SPARK!

This is a wonderful week to make a donation at donorschoose.org.

Select a project you like, and add SPARK as your promotional code/match code.  This provides a dollar-for-dollar match courtesy the Donors Choose board.

My school is already at critical alert status for some supplies: glue sticks, markers - and we have one hundred days to go.  I haven't seen a Sharpie I didn't buy myself in four years.  Other schools are in similar straits.  If you can, lend a hand - donate, and demand California fully funds its schools.

My Problem with Teach for America, in One Ancedote.

A couple of years ago, I had a letter published in the New York Times.  In responding to an article, I decried the false dichotomy between academic and play-based early childhood education.  Play is academic, and academics should be embedded in play.  The trick of teaching is to create the framework that enables children to integrate their learning and use it across disciplines.

The letter following mine was authored by a Teach for American.  She was solidly anti-play; her students did not deserve play because they did not know the alphabet when they entered Kindergarten.  Nor had their parents taught them to count.

(Neither do many of mine, which is why they deserve play.  Some of mine do, though - that's why they also deserve play.)

And that's my issue with Teach for America.  If your worldview holds that the schools are broken, all of your assumptions will be negative.  The children aren't ready for school.  Their parents don't know how to parent.  The teachers aren't very good.  The neighborhood is crummy.  When you start with the bad, you will never get anywhere good.  You can't see the many things your students can do, so you can't find somewhere to start.  You don't acknowledge that norms of parenting may differ from your own: there's good and bad, not different.  Teaching is not a craft that you hone through experience, and your fellow teachers are not humans - they're lazy, bad people destroying children.  You will never walk comfortably or be a valued part of a community you disdain.

TFA is the sum of starting with the negatives.  Nothing good comes from deficit thinking.

Unsent Letters

Dear Mikey One Percent,

Frankly?  I doubt you attended Kindergarten with forty three of your peers.  And I know - I know, with absolute certainty - that when it comes to academic performance, that Kindergarten class didn't get the results that my students meet by the end of August.  (Things have changed since you went to Kindergarten, dude, and it's not just the terrible union teachers and their tiny little classes.  The standards are years higher, too.)

But as always, I have to tell you that if you intend to double my students and my pay, I want to see you do it first.  Mikey, it might sound like a generous offer, but compare it to your income, and think hard about this offer.  (It's worth remembering that while, say, $125,000 may sound like an awesome amount of money for a teacher, the people proposing it make more than ten times as much.  And their pensions, insurance and so on are better than teachers', too.)

Given my typical class load, the forty four students you'll have will present some serious classroom issues, Mike.  At least six will have IEPs upon Kindergarten entry.  Eighteen to twenty will be on the young side - late October and November birthdays.  Thirty will not speak English, so start planning those ELD lessons now.

Four children will be in foster care; at least six more will be in kinship placements.  Two will be homeless; almost all of the rest will live in decrepit, violent and under-resourced public housing.  Eighteen will have witnessed or been personally involved in serious violence.  Twelve will have chronic asthma or other major health problems.

Forty three of them will qualify for free or reduced-price lunch, and half will face food insecurity at home.  Twenty five will live in homes where no adult is able to find work.  Start stocking up on the snacks and school supplies, Mike: you'll need to use that excellent salary to supplement what your school and your families can't afford.

Based on your breezy comments, despite the challenges, you'll have no trouble ensuring all forty four read fluently by the end of the year.  They'll whip through their fifty sight words spelling test in five minutes before finishing twenty addition and subtraction problems.  Then they'll write a five sentence story before making a map of their neighborhood and creating a Venn diagram to compare insects and isopods.

And then you'll have the credibility you need to lecture me about school success, ineffective teachers and the good old days of fifty kids to a room.

Until then: shut up.

Not So Cordially,

E. Rat

Unit Blocks for All!

Sadly, this article highlights their use at private and charter schools.  It suggests that blocks are the province of the public school, but that may only be true in New York and similarly funded states: here in California, if you don't have unit blocks in your classroom, there sure isn't room in your budget to buy them.

