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?

This blog=facebook without endless teacher stuff.

It is my general practice to begin obsessively checking online weather reports on any late summer afternoon during which I do not observe fog rolling in.  So I was well-prepared for the hot days this school week:

• sprayer bottles filled and set to mist
• case of water bottles, each labelled with a student's name
• procedures for bottle refills and accidents planned
• consideration of responses to unconventional bottle use
• checked batteries in sensory fan
• purchased two small box fans
• rescheduled all heavy academic content/serious procedure teaching to the morning
• enforced resting (usually I have a quiet activity running - not this week)
• planned outfits so that I am not grabbing knee-high boots because they are the only shoes I can find on my way out the door
• mandated jacket removal upon entrance
• scheduled afternoon indoor PE with second grade classrooms for the two hottest days
• purchased popsicles

My classroom has a full wall of windows and old school encapsulated asbestos insulation, so it gets very hot.  All the Kindergarten bodies add to the heat.  The kids are cranky and tired, which heats them up further.  So my overall goal is to keep the classroom mellow, emotionally smooth and friendly.  Years of experience have taught me that it's better to spend afternoons rolling through the tunnel and painting than pushing through curriculum.  Not only is the former academic anyway (this.  is.  Kindergarten.), but the latter doesn't build goodwill.  I will need that later for heavy-duty academics, especially on days I am cranky and tired.

The transition to Kindergarten continues.  There was an upswing in roughhousing this week; I did some individual/small group stuff around limits and personal space.  Roughhousing is of course not allowed; sadly, that does not cause it to disappear.  On Monday we will be reading So Much as part of my anti-roughhousing/situational appropriateness campaign.  I talked to the lunch yard monitors and after school leaders.  Last year's anti-roughhousing campaign went pretty well, so I am hopeful this year's will too.

I have three students who are really struggling with behavior expectations.  Well, perhaps I should say that I am really struggling with their behavior and my expectations.  However, the behavior is out of line, so it's just finding the appropriate techniques for teaching/enforcing acceptable behavior.  One of the three has been doing better in the morning and apparently is a night owl by nature, so I think the issue is worsened by tiredness - after lunch, the kid's done for the day.  There is also a language issue, and since morning recess marks the downward trend in behavior, I suspect a need for structure (I find morning recess very difficult myself, what with the kids and the water and the bathroom and the play structure and the hoops and the balls and the blacktop and and and, myself).

I had a breakthrough with one of the others; I think the issue was limits-testing.  I will bargain with students about the amount of work that needs to be done/how it needs to be done/when it needs to be done (I like Collaborative Problem Solving a lot and try to use its philosophy in little situations like these), but there are non-negotiables.  Anyway, after losing out on doing a craft project until the work got done as agreed, this child has been doing a lot better across the board.  (She did get to do the craft project, by the way; it was just seeing that she would not get to do it while everyone else did that I think did the trick.  Yep, I'm a MEAN LADY.)

The third child is experiencing a disconnect between behavior systems at home and those at school.  Specifically, I will not be providing chocolate ice cream to end a tantrum.  Nor am I able to ignore the child until approached with an apology (the kid has stamina, I'm telling you).  I reserve incentives for kindness, personal best work, etc.  This child has been having serious difficulties in all environments (there is no adult on staff who has contact with K who has not had a Bad News Bulletin for me), and after some reflection and discussion with our emotional/behavioral support people, I think we are in for a couple of unhappy days before just how mean and non-budging I am comes through.  There was a large tantrum on Thursday; it was not rewarded.  Friday I did some one on one with this child, so I am pretty sure that certain cause-effect relationships are clear (throw food in cafeteria?  Clean food in cafeteria.  Rip up work?  Get new work).  For next week, I am planning to set some very specific targets with this child with short time spans and clear incentives.

