Halloween

Having sorted all of our Halloween candy into "chocolate" and "fruity/mockolate"(Tootsie Rolls, I'm looking at you) sacks, I am rewarding myself with a sampling.  I passed out my address to at least sixty kids, so I'm hoping to unload quite a bit of this stuff.

I don't do a Halloween party with my class, because I am a mean and terrible person.  We did manage to have our school walk-a-thon.  This is a fundraiser for a local community organization; they use the money to fund outreach programs and field trips.  So the money does come back to us (my class has already been there and will go again next month).  But as a school, we think it is important to stress community interrelationships and to work together for causes other than our own budget.  (That's important, too.  We're selling hoodies and tee-shirts for that right now, and I will try to pull off a much larger art sale this Spring.)

After the walkathon, we had a snack, did some work and baked intensely healthy seasonal treats: pumpkin muffins.  I didn't feel like dealing with flax seed, so they did have eggs but I halved the sugar and replaced the oil with greek yogurt.  After lunch and a little more work, their buddy class came over and we all made little tp-roll mummies and ate muffins.  In the end, it feels like a party day but is very low-sugar.  I am a big believer in teaching choices rather than noes (so that we have "sometimes snacks" and I allow cupcakes on birthdays but not cupcakes every day), but Friday Halloween at school followed by Sunday Halloween and Monday candy-eating is pushing "sometimes" a little too far for me.

Monday is a furlough.  I like the day off if not the pay cut; what with the vet bills and the Jeremy's sale I am not enthusiastic about my somewhat smaller paychecks.  I went in yesterday to put the library loft together, and I will be going in tomorrow to hang wall mazes and clean up for the next week.  I will be joined by many teachers on Monday, and it's all these extra hours that teachers work that make the arguments about why Board employee perks (food) ring a little hollow.  We make less.  We work plenty of twelve and fourteen hour days.  There will be no Arguello catering meal awaiting us at the end of the day.  Just a salary cut of at least $1200.  WHINE WHINE WHINE.

Words Cannot Express...

WHY is it RAINING?

Today is our school walk-a-thon.  It is a fundraiser for a neighborhood organization.

Obviously, the walking component will have to wait.  BOO!

The walking component is really great, because the overexcitement of Halloween is soothed by the walking and resultant tiredness.  Twenty one children in costumes on a rainy day does not excite, particularly since I haven't slept much this week and I'm still sick.  BOO!

Well.  We do have pumpkin muffins to make and bake, and half the class did string art while the other half did crayon shavings, so we have some art to do.  I've got a phonics sort that is Halloween-themed, too.  And we can check in on our water cycle experiment.

Or maybe it will magically stop raining, PLEASE.

I have a lot of Donors Choose boxes right now, but three of them are filled with unassembled furniture.  So  "Open the Box" would not be that exciting.  We do have a few more thank you notes to bust out, though.

I cannot remember any rainy Halloween-observed days in my youth or during my teaching career.  At least it should clear up this weekend.  I have liberally passed out my address to students at my school (since I live a couple of blocks from it) as part of our household campaign to Restore Trick or Treating to Urban Areas.

In other news.

My pet lives.  My pet is lucky to have the best vets in the whole wide world.  The survival of my pet has put a pretty big hole in my discretionary spending, but I suppose it is time to begin experimenting with the use of accessories and whatnot to make new and exciting outfits out of the clothing I already own.

The Chronicle posted yet another of its limited utility yet temperature-raising reports on SFUSD this week. This one is particularly prettied up, I have to say.  It starts with a big number (half a million), but one that certainly includes salaries and dues and things like that.  The meat ends up being relatively small sums -  $22,000 for food (food that doesn't meet the Districts' nutrition plan for schools, which as a NPTL I must note with disappointment), blah blah blah.

Still, I do think this is indicative of two larger SFUSD problems:

1. SIZE ISSUES.
I have heard the Superintendent say "It's only a million dollars!"  That's true enough when your budget is five million dollars, but the thing is that all of those millions add up, and when you're laying off teachers in March we don't forget them.  Is $22,000 a lot of money in the Big Picture of SFUSD?  No.  Is it a lot of money?  Yes.  I am tired of getting annual pink slips and twenty cents for supplies.  Every expenditure really needs to be means-tested if you are going to go on and on about belt-tightening and sharing the pain.

Every teacher in the District took a pay cut by furlough.  District employees and Board Commissioners need to pack a meal.  (FYI: As you can see here (courtesy the SF Budget Blog), working at the District Office - even for those working for the Board - is more lucrative than teaching in SFUSD.)*

2. OPTICS.
Dear BoE, Superintendent and Similar:

When this stuff comes out - and it always comes out - you feed nasty notions about school budgeting.  "WHY FUND THOSE BLOATED ADMINISTRATIONS?" howl deformers.  "Hmmm," says the voter.    "I just read that the SFUSD Board of Education is going to a lot of conferences."

THINK ABOUT IT.

Love,

Your teaching staff.

*Which is not to say that I think these salaries are unwarranted or excessive, because I don't.  And goodness knows there are lots of SFUSD employees who aren't making this kind of money and are working at the DO.  That said, buy your own food.  In interest of demonstrating my moral righteousness, I am also against catering teacher PD days, which I may have gone on about earlier on this blog.

On Stage

Ultimately, teaching is all-day acting.  You can't even take a bathroom break when you need one, and the current image of teaching as a profession is a day-long ritual of empathy, selflessness and excellence.  One's lessons shall always be on point, and one's students always engaged.  Responses to poor behavior should be caring and take underlying motivations into account at all times.  All standards shall be mastered by all students, and all standards shall be taught in multimodal approaches that value all learners.

This is great except for the little problem that teachers aren't robots.  We get sick, we have kids, we have family dramas.  Our partners lose their jobs, our children move back home, we're not sure we can afford college for our children, we slept badly last night, we were in a fender-bender on the way to school, the bus was late...

The best you can do is build up credits with your students for the bad times, so that they know your blue mood is passing.

I am sick and my pet is in the hospital with a guarded prognosis.  I have had this pet for many years and it has been my companion in very difficult times.  What with the coughing and vague lethargy I'm not going to be the nicest lady ever tomorrow (and if the vet calls, you'd better believe that's an emergency call I'm taking).

