Food for thought

Throughout this week of highs and lows, a number of rhetorical questions have come to mind.

1. How do I motivate a group of students who start counting the days until they are finished with school when they are in the seventh grade?

2. Why am I using a daily activity that I can't teach wholely in my classroom? My kids struggle with six trait writing because they aren't taught to write a paragraph or organize their thoughts. Can I just drop it if it's more of an actual burden than a useful tool?

3. Do kids ever get the point that their interruption takes their own time away?? 

4. How do I change attitudes without changing culture?

5. Does individual attention count if I ask the child to sit down ten times a day? (That's, like, 5 minutes of asking=5 minutes of attention!)

6.  No, a simple word but hard to understand....

This week has been a long week leading up to the end of the first quarter. Yep, as of today, I have made it through one fourth of the school year. It's official. You can't get rid of me now.  Though I am feeling a little pessimistic about the upcoming days with the changes I am making in my classroom, I am hoping to change the attitudes in my classroom that are negative towards the importance of what they are learning.  I recently thought about my philosophy of teaching and if I could apply it to these kids. It is interesting to think, that while my philosophy of teaching was written with the English/public school in mind, much of it is applicable to the culture I am immersed in.  My goal is to teach every student to be a problem solver and know how to  be productive in the society they live in.  The culture and it's contradictory ideologies that I teach in is no different than any other culture.  In order contribute to the colony, one has to know basic operational skills, social skills and communication skills, written and oral.  The complexity of joining the outside world of computers to run the chicken and the hog barns with the simplicity of traditions, unchanged since the 1500's puts an interesting perspective of what is and is not accepted. 
Speaking of techology, how is it that two of my students can give me play by play details of the world series from the previous night when they haven't read the newspaper yet?  I admit that I have been watching as much as I can just so that I can keep up with their plethora of knowledge about the previous night's game.   Rhetoric seems to be the theme tonight. Now for something non rhetoric. I am off to get in my jammies and do absolutely nothing except something that doesn't require a lot of brain thought such as watching a lifetime movie and facebooking? (Am I allowed to use facebooking as a verb??) Wierd teacher thought.....

1/4 through

It is hard to believe that I have nearly made it through one fourth of my first year in my own classroom. Yep, Friday the 29th will mark the last day of the first quarter.  There have been a lot of firsts for the quarter. First try at management, first time arranging the desks, first time disciplining a student that is mine and mine alone, first time decorating my classroom and the list goes on and on. I can assure you that I have changed everything on that list more than once.  Next week is the debut of my new classroom management strategy.  I have been talking to some fellow, and very wise teachers who have given me lots of sound advice.  I am going to try and use the money system of earn/pay to encourage positive behavior and curb the tope three negative behaviors in my room.  I have five rules in my classroom, and they are not hard to follow. In theory.  This week we have been working on rule number two. Rule number two in my class is "raise your hand when you have a question or an answer." This is a simple rule but the cultural tendency of shouting over someone else to get your voice heard tends to overrule that. The number one rule of my classroom is "Show respect." The concept that one general rule or idea can cover more than one specific topic is so foreign to them. However, help (I hope) is on the way.  Today, I think was a record for my kids for time owed to me after school.  We spent 27 minutes today in silence because since they continue to waste my time, I will waste theirs.  I think, with this blog post, I was going to write something fantastic but I got interrupted by facebook and a phone call. Right now the social studies assignments that are sitting on the table are just screaming, "Grade me! Grade me!!!" So, that is my little voice telling me I should be sensible and grade the assignments so  I can go to bed at a sensible hour!!!  Signing off...