I left work on time yesterday so that I could do real life stuff, like shoes and gym, before seeing a fellow K teacher play with her band.  While I was enjoying the show, my car failed to enjoy a hit and run.  At least DPT was good enough not to give me a street cleaning ticket, since I did not feel up to getting it off the street until today.  The fact that it had been pushed onto the curb and into another car may have influenced that decision, although the other car was gone this morning.  Anyway, it is time to walk over to school and get ready for the next couple of weeks (and Back to School Night!).  The sleep deprivation associated with concerts, early-morning police reports and poking vengefully at the many pieces of not-my-car car left behind will make this a little harder to do; I had better write a list before I spend another hour on non-classroom tasks.

Amazing Fun Fact Day!

ADHD and Giftedness look a lot alike, at least in the school setting.  In fact they look so much alike that it comes up in teacher credentialing classes.  They may also be co-morbid.  (Successful ADHD people are also often gifted, which I bet is the extent of the co-morbidity - the giftedness helps get around the disorder, and the successful ones write the articles.)

Given my high-faluting education, fabulous wardrobe and bougie lifestyle, I figure I can claim success myself.  So there.


Honestly I don't get the fascination with GATE programming.  Maybe I would had I received it myself, but I went on my merry, distracted, gifted way without it.*  I'm not sure what it's meant to provide.  As far as I can tell, GATE stuff tends to be more hands-on, more inquiry-based, more open-ended.  It may be somewhat accelerated, I suppose - but giftedness is not the same as skill, so if we are saying GATE programming starts at a higher level of skill we are excluding gifted persons who have limited familiarity with the material, right?

All of my Kindergarten students are gifted.  They have all learned a lot already - like, how to speak a language, how to walk, how to get attention, how cool their world is - before they come to school.  And they can all learn the school stuff.  Some of them have talents I don't.  This is not Hallmark stuff or even Howard Gardner, here: they are all gifted.

I have yet to meet the learner who does not learn more when the work is engaging and involves doing and asking.  So why isn't GATE good for everyone?  I have to wonder if GATE classrooms are fulfilling some other need we perceive children to have.

*Admittedly I spent a lot of valuable learning time staring out the window, getting in trouble, tapping my foot and ripping paper into microscopic pieces (unless I had scissors,  in which case I cut it into said pieces).  But I got a scholarship to fancy college and everything, so I must have learned something.

Respite ho!

I don't know what it's like district-wide, but the first week at my school is endless flux at Kindergarten.  Kids not on the roll appear; kids on the roll disappear or never show up in the first place.  The kid who sobs on Monday runs on to the playground screaming for joy Tuesday, while the happiest Monday kid lurks at the gate crying.

Presently all of our Kindergartens are full or nearly full - I was overloaded for most of the week, actually - so at least we don't have class collapse fear.  Overall for the week things were fine: no accidents even.  Alas, on Thursday one child was absent.  She returned Friday only to throw up, in which she was joined by several of her peers.

I was hanging up the rainbows the kids made Friday and I realized that they were probably the best set a class had produced yet.  Almost everyone used all six color strips and got them in rainbow order (I number them to help them out a little bit...if they know their numbers).  Yet at the time they were making the rainbows I was feeling totally overwhelmed by child insanity, adult insanity, noise and trivial misbehaviors all adding up to SYSTEM FAILURE.

I think this is a little bit feedback from the start of last year, when our classes were small and we were stressed.  And I started last year with a student who was entirely out of control: body memory, I guess.  Anyway, it's a good reminder to chill out and care less about the small stuff, or the times when sixteen kids need my total attention at the same time and two other kids are throwing bits of paper at each other.  Even when they don't all get the attention and the paper bits collect like snow, the rainbows still get made and I don't need to be all tense and grumpy and join the paper fight myself.

In other news, I wore this the first day of school:

Got it at a thrift store, new with tags.

I still haven't worn the runner-up (this also thrift store Givenchy that supposedly/theoretically/according to people who possibly would know dates to the McQueen era), but I did pull out the Lacroix (salvage), the Balenciaga (salvage), the jacket with the heart-shaped buttons, the dress I bought on the Jeremy's Teacher Shopping Trip and the nifty Puma/designer collab dress.  In short, my clothes are awesome.

