessness, and transience. Hiding, scavenging, wanting. Lacking.
She talked about diving into ditches to escape machine gun bullets, of collecting nettles to make soup to stave off starvation.
And she also spoke of her immigrant experience. So many of the things she talked about reminded me of bits and pieces of my kids’ current lives: moving to New York City to live a brand new life that resembled nothing she’d ever known. Sleeping on mattresses lining a relative’s living room floor. Sharing a small apartment with three families - one bathroom between fourteen people. Moving from place to place. Having parents who took the jobs as janitors and superintendents of buildings. Being frugal. Caring for siblings and cousins. Getting food stamps. Starting a new school where she didn’t know the language. Having family members that didn’t speak English, didn’t understand America.
And now look… we sat in her beautiful, luxurious living room, feasting for days to celebrate her seventieth birthday. There were three magnificent cakes, and not even the combined forces of all the extended family could finish them. She speaks three languages, has a PhD and has retired from being the dean of a major university. She has five gorgeous grandchildren that have every opportunity open to them and have never experienced deprivation, and hopefully never will.
So she embodies the American Dream. She worked hard, she overcame, she succeeded. Her life’s story makes me believe in what I am doing, makes me believe in the kids. Her life is proof that things can be hard but they can also get better. That hard work will get you somewhere. That the better life is possible, that it is worth striving for, that sacrifices made for kids’ futures do pay off. Her story is hope. Her story, and others like it, is why I am doing what I am doing.
She talked about diving into ditches to escape machine gun bullets, of collecting nettles to make soup to stave off starvation.
And she also spoke of her immigrant experience. So many of the things she talked about reminded me of bits and pieces of my kids’ current lives: moving to New York City to live a brand new life that resembled nothing she’d ever known. Sleeping on mattresses lining a relative’s living room floor. Sharing a small apartment with three families - one bathroom between fourteen people. Moving from place to place. Having parents who took the jobs as janitors and superintendents of buildings. Being frugal. Caring for siblings and cousins. Getting food stamps. Starting a new school where she didn’t know the language. Having family members that didn’t speak English, didn’t understand America.
And now look… we sat in her beautiful, luxurious living room, feasting for days to celebrate her seventieth birthday. There were three magnificent cakes, and not even the combined forces of all the extended family could finish them. She speaks three languages, has a PhD and has retired from being the dean of a major university. She has five gorgeous grandchildren that have every opportunity open to them and have never experienced deprivation, and hopefully never will.
So she embodies the American Dream. She worked hard, she overcame, she succeeded. Her life’s story makes me believe in what I am doing, makes me believe in the kids. Her life is proof that things can be hard but they can also get better. That hard work will get you somewhere. That the better life is possible, that it is worth striving for, that sacrifices made for kids’ futures do pay off. Her story is hope. Her story, and others like it, is why I am doing what I am doing.
testing tirade
I left school on Friday buzzing.
We tried to take it easy, squeezing in ONE more practice test, ONE last reminder to answer all the parts of the short answer question, to re-phrase the question in your mind, to look back at the text and rely on your eyeballs to find the answers and not your memory. But I didn’t expect anything I did that day to make or break their fate on the ELA. Mostly I wanted them to feel confident.
In the afternoon we looked back at all the Kaplan lessons we’d done and took note of all we’d learned; the types of questions that were trickiest and the strategies that have helped us the most. Then we made posters of advice and encouragement for the third and fourth graders who are also taking the ELA tomorrow. They were really cute. S---‘s was two crossed light sabers and said “Victory will be yours!” Sh— drew a (really good!) Jedi defending himself from Testing Vader. Others wrote strategies we’d learned or generalized words of encouragement. Then we snuck over to the third and fourth grade hallways to hang them up as a surprise.
During the last few minutes I took them out on the terrace -- this largely unused, empty patio that we have on the third floor -- to give them a pep talk. I reiterated how proud I am of them, how I was confident that everyone sitting in that circle was more than capable of getting a 3 or a 4, but that I would be proud of them even if they all got ones because of how hard they’d worked, how they had been supportive of each other and stayed positive and worked as a team.