I have about a third of what the article says would outfit a classroom ($1,000 of blocks).  The kids do get an incredible amount of collaborative concept development out of the blocks, including thinking about properties of physics, engineering and social studies (what buildings does a community need?, etc.).  Sadly, what I don't really have are the arches and curves that the photo shows.  I tried to get them off Donors Choose this year, but that project expired.  Maybe I'll try again when I have an open slot.

My Holiday Cards

Drawn to my image request by a previous Kster, now in 4th.
Inked by to K alums, now in 3rd.

It will be the best holiday card ever.

Christmas List

Santa My Dear,

You would not believe how good I've been this year.  Seriously.  Please consider providing the following:

1. Classroom computers the kids can use and on which I can do report cards;
2. Fulfillment of all my current Donors Choose projects;
3. Quick diagnosis of current health problem with no more steroids after this month;
4. Eternal health and excellence for my pets;
5. Magical complete funding of California state education budget, with full restoration of current furlough days;
6. No layoffs this year;
7. In size 38:

Best,

E. Rat

P.S. The diabetic cat will eat any cookies put out for visitors.  Perhaps a delicious glass of water and some carrot sticks?

At Last, the Vacation!

Here's to hoping the room is not too destroyed, the kids not too wound up, and the day smooth.

if they could be crossed...

I am out today because I need to see the rheumatologist and it cannot wait until after the holidays.  Because of the short notice - it's something of an emergency - the kids are not really sub-ready and the guest teacher, while not the luck of the draw, is not my first choice for absences.

Still, no matter how badly it goes, I will be back tomorrow (early to clean up, even).  Hopefully I will be back to full shoe-tying, belt-fastening, writing-on-the-white-board, pencil-sharpening skills, too.

Timing is Everything.

Another teacher at my school and I nominated ourselves as PE Champions, and we won.  The prize is to be interviewed and videotaped, but we should get gift certificates for nominating ourselves and that's pretty neat.

I had a lot going on this week and kind of forgot to tell the kids until we were in plank position during morning exercises, which caused them to get excited and fall down.  Oops.

In a decision I should've remembered to follow through upon ages ago, I am removing all links to the K Files blog.  However amusing I originally found it, the unregulated racism, misogyny, hate speech and conspiracy theory are revolting.  I suppose there is some value in recognizing how prevalent these values are in San Francisco, but since I knew that already the educational value is nil.

Also, to comment on conspiracy theories not involving nefarious San Francisco politicians who are all secretly communists who also love big business, I do now understand why a couple of dedicated trolls can destroy any chance of conversation.  The level of discussion on that blog was never that high, but it did tend to be varied and have many participants.  Now there seem to be many participants arguing facets of one point, all of whom use very similar syntax, vocabulary and rhetorical devices.  These participants make conversation impossible, since they drown out all other voices and restrict the discourse to issues they find interesting.

Dear SFUSD,

When you use timelines as a cost-savings measure, you harm children.

This is not good for your employees' morale.

Sincerely,

E. Rat.

PS: I have impulse-control issues, so the next district bigwig to pontificate about timelines and inclusion and equity in my hearing is getting glitter-bombed.  I buy the stuff by the pound.  You'll be finding flakes of it for years to come.  FEAR ME.

Prop. H Lost.

However, the fact that it lost is unimportant because it was really, really close.

...why do I sense that the reverse would not be true?

In other news, I really really really really really hate EPC.  They have left me too tired to use exciting words.

Whine, Whine, Whine.

This has been the longest lull on Donors Choose I've had in years.  I'm not alone, either: I think that donations have slowed quite a bit this year.  Certainly teachers at my school are not having the 100% success and endless runs of exciting boxes we have enjoyed over the last couple of years.

I'm still hoping for great things with Mustaches 4 Kids active right now and holiday charitable giving coming up, but since school has started I've only had one project funded...and I've watched three expire.

Presently I have five active projects, of which three have match offers.  I am hoping that at least one of these will get funded.  One of the five is a "Hey, I Have the Points...Why Not Shoot for the Moon?" project that rings in at over $4,000.  But the rest are standard items that my kids could really use and I can't get any other way - a listening center, summer materials, and so on.

Although I believe in public financing for public schools, I also believe in getting my students what they need.  Public financing isn't getting my classroom much more than pencils; Donors Choose has afforded tens of thousands of dollars in supplies and materials for my classroom over the last seven years.  (Yeah, literally.)