Conference

Good afternoon to you all.  I am sitting here in my conference in Helena.  This is my first ever conference as a real, live, contracted teacher! I know, super exciting. This morning I went to a class, taught by my former UM professor, about using literacy to teach math.  Some of the ideas I got were new and some reinforced the ideas I already had.  The best part was I came out of the class with a whole bunch of new books that I would like to purchase that will help me with teaching some matmatical concepts that I struggle with.  This afternoon, I am going to be attending some classes that have to do with classroom management, differentiating instruction and problem solving.  The challenge that I have here is finding classes that are directly related to my situation.  So, in the end I usually go to general education classes that are about my grade levels that I teach.  I always get this look of awe that I have 16 students and five different grades in my classroom.  I also ran into a friend from UM and we were able to connect and have lunch together. I am off to anothe class...more update later!

Sunday in Ryegate

Hello there!! I know you're reading this and enjoying every minute of it. Here is what I have been up to this fine day. After a busy morning of cleaning, grading papers and a fun trip to Lewistown I came home and made pie!!! Here are the results of my efforts. My crust is not what it should be but all, in all a good effort on my part.

 

 Step one..make crust

Roll out crust and put in in pie pan

Make sure you have yummy granny smith apples

Peel apples

Slice and dice em

Assemble and bake!!!

Take out of oven and eat with friends!!!!!

Enjoy your week!!!!

Planning

I am going to make a declaration. If you are a teacher type you will totally get this. If you aren't well, you will understand, but not in the same aspect. Here it is: It is much, much harder to plan a for a week of school that is two days long than a week of school that the kids attend all five days. I have been planning and grading like a mad person for the past week to prepare for being gone for three days, then having the next full week being the last week of the quarter. It's simply amazing how fast school is going. I am afraid that it will go too quickly and I won't learn all that I need to learn. I can already tell that next year is going to go better from what I have learned about managing the kids and my time so I can maximize the amount of material I can teach each day.  What I am quickly realizing though, is that there are not many opportunities, professionally to interact with other teachers who teach in such a unique environment as I do. Many teachers are aghast at the fact that I have five grades in my classroom.  It is certainly not what I imagined but I am learning every day.
I have been having a bit of fun this past week with my kids who have poor handwriting.  I borrowed a handwriting practice book and made some nice packets that the kids who write with sloppy handwriting get the privilage of completing during recess.  Ooohhh!!! Let me tell you, my sixth graders were not happy with me last week when I made them stay in at recess to redo one of their assignments and to practice their handwriting. However, there are only so many assignments that I can give zeros on for sloppy work because the kids simply don't care.  I know that I have stated this before, but the biggest challenge I face is teaching against the normative ideal of the colony that education is not important but the law says they have to go.  I have kids regularly tell me that they hate school.  I must say that I have made some progress with a couple of my students.  They have discovered that if they take their own time to come and ask me questions, I can spend more than 30 seconds with them and ensure they have a better understanding of the concepts.  I have to give kudos to my eighth graders this past week.  They worked very hard to try and understand rational numbers and using them in algebraic equasions.  We went over and over and over them until my teacher brain ran out of ideas of how to explain the concept to them. The other teacher and I even worked through some problems together to give me different ideas on how to explain the rule of taking a fraction from one side of the equals sign to the other and why you flip a fraction when you divide, even though it is not the second fraction. If you didn't get that, think waaayyyyyy back to sixth or seventh grade when you learned how to multiply and divide fractions.  According to the algorithm of division of fractions, you flip the second fraction, multiply straight across and then reduce to lowest terms.  Now, skip ahead to ninth grade when you throw letters into the equasion and have to isolate the unknown term. This totally baffled me when I was in middle school and quite frankly it still befuddles me. I guess this is what happens when I am teaching eighth grade with a high school curriculum. 
I am sure you have been bored out of your mind reading my little math lesson...not much else to talk about school wise.  I have three days off the week and am headding to Helena this Wednesday and then to Missoula on Friday.  I am going to watch the Griz play Northern Arizona.  GOOOOOO GRIZZZZZZ!!!!  If you're in Montana, you might see me on TV. I don't know where I am sitting yet.  Signing off for the night....