Finally, on our way out for dismissal, we went down the stairs chanting the Test Prep Jedi cheer… “Test Prep Jedis Use the Force!” and “Oh Yes we Can, Yes, Yes we Can!” and “Testing Vader Goin’ Down!”
The rest is up to the kids and the powers that be in
I know kids need to be evaluated from time to time for logistical reasons. I know the government needs some sort of gauge to see how kids and schools are doing. But I think that multiple choice tests are too narrow to capture an accurate picture of what kids have truly learned, that they do not assess what we think they are assessing. I think that the stakes of “high-stakes” testing are inappropriate, and that the emphasis on these scores is detrimental to real learning.
Of course, it’s obvious why we do it this way. Multiple choice tests are the easier and less inexpensive way out. We do it because the outcome is clear-cut, because the end product is a number that can be compared to other kids’ numbers and compiled and graphed and averaged and compared other schools’ graphs and averages…
If the end product were, say, a portfolio, or a project or the completion of a task that more closely resembled tasks that could be encountered in the real world… well, imagine! Who would pay to grade all that!? Who would decide what is good enough? How could we create and cut funding based on that!? Whom would we penalize? How could we manage if not every kid did the SAME thing?!
We like to put kids in boxes because we know what to do with the boxes. They are easier to line up and stack up and count. Reducing each child to a single digit is convenient for us. A 1, 2, 3 or 4 is a lot easier to digest than a project, a painting, a poem, an essay.
Just imagine! If we looked at the actual shape of kids minds, rather than the leftover space in the boxes we build for them. What would happen if we looked for what is there, rather than what is not?
With standardized tests, we ask a yes or no question… “Did they learn enough?” without asking the logical follow-up, “enough for what?” To look at kids’ minds through this pass/fail, black/white, yes/no model limits our collective definition of human understanding and intelligence, and it seems to me that it may actually be limiting the breadth and depth of our understanding and intelligence and progress as an entire species…
I don’t think it’s an accident that no two individual minds are created alike, and I think it shows the short-sightedness of Education to expect that we will all use our minds the same way to achieve the same result in the same amount of time. That sameness is considered desirable is at odds with a fundamental reality of being a human: To be human is to be an individual – irreplaceable, inimitable, and unique. There are more than four categories of human.
Thursday, April 22, 2010
Why I love my colleagues
Henrietta came to lunch wearing her glasses, which was unusual.
"New glasses?" I asked? "Nope," she explained...
One of her ESL students had to get glasses and was feeling kind of bad about it, so she promised him that the next day she would wear her glasses and they could be glassmates! (She had to explain to him why it was funny, but then he laughed.)
"New glasses?" I asked? "Nope," she explained...
One of her ESL students had to get glasses and was feeling kind of bad about it, so she promised him that the next day she would wear her glasses and they could be glassmates! (She had to explain to him why it was funny, but then he laughed.)
working
I've been dreaming again. The other night I dreamed of a plane crash. Just for kicks, I looked it up on some internet "dream analysis" sites.
Aisling Ireland (an ordained Spiritual Counselor!) said: If you dream of an airplane crash this may symbolize an overactive mind, one that needs a rest from thinking...An airplane crash may also symbolize spending a lot of time worrying and fretting about things over which you have no control...
Hmm. Test Prep ring any bells?
...lack of control may be another concept a plane crash dream symbolizes. Do you feel like you are in a situation where not only are you not in control but there is absolutely nothing you can do to rectify what is occuring? Do you feel that the person in charge of the situation is ill-equipped to handle it?
Why, yes! Yes I do!
Perhaps this is related to my last night's dream, of Principal Peevey being just absolutely awful to some of my kids and saying verbally abusive things to them... I guess he is my subconscious's go-to villain for educative matters.
It think all this dreaming is a result of test prep madness coming to a head.