The problem with private funding.

I have received tens of thousands of dollars in donations through Donors Choose.  Indeed, I just got two more grants filled this week.  Over the years, I've gotten

• rugs
• backpacks stocked with games and supplies, one for every child to take home at the end of the year (...twice)
• a workbench and tools
• a puppet theatre and all the goodies to go with it
• costumes
• oodles and oodles of sensory equipment (fidgets, raised-line paper, ball chairs, sit disks)
• oodles and oodles of PE equipment (ribbon wands, balance boards, scooter boards, a tunnel)
• an ipod dock and speaker system
• a mobile kitchen, including plates and silverware
• science units
• books
• math games
• reading games
• chair pockets, bookshelves and a rolling cart
• wall mazes
• extremely nifty arts and crafts supplies

In short, I've been very lucky to have had many generous private citizens and foundations support my students.  I am also an eager grant writer; for the last two years I have always had a project up on Donors Choose - except when all eight allowed have been filled and I am working on thank you projects.  And I can write a pretty good grant.  A colleague of mine says it's free money being wasted if you don't get those grants up, and I agree.

Also: I'm shameless.  Are you my friend?  Frienemy?  We went to second grade together and I have your email address?  Prepare to be solicited.

I am also asking for things that sound good.  I've had a couple of grants filled by the same foundation because I write grants for a specific area in which they are interested.  I have written some other grants to attract the interest of certain funding streams (and have been gratified by managing to get that interest, and the cash that accompanies it).

The problem is that not everyone is quite the grant-writer I am.  Not every teacher has the time to pull a grant together.  And some very basic needs - like school supplies - do not sound as awesome as "Help my students make extremely awesome sewing projects about their science learning" or "Caitlin Flanagan sucks: we want garden tools."

So while I certainly hope that all the world continues to enable my students a world-class, interactive and project-based Kindergarten, I'd prefer that all students could have the same experience through public funding.  The system we have now is unfair.  My students and my school do not have the advantage of generous local funding; we are lucky to have Donors Choose as a resource.  But there are equally-deserving schools that aren't able to make up the difference this way.

So far I am batting 1.00 on conferences: no no-shows three days in.  This is very exciting for me, since I really need to get them all done in a week and not try to run clean up.

In other school news, I am wearing my spiffy new school hoody featuring art from a well-known children's book author (sadly, not Tomi Ungerer, but almost as good) made specifically for our school.  The shameless scrounging to awesome thing is a staff trait; one of the teachers got the art and another got us a deal on the printing.  If we can just arrange for a Banksy mural we're so set.  Also,  I had a cute little  plaid-and-crinoline number to wear with the sweatshirt.

Why My Job is Awesome.

1. I get to blow minds with science - by dyeing a flower using colored water, by blowing up a balloon with yeast.
2. I get to blow minds with arts and crafts - with water resist painting, with suncatchers, with oil pastels.
3. I get to read all of my own personal favorite children's books, including my all-time childhood favorite story The Journey (one of the Mouse Tales) and the gruesomely fascinating, hunger-causing Zeralda's Ogre.
4. I get to do daily ab exercises as part of my instructional routine.
5. I don't have to sit at a desk.  In fact, I don't even have a desk.

Six Reasons Why Michelle Rhee Isn't the Answer.

(NB: Edited and expanded from something I put on my facebook a couple of years ago.)


1. Ms. Rhee seriously considered voting for John McCain because - get this - she is so afraid of what Obama and the terrible, horrible, no-good, very bad Democrats will do to education.

...the hell? "McCAIN: Because underfunded public schools and skeevy for-profit charters are better than the dread teachers' unions."


Dude, isn't the Obama administration's education policy bad enough?  We knew it would be like this before he got elected, too.

2. Ms. Rhee demonstrates a critical lack of understanding culturally responsive education and more broadly of social justice. It is her stated opinion that any arts, music, or otherwise "imaginative" (her words) programming should not be provided to students unless they have mastered reading. Similarly, she is disgusted by classroom meetings, TRIBES and so on.

I missed the part where teaching arts was absolutely entirely antithetical to literacy. One of the key premises of CLRP is that the arts are critical to a powerful and multifaceted literacy, actually.

But that's Ms. Rhee's problem - she sees a teacher's responding to a student's needs as "soft bigotry", if you will. It is evidently beyond her ken that social justice requires that we give students the tools they need to succeed - both by using the most effective strategies and by being absolutely explicit about the strategies we choose (so that students can succeed even in, say, a wretched KIPP school, where blindness to white privilege is required for a hire).

White Liberal Social Darwinism.

Only in San Francisco, seriously*.

According to denizens of the Aggrieved Reverse Racism Brigade, San Francisco (the city?  the district?  each and every resident?) is attempting to ensure "equality of results" (er, the usual phrase is "equality of outcomes", but I think the intent was to dumb it down for dimwitted Kindergarten teachers).

There is only one way to respond to this:

No.  There is no equality in outcome or in opportunity being attempted here.


How could you even say that with a straight face?

Let's look at some of those conditions here.

1. How many white people live at Sunnydale, originally slated to be torn down in the 1950s?
2. Are you aware of the location of Superfund sites in San Francisco?
3. How about of the breast cancer spike?
4. The asthma spike?
5. Taken a look at school funding inequities within the District lately?
6. Seen any of the figures on educating high-needs children?

That's just a teeny scrape on the pyramid of institutional racism.  There are your starting conditions.

As far as attempting equality in outcomes, how you could create evidence that anyone in San Francisco is attempting that is beyond me.  Are many forces - including SFUSD - trying very hard to ensure a quality education and college readiness for all students?  Is San Francisco attempting to offer medical care - thereby increasing productivity, life expectancy and ability to care for oneself - to the city as a whole?  Arguably, there is some attempt to enable equality of outcomes.

The thing is: it's a massive failure, and no one is trying that hard.  Yammering about being Beyond the Talk and being Beyond the Talk are two different things; no action SFUSD has taken leads me to believe that we'll be going beyond talking about Beyond the Talk.  Demanding A-G requirements is as powerful as mandating CASHEE: sounds good, no proof it'll do anything but increase the dropout rate.

Ultimately, what these semi-educated claims tell me is that the huge simmering vat of ignored privilege and sunny colorblindness that characterizes San Francisco's white liberal community is nearing a fast boil.