If you are able to do so financially, do take a look at their website and support our public schools today.

This is How "Counseling Out" Works.

This article puts off mentioning a key point until the end: after a meeting, there was "mutual agree[ment]" that the child attend a closer, non-charter school.

Not mentioned: homeless children are harder to educate.  Their lives are in flux.  They are likely to be underslept and badly nourished.  Their families are under stress.  It's unlikely that they have a clean, quiet place for homework.  It's not just the tardies and the absences: Ascend is saving itself some cash in resources by having this child go elsewhere.

It's unclear to me how New York City schools, what with their ready millions for consultants and educational technology, were not able to come up with school bus service.  Providing Metrocards to subsidize a one hundred and fifty minute commute seems like a violation of the spirit if not the letter of McKinney-Vento.

Of course, it could be worse.  I read last year that districts tend not to offer families services for which they are eligible under McKinney-Vento since they are expensive and underfunded.

YES on A, NO on H.

That's all.

ETA: YAY, less peeling paint and maybe lead-free pipes in my future.  As far as H goes...it's not over until it's over.  I feel the same way about the mayoral race.  Isn't it likely a lot of Herrera voters had Avalos #2?

Fall Back.

I'm tired.  We're in the final push toward the Winter break, and this is a hard part of the year for everyone.  The kids - who had Monday Halloween on top of everything else - haven't had a vacation in ages, the teachers are tired from getting through conferences, and the weather is changing to rainy-day recess.

It's not a great environment, and my personal slice of it was made worse by having a number of out-of-classroom people on vacation/leave/at conferences this week.  This actually made me pretty mad.  Anyone who's been working at a school for a couple of years knows November is hard.  One year is enough to tell you that the day after Halloween is miserable.  And none of the adults are at their best.  All hands are needed on deck.  By taking stress-relief days, you impact everyone around you: they pay for your relaxation with extra stress of their own.

Anyway, I intend to politely but definitively let the out-of-the-classroom people who left us short-staffed and flailing how that felt and what it meant for those of us who showed up every day.

It's not that I am against taking personal days.  It's taking them and not arranging for your position to be covered, or taking them without leaving plans, or taking them and calling in with demands you want filled immediately even though everyone is swamped and you're not at work.  I also favor them more for teachers - who have the hardest job, hands-down, of anyone on a school campus - than I do for out of classroom employees.

Not Feeling Nice.

In some ways, I love the "Yes on H" people because they are a microcosm of all my favorite white liberal unthought political positions:

1. Demographics are for losers!  The sad fact is that on a block-by-block basis, San Francisco is incredibly segregated.  (Notice that their plan would also restrict all of the public housing stock, which is the least diverse in the city, to specific schools.)
2. The other guys are totally racist because they don't agree with the people of color who agree with us!  Yes, because all people of color agree, and because "not being racist", for whites, means lockstep agreement with any position put forward by any person of color: apparently, you show your anti-racist ally credentials by not showing the respect that civil disagreement and debate require.  I think this also has a touch of modern Ann Coulterism going on, too.
3. We hate unions!  See, when a union disagrees with you and you respond respectfully, that's one thing.  When you call the union "jack-booted thugs" and other such names, you make it clear that your real issue is a hate of organized workers.
4. Wealthy white people fix everything!  Even if you grant the idea that some neighborhood schools plan will send white people running back to SFUSD, it doesn't change the fact that this is more pandering to the population already the best served in the district.  It's also the population most able to advocate for itself without any help.
5. This will be the impetus that lazy district/government organization needs to fix their terribleness!  Not only does this totally ignore reality (uh, a Consent Decree couldn't get it done/have you seen the state of school funding?), it's just not true: the demographics of the city would easily enable even higher-needs schools.  And all data - every bit of it - show that diverse schools benefit all comers.
6. There are poor people everywhere!  Yes, and the vast majority of housing projects and concentrated poverty are on the southeast side.  We are not interested in unicorns.  We are interested in horses.
7. Whatever is needed to make this work is free.  I did not realize that the Prop. H people had access to a magical money tree.   However, they apparently do because their answer to capacity issues is that the district is going to build a whole lot of schools.

