Almost there

I have four days of school left until my first Christmas break that will be spent NOT working retail!! Yippee!!!!!!  I get to spend it hanging out with my family and friends and catching up with everybody. Here is what my week looks like until I arrive home on Saturday. Tomorrow morning (Tuesday), I have a staff meeting, fairly normal school morning, then play practice in the afternoon and the kids have to wrap their presents for their parents. Wednesday comes and the morning will be as normal as it can be with the dress rehersal for the Christmas program. Some of the students from the town school are coming to watch the rehersal and I guess this is a BIG deal for both sets of students. They are so excited! Then comes Thursday.....the big day. This is the official Christmas program where members from the community (aka:the town of Ryegate) can come out to the colony and watch the kids perform. After all the busy work of doing the Christmas program on Thursday, Friday will come. Friday is the day that theyy get to undo everything that they have been working on for the past three weeks! All the decorations, play props and lights will come down. the costrumes will be reorganized and put into their totes for next year. After all the posters come down off my walls for the break the girls will scrub the school from  floor to ceiling, literally.
Today I made my lesson plans for the first week in January. I get to start off my first week back from break with a four day school week.  Thursday, January sixth is a holiday on the colony. I am not really sure why it is a holiday. The kids tried to explain it to me at the beginning of the school but I don't remember what it is. I think it is an extra day to celebrate Jesus.  Yay for Jesus, right?!!  I will be able to spend that day working in my classroom and maybe even going into the town school and doing some observations.  I need to get into some math classes because some of the 8th grade algebra is the math that hauted me in middle school, high school and college and now it is coming back to haunt me again! I just can't get away from math!!!! AAHHHHHHHH....at least we are doing awesome things right now like circumference, perimeter, slope and ratios. At least I know how to do these things without having to sit down and do the entire set of practice problems before teaching the lesson.  Today, however puzzled me because I was teaching circumference to my sixth graders and one of the kept saying "but I don't know." so, I kept asking a series of questions to figure out what part of finding the circumference of a circle she was confused on. They kept answering, "yes, I know," and "uh-huh," but somehow they still did not understand. We even practiced finding the radius and diameter together and putting the numbers into the formula. "What do you multiply?" was the most common question. "Why are their two formulas? Why is 3.14 that way?"  These are the kinds of thoughts that go through my students' heads when I am teaching. I am still not sure they got it though, the symbol of pi seemed to be what royally confused them. They have such a hard time accepting symbols as a part of math.  They think it is odd that they are supposed to use a symbol instead of writing a number out. Perhapse a different approach tomorrow will shed some light onto the situation. Signing off for now! Stay dry Washington!!!

Observations

Greetings! It has been a while. A lot has been going on at the Colony to get ready for Christmas.  My afternoons have been filled with play practice and making gifts for the families. It is going to be pure chaos for the next week and a half. The Christmas program is on the 16th over here and if any of you happen to have travelled the 900 miles to Ryegate, you can come.  The kids went did their first run through on the "stage" this afternoon and did quite wll! I was impressed.  It is always hard to tell if they are actually learning their lines when they are not being serious while practicing their lines in the classroom. Although we were missing a couple of students today, the practice went very well.  I of course got the lucky opportunity to babysit the kids who could not handle themselves downstairs so they got to sit in silence upstairs with me. They were none too happy however, if you can't pay attention and follow directions when you are supposed to the concequence is that you get to sit in silence while being bored!!! BUMMER for them!!!