For readalouds, I stuck with the excellent-yet-brief/audience-participatory favorites: Tickle the Duck, Knuffle Bunny, Z Goes Home - stuff like that.  We also made Texas Snowflakes (but haven't turned them  into hats yet), had a garden lesson, two parachute PE blocks and one visit to the Imagination Stations (the play kitchen is popular, but still nothing compared to the Dress Up Bureau).  I made new alphabet first-run sheets this year and broke out the Handwriting Without Tears letter building blocks and magnetic boards (which as soon as I have a slot on Donors Choose available I am begging for more of.  Hmmm, awesome syntax there.).

Skillwise my class is all over the place.  I have only three students who need to learn how to use scissors and several kids who can write their names.  Two kids are reading a little and one can do a little phonetic spelling.  Several will benefit from the letter/number sorting game we will play on Monday.  The behavior patterin is interesting; I have very little hitting/pushing/shoving overall but a lot of issues with kindness/sharing/negative self-talk.  We started Caring School Communities on time and I think it will make a difference.

Procedurally, we have made a good start at composting/trash/recycling, walking in a line and respecting personal space.  Friday we started on work completion expectations.  Scissor safety is going well; glue use not so well.  I did a poor job of glue stick demonstration.  Also, my hypothesis around mechanical pencils (that massive lead wasting would not occur if we had them on day one) has failed.  

My general teaching philosophy is that it is useless to teach all policies on the first day, because the children cannot learn them all and the teacher cannot reinforce them all.  So I introduce a few at a time.  This seems to work.

Resident-wise, my resident is confident and can give directions, lead a table group and read Tickle the Duck (which allows for two daily reads, since I refuse to read it more than once a day).  With her first week schedule I don't really think we had any feedback time, so I am trying (not too well) to use the method I saw Adria Klein use: you're there and you pop in as needed.  The kids like her a lot.

One of my students had a bedwetting incident last week, which is possibly a school stress because my teacher is mean thing, or a sleeping so heavily because of the rigors of all day Kindergarten thing, or part of the coming of the virulent fever and flu with which this child was afflicted shortly thereafter.  This makes me sad.  On the positive side, I have not yet had many children disappearing into waitlist schools with no goodbye.   I can say that that behavior makes many many many teachers feel rejected and mean. (I know because it comes up at lots of trainings when Kindergarten teachers sit together.)  So far, only one student has left for another school, and I was keeping that child an hour after school because she was on the after school program wait list and her mom had no way to pick her up before then - clearly a case where a wait list opening was a blessing.

In the best news of the week, I am not going to school this weekend.  YAY!

First week: DONE.

I'm tired (virulent stomach flu hit the Kindergartens starting Thursday, leading to lots of stinky, feverish excitement), so I'll keep this short and sweet:

For the love of a #2 pencil, will someone slap CW Nevius already?

My informal teacher poll is running 90% in favor of the resolution that teachers are always nervous on the first day of school.

I have a slightly overfilled class, which bodes well for healthy enrollment after the wait lists start clearing, but I've only met three of the kids and only have a couple of siblings this year so that's plenty of new children to scare me.

I also have a Resident this year, so I can be anxious about whether my classroom will provide my Resident with a powerful preservice teaching experience.

The best bet at this point is a few hours at school this morning and then successful displacement of first-day jitters onto the all-important question of first-day outfit.

Who is Paid for Performance?

I am tired of hearing that teachers should leap to embrace pay-for-(student)-performance schemes.  The fact that there is no reliable method for linking teacher pay to student performance - no testing instrument, no data collection scheme, etc. - should end the conversation, but it doesn't.  The amount of additional testing this would require also gets forgotten; I think we test enough as it is, and no matter how much it might add to my pay, I will destroy every #2 pencil in the world before my Kindergarten students take a standardized test.