Unsent Letters

Dear SFUSD,

The Data Director system continues to be so fun, what with the crashing and the overloads during report card season.

But now that the sixteen year old eMacs in my classroom are no longer compatible with the Internet, I can look forward to hours of mandatory work at home.

Admittedly, completing report cards is something no teacher can do within contract limits.  But it bothers me very much that I am not given the materials necessary to complete my job requirements.  You assume I'll spend my money on the supplies you don't buy, become the PE teacher so that your state requirements are met, and provide own technology so that I can provide written assessment reports on my students on the system you require me to use.

I'm not sure if you're more thoughtless or arrogant, actually, but please keep your spokespeople from bragging about out technologically ready schools and awesome student opportunities in my hearing for awhile.

Sincerely, etc.

Crazy Doctor Hospital

Sometimes children have oversized reactions to minor injuries (for instance, being inadvertently poked in the arm or a very minor recess collision).  This can be tiredness, being upset with the circumstances of the accident, a need for adult attention, a response to something else entirely, etc.  Some ways to assist children in these cases:

1. As much as possible, try to calm the child down before taking his or her statement.
2. Do not take eyewitness statements until the injured child has been heard.
3. Ask the injured child what he or she needs to feel better.
4. Suggest a drink of water.
5. Invite the injured child to seek care at the Crazy Doctor Hospital, the cutting-edge facility of medical care.  CDH has only one technique: total amputation.  Once the offending body part is removed, there will be no pain.

Actually, CDH is so fun we play it all the time.  A retiring teacher gave me a giant pair of fake scissors a couple of years ago that make the amputation all the more fun.  With a few "This might hurt...a lot"s and evil laughs, you will regularly have to close the hospital to take a break (I refer to this as "cleaning", since CDH is soon awash in a pile of heads, arms and legs).

Keep the Candy at Home

"Halloween candy should stay at home.  Candy is not an everyday snack and is not allowed at school.  Also, candy eaten at school is taken away.  We do not throw it away.  We eat it in front of you while laughing like this (insert maniacal cackle).  After all, we are too old to go trick or treating and therefore do not get bags of free candy to eat...unless you bring yours to school."

Nearly singlehandedly, I am bringing Halloween back to my neighborhood.  Even though I did not pass out my address at school this year, we got quite a few trick or treaters and all but one family was from my school.  Every year, we get more despite the calendar date becoming less and less trick-or-treat friendly.  Key factors:

1. Prior years of address-giving,
2. Notorious electricity-wasting light displays,
3. Candy portioned out by the handful,
4. Possibility of viewing my pets.Preview

Very Quick and Scattered

1. Why progressive reformer types don't get education: technophilia, whiteness, predilection for capitalism without progressive critique, still angry at 2nd grade teacher for benching them unjustly.
2. It is amazing to me that San Francisco can support both a blog on Kindergarten choices...and another blog to critique that one.
3. The Prop. H people need to get over themselves.

Dates, Schmates.

We did Halloween on Friday this year by unanimous staff consent.  A Monday Halloween is a week of disregulated, sugary children: when you start the school week with what is basically a play day, it's hard to recoup.  A Monday Halloween is even worse than a November 1st picture day, and I speak as someone who  had to take extreme measures to remove the last of the waterproof makeup from a child's face.  I know someone who teaches in a school district in which November 1st is always a teacher PD day, to which I say: BEST PLAN EVER.

After over a decade of Kindergarten teaching, I know that there is never any need to provide more than twenty minutes of designated "class party".  The kids do not enjoy eating snacks for longer than that, no matter how gooey the snacks are.  (This year, I had amazing 100% compliance with the class snack policy. As the kids munched fruit, cheese and the little pumpkin tarts they baked at school, there were no complaints about Mean Teacher and her Mean Anti-Candy Policies, either.)  Also, we snack outside.

Regardless of the fairly easy Halloween day, by the end of it I was so exhausted that I'll be at school on Sunday.  This would have had to happen anyway, I think: Kindergarten was on duty to clean the staff room, and when I left around 4:00 the copier was still broken.

Performance Standards

I want to know: what are Michelle Rhee's performance standards for her new position?

Superintendents, chancellors and the like receive their salaries independent of whether or not their district shows improvement on unreliable state test data or more reliable information (say, district infrastructure improvements, employee satisfaction and retention data, etc.).