This is why I do not particularly care if San Francisco ever desegregates its schools.  Honestly, my school has a better chance of succeeding in its mission without having disruptive, anti-change elements like these in our community.  The students at my school are not the people who need to knock some sense into the ambience.

It is necessary work, of course.  Like it or not, the only way to ensure eventual equality of opportunity is to get all the stakeholders on board, and that includes the families turning to private schools because the public schools are scary social engineering places.  (Hack.)  And I do believe that it is the responsibility of white allies to do this work.  But I need a break from it, because I'm about to bash my head against the monitor to put it out of its misery**.

In other more cheerful news, I got a winter jacket.  With my thrifted Haider Ackermann culottes I cut a very Novakian figure in it and am more pleased with myself than usual.

*Okay, not really.  This particular blend of happy talk left politics and racism you don't see everywhere, though.  It's like a Ron Paul convention with more hugs.

**Which speaks to my own privilege, but you know what?  I am going to need to cut myself some slack on this one and reflect later.

Courtesy Teacher Sabrina over at failingschools.wordpress.com.



I personally ordered six or seven of these, although I feel that the standardized test amount is unacceptably low.  Horse-choking quantities would only allow for six or seven weeks of uninterrupted testing, and that is simply not enough data for our laser-like foci.  Elephant-choking might be better.  Or that snake that swallowed the alligator?  That snake-choking.

That snake eventually exploded, of course, which is about exactly what the educrats and for profiteers have in mind for public education.

Despite it being a four day week, this one felt long.  Mostly it was the heat, I think.  Everyone is a little grumpier and stinkier, but being forty days in there's more to get done before we turn to popsicles and water experimentation.

We also had a giant walkthrough, which I guess had positive feedback.  It was still kind of useless, though.  There were a lot of high school administrators walking around.  They were in my room for twenty minutes; it was a twenty-minute whole class instruction period where we hit a bunch of reading standards quickly for review and not for mastery.  I can't imagine how you understand this if your mindset is high school, where you would have a lesson plan and formal instruction/guided practice/independent practice stuff going on.

It also explains why all three of them had to get up and see what I was drawing on the kids' hands with dry-erase markers while the Resident led a phonics chant.  I mean, I guess in high school you might draw a skull and crossbones (designating detention) or something.

(Dry-erase pictures: more loved and easier to manage than stickers.)

Even staying for twenty minutes - which is a lot better than wall-walking, for sure - there is so much you just can't know.  For instance, when they came in I was drawing a letter person using letters the class suggested.  I was picking sticks to call on kids.  My sticks are loaded: if I think we had better call on you more often, you have extra sticks.  But you don't know this unless I tell you.  And the kids were all super on-task.  I mean, in terms of participation, engagement and behavior they were unbelievably on target.  (Really.  At the end of the day the Resident and I speculated that Thursday would be hard because they used up so much positive energy on Wednesday.)  That suggests we have decent procedures and protocols to guide behavior toward learning, but they were largely invisible (especially, again, if your mindset is high school.  The way I heard it, high school students can monitor their own need for pee breaks and whatnot).

Anyway, there were no interesting questions or pushing feedback that applied to anything happening in Kindergarten, so from my perspective it was kind of useless.

They gave us all their guiding question stuff and problem statements, and they say they are focusing on instructional leadership as opposed to nostalgia/witch-hunting.  The whole problem statement+consultant bearing Power Point leads to my problem statement with the Redesign.

If all of these highly-paid EDs, Associate and Assistant Superintendents are "instructional leaders" (debatable anyway), who's doing macroanalysis?  We had eight Assistant Superintendents and a host of other District people wandering about, all focused on a tiny problem statement about one school.  This is the gist of the redesign: the Central Office is Watching You.  Assuming best intentions, we're all going to go laser-like on little school site problems and save the world.  (Thinking like your average SFUSD peon, we're stuck in a giant game of Pass the Buck in which teachers will always lose.)

But someone has got to look at the big picture.  We have a District-wide problem educating the kids who live at Sunnydale.  Just as you can't offset the entirety of that problem to institutional racism, you can't say that fixing classroom practice issues will fix everything.

The problem is bigger.  Many Sunnydale families don't trust us, which makes it hard to collaborate with them.  Many students living there have PTSD or poverty-related health problems: we need to focus on their social-emotional and physical needs, too.  And critically, if you live at Sunnydale the chances that you attend a drastically under-resourced school is very high.  This is a case where we haven't tried money, and it would make a difference.

Of course, if no one is doing macroanalysis, you can ignore the whole child, ignore District complicity in creating the current relationship we have with Sunnydale families, and holler righteously that "it's not about the money".  All these newborn instructional leaders can put the blame where it tends to end up: on the teachers.

Oh, (my fellow) White People.

Pointing out that SFUSD has a long-standing access problem is offensive to some element among SFUSD stakeholders.

How depressing.

Fear of these people is one of the reasons why SFUSD will never do anything actually beyond talking when it comes to the radical changes needed to ensure school equity (HINT: it involves money).  I mean, I was just threatened for mildly stating that the school enrollment process has some access issues.  This is a well-known fact, and data on the issue are helpfully posted on SFUSD's own website.  Apparently this is a case of The More You Know, the More You Are Clearly a Proselytizing Socialist Liberal Communist Fascist or Whatever.

I so call BOO on that.  I don't post anonymously on forums and I'm not working terribly hard to hide my job location.  I take responsibility for what I say and do.  I go ahead and go beyond the talk every day, and I don't wait for SFUSD to catch up.

In other news, the latest SFUSD article in the Chronicle suggested layoffs are coming again.  I suspected that Garcia's (public) claim that the point of the contract concessions was to avoid layoffs next year would come to nothing.  It's a little irritating that we're still talking about the $113 million shortfall - couldn't they have waited until that figure was updated? - and the central office had a bit of a redesign that necessitated many more big dollar contracts and we're ALREADY on layoffs again.

But seriously, after last year the White Trolls of SFUSD really should get with it.  I go to Board meetings and after announcing my name and job location, I join with my colleagues in noting that going Beyond the Talk requires action, and if you're not willing to take it then you are nurturing institutional racism.  And at least once the majority of the Board and Cabinet wasn't texting so I know they heard what I said.

