Today is the midpoint of the year, the fulcrum of 2009. So, is the year half over, or is there half a year to go?
I spent part of this day with the sixth grade counselor and the team leader of the other sixth grade team. We had 200 placement cards, one for each student we expect next year. They had been filled out by twenty or so fifth grade teachers from eleven elementary schools and on them there was information about math and language arts placement, study habits and social skills, native language and special education needs. In addition, there is room on each card for the teacher to write a comment. Every year, it is these we enjoy most.
It was our task to divide them fairly into two even, heterogeneous teams, and so we spent the afternoon sorting and resorting by elementary school, achievement level, gender and race, keeping count and keeping tallies. This is an annual event, and when we make the teams, the cards are just cards to us; we don't know the kids, yet, so at times the process takes on the feeling of a game or a backroom draft, with questions like, "Do you want the boy who uses his intelligence for the wrong reasons or the one who can be disrespectful at times?" or "I have a couple of smart girls here, why don't you take one each?"
Eventually, the cards ended up in two piles, and the teams were pretty well set for next year. I can't wait to see how we did.
Thursday, July 2, 2009
Wednesday, July 1, 2009
Never the Same Place Twice
I spent the afternoon at Mt. Vernon yesterday. I was looking for something fun to do on my birthday, and it occurred to me that it's been several years since I've been there without having to supervise a group of students. One of the candidates that we interviewed on Monday asked about field trips. The other sixth grade teacher on the committee and I looked at each other and frowned. Neither team had taken many field trips last year. There were a couple of main reasons why: cross-teaming and cross-grading for math made the logistics of any trip challenging; it was also the first year that sixth graders took the state standardized test in social studies, and there was general hesitancy on the part of teachers to trade class time for field trips.
The teacher we were interviewing looked surprised. "But, this area has so much!" she exclaimed. We nodded, and then my colleague explained that because that's true, by the time they get to sixth grade, many kids have already taken a lot of the trips we might plan for them. I shrugged in agreement, because I've heard that excuse a lot over the years when we talk about taking field trips. The truth is that, as with any other learning opportunity, field trips are only as valuable as the meaning that students take from them, but they have much more potential than most classroom experiences.
My nephew went with me to Mt. Vernon yesterday. As it turned out, the last time that he had been there was when he was in sixth grade, and the adult in charge of his group was... me. "Did we see the sixteen-sided barn?" I asked him. He didn't think so. "Whaaat!?" I said. "Are you sure?" He was pretty sure. "Well," I said, "you can't miss it this time." And off we headed in a light drizzle to the lower fields of the estate. Past the cow pasture, and right before the trail entered the woods, we found a patch of wild raspberries. The fruit was dark red and fell from the vine with no more than a nudge. Birds had already gotten some of the warm, sweet berries, but we picked what we could reach and ate them out of hand.
He liked the barn well enough, but much more interesting to me this time were the tiny pear tomatoes and red-skinned new potatoes almost ready in the kitchen garden at the slave cabin, and the mother duck with her three hatchlings on the bank of the Potomac. Back up the hill, we saw a little boy petting a young goat through the split rail fence, and I remembered a visit a few years back when a small group of students and I saw a lamb born here. We were just passing by the barnyard on our way to the mansion when out it dropped, wet and sticky, from the sheep to the frozen February ground. Astonished we stood rapt as the mother turned calmly around and nudged her newborn to a stand.
Next year, I want to take more field trips.
The teacher we were interviewing looked surprised. "But, this area has so much!" she exclaimed. We nodded, and then my colleague explained that because that's true, by the time they get to sixth grade, many kids have already taken a lot of the trips we might plan for them. I shrugged in agreement, because I've heard that excuse a lot over the years when we talk about taking field trips. The truth is that, as with any other learning opportunity, field trips are only as valuable as the meaning that students take from them, but they have much more potential than most classroom experiences.
My nephew went with me to Mt. Vernon yesterday. As it turned out, the last time that he had been there was when he was in sixth grade, and the adult in charge of his group was... me. "Did we see the sixteen-sided barn?" I asked him. He didn't think so. "Whaaat!?" I said. "Are you sure?" He was pretty sure. "Well," I said, "you can't miss it this time." And off we headed in a light drizzle to the lower fields of the estate. Past the cow pasture, and right before the trail entered the woods, we found a patch of wild raspberries. The fruit was dark red and fell from the vine with no more than a nudge. Birds had already gotten some of the warm, sweet berries, but we picked what we could reach and ate them out of hand.