But seeing that Ms. Rhee is now outside of public education and working as a lobbyist, I'm sure that the charge she led to evaluate teachers is one she's modeling for all of us, right?  What is her value-added assessment?  When will she publicize her results, much as the LA Times does for LAUSD teachers?

Or are value-added evaluations only for the little people?

I LIKE 'matchy-match'.

To wit, Monday's outfit:

Ten Weeks Down.

I have reached the point of the year where I am so stressed out I don't sleep very well and would consider taking a mental health day except I am too busy to actually take one.

I am in favor of teachers - well, every worker, but especially teachers - taking a mental health day.  Underslept, overstressed teachers are grumpy, and grumpiness is not good for classroom community and management.  The job is so emotionally demanding that recharging is a necessity, not a convenience.

Luckily for me, the constant business keeps the grumpiness in check, since I like varied and changing environments.  Also, I used parent-teacher conferences to get the next three permission slips signed, so the big ARGH source of Paper Management and Control has been mitigated.

Anyway, we have two field trips next week.  One of these is a school-wide service event for which I am a primary planner.  The week after we have another field trip.  I did all of my conferences except one (child out sick) this last week.  I am helping the New Resident finish her first big series of observations/write ups, have a wedding to attend, need to plan for Thanksgiving and deal with some family health issues.  Also, I skipped a doctors' appointment this week and need to stop doing that.  However, I am tired of hearing words like autoimmune and rheumatoid and needed a holiday from that.

Conferences went very well.  Nothing I said was met with shock, which is good: my understanding of the child being discussed was in tune with the parents.  The kids report liking school and everyone is making good growth.  I had zero no-shows, although I had some problems getting scheduled translators to actually appear.  This is especially irritating for me when they are paid SFUSD employees for whom this is part of their job.  But in the end I did have a translator for every conference that needed one.

I made it 47 school days before I repeated an outfit.  I did not feel like wearing an evening gown on the day of Jump Rope for Heart - I changed to jump anyway, but dealing with an internally-boned dress in the confines of a bathroom stall was just more than I was willing to take on.

I've been thinking a lot about teacher impact on a classroom.  It's important that I'm not grumpy, because when I am a fine fog of irritation fills the classroom.  Still, not all lesson failures or bad transitions are teacher-caused: child mood is important, too, and sometimes things just go wrong.  According to this very famous graph, teachers are at their lowest around now, and a couple of my colleagues are feeling very hard on themselves.  Anyway, I plan to pontificate about this later.

News.

1. I went to a conference on Mindfulness in Education, which was neat.  There was a lot of problem-solving around the secular nature of mindfulness being misunderstood, I don't think that's why some schools and communities avoid it.  I think that the grounding mindfulness gives you, coupled with its inherent ability to create community and an ethic of empathy, are contrary to the political pressure for an individualist, no-responsibility-all-men-are-islands society.  You can't really be mindful and blame others for being poor.
2. One of the caterpillars went into chrysalis and I was doing a leaf change when it did.  I am afraid it will not emerge because it was bothered.  I have not mentioned this to the kids and am counting on the checkered skipper caterpillar to chrysalis itself when I am not around.
3. I still have not repeated an outfit, mostly because it's been warm and my warm-weather clothes have not all been worn yet.
4. I had a Donors Choose project expire, so I had an empty slot and I figured, why not shoot for the moon?  So I have submitted a proposal for a classroom loft.

Differentiation, School Selection, "Those Kids".

One of the justifications I hear for avoiding certain city schools for Kindergarten has nothing to do with bad teachers, bad buildings, low fundraising or behavior: it's the "giftedness" issue.

It scans something like this: a lot of the children at School Y don't know the alphabet when they start, so my child, who does, will be bored and unchallenged.

I am not terribly sympathetic to this argument.  In general, my students don't know the alphabet when they start.  Learning it takes around five to ten minutes of our school day for whole group instruction, doing activities that are fun for everyone and teach more skills than letter names (for instance, activities that hone eye-tracking or hand-eye coordination, or patterns, or teach cooperative skills, or teach classroom structures that we all need to know - since alphabet teaching doesn't last all year, and I need to teach these structures, it's an important and valid educational goal).  Everything else is in small group, targeted to the needs of the learners.  After all, it's not really "knows the alphabet" and "doesn't" - there are the kids who have sorted everything but b d p q, the kids who know the capitals but need work on lowercase, the kids who know eighteen letters, the kids who need to sort out the category "number" and "letter".