Not to mention: pay for performance doesn't work.  Study after study after study demonstrates that it doesn't lead to increased performance in any domain, and ancedata suggest increased cheating under pay for performance schemes.

The argument that really gets me is the claim that CEOs and other corporate types are paid by performance, so teachers should be, too.  This is so entirely false that it leads me to question a claimant's intentions.

Blue and pink collar workers are generally employed by performance.  Doctors and lawyers are not.  Service industry employees are paid by performance; investment bankers are not.  Hedge fund managers make out just fine even when their investors don't.  Elected officials are not paid by performance.

CEOs are most emphatically not paid by performance.  CEOs make out just fine even when they are forced out; Mark Hurd is leaving Hewlett Packard with a cool twenty eight million dollars.  Let's see that in numbers:

$28,000,000.
Wow.

Maybe teachers should agree to bizarre compensation plans if and only if our pensions are as generous as Mr. Hurd's package, here.  The average state pensioner gets a whopping $24,000 annually - not too impressive, given that teachers pay into their pensions and get no earned Social Security benefits.

Equity is Not Equality.

I have a very simple, very straightforward and (alas) fairly costly way to quickly and effectively improve the conditions at high-needs schools:

LOWER CLASS SIZES - and if you can't do it everywhere, do it at the poorest schools!

No, it really is that simple:

1. Class size matters, but the positive impact is largest and most lasting when the class sizes are around 12:1 to 17:1 (see Perry Preschool, the Tennessee study, etc.  This isn't controversial.  Contrary studies produced by right-wing organizations have used CSR at 22:1 or so or failed to account for schools that already had smaller classes - bad science).
2. Class size matters, and especially for high-needs children and children of color.  The most positive impacts are seen for African American students (again, there is massive research supporting this).
3. Smaller class size enables families to have a closer relations with teachers.  Relationships are key, particularly in communities that have been ill-served by schools for generations.
4. Smaller class sizes enable teachers to offer better differentiation in content and management.
5. Smaller class sizes are popular with teachers.  Want veterans at high-needs schools?  Lower class sizes would be a popular perk!  I'd take a guaranteed 16:1 class over my hard to staff money for sure.
6. Private schools and privately-funded public schools use the money to lower class sizes.  If our wealthiest students deserve it, why don't our neediest ones?
7. This would end the horrible practice of combination classes - when kids leave 3rd grade and class sizes increase, school funding often dictates 3/4 or 4/5 splits.  Combination classes (note: not multi-age/grade span classrooms, which are something different) are brutal.

This is what a robust "Weighted Student Formula" or STAR program would do: fund schools to maintain class sizes at 16:1 K-5 (at least).  But this is expensive, prohibitively so system-wide, and only offering it to some set of high-needs schools would, I bet, set off some real howls.

Here's the problem with those howls, though:

1. Life isn't fair;
2. Equity is not equality.  Giving BVHP schools exactly what you give to schools in the Sunset is equality.  But those BVHP schools have greater needs, and if you truly want all students to have equal opportunity, those greater needs must be ameliorated.

This is a lot easier than school desegregation, which is so enormously unpopular among a certain subset of San Francisco that it seems like wasted energy to me.  Besides, the smaller classes and improved test scores might drive parents to consider these schools.  Given a big population shift, it's likely that some schools would start exiting the class size reduction program, at which point school communities would have to ask whether the reduction was so powerful that heavy advocacy to maintain it across the system (thereby eventually extending it to a larger group of schools).  After all, ratios like 16:1 just make California more like other states.

And so it begins!

I went to school yesterday.  I dragged in a big wet vacuum to steam the rugs, but I forgot to ask how to use it (oops) so I wasn't too upset that the floors in my room were just getting waxed.  I had surgery on my hand and it's still not 100%, so I am hoping to use a patented combination of whining, eyelash-batting and bribery by baked goods to organize a work gang.