He liked the barn well enough, but much more interesting to me this time were the tiny pear tomatoes and red-skinned new potatoes almost ready in the kitchen garden at the slave cabin, and the mother duck with her three hatchlings on the bank of the Potomac. Back up the hill, we saw a little boy petting a young goat through the split rail fence, and I remembered a visit a few years back when a small group of students and I saw a lamb born here. We were just passing by the barnyard on our way to the mansion when out it dropped, wet and sticky, from the sheep to the frozen February ground. Astonished we stood rapt as the mother turned calmly around and nudged her newborn to a stand.
Next year, I want to take more field trips.
Tuesday, June 30, 2009
Help Wanted
A big chunk of of my day yesterday was spent in a conference room as part of a committee interviewing for a teaching vacancy on my team. There were several candidates, and I would have been happy to work with any of them, but obviously the whole idea was to pick the best one. With that in mind, we asked a series of questions about planning, assessment, differentiation, philosophy, discipline, technology, teaming, inter-disciplinary units, and what the students should take with them at the end of the course. After a while, it all ran together, and if you asked me to described the people we interviewed without referring to my notes, I might say:
energetic undisciplined creative inexperienced polished rambling well-versed uninspiring knowledgeable clueless thoughtful unprepared student-centered short intense-eye-contact tall young firm-handshake thirsty
All four of us on the committee were women, as were four of the six applicants for the job. Three of the people we spoke to were applying for their very first teaching job, two straight out of school, and one as a "career-switcher." The others had between 3-11 years of experience.
The interviews were informative, but the conversations we had in between were way more interesting. So often it seems that a person will have an advantage in teaching because he is male. This was true with at least one member of our interview team: "If we can get a qualified man, we should," she said. There was discussion about our professional responsibility to encourage and support new teachers, and the time it takes to do that. We talked about the programs that expedite certification for career-switchers and whether or not they properly prepare their participants for the classroom, and what made a new colleague a "project" versus somebody who might fit right in.
In the end, I think we made a sound choice, but only time will tell. I'm in no hurry to apply for a job, though, of that I am very certain.
energetic undisciplined creative inexperienced polished rambling well-versed uninspiring knowledgeable clueless thoughtful unprepared student-centered short intense-eye-contact tall young firm-handshake thirsty
All four of us on the committee were women, as were four of the six applicants for the job. Three of the people we spoke to were applying for their very first teaching job, two straight out of school, and one as a "career-switcher." The others had between 3-11 years of experience.
The interviews were informative, but the conversations we had in between were way more interesting. So often it seems that a person will have an advantage in teaching because he is male. This was true with at least one member of our interview team: "If we can get a qualified man, we should," she said. There was discussion about our professional responsibility to encourage and support new teachers, and the time it takes to do that. We talked about the programs that expedite certification for career-switchers and whether or not they properly prepare their participants for the classroom, and what made a new colleague a "project" versus somebody who might fit right in.
In the end, I think we made a sound choice, but only time will tell. I'm in no hurry to apply for a job, though, of that I am very certain.
Monday, June 29, 2009
Happy Birthday to Me
I spent my eighteenth birthday at Heathrow Airport. I was working as a counselor at a summer school outside of London, and it was my job that day to collect the students flying in from some forty different countries and direct them to the school van circling outside. We had names and flight numbers, of course, and there I was, that person holding that sign when you exit customs.
In between flights, I was on my own at the airport, which wasn't an unfamiliar place at all for an airline brat like me. I browsed the bookshops and kiosks, and made myself comfortable in hard orange plastic chairs nibbling chocolate and reading magazines. The weirdest thing about the day was that no one but me knew it was my birthday. I wasn't sure what to do with the information: I hadn't known anyone I was working with for longer than a couple of days, and it didn't seem like it was relevant, so as I wandered the airport shepherding nervous kids, every now and then I'd startle myself with the reminder that this day was my birthday-- I was 18. It was like wiggling a loose tooth-- I would forget all about it when I was occupied with something else, but once I remembered it, I couldn't leave it be. Alone, doing my job in the middle of thousands of strangers from all over the world, I wondered if this was what it was like to be an adult.