So, as I was saying: BOO.

Unified's Doings.

1. This is the first year of the "Central Office Redesign", or "What do you mean you don't know about our redesign?"  Unless you'd made it your business to read the Powerpoints the District entertains itself creating (this one had a cow theme, if I recall correctly), you may not have known a redesign was in the works.

This summer I sat on a panel of SFUSD educators.  We were asked about the redesign.  Of the five panelists, two were aware of its existence and neither of us were certain that they really intended to roll it out this year.  SFUSD also did a study of redesign awareness among teachers, helpfully pulling the teachers to be interviewed from the teachers who were at the central office over the summer helping write assessments to be used as part of the District-wide systems creation meant to accompany the redesign.

I'm guessing that knowledge about the redesign among that select group was pretty high.  In the end I was also interviewed for this study and my knowledge was pretty high, I suppose, but also far more skeptical (well, I'm assuming).

I am not really enjoying the redesign because it means that there are now some other people in power who have a different idea of what EDUCATION looks like.  Whatever the wallwalkers before them liked, they don't.  If it was standards, now it's objectives.  If Do Nows were in, now it's class meetings.  Whatever.  I have been teaching for a long time.  I have a documentable record of success in the classroom.  I am always interested in learning something new and whatever feedback I can get, but I am not adopting the latest craze in reform just because someone at 555 Franklin read a neat new book over the summer.  And at this point, how I do what I do in the classroom flows from what I believe education should be.  If I don't know your philosophy and you don't know mine, then it's very hard for your advice to be applicable to my situation.

2. I was going to yammer about the special education report, but what I think about that is so complicated that I had better not.  Also my laundry is done and I must hang up my harem-panted jumpsuit before it is too wrinkly to wear to school.  It is a key part of my hot-weather wardrobe.

Deep Thoughts: I Don't Really Have Them.

1. Does it bother anyone else that the "All these lower-income children many of them of color don't all need to go to college!" brigade is led by the racists who brought us the poorly-researched, worse-cited and intentionally misleading The Bell Curve?
2. It is better to pay the taxes one owes than to donate cash to schools.  Goldman Sachs et. al merrily dodge their way through the more esoteric portions of our tax code and starve the public sector - yet receive accolades when they toss a couple million at a charter endeavor.
3. None of these "best and brightest" currently telling me how to do my job have any evidence that they are, in fact, terribly bright.
4. Related: Three years in the classroom and conflicting reports (from one's own mouth, no less) of one's success there does not an expert make, MICHELLE RHEE.
5. Every so often in teaching, one has a student who is just on your wavelength.  It's neat and it doesn't happen every year, which is why yesterday I hosted the latest meeting of the Ladies Who Love Clothes (More Than You) in my classroom.
6. One week until the first field trip.
7. Having a Teacher Resident is so great that I am preemptively getting worried about possibly not having one next year.  Our school community is under increasing stress - the economy is bad everywhere and worse for people who were already low-income.  The stress manifests itself in underslept, underfed and underhoused five year olds and a prevalent air of tension.  We need two adults because our kids need reliable, known and loving faces who are not themselves drowning in a sea of needs.
8. If this budget is the best the state Congress can come up with, they really should've just not bothered.

Businesses aren't really that good, actually.

I am so very tired of the idea that running schools the way we run corporations is a good idea.

Looking out at the wreckage of the me-first, you-never economy - a system in which some marginally smart but exceptionally greedy people made out quite well while everyone else and all of our societies teetered on the edge of collapse - it's a bit rich to think that these cats have any idea what they're talking about.

One of Michelle Rhee's big funders in DC is ex-Enron.  I don't care that not all Enron employees were criminally liable for the company's failure.  This creep was an energy trader, and all Enron energy traders - all of them, every last one - built an unsustainable system (the Enron book was worth less than nothing when finally cracked open at UBS) predicated on gaming California.

The conduct may not be illegal, but still: their business plan amounted to "Let's go long on California power, milk the system any way we can, and laugh while California goes dark.  It's okay, because they deserve it.  Shouldn't have let us write their deregulation scheme, huh?  SUCKERS."


I do not believe that the idea of making a buck on someone else's bad planning, ignorance, good nature or bad luck is a value worth enshrining.

Nothing Good Comes from Capital Letters.

As a field, education has got to be the most prone to reinvention of the wheel.  This happens on a classroom level.  Every day, precious prep minutes are wasted as a teacher tediously nudges a line around the screen in pursuit of perfect journal paper for her students - paper that a teacher down the hall perfected two years ago.  You can see it at the school level of course, and also in districts.  SFUSD, for instance, has had at least three different adoptions of Mainstream English Language Development over the last twenty or so years.

Wheel reinvention at the management level becomes sinister quickly, and is always occasioned by Capital Letters.  When new math becomes New Math and balanced literacy becomes Balanced Literacy, trouble awaits.  After all, balanced literacy is just the careful balancing of phonics and whole language approaches.   Balanced Literacy means you need Fully Trained Consultants, a rocking chair in every classroom (Ravitch's discussion of San Diego covers this key point lest you think I jest) and lots and lots of professional development binders.  Balanced Literacy means that there is not just a framework and a guiding philosophy but a checklist and a pile of naughty notes for bad teachers.  Balanced Literacy is expensive and teachers resent the cost and the back brace of a framework from which there can be no deviation; balanced literacy is cheap good teaching with lots of fun literature and interest and the freedom to take a roll around on the floor break as needed.

I suppose some of this happens in the interest of replication; if you have some kind of framework ("A Rocking Chair in Every Classroom") it's easier to roll something out across a district.  But when teacher and school initiative and adaptation to circumstances is less important than your Capital Letters, you have a problem.  Particularly when adaptations are obviously and objectively effective.

As I understand it, the premise of "Waiting for Corporate Takeover" is that

1. Public schools are very bad.
2. This is because they have teachers.
3. Teachers are very bad.
4. Especially when they have a union.
5. Our conclusion has nothing to do with the fact that we represent powerful union-busting interests.
6. Nor should our position as oligarchs who oppose civil servant pensions be held against us.

I hear that the august hedge fund managers, ex-Enron employees, Waltons and similar financing this film now have a new PR arm.  Apparently, they are Superman.