Today I am also going to school, but it's only to meet up with some of the fabulous ladies with whom I work so that we may refresh our collections of salvaged couture and DIY remakes.  Which brings me to the next stereotype in my teacher fashion parade:

The Teacher Who Wears the Same Uniform the Kids Should.

This teacher invariably has one or both of the following motivations:

1. S/he is not an early bird and teaches at an early-start school.  Uniforms do not require one to be awake and generally do not require ironing.
2. S/he has some kind of ethical/political/socioeconomic position that is best visited upon fellow teachers through wearing the uniform...accompanied by regular lectures.

Monitoring the students' uniforms is not something I'm willing to waste a lot of energy on.  Like many of my fellow attention-challenged, I have to get up very early so that I can be fully functioning by the time school starts, so I have lots of time to decide if I'm feeling Midge Wood or Grace Jones.  While I have great sympathy for the ethical/political/socioeconomic arguments, I prefer to make them while well-dressed.  (Also, buying salvage means fair trade labor and reuse.  WIN!)

Whatever the case, the course of action is clear: avoid this person at least through first bell.

Argle bargle.

(Sorting through, disjointed, etc.)

I strongly believe that diverse schools are best.  Moreover, I think diversity in and of itself is an important value; all children deserve diverse schools because all children benefit from it.  Well, providing that the school affirms that diversity for all, I suppose.  So I would love to teach at and learn in a diverse school.  I feel fortunate that our school staff is quite diverse, and that our student population is also mixed.  Still, our school staff is not diverse in ages and the children at my school are all of color and mostly (80%) poor.

Yet some wealthier and whiter parents are not interested in diverse schools - or at least schools that match SFUSD demographics.  I don't think anyone would benefit from their (perceived) forced presence; their perceptions of the school community would complicate assuming best intentions on either side.  I still think these parents and their children would benefit, but the amount of work it would take to just get everyone talking seems way too strenuous.

So right now I'd settle for more equity with the students we have right now.  Our schools are not equitably funded, and it's a problem.  Moreover, there is a persistent attitude among some stakeholders in SFUSD that poorer schools are riding high on Title I funds.  That is simply false.  Not only are those funds miniscule, this position ignores the reality that Title I students need more.  They need more services through school health.  They need more school readiness activities.  They need more counseling, more food, more after school programming, more outlets, more more more.  The Weighted Student Formula isn't keeping up, and neither is federal Title I.

Then there's locally collected money.  At a school level, some schools are raking in PTA dollars.  We're not.  Without getting into any of the issues around this, it's not possible to argue that it's fair - and I don't think much of "Life isn't fair" being visited upon children in this way.  (Besides which: my Kindergartners have figured that out already.)  More broadly, the Supreme Court has upheld the constitutionality of property tax funding disparities, so districts with high property values (Palo Alto) or big industrial concerns (Santa Clara) have more money on hand than SFUSD does.  And of course, California's statewide school funding is abysmal.

All that said, I am growing more and more concerned with the idea that one has to do one's best for one's child no matter what the cost is.  The fact that so many San Francisco parents opt out of public schools means that the system as a whole becomes less diverse, and it loses its most powerful advocate voices: the voices that have the power and the privilege to demand systemic changes to school funding.  (Small philanthropy is great, and I love Donors Choose, but I think the state should be funding my classroom.)  So the aggregate of doing one's best for one's child is that many other children get less.  Long term, I suspect the costs for that same child will be great (PreK to prison pipeline, etc.) but the cold hard cash arguments are not my favorite.

I think what is bothering me right now is that I feel like there is very little understanding that like it or not, we really are all in this together.  Opting out is not actually an option; you can opt different, if you will, but you are not an island.  I want to live in a society that cherishes its members and works collectively for all within it.  Lately, I feel like "American individualism" has become a contrary (and false, BECAUSE YOU STILL AREN'T AN ISLAND) and forceful thing that does great harm.

Two weeks.