That night after all the new students were checked in with lights out, I sat in one of the other counselor's room playing cards and drinking warm ale that someone had fetched from the pub down the road and feeling pretty grown up having made it through my first solo bithday. There came a merry knock at the Tudor diamond glass window we had pushed open to the cool night air, and there was my mom and dad and brother and sister! They had re-routed their flight home from vacation in Portugal to stop overnight in London and surprise me. We spent a happy ninety minutes celebrating with my new colleagues-- "Why didn't you tell us it was your birthday?" they scolded me-- and then at midnight, my family left to get a few hours of sleep at the hotel before their flight, and I went off to bed, too, still feeling pretty grown up, but also really glad that I hadn't been alone on my birthday.
In between flights, I was on my own at the airport, which wasn't an unfamiliar place at all for an airline brat like me. I browsed the bookshops and kiosks, and made myself comfortable in hard orange plastic chairs nibbling chocolate and reading magazines. The weirdest thing about the day was that no one but me knew it was my birthday. I wasn't sure what to do with the information: I hadn't known anyone I was working with for longer than a couple of days, and it didn't seem like it was relevant, so as I wandered the airport shepherding nervous kids, every now and then I'd startle myself with the reminder that this day was my birthday-- I was 18. It was like wiggling a loose tooth-- I would forget all about it when I was occupied with something else, but once I remembered it, I couldn't leave it be. Alone, doing my job in the middle of thousands of strangers from all over the world, I wondered if this was what it was like to be an adult.
That night after all the new students were checked in with lights out, I sat in one of the other counselor's room playing cards and drinking warm ale that someone had fetched from the pub down the road and feeling pretty grown up having made it through my first solo bithday. There came a merry knock at the Tudor diamond glass window we had pushed open to the cool night air, and there was my mom and dad and brother and sister! They had re-routed their flight home from vacation in Portugal to stop overnight in London and surprise me. We spent a happy ninety minutes celebrating with my new colleagues-- "Why didn't you tell us it was your birthday?" they scolded me-- and then at midnight, my family left to get a few hours of sleep at the hotel before their flight, and I went off to bed, too, still feeling pretty grown up, but also really glad that I hadn't been alone on my birthday.
Sunday, June 28, 2009
Volunteers
Back from a week away, the dog and I took a walk around the neighborhood to see what's new. I noticed right away that the Golden Rain trees are a bit past their bloom and dropping their tiny flowers in bright yellow puddles beneath their boughs. This is another tree that reminds me of my grandmother-- they grew tall and shady in her backyard, and when she died, my aunt pulled a seedling from a crack in the patio and planted it in her own garden. Years later, when they were reviled as "trash trees" by the person I loved, my eyes fell, and I felt my face go stony with disloyalty when I did not speak up to defend them.
One of my neighbors has a sweet little gardenia flowering by her door. I stopped earlier today to smell one of the fragrant blossoms and was sad to see that it was gone when I went by again this afternoon. That's the thing about common landscaping: some people act as if it's theirs alone. Another of our neighbors regularly cuts luxurious bouquets of day lilies from their beds. That doesn't seem right to me.
The strangest thing I noticed today, though, was that scattered all over the complex in odd beds here and there are some huge squash vines. They are flowering but no fruit has set, so it's hard to say exactly what they are. My theory as to how they got here involves free mulch from the county that probably never got hot enough to kill any stray seeds, but I also favor the notion of some kind of modern-day Johnny Squashseed hijacking our well-manicured condo gardens to cultivate some seasonal local produce. Such an act of renegade sowing might provide a nice counterbalance to those who reap without regard for the rest of us.
One of my neighbors has a sweet little gardenia flowering by her door. I stopped earlier today to smell one of the fragrant blossoms and was sad to see that it was gone when I went by again this afternoon. That's the thing about common landscaping: some people act as if it's theirs alone. Another of our neighbors regularly cuts luxurious bouquets of day lilies from their beds. That doesn't seem right to me.
The strangest thing I noticed today, though, was that scattered all over the complex in odd beds here and there are some huge squash vines. They are flowering but no fruit has set, so it's hard to say exactly what they are. My theory as to how they got here involves free mulch from the county that probably never got hot enough to kill any stray seeds, but I also favor the notion of some kind of modern-day Johnny Squashseed hijacking our well-manicured condo gardens to cultivate some seasonal local produce. Such an act of renegade sowing might provide a nice counterbalance to those who reap without regard for the rest of us.