This is actually the next day now.  I survived my first observation by my boss yesterday!  It was mostly good news! The biggest thing that I was criticized for was not reviewing my math lesson for sixth grade before teaching it.  I had a big boo-boo in calculations and that was not a good thing to have in my lesson.  However, in my defense, when I went to rexplain the concept today to the students and have them do a review of the lesson, the kids totally knew how to do it.  They did much better on their assignment today as well. Even though I know the importance of modeling correct mathmatical skills,  still think that it is interesting that they understood the concept even though the math was incorrect.  On the happy side, I was told that my classroom is much more oganized and runs more smoothly than it did at the beginning of the school year.  That is a big YAY FOR ME that I was glad to hear because even though there are the day to day struggles with the snotty and whiny kids that I teach, the amount of material I am able to cover and the individual attention I can give the students has increased.  I was also told that I moved through the material at an effective pace and did a good job of pacing the lessons.  Occasionally one grade will run long and I will have to explain everything what feels like a bajillion times and that will derail me from keeping to my schedule.  I have found ways to ensure that I am back on schedule and the kids get enough time to finish their assignments. 
This week has been crazy getting ready for the Christmas program, and decorating for Christmas.  it is not a tradition to decorate their house for Christmas and so their opportunity to do so is at school.  Quite frankly, it looks like Christmas vomited all over my room and the school, including the basement.  The kids go crazy while decorating wih lights, garland, tinsil and pictures they have colored over the years.  It is a mad house and causes lots and lots wild children.   The big highlight of the day was getting the real Christmas tree downstairs to have for the Christmas program.  The kids were very dillegent about putting it in water and making sure it was standing straight in the tree stand. 
Two more days of school this week and then five, really like four, school days next week.  It is hard to imagine when I am going to fit in packing amid all the chaos, faculty meetings and Christmas parties.  Never fear, I will fit it in!! Till next time....

November flies away

Wow. I cannot believe how fast the month of November has gone by! This week in school will be filled with play practice, music and planning for decorating. Apparently, decorating the school is the kids' favorite part of the school year. They do not traditionally decorate their homes or any part of the colony for Christmas.
However, my kiddos were into being obnoxious and rude today and apparently Thanksgiving break came with an attitude change in some of my students (and not in a positive way, either). I told them that it was up to them to be able to decorate and that their behavior would be the determining factor in that. I think will also make a fee for decoration.  Something around the tune of 50 or 75 dollars to be able to participate. I think that would be the most fair and utilize the system that I have in place.  This way, the students who have obnoxious attitudes towards me would have to work ten times as hard to earn the privilage of decorating the school for Christmas, which I have to point out is in 26 days. Oh yes, it is coming. Even as I am typing this I am getting slightly distracted trying to figure out a bulletin board that I want to do.  I have decided that one of the most efficient ways to create a bullettin board in my classroom is the have my students do most of the work!! I have also discovered another bonus to this; the kiddos absolutely love to see their own work displayed up on the board.  It makes the equal to the others and creates a bit less dissonance in my classroom.  I am thinking poetry; perhaps a cinquain about something related to Christmas. One advantage that I have working out here on the colony is that I get to include the real meaning of Christmas and not just the retail, materialistic Christmas that we are enveloped with from the end of August to December.  One random thing to note, I don't have to work retail this Christmas!! Yippee!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!
The five days off from mu students was a refreshing break that my brain needed.  I do admit that I did my grades over the weekend but those needed to be done anyways and sitting in Starbucks doing my grades for an hour was not nearly as boring as sitting in the quiet school doing them. Plus, I had my new computer to motivate me.  I am sure that the novelty of having it will wear off as soon as I get all of my files and things straightened out and transferred and use it repeatedly day in and day out.  I think that Itunes is the last program that I have to straighten out. 
This blog entry is turning out to be as random as some of the things that come out of my students' mouth.  Here are the ones that I can remember.
1. A fourth grader singing "Cotton-eyed Joe."
2. My 7th and 8th graders saying a cheesy punch line, "Do you want some honey for that?" "Well, here I am!" ~I have no idea where they get these things
3. My a$& is cold!
4. My student saying sh*t and me thinking it is so funny I amost forget to punnish her.
5. My mom is named after Sarah Jessica Parker ~(I am sure this is NOT true)
6. Girls singing the Kellermans theme song

Okay, that is the list that I can think of this late in the evening.  Maybe I will post again when I am a little more awake and the entry will have more fluidity to it.  Till next time...