And again, I'm not doing this all year.  And not for a long time each day: I take teaching science and art seriously, we have other aspects of reading than alphabet recognition to cover, and so on.

My other problem with this argument is personal.  I was a very gifted (if also very hyper) student.  I was reading before I started Kindergarten and not just a little, either.  By the beginning of first grade I'd finished off the Ramona Quimby books and starting in on Joan Aiken.

In Kindergarten, I was absolved from penmanship practice and phonics workbooks (about fifteen minutes of the day) in favor of additional recess with a couple of other early readers.  In first grade, the reading teacher pulled a high group from the class, and I went for awhile, but I was too high for that group too, so I stayed with my class.

I was also high in math, and honestly?  I wasn't bored very much.  This may be thanks to the magic of ADHD, Saving Children from Boredom By Providing All Kinds of Bad Ideas.  It wasn't due to excellent differentiation in first grade, either: I did the same work as everyone else.  But the work we did didn't just teach reading: it also taught skills that kids need.  Some of these - like paperwork skills - I really wish we didn't need.  But we do.  They also included games, and games are fun even if they're easy.

Nor do I think I could have gone further faster had I been in a classroom of all high-performing children doing high level work: attention was an issue, for sure, but I am an intensely non-competitive person.  I have yet to see a model of gifted instruction that doesn't only pay lipservice to cooperation and multiple intelligences but actually believes in it.  I was the kind of kid who threw the county spelling bee once there were two kids left because I wanted it over and 2nd place was pretty good.  I am the kind of teenager who never shared her SAT score because all the tension around those numbers was scary.  I am the kind of adult who won't play Trivial Pursuit at the Albatross because people get so nutty about winning.

So the gifted classroom was likely to make me sit with a box on my head more than I did already (it's fun to make whoooing noises from under the box!  Like your own ghostly echo chamber!).  Besides, the stuff I learned and read and did I learned and read and did because I liked it.  I am one of those irritating nerds who learns stuff because it's neat.  I majored in a field notorious for its geektitude.  I went to a university that prides itself on being the place where fun goes to die.  Etc.

Also?  I don't know about the everyone-knows-the-alphabet Kindergarten, but in my classroom, which annually spans from fluent readers to no-name-writers (somehow people assume there are no high kids on the southeast side, and honestly?  Some of my kids are probably higher than the average child at Clarendon), everybody looks pretty gifted to me.  If Kindergartners were formally identified for GATE, I'd probably identify everybody, because every kid has some spike of awesome in some area that needs nurturing so they can apply that awesome broadly.

Forty Days

Forty days in and I haven't repeated an outfit.  I am now allowing repeats - I could do a couple more weeks but it would involve wearing jeans three days a week and at least one evening gown that is a bit restrictive. For day 40, I wore:

• purple and gold dirndl
• red sweater
• purple tights
• red cowboy boots
• purple jacket

The art teacher told me that she's so glad I wear colors.

In other news, I mistakenly announced that one of our caterpillars had died, but it in fact was molting.  Hopefully I did not interrupt the molt when I was changing out old leaves - it looked alright when I left.  I was able to correct my mistake before the day was out, luckily.  It had gotten itself stuck to the roof of the terrarium, which is why I thought it was a goner.  Here's hoping it's alright tomorrow.

We have two caterpillars, both collected from a nearby park on a field trip.  They're different kinds, so it's cool to see how the caterpillars are different, etc.

Kindergarten Logic

Given:

• Chicago and Pluto both end with the long o sound.
• Chicago and Pluto are both cold.

Therefore, Chicago and Pluto are the same place.

Accomplishments.

I wrote four one verse songs for four stages of the water cycle, all set to "Alouette".

Additionally, I wrote my masterpieces out on large paper and got 1st graders to decorate them appropriately.

Hey, not all of us are going to win Nobel Prizes or MacArthur genius awards.  I'll take my victories where i can get them.