So here's what I don't get.  If the problem is teachers...the solution is hedge fund managers?

How does that work?  Certainly they aren't intending to pay taxes like regular citizens, thereby strengthening our public institutions.  And their "gifts" always seem to have too many strings attached - like union-busting, pension-killing, almighty dollar worshipping - to be heroic.

I am forced to assume that they're all applying for jobs in their local public school district.

YES!  They're going to be more irritating and harder to train than your average uncredentialed do-gooder, what with the Objectivism (to which I object) and the synergy and the cheese-moving and whatever else they're getting up to in the halls of finance, but I see financial opportunities.

I'm charging five hundred bucks for each worksheet I hand over, one thousand for every good substitute's phone number and a cool million to borrow my parachute for an hour.

I must put together a workgang next week so that we can paint "JOHN ARNOLD, APPLY HERE" on the roof of my school.  Four months and we'll have a fully-kitted sensory room and I will have the best wardrobe ever.

I Hold These Truths to be Self-Evident.

1. The ultimate purpose of hanging standards with wall displays is to please disaffected, out of the classroom and generally useless administrators who cannot be bothered to observe actual teaching and learning and therefore want to wall-walk to decide how useful you are.
2. Given the lack of knowledge about standards in the arts, standards-posting dumbs down schools by mandating boring, strictly academic wall displays of limited beauty and interest.
3. Given that California is more or less "between standards" right now, having adopted Common Core but teaching from the state content standards-aligned textbook adoptions, standards-posting is particularly useless at present.
4. When one has encapsulated asbestos that precludes anything being hung from the majority of walls in one's classroom, standards-posting is a real waste of space and time.

What with the redesign, all the schools have a new host of administrators to please, all of whom bring their favorite pieces of school reform for our immediate adoption. Given that education reform assumes negative practice needing amelioration/reform (hey, don't take my word for it: even the Rheecolytes over at the Washington Post say so in their style guide), they come looking for their pet answer to the reformer question ("Why do all you classroom teachers hate children so much?").

If I seem a little irked, well that's because I am, having never desired the affected disaffection associated with popular British acts of the 80s.

Not only have I outlasted many school reform programs, I've also lived through many different procedures for administrative walkthroughs, and have hosted visitors both local and federal (with a stop at state-level functionaries, who in my opinion are the worst.  Living in Sacramento does nothing good for one's joie de vivre, and man do they take it out on you).

There was the three-minute-and-a-sticky-note period, which wasn't so bad because at least they left a post-it that informed you what their general takeaway was.  (I also had a really great principal at the time, a natural teacher who left administration to go back into the classroom, and that principal left useful questions or comments.)  I have several copies of Good to Great and other insipid corporate screeds floating around for kindling, I mean for drinking games at parties.  (I do not condone book-burning, and I don't want these things back on the market, so they hide out at my house.  Besides, you never know when a freak blizzard might hit, taking all power and leaving subarctic conditions.)  There was the biweekly long visit period, the you will all be on the same page at the same time at least you will be when the Reading Lions people show up period...

In my old district, our school's Kindergarten team was a go-to place for other district teachers to visit.  Our kids did quite well on district assessments, our Kindergartens were always full and the state team never had anything concrete to pin on us.  That said, it was also very well known that we did not in fact follow our state-mandated program to the letter, as mandated with a mandate, mandately.

That's because we taught Open Court.  Open Court, if taught by the book in Kindergarten, will not finish introducing letter sounds until mid-May.  That's a real problem for Kindergarten writing.  The literature selections are horrible, bad enough that a trainer told a room of teachers that the purpose of readalouds in Kindergarten is not the enjoyment of literature but the teaching of reading strategies (these two being in a dichotomy, apparently).  Kids will only learn thirty-three sight words, too.

If you want academically high-performing Kindergarten students, you're going to need to massage that curriculum.  Sounds will have to be introduced earlier, you'll need more sight words and, unless you want to hate yourself, your life and what your students will become, you'll be selecting your own readalouds.  We did this.  It was so well-known that we did this that there is an ex-district, now state-employee who used to warn my trainer about me at the annual AB466 training.  (One year she even read my homework to see if I was putting any anti-Open Court sentiment in there.  Looking back, it's kind of amusing (E. Rat: SUPERVILLAIN!  Debonair criminal, subverting Open Court trainings with real linguistics and Whole Language principles!  Fetch me my cape and/or stylish trench!  I prefer black!) but then it wasn't, and she did manage to get a colleague of mine fired.  Our kids did well.

But for site visits, the District wanted us to sing the party line: flip the alphabet cards back over, hide the extra sight words, find the OCR big books.  They wanted us to lie to our fellow teachers, to say that we did use the curriculum just like they did, and our results were better because of our intrinsic yet learnable awesomeness.  If they'd just try a little harder, their students could also excel, because Open Court works.

Reading this, it sounds like Catch-22 level paranoia (only a lot less humorous and well-written).  Sadly, it's not; the district and the Reading Lions had convinced themselves that the program worked, and when it didn't it was the teaching - and despite knowing we weren't toeing the line, they held us up as an example of what they believed.

The other drag of visits is that invariably nine will be normal or even awesome days, and the tenth will be horrible.  The kids will not be fidgety (I have in the past been both reprimanded and praised for letting students fidget/not sit criss cross applesauce/getting self-regulation items), they'll be lethargic.  Or twenty will be on their game, but number twenty one is having a meltdown of epic proportion, requiring immediate attention and leaving the other twenty to notice the strangers and react appropriately (tension?  check.  strange adults?  check.  teacher stressed out?  check.  unpleasant noise?  check.  peer melting down?  check.  All systems set for pandemonium!)

And speaking of these meltdowns, high-needs schools are going to get more than their fair share.  In this class - like any other at my school - I have students who are currently homeless, whose parents have had custody terminated, whose family members are incarcerated, who have experienced family violence and sexual abuse, who are experiencing food insecurity, who have sensory integration issues that lead to overstimulation, who do not trust strange adults because no good has ever come from one, who...

If wallwalkers want to be welcomed, they need to have a sit down with school staff first and explain why they're there, what they are looking to do and how they plan to help.  They can then do the same for the students whose classrooms they'll be interrupting.  And then they're going to need to visit regularly and get down in it - look at some data, find out about the neighborhood, come every day for a week to see the flow and stay quite a while in each class.  Then their takeaways will be useful: an outsider, but an informed one, whose perspective can be welcomed.