Pie

Pie. I could make it into a fancy acronym. Pie I Eat. Or, I could make you guess in 20 questions, though everyone I know that reads this blog is so intelligent that you will get it in five questions so I won't do that.  I haven't tasted it yet but it is sure to be delicious.  It is not the totally homemade variety.  But the fact that I made the crust and mixed all the ingredients together makes it homemade.   I made pumpkin pie tonight!

It is finally starting to feel like the holidays around there.  I must say that after working retail for nine years, by the time that November rolled around I was rather sick of the holidays and it's marerialisticness.  Now, that I have not been in the retail world as a worker for three months, the immunity to the fantasticness of all the goodies yummies associated with Thanksgiving and Christmas has worn off.  I get to enjoy the time of decorating and baking and the likes. It's wonderful. Speaking of Thanksgiving, it is coming up next week. This will be the first Friday after Thanksgiving that I have not been up before 4 am to work.  I absolutely love to watch all the crazy "runners" that rush in right when the store opens and after that there is not much of the day to remember, there is just too much going on to bother trying to remember. Tomorrow is Monday, my busiest day of the week. I have a staff meeting at 7:20, then I hustle off to school to set up my classroom by 8:20 so the kiddos can come in and I can impress their brains with all the knowledge of the day!!!  Have a good week!!

Parent conferences

So, I am not sure whether it was me or the parents who were more stressed out over the conferences that I did survive.  I was so nervous about the conferences and when the first parent came I could hardly containj myself. After that one was over the rest were a breeze.  I also think the fact that my first parent asked me if I knew how to do my job and if I could handle the children. I assured her that yes, I can handle them and in fact, with my new classroom management plan, the days are going much more smoothly and I have an extra 30 minutes a day (on average) to spend answering individual questions rather than waiting for the kids to calm down and be quiet so I can continue my lesson.  This did not assure this parent, and at this point they told me I need help. I told them that we do have more help than last year and asked if she would be willing to volunteer in the classroom! I recieved a definate "NO" I can't. "Well, then, we'll just have to work with the resources available," I told her. The aid that is out there now is wonderful! She grades half of my papers every day, helps the kids with questions for about an hour each day and gives some of my spelling tests on Fridays.  I don't know what I would do without her.  But since this parent can't do anything but complain or simply tell me I need help but won't contribute to the solution, I am on my own here.  I am counting a lot on my new plan to affect the grades in the classroom.  I only had one student go down in grades and I have been working like a madwoman to figure out how to get this kid to do all of his work and turn it in.  If he does it, then he "forgets" to turn it in or if he turns it in, he "forgets" to do it.  "OH, MISS STEPP I FORGOT!!!"  Yeah right!!  He just wants me to do it for him. 
Speaking of wanting me to do their work. I had a group of fifth graders yesterday so frustrated with me because I would not just give them the answer to the phonics questions that they were working on.  They were working with words that had the prefix "co."  Codirect, comanage, consequently and the like.  I would give them the definition of the word and then show them a strategy to use to figure out the answer.  They were like, are you going to help me or not???  I told them that, of course, I would love to help them but I may not be helping them in the way they want me to.  The were puzzled and angry that I would not give them the answer. I actually think it is quite comical the way they act when I won't give them the answer and I make them use their brains to do their own work.
On another note, one of my girls said the word "underwear" in class yesterday when she was reading outloud for reading.  The word was actually "undercover" or something like that but when the word underwear was said, it sent a burst of giggles through my classroom and made my student turn brighter red than she usually is.  The other thing that brings a burst of uncontrollable laughter in my class. Farting.  Yes, as natural as it may be, farting is garunteed to bring about five minutes of giggling and accusations of "who stunk the room?" and "Open the window!" Yes, the life of a teacher and what I deal with on a daily basis.  Signing off for now...

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...