I once had a principal who absolutely refused to allow teachers to be at school after 5:00 PM on the last Saturday before school started.  Sunday trips were verboten.  This is good policy; I don't think people realize how nervous teachers are starting a new school year.  The tension grows through interminable "professional development" sessions a few days before school starts.  This is the worst time to have any kind of professional development; teachers are too preoccupied.  There is a great deal of list-making and classroom mapping in these workshops; teachers with laptops compose "Welcome to My Classroom!" letters on the sly.  I find it difficult both to sit still and to remember orally-given information without some kind of hands-on element, so I generally try to bring a bunch of laminated things to cut - it's mindless, yet focusing.

Teachers are stressed out and eat too much boxed lunch at the break, so to keep them awake presenters invariably break out the candy in the afternoon.  It's downhill from there.

I've heard of all kinds of centering, stress-lowering activities for teacher work days.  Personally, my stress is not lowered by anything other than getting my classroom in order so I skip the yoga and whatnot.  On the other hand, one year I was so nervous on the first day of summer school (new grade, unfamiliar school building, forty two kids on my roster) that I washed but did not rinse my hair.

Anyway, I do like to focus on BIG GOALS for the year.  These are not the BIG GOALS in the management textbook sense, nor in the Teach for America sense.  I have been teaching for a long time now.  We do not have new standards this year nor any new curricula.  I do want to develop my practice, and I do that by making some plans every year - things I want to try, subjects I want to teach differently, management techniques I would like to use more effectively, etc.  It is not as important to me that I see each of these ideas through; some things end up not working out simply because I cannot maintain them successfully.  I just want to make sure I reflect on what happened and see what I learned from it.

Last year, my big push was teaching thematically and I think I pulled this off reasonably well.  It led to a lot of long projects taking many days.  These can be hard for me; they require organization and planning.  So it was an important development area for me personally, and I think the learning payoff was big.  Students seemed to have more patience and more willing to keep working on things; for instance, by the end of the year students were willing to spend 90 minutes weaving a basket (with music, conversation and short breaks, of course) and "sewing bees" were popular at art time.  And I think the content integration was useful, too.  In the past, I've worked to integrate more sensory stuff and to actively teach cooperation.

For this year, I have some very specific learning goals for motor development.  I failed penmanship (left-handed, ADHD) in school and am not a stickler for it now.  I think it's destructive; my students struggling with illegibility put so much energy into neatness that they have nothing left for content.  I do want to provide experiences that will build hand-eye coordination and fine motor control and to be very explicit why these are important.  I also want to experiment with teaching letter formation; I am the happy inheritor of a bunch of Handwriting Without Tears stuff that looks promising.

Tenure: I Have It.

Or: While I Admit the Persistently Problematic Issues Underlying Cat Macro Grammar, I Find Cat Macros Funny Enough to Borrow Their Structure; Alas, I Remain Unable to Utilize Their Non-Standard Grammar.

For all the alarmist rhetoric around tenure, one thing that's really really really really awesome about tenure (which I totally have...as you can see, I have not one whit of a problem with Valley Speak) is that it means I don't feel any particular need to keep my smart mouth shut.

Realistically, the number of Kindergarten teachers in SFUSD is not enormously large; the number of Kindergarten teachers in SFUSD at high-needs schools is even smaller.  It would not be that difficult to find out who I am, and it's not like I'm hiding my identity or the school at which I teach.  And why do I feel free to do that?  I have tenure!  La la la la la.

Teacher free speech rights are constrained within the classroom and without it as well.  Moreover, I have actually witnessed vindictive administrators moving against high-quality teachers because those teachers had the very bad idea to explain that Open Court had some issues.  (This did not happen in SFUSD.)

If you teach Open Court (California Edition) to the manual in Kindergarten, the kids get their last letter sound at the end of May.  This is utter insanity.  By the end of May, students will have finished off many of their End of Year assessments, and unless they picked up the last letter sounds on their own, they will have a lot of Open Court-caused misses on their assessments.