Otherwise they're just looking to feed whatever notion of school success and failure was popular when they got demoted outside the classroom.

In other news, for the first time ever I wore apparel that was worthy of compliment in the eyes of one of the extreme Jeremy's fashionistas (not the nice young college kids who work there rocking 70s revival wear, the other ones).  Perhaps I can continue to win praise so that when choice items from 2010 F/W start appearing I will know about it first. (Funnel neck bird print dresses, you made your first appearance 1.5 years ago and at this point we're approaching full ADHD hyperfocus.  Come to Jeremy's. Sport attractive price tags.  Be the envy of my Kindergarten students.)

Looking forward to a pleasant weekend at home.

This is the response I sent to NBC.  There are instances of poor word choice and redundancy, but I will excuse myself since I wrote it at 5:30 in the morning in less than four minutes.

After significant consideration, I have decided not to attend this event.  It is a great deal of time outside my classroom; moreover, it is abundantly clear that the guiding principles of the Town Hall are antithetical to my own.  As a veteran public school teacher with a long record of success in the classroom despite the institutional challenges placed upon me, my students and our community, I have outlived a great deal of "education reform", any number of organizations explaining that it's not about the money, and the daily denigration of my profession by people with less experience and far less education than I have.

It is clear to me that the Town Hall will prioritize these voices.  Since I do not believe that there is any interest in opposing viewpoints, I do not feel it is in anyone's best interest that I attend.

I think that NBC has the power and ability to make sure that audience malcontents like myself keep their malcontented mouths far, far away from microphones.  I strongly doubt that I could get through "Waiting for the End of Public Education" without some snarky comments.  I mean, I couldn't get through "Contact" without some snarky comments, and I had to leave "Titanic" forty minutes in.  So I would be a known problem entity prior to the teacher panel.

The sad thing is that with ten years in public K-12, I HAVE outlived several reforms/programs, all of which were supposed to...well, do something:

• Reading First
• II/USP (aka "March of the Consultants")
• Small Schools (Gates Foundation iteration)
• Edison Schools
• Jr. 6th grade/moving 6th out of middle school/moving 6th back
• 20:1 class size reduction (SFUSD not included YAY)
• Full day Kindergarten (SFUSD not included)
• I could go on forever and ever but just making this list makes me jaded.

Top Ten Reasons I'm Not Going to the Education Town Hall, Even Though It's a Free Vacation.

1. Several of my students this year have trauma issues.  Four days out, having just missed two, would be cruel.
2. The organizations funding this NBC programming extravaganza all share the same viewpoint, which does not make me confident that other views will be expressed/allowed to be aired.
3. After being in southern California, it is clear that my continued solvency is strongly dependent on not being within one hundred miles of an Alexander McQueen store.
4. Especially when I am likely to be disgruntled and wishing to justify my vacation through avarice and dresses.
5. They are mandating viewing of "Waiting for For Profiteers", and I have ADHD. Sitting through movies is not my thing.
6. They are mandating chit chat with Davis "My Kids Go to Private School" Guggenheim, and I have ADHD.  Pique and impulsiveness might lead me to conclude that there is ample reason to fashion my program into a dunce cap and place it on his self-satisfied white liberal head.
7. They are mandating viewing/chit chat (see 5 and 6) that are a renunciation of everything I do in my working life.
8. They are mandating viewing/chit chat (see 5 and 6) that are a renunciation of everything I do in my working life.
9. They are mandating viewing/chit chat (see 5 and 6) that are a renunciation of everything I do in my working life.
10. They are mandating viewing/chit chat (see 5 and 6) that are a renunciation of everything I do in my working life.

Reason #7 deserves at least four slots on this list, I think.

P.S. I am not allowing myself to buy any clothes until January excepting bird print funnel neck dresses and even those only in my size, not random giant sizes, no thanks Gilt Groupe with your ridiculous e.

Hmmm.

I was invited to go to New York on NBC's dime to be an "Education Champion".

Driving down south will give me lots of time to think about whether to go or not.

Long, but Worthwhile.

The Problem with Education Rheeform.

Take a break and then look what happens.

1. Although I think it's depressingly likely that Michelle Rhee ends up in California, compressing all issues in education to bad teachers and getting favorable press despite her proclivity to demean her allies by mimicking them in funny voices, I hold out the hope she ends up far, far from the Bay Area.

2. Man, take a one meeting break from reading SFUSD BoE agendas and the National Urban Alliance contract shows up again.  I don't really understand what these overpaid independent contractors have other professionals in presenting the same graphic organizers that totally blew teachers' minds fifteen years ago.  Nor do I really understand why the various NUA contracts are the biggest bugbear for budget watchers; SFUSD drops unrestricted money all over the place.  (Again: I do read those agendas, and contrary to the belief of those with financial control in SFUSD, education funding isn't that complicated.)

That said, piddly teacher stimulus or not, I still hold that the A #1 way to improve the learning experience of poor children of color is to dramatically lower class sizes, and if we have fat piles of money for contracts, I strongly support teacher contracts over consultant contracts.

Based on my reading of the gutted Harkin bill, I think the federal teacher bailout money could be used to hire consultants for PD, and that is just too depressing for words.

One of my Donors Choose projects got posted on the Stephen Colbert challenge.  Funded in an hour.  TV is powerful, I see.

Revengance!

On both sides.