October

For lack of a better title, it is October in eastern Montana. However, I am not sure the weather person knows that. The highs have still been in the 70's and the lows are only in the mid 40's.  I still am wearing flip flips and capris almost every day! There are absolutely no complaints coming from me though because I love wearing flip flops!!  Yay! My students think I am so impractical for wearing them.  I just tell them I get to wear them because I'm English.
This week has been an interesting week. Monday and Tuesday were awesome! We finished Math, English, and Reading all before lunch!!! Now, this is, in theory, what is supposed to happen every day but usually doesn't because I am usually have to spend my extra time telling certain students to not linger and mingle at the supply bins or not to take a detour from one desk to the other on their way to group work.  Today I had 8th graders crawling on the floor, sixth graders throwing shoes in the garbage and students throwing crayons because they supposidly have nothing to do. Well, I know for a fact that this is not true because their grades reflect their lack of ambition.  If they would spend more time reading the directions and double check their work to ensure they had followed all the directions then their grades would not be so poor.  The other thing that makes a huge difference in grades is.....*drumroll please!*  TURNING IN WORK!!! Suprise!! I know, to us it seems like such a simple concept but seriously, my kids don't turn in their work. Or, if they turn in their work book the pages are incomplete. Mmmmm.....
Today, in the afternoon, the other teacher and I switched classrooms for a bit because I needed a timeout from my kids. Yes, even teachers need a timeout from their students.  It was great! My kids got to suffer not getting PE while I went and played dodgeball and soccer in the basement with the little kids. Then I taught science and read them a story until my kids went to recess and the little kids went home. It definately put a better mood on my day and the hour and a half I spent grading papers went by rather quickly. It also helped that I had to chase down one of my students who decided to draw on his desk with a whiteboard marker and he was asked to stay after and wash the desks. He decided to "forget" I had asked him to do this. Let's just say that I have nice and clean desks. :)  Oh, and one last thing from this random post..I have a new electric pencil sharpener!!!  It is pretty blue and works wonderful...now no more dull pencils!!! 

A good week

I hope that I am not premature in calling this week at school good.  The behavior of my kids has improved I am happy to announce. Today was a bit rough and I was behind most of the day. I was constantly waiting for kids to stop talking so I could give directions either to the whole class or to the grade level that I am working with.  I had kids in at all recesses and some that chose not to come in! They don't realise that their choices affect the whole class and that when I have to shorten assignments or continually wait, I have to take their time after the school day.  I had kids who's bosses came looking for them after school today. Oh well, if the kids waste my teaching time and then I am going to "waste" their time after school or recess.  They had seven minutes owed to me today and I had to restart the timer about three minutes into the time because someone talked! BUMMER!!!  It takes everyone's efforts to work together and particularly in an environment like this, one person who is not putting in their best efforts affects the process. It's like an assembly line, if the person who inspects the item to standard doesn't check thoroughly every time, then less goods of poorer quality will be produced. 
I also gave out report cards for midterm grades.  Needless to say I once again had to give several of my students my standard lecture of " I don't GIVE you grades, like you are "GIVEN" presents. You have to earn them." Many of my students are convinced that I am grading them wrong or giving them poor grades because I don't like them. Ha...we all know that is about as far from the truth that you can get!  Once again, I am seeing a familiar theme with the kids of no not holding themselves accountable and blaming the situation on someone else.  Of course, when you put 14 students in one room with a teacher, it always becomes the teacher's fault!!!

Many of you are probably wondering what I do every day after school until 6pm (or, in today's case, 6:45pm). Well, here is a picture to give you an inkling of what I grade everyday after school. Sometimes the height of the pile varies depending on whether the students do work out of workbooks or text books (in which case they just turn in loose-leaf notebook paper. If it weren't for the wonderful help of my aid, the height of my pile would be double because of the daily workbooks the kids do for all the subjects.  Tomorrow is Friday...TGIF!! Then it's off to another adventure for the weekend!