Today my classroom underwent its ritual transformation into a "testing site." I had to cover up all printed materials that might aid in the examination on Monday. My "print-rich environment" must become a print-null environment, and all the Word Walls and artfully made charts and reminders must go into hiding for the Duration. The school quickly ran out of the brown paper we usually use, so we had to resort to other methods. I ended up using big black garbage bags for a lot of my walls, and as I teetered high above the classroom on a chair with stapler and packing tape in hand, I thought to myself, "It's kind of fitting, shrouding the classroom in black. Like a funeral for education." Appropriate color for Testing Vader's day of destiny as well. The use of garbage bags, too, seemed symbolic... you know, like, this is garbage?
The day of reckoning approacheth, and it's hard not to be nervous after thinking about and focusing on practically nothing else for all this time... When you go around acting like it's the most significant event in the kids' educational lives, you start to believe it, too. I know on Monday I'll have to model confidence and nonchalance, like, psssh? ELA? Puh-leeze. You guys could ace it backwards, upside-down and sideways with your eyes closed and one hand tied behind your backs! But even so -- even though I truly, truly believe every one of them can and will do extremely well -- I wouldn't be surprised if some knots of anxiety infiltrate my abdomen come April 27.
It will be a relief to put all this behind me, to go back to the luxury of Read Aloud and Independent Reading time and even writing memoirs, and ease back into the normal pace and rhythms. I think all the upper grade teachers are burnt to a crisp, myself included. I feel like I climbed into a big black Test Prep-shaped hole for the last month, like I've been burrowing into the side of a mountain. It's been such a long slog at such a frantic pace... We run around making copies and creating lessons and collecting "data" like so many headless chickens, and then we look up at the clock and the calendar and it's like, eleven-hour work day? How'd that happen? April already almost gone...? How? When?
This afternoon I saw the end of my rope coming up quick and it was all I could do not to snap in half. I think the kids hit their limit days ago. It was becoming one of those moments, the dizzying kind that happened a lot more often in the first couple of years (thankfully not as much anymore...) Disaster strikes, Plan A aborted, Plan B non-existent, stalling for time, fumbling around, the kids' decibal level hitting the upper limits of acceptable and creeping upward...
The smartboard wouldn't work properly - I think I may have desensitized it from overuse of something..., I couldn't find my clipboard with all my notes, the Venn Diagram lesson I'd spent my whole prep making had just absolutely up and disappeared from my hard drive, and when I picked up a dry erase marker to teach it the old-fashioned way, the ink was dry. I let out a long exasperated sigh and asked the kids, "Have you ever had that kind of day when everything you do and everything you touch and just doesn't work?"
And then one of them piped up, "We work!"
Which kind of made me laugh. I said, "You know what? You're right. We do work." If nothing else, at least we've got that. I took the opportunity to remind them that I love them and how proud I am of them for giving it their all.
And the truth is, we do work -- as a class, as a team, as a family. Even despite Sh--'s perpetual motion machine of a body, despite I--'s buffoonery (he of course couldn't resist pointing out to his friends how much the Venn Diagram I'd drawn resembled a scrotum), despite K--'s less than stellar work ethic and A--'s tendency to talk back, depsite the space cadets and the fisticuffs and the whining and wheedling, we work. Together. We're a unit.
It ain't always pretty. I don't spend a lot of time feeling like Robin Williams in Dead Poets' Society - (probably more time feeling like the dead poets) But I realized, hey! We're doin' it! I'm doin' it! It's like riding your bike without training wheels for the first time...I fell hard and I fell often those first couple years. But here I am. Just like they promised. Workin'.
Aisling Ireland (an ordained Spiritual Counselor!) said: If you dream of an airplane crash this may symbolize an overactive mind, one that needs a rest from thinking...An airplane crash may also symbolize spending a lot of time worrying and fretting about things over which you have no control...
Hmm. Test Prep ring any bells?
...lack of control may be another concept a plane crash dream symbolizes. Do you feel like you are in a situation where not only are you not in control but there is absolutely nothing you can do to rectify what is occuring? Do you feel that the person in charge of the situation is ill-equipped to handle it?