• I am so bad about keeping a neat, organized desk that I don't have a teacher's desk; I either take care of memos, forms and whatnot or I lose them entirely.  (This mostly works.)  This has been a problem my whole life, and in fifth grade I had a teacher who periodically walked down the aisles and tipped over any very messy desks.  The year I was in fifth grade she could manage an impressive double-dump because the kid who sat across from me was another big offender to order.  Needless to say all we learned was to stuff the papers in their tighter, so that nothing came out of those desks, EVER, and they took on the sullen density of black holes.
• In Kindergarten my picture was taken for a Tana Hoban-style book.  It was a counting book and all the kids had instruments; I had a bell ringing stick with three bells.  I also have the world's most hostile look on my face, because although I am wearing one of my favorite dresses it is not my dress WITH TINY MICE DRIVING TRUCKS, COOKING, FLYING KITES AND OTHER ASSORTED ACTIVITIES on the puffy long sleeves and pussy bow.*  I think they tried again later with all of us in Oshkosh and it went fine except the daily Star Wars game had left us a little muddy.
• In seventh grade my cousin and I sat next to each other in English and we spent the better part of a week holding up a sign that said "DROP DEAD" before the teacher noticed.  To her eternal credit she was quite amused.
• In high school I was part of an all-female Wild Dada Ducks-type group that added color, class and post-modern critique through installation pieces.  Some of these were very clever.  All of them were disruptive.
• Also in high school, I arranged for the Biology classroom to be haunted by the spirit of the pregnant cat specimen some long-gone teacher had ordered that was found lurking in the chemistry cabinet that year.
• My first grade teacher was awesome but once a month or so we'd go to the other first grade to do a project.  I was scared of that teacher to the extent that one time we went over there and I had a runny nose.  I sat covering my nose for quite a while (it seems like hours now, but was probably two minutes) because I did not know where she kept Kleenex and if she allowed kids to just go get one.  By the time she noticed it was hugely gross and embarrassing and boy was she mad at me.

*If you were not wearing this dress you would be mad, too.  In fact, I am mad I am not wearing this dress right now and that it mysteriously disappeared after it no longer covered tap pants or wrists.

13th Paycheck!

We start so early now that the District and UESF worked out something so that the check I expected in July 2011 came nearly a year in advance.  This is clever on both parts, since the beginning of the school year has got to be prime teacher spending time and flush pockets makes for fun at the teachers' supply store.

In fact, someone should recommend a federal stimulus plan of this nature: hand public school teachers a few hundred bucks and tell them to go to town on classroom materials.

I personally got some science stuff - the materials to do a little unit on magnetism and refills for a unit I did last year on light and color.  I got a prism, which I didn't have last year (just various prismatically finished things), and a pound of Insta-Snow.  Accept no fake snow substitutes: Insta-Snow is where it's at.  Were I more ambitious, I might try to do a whole unit on polymers rather than just explaining how the snow works.  Its purpose is to reinforce color blending.  I let the kids go to town with Insta-Snow and colored water or diluted liquid watercolor in primary colors and have them record their color formulas.  (This is after we've blended primary colors to make secondary colors and talked about complimentary colors and all that - otherwise, I'm guessing you'd get a lot of mix-everything-to-brown.)  It's very engaging and the whole thing made the kids very impressive at MoAD last year because they could explain shading using complimentary colors.

I also picked up some craft stuff - little foam fruits and veggies, wings for the kids to decorate and wear - and a few gender-neutral additions for the dress-up cabinet.  Oh, and three pairs of dress-up shoes.  A few of the kids are quite tall this year and can only wear the largest pair of shoes, so I got some bigger ones.

I also have a birthday coming up, so I figured I deserved a new pair of shoes.  Over the summer I had a conversation with a Neiman Marcus clerk in which we agreed that the utter lack of McQ in San Francisco is a tragedy.  It ends up that if you are willing to wear last season, you too can shop fine diffusion lines at Loehmann's.  I do not buy by season, both because I live in strange weather San Francisco and because I shop by awesomeness of the item.  Anyway, I ended up purchasing another excellent dress at a very good price.  Perhaps the stimulus plan could be slightly more broad; the kids looooove my new shoes (they have big big bows) and I know I teach better when I look fab.

Yawn.  I went to a birthday party for one of the kids at my school today and spent a solid forty minutes in the jumpy.  It calls for an early bedtime, I think.  I need to go to school tomorrow to ready things for next week and possibly give a second coat to the backscratchers the kids sanded and primed on Friday, too, so it  will be an early day!

And while I'm ranting...

In 2005, California had a whooping cough epidemic.  I caught it; despite the romantic image of 'whooping' I developed as a child reading Ballet Shoes, it is really not a good time.  The problem is that the whooping starts up after you're feeling pretty good, so you end up back at work having an uncontrollable, endless and breathless coughing fit in front of twenty-odd frightened children.

Anyway, here we are having another pertussis outbreak.  Lucky California!  No dark sarcasm in the classroom means lots of it elsewhere, you see.  Needless to say, this has become fodder for anti-immigration fear mongering (apparently whooping cough takes on human form and comes to the United States without papers, hellbent on infecting upstanding white nationalists citizens) and bad mother blamers (the New York Times had an article titled something like "Wealthy Stay at Home Mill Valley Mothers Fail to Vaccinate, Thereby Causing Nuclear War").*

DTaP vaccines become less effective over time.  Whooping cough sucks, but not literally seeing as how you will be unable to suck down any air.  Get yours updated today!

*For the record, I find anti-vaccine philosophy the kind of individualist, Ayn Randesque tripe that makes me gag, even when I don't have whooping cough.  I do not, however, think that the ponderings of a few overly-educated, overly-monied mothers makes a trend, and I wonder why it is always the mothers who are to blame for anti-vaccine sentiments.


Also, I personally cannot get a DTaP booster; I have an actual, doctor-verified, terrible horrible no good very bad extreme adverse reaction to tetanus and no pertussis vaccine is made without it.  So while this is a case where I am personally counting on herd immunity, it is also one where I cannot lord it over others while waving my pricked arm self-righteously.

Guilty guilt.

Unavoidably and non-negotiably, I will be missing two days of school in a couple of weeks.  My attendance is required at a wedding in L.A.*

In your general professional job, my understanding is that if you're out, you're out: calls go to voicemail, you set up an away email, and it all gets done when you get back.  I've spent long hours and traded excellent shifts to get someone willing to cover me in my days as a server/bartender/retail grunt.

Teaching of course is different: there will be a substitute teacher in my classroom.  Like most teachers I know, I have dragged my feverish, pale self to work - uphill in driving snow - to drop off lesson plans (even if emergency sub plans are already available).  Through advance planning, I have managed to arrange not only a sub but a good one, who will be kind to my students and make every possible effort to get through some portion of the plans I leave.  This year I also have a Resident, who knows how things work and is fully capable of getting through a day, and who is well-known to the kids in my class.