Additionally, Open Court's literature selections are...well.  Let's just say that an Open Court trainer told me once that the purpose of reading these selections was not that students would enjoy them; no, it was to practice reading strategies.  After all, we all have to do things we don't enjoy, right?

Dorothy Parker wrote a review of an A.A. Milne play wherein she claims to have shot herself in the head during a particularly twee scene.  This is where I wanted to do likewise.  I mean, this idea is wrong on so many levels I can't even begin to unpack it without instruments of self-harm near at hand.

And I'm not even getting into the Massive Flaw of Open Court: that it was written by Louisa Cook Moats, a woman who believes in the Language Deficit Hypothesis.  You know, a hypothesis absolutely destroyed by William Labov in the 1950s.  (Fun Fact: Vocabulary Deficits Don't Exist, Either...Unless You Don't Know the Difference Between 'Difference' and 'Deficit'.)

Okay anyway, so this teacher I knew questioned Open Court in front of an administrator.  Her comments were pretty mild and had teachers nodding all over the place.  When the administrator moved to shut her up, I also said some anti-Open Court things, and another teacher commented that the Louisa Cook Moats article we had just read had an underlying racist ideology of language.  (Teachers are smart.)

The administrator blew a gasket.  The kind where everybody in the  room gets a letter in the file and the principals of the offending teachers get a phone call.  (This administrator ended up working for SCOE and warned a trainer I had later about me and wanted to check my homework for that trainer.  This backfired astoundingly, but I digress yet again.)

So we have three naughty teachers.  Two of the naughty teachers have tenure and full credentials.  One of the naughty teachers does not.  That naughty teacher is laid off at the end of the year.  When it ends up that her position still exists and she is the most senior person laid off, she is not offered her job back because she was so naughty they fired her for cause (mouthing off to administrators).  Since we shared a room doing AM/PM Kindergarten, this means I teach two classes a day until they come up with someone to fill the position: a first year, uncredentialed newbie who is so low-functioning that she cannot bother coming to school before 10:30am.

Anyway, without tenure I sure wouldn't have a not-very-secret blog and I sure wouldn't be mouthing off to the BoE.  But I have it.  I suppose I should worry about anti-tenure forces and caches and all that, but honestly?  The Jeremy's new arrivals email looked promising and that's far more interesting than playing hide-the-opinion on the internet.

Strapping on helmet.

Living three blocks from school and possessing a full set of keys, I don't really have a whole lot of excuses not to work over the summer (except burnout avoidance).  Throughout June and into July, I was caring for our late-blooming silkworms so I went in every couple of days.

I haven't been to school for three weeks.  The administrative staff is back in today, and so am I.  Something nifty is happening, so there will be a lot of people there, but it is still a little jarring.

On Starting Out

Earlier this month, I spoke on a panel with some other teachers for an audience of education reformers.  The topic was SFUSD, with a focus on the current strategic plan ("Beyond the Talk: Two Years In and We're Still Just Talking").  Needless to say, I had quite a lot of opinions on the issue and I aired these at some length to an audience that seemed receptive.  At least they gasped at all the right parts, like where I ran down the school demographics and statistics, noted our #1 (in layoffs) status and then stated that these factors left me leery of the will behind the strategic plan.

Anyway, one of the other things I said was that I thought SFUSD would be a very difficult district in which to start one's teaching career.  I didn't, for the record.  When I got to SFUSD, I had a credential, done teacher training, had student teachers, done education research, all that noise.  I knew what I was doing.  So while I had to deal with the eccentricities of a new district, the vagaries of a mammoth district and the specific drama that is SFUSD I could go into my classroom and do my job.

Even better, I could do my job with none of the unpleasant nonsense of Reading First mandates, scripted math curricula (they even give you lines for the wrong answers they predict students will give!) and whatnot.  If my students had mastered rhyming, I didn't have to teach it for seventy four more days.  If the unit on wood went so well that we needed to stop and do a little carpentry art for a week, we could.  We could even TAKE FIELD TRIPS (providing they were within city limits and free, but all the same!  FIELD TRIPS).