Why, yes! Yes I do!
Perhaps this is related to my last night's dream, of Principal Peevey being just absolutely awful to some of my kids and saying verbally abusive things to them... I guess he is my subconscious's go-to villain for educative matters.
It think all this dreaming is a result of test prep madness coming to a head.
Today my classroom underwent its ritual transformation into a "testing site." I had to cover up all printed materials that might aid in the examination on Monday. My "print-rich environment" must become a print-null environment, and all the Word Walls and artfully made charts and reminders must go into hiding for the Duration. The school quickly ran out of the brown paper we usually use, so we had to resort to other methods. I ended up using big black garbage bags for a lot of my walls, and as I teetered high above the classroom on a chair with stapler and packing tape in hand, I thought to myself, "It's kind of fitting, shrouding the classroom in black. Like a funeral for education." Appropriate color for Testing Vader's day of destiny as well. The use of garbage bags, too, seemed symbolic... you know, like, this is garbage?
The day of reckoning approacheth, and it's hard not to be nervous after thinking about and focusing on practically nothing else for all this time... When you go around acting like it's the most significant event in the kids' educational lives, you start to believe it, too. I know on Monday I'll have to model confidence and nonchalance, like, psssh? ELA? Puh-leeze. You guys could ace it backwards, upside-down and sideways with your eyes closed and one hand tied behind your backs! But even so -- even though I truly, truly believe every one of them can and will do extremely well -- I wouldn't be surprised if some knots of anxiety infiltrate my abdomen come April 27.
It will be a relief to put all this behind me, to go back to the luxury of Read Aloud and Independent Reading time and even writing memoirs, and ease back into the normal pace and rhythms. I think all the upper grade teachers are burnt to a crisp, myself included. I feel like I climbed into a big black Test Prep-shaped hole for the last month, like I've been burrowing into the side of a mountain. It's been such a long slog at such a frantic pace... We run around making copies and creating lessons and collecting "data" like so many headless chickens, and then we look up at the clock and the calendar and it's like, eleven-hour work day? How'd that happen? April already almost gone...? How? When?
This afternoon I saw the end of my rope coming up quick and it was all I could do not to snap in half. I think the kids hit their limit days ago. It was becoming one of those moments, the dizzying kind that happened a lot more often in the first couple of years (thankfully not as much anymore...) Disaster strikes, Plan A aborted, Plan B non-existent, stalling for time, fumbling around, the kids' decibal level hitting the upper limits of acceptable and creeping upward...
The smartboard wouldn't work properly - I think I may have desensitized it from overuse of something..., I couldn't find my clipboard with all my notes, the Venn Diagram lesson I'd spent my whole prep making had just absolutely up and disappeared from my hard drive, and when I picked up a dry erase marker to teach it the old-fashioned way, the ink was dry. I let out a long exasperated sigh and asked the kids, "Have you ever had that kind of day when everything you do and everything you touch and just doesn't work?"
And then one of them piped up, "We work!"
Which kind of made me laugh. I said, "You know what? You're right. We do work." If nothing else, at least we've got that. I took the opportunity to remind them that I love them and how proud I am of them for giving it their all.
And the truth is, we do work -- as a class, as a team, as a family. Even despite Sh--'s perpetual motion machine of a body, despite I--'s buffoonery (he of course couldn't resist pointing out to his friends how much the Venn Diagram I'd drawn resembled a scrotum), despite K--'s less than stellar work ethic and A--'s tendency to talk back, depsite the space cadets and the fisticuffs and the whining and wheedling, we work. Together. We're a unit.
It ain't always pretty. I don't spend a lot of time feeling like Robin Williams in Dead Poets' Society - (probably more time feeling like the dead poets) But I realized, hey! We're doin' it! I'm doin' it! It's like riding your bike without training wheels for the first time...I fell hard and I fell often those first couple years. But here I am. Just like they promised. Workin'.
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