Before I rant, I should say that I have thankfully never done a substitute gig.  I cannot imagine anything more difficult: different school, different kids, different grade every day for low pay and rotten benefits.  You may or may not be left plans that make sense.  You may or may not be left name tags, and you will be blamed for anything that goes wrong.  YUCK.  Even the very best teacher is going to be challenged by these requirements.

That said, SFUSD seems to have more than its share of sub problems.  First there's the issue of availability. No matter how big the sub pool is, some schools can't get substitutes.  During my one year out of the classroom I witnessed this firsthand at a school to remain nameless.  I'd estimate that three-quarters of the absences meant splitting a class.  That only happens occasionally at my current school.

SFUSD used to have "site support subs" at the STAR schools, but that funding evaporated.  Now they have "core subs" (which has been around for a long time, I think): guest teachers who agree to take jobs at hard-to-substitute-staff schools.  Unfortunately, being willing to take such a job and being able to do it are two different things.

Many of the subs inflicted upon my students have been decent, but it's the bad ones that stick out.  Like the one who left me a note that my students were "awful".  I don't care what they did - that's not okay.  Or the one who left half an hour early, or the one who fell asleep (luckily, neither of these were in my room).  After an illness I came back to a trashed classroom.  A lot of things stored up high - out of students' reach - were particularly messed up.  A little questioning informed me that some of these things had fallen during attempts to get them as the kids led themselves through various routines.  What was the guest teacher doing as they climbed on chairs to retrieve calendar tags, readers and whatnot?  Reading the newspaper.  The paper and the sub's coffee cup were thoughtfully left for me to clean up.  I was especially irritated to find that the coffee had been spilled all over my lesson plans (helpfully labeled "SUB PLANS" with a red trifolded paper), since this same guest teacher claimed I didn't leave any.

For guest teachers who can't return, there is a process for "blacklisting".  Yet too often it seems not to go through; there have been cases whereupon a substitute comes to our school site and is immediately sent packing.

This is not really a solveable problem, unless teachers are somehow able to convince all friends to have summer weddings, have families who are immortal, are made immune to all illnesses and are cloned for maternity leave and whatnot.  I'm crossing my fingers I don't have any major illnesses this year; having a Resident will also make a big difference.

*I have an outstanding dress to wear, too, and an iron-clad agreement that we can visit at least one designer concession that I cannot visit in San Francisco.

Checking in on Last Week's Plans

Folder Use and Care: Folders introduced, decorated and explained.  Adult assistance in the placement of papers inside folders provided.  Fewer incidents of papers floating idly about whilst Kindergartners clutch jackets, hats, lunchboxes and toys while toting empty backpacks.  Return rate of folders rather low, but most expected to be returned Tuesday.

Roll Out Small Group Rotation: Rolled out; we had rotation three days of five.  Only one incident of a child attempting to regroup.  Students successfully used in/out folders for materials and most completed independent work activities.  Due to class size, the groups are very large and it's still a toss up as to whether we'll go with groups or centers for the year.

Social-Emotional Goal Setting: Only got through about half.

Sensory Fan: Mysteriously turned its own lights back on.  Perhaps it just needed a break.  I am not enthusiastic about moody equipment.

We got a lot of boxes this week courtesy Donors Choose.  On Friday we got two Gel-E-Seats, which were unbelievably popular; we may need to request more.

Schoolwide enrollment is up, even up above District budget projections.  If you're below, they cut your money, so they better be handing out more money if you are high.  If so, I won't have to order my own Starfall stuff this year.

I successfully contracted my first virus of the year.  Luckily it appears to be receding to the disgusting coughing phase now.  It had a lot of potential to disturb the three day weekend...fingers crossed, etc.

On the behavior trend, of the three high-difficulty students I think we have two mostly sorted.  The other...well, we have a better idea about why wherever he goes, pandemonium ensues.  However, I am looking extremely forward to recess duty so that I can enforce safe play with equipment; our CSC meeting around playground rules and safety was enlightening.

I figure if we set the alarm off because no one thought to disarm it since no one was thinking that we'd still be there when it went off, we must have had a pretty successful Back to School Night.  I think we had better than 50% attendance, which is pretty good when you take in second shift jobs, transportation difficulties, general disenchantment with the establishment, etc.

The classroom was finally down from its tropical rainforest heat this evening, undoubtedly helped along by Crafternoon: all academic work before lunch, followed by an afternoon of crafts, motor development and games that require turn-taking over in the unused dark portable with its industrial-strength fan.  Removing twenty three bodies from the classroom helps a lot in cooling.

I had a kid disappear off my roster this week but continue coming to school; her mom came to Back to School Night and they declined their waitpool school because her child is so happy.  That's always nice to hear.  I also wore a kicking dress (ombre silk McQueen S/S 2008, salvage as usual), so really I think I have to call that a success.

In general, I'm not a big fan of press reports, books or films decrying the Dread Teachers' Unions.  I note with interest that all the venture capitalists so hot to fund KIPP are not so hot to send their own children to KIPP.  And I am always bemused by prostisuits and educrats explaining why 37:1 is actually optimal for classrooms while their own children attend fancy private schools with 2 teachers for every student.

So when I heard Donors Choose was hooking up with the makers of Teachers Hate Children So Much or whatever the latest pro-privatization propos* is called, I gave my computer monitor a good hairy eyeball teacher look.  Sadly, it did not cower as expected; nor did it alert Donors Choose to hook up with an education ally, not some destroyers.

This did not, however, cause me to stop writing Donors Choose proposals.  I got four funded over the summer.  I had two projects still up this morning, when a donor funded all 2,200 projects in California.  My school had the most projects posted of all SFUSD - fifteen.  All fifteen got funded.  We're getting a curriculum kit, a mess of leveled libraries, cozy furniture for classroom libraries and Peace Places, basic supplies, storage carts and shelves, sensory integration and fine motor equipment, play therapy equipment, a DVD player, math games...

None of these are provided by SFUSD or the state.  Heck, they can't even get classroom mats or cots so the Kindergarten students can rest comfortably.  If we want our students to have what some kids get, we need to buy it ourselves or find someone who will.

I suppose this is a case of trampling on principle for daily reality, a pose I generally do not favor.  Still, standing on principle in front of twenty one students who already aren't getting a fair shake doesn't sound so hot, either.

*Guess who just read Mockingjay?