On the other hand, there are some flaws in this model even for the veteran.  Finding teachers with whom to collaborate could be a bit difficult - it took me a year to get a good buddy system going.  Since I no longer used the purchased language arts program and there is no district language arts assessment, I had to come up with my own (or not assess at all, I suppose, but life is easier when you know what the kids know and don't know.  They're not bored or lost, so their engagement is higher and the management is smooth).

But imagine this system as a first year teacher: worse, as a first year, uncredentialed teacher.  A credential may give you very little in practical technique, but you will have at least a student teaching experience upon which you can draw.  I can't imagine what this would be like.  Of course, some schools probably have more cohesive programs (but not many) and at my school the grade levels are tight team projects so that even the greenest newbie can get some assistance (this I know is far less true at most SFUSD schools and generally not that true at Kindergarten, although I have no idea why).

The lack of support system is brutal for the newbie - and these teachers invariably start at high-needs schools, where there are fewer supports and higher concentrations of early-career teachers.  And high-needs teaching is never easy: I have ten years in doing it, and I'm really good, but my job is not easy.  Fun, yes.  Exciting, yes.  An intellectual challenge, oh yes.  But it is not easy.

So you have the neediest teachers at the hardest schools having exceptionally hard times - the kind of experience that means burn out even if you do survive a layoff cycle.  There just isn't a safety net in SFUSD.

Based on what the reformers told me later, SFUSD seems to know that there is a lot of site-based freedom.  However, they seem less interested in building a safety net than building a boot camp - or maybe they just can't see a middle ground.  I do suspect this will be the big tension of the whole "re-design" this year.

For the record.

The purpose of this blog is largely to keep my endless teacher blathering off my facebook page.

That said, dang.  Open Court is watching you.

Guide to School Personnel: Team Kindergarten

I know there are bright young Kindergarten teachers out there, just starting their careers...but I don't know any.  Kindergarten teachers always seem to be in their late twenties or older.  I think this is because Kindergarten really is different.  It's not like teaching any other elementary grade, and you either like it or loathe it.  The people who like it will never leave, and those who don't will flee as soon as possible.

I think Kindergarten used to get more than its fair share of burnt-out teachers, too.  Old-school Kindergarten is just alphabet, singing and playtime, right?  And those things aren't HARD, are they?  (Note world-weary, dripping sarcasm.)  So if you have a veteran who really needs a career change or a couple years in the book room, put that person at Kindergarten if you're too lazy to deal with the paperwork of evaluations and documentations and all that stuff.

These days, that doesn't really work anymore.  Kindergarten has some serious academic standards, and in SFUSD it's full day.  You are going to spend a lot of time crawling on the floor.  You will teach reading and also nose-blowing technique.  Shoes will be tied until you develop carpal tunnel.  It is not a job for the weak.

However, Kindergarten teacher fashion still branches down just two paths: Pooh Bear and Anti Pooh Bear.

Pooh Bear Kindergarten fashion is the home of your fabric painted sweatshirts, your wooden jewelry, your Disneyland memorabilia.  Denim is popular, and relaxed-fit is assumed no matter what the body type of the wearer.  These Kindergarten teachers have special clothing for at least seventy three holidays, some of which are extremely esoteric and known only to other Kindergarten teachers.  These teachers tend to make extremely cute parent presents.

Anti Pooh Bear teachers buy each other sweatshirts with cats on them as gag gifts.  This can lead to acrimony.  They know when the next Target and/or H&M designer collaboration is coming out and they have an opinion on it.  They tend to be really excellent shoppers and scroungers, which leads to very interesting and well-equipped classrooms and projects.   They have a favorite designer and are eagerly awaiting Sarah Burton's first collection as creative director at Alexander McQueen.

Needless to say, I am absolutely of the latter group.