Saturday, June 27, 2009
On the Road (Again)
Saturdays are never a good day to travel, especially if you're trying to use anything close to the I-95 corridor in the mid-Atlantic states, and, if your route involves a tunnel? Forget about it. Last Saturday it took us 5 1/2 hours to make a trip to the beach that used to take a little under 4 when we lived there. Today was even worse.
My brother, who was about a half an hour ahead of us sitting in stop and go traffic, told me that my nearly 17-year-old nephew asked him when we were going to get hover cars. "Haven't they been promising them your whole life?" he asked, and my brother had to admit it was true-- starting with the Jetsons on forward, flying cars have definitely been one of the glaring unkept pledges of those white-coated technocrats with their horn-rimmed glasses who starred in all the science movies we saw in school. Beyond that wild dream though, my brother also observed that this was evidence that the infrastructure we have now can't really support the population who uses it regularly.
Back in our aging station wagon, the threat of overheating encouraged us to try various alternate routes. On those less-traveled roads, my eye landed on the likes of Two Frogs on a Bike Antiques, plenty of Queen Anne's Lace and escaped orange day lilies decorating the side of the road, three or four of those long and low old-fashioned motels whose single doors lead to tidy little cubes of rooms, so organized and space-efficient (how are they still open so far from the interstate?), and a hundred mimosa trees in full bloom-- their flowers always remind me of my grandmother's pink slippers.
By far, our two biggest mistakes today were the times we decided to get back on the interstate in the hopes that it was clearer, and we made those choices because we were so focused on our destination-- home-- but the journey was spoiled, and we didn't get there any quicker.
My brother, who was about a half an hour ahead of us sitting in stop and go traffic, told me that my nearly 17-year-old nephew asked him when we were going to get hover cars. "Haven't they been promising them your whole life?" he asked, and my brother had to admit it was true-- starting with the Jetsons on forward, flying cars have definitely been one of the glaring unkept pledges of those white-coated technocrats with their horn-rimmed glasses who starred in all the science movies we saw in school. Beyond that wild dream though, my brother also observed that this was evidence that the infrastructure we have now can't really support the population who uses it regularly.
Back in our aging station wagon, the threat of overheating encouraged us to try various alternate routes. On those less-traveled roads, my eye landed on the likes of Two Frogs on a Bike Antiques, plenty of Queen Anne's Lace and escaped orange day lilies decorating the side of the road, three or four of those long and low old-fashioned motels whose single doors lead to tidy little cubes of rooms, so organized and space-efficient (how are they still open so far from the interstate?), and a hundred mimosa trees in full bloom-- their flowers always remind me of my grandmother's pink slippers.
By far, our two biggest mistakes today were the times we decided to get back on the interstate in the hopes that it was clearer, and we made those choices because we were so focused on our destination-- home-- but the journey was spoiled, and we didn't get there any quicker.
Friday, June 26, 2009
Seaside 7: Sunset, Sunrise
On the east coast, the sun does not set over the ocean. There are lovely sunrises for those who get up early enough, but for a sunset over water, you have to be on a mighty big lake or bay. Tonight, as the sunset washed the sky behind a bunch of houses and trees to our west a faded pink, we bid the first farewell of our vacation. My mom has a 6 AM flight in the morning, and so she left to stay with some friends who live closer to the airport. After yet another perfect day at the beach, some late afternoon Wii Karaoke, and a great dinner of crab cakes, homemade slaw, and salads (it pays to have high-end leftovers), there were tears-- as there always are when our family parts-- and the gray light of the dusky evening seemed to reinforce the undeniable fact that all that was left of our vacation was the packing up and getting out of the rental place by 10 AM.
A week ago I mourned the passing of another school year, despite the happy prospect of summer vacation, and tonight I'm sorry to see this time with my family end, although I look forward to the pleasures of summer at home. How lucky I am to have so much of value in my life that I can't even choose what I would love best.
A week ago I mourned the passing of another school year, despite the happy prospect of summer vacation, and tonight I'm sorry to see this time with my family end, although I look forward to the pleasures of summer at home. How lucky I am to have so much of value in my life that I can't even choose what I would love best.
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