job job job

I officially accepted the interventionist position. The only real drawback I can predict about it is that it's a bit of a drive from here, in the snow, uphill both ways. It's about 30 miles from my home, and I need to allow for at least 45 minutes to get there, especially in the snow and ice. And I have to call my husband each time I arrive at the school to let him know I got there OK (there are some notorious stretches of road along the way) and again when I'm on my way home. And I'll be doing it in the 20-something years old pickup truck with No Radio because he needs the Regular Car for in-town work and child chauffeuring. This will be difficult. I will have to Be Alone With My Thoughts for like two hours each day I go up there. Alone with my thoughts but unable to write down lists. Gonna have to fix the radio situation.

Anyway, I think it's going to be a good thing. If I thought teaching kindergarten on short notice was a challenge, how's intervention support for grades K-7 going to feel? I think it will be exciting. Reading is the main focus, but because of bureaucratic stuff it will be kept to less than half of my time there (probably hovering around 45%). For kids with tons of need in reading, I may be able to incorporate reading skills into some math work, as that will be around 45% of my time. Writing will likely round out the remaining 10%, and of course that's got some overlap with reading so it should be a system that can meet the kids' needs.

I want to start researching and preparing for this, but I'm not sure where to start. I don't know who the kids are, what they need, or what kind of work load I'm really looking at. I hope I can accomplish a  good deal of it within the alloted hours, as it doesn't appear I'll be paid for prep time. I'm already used to a lot of unpaid overtime, but when it's one's own (even temporary) classroom it's a little different. Then again, the director says I'll be free to craft my own program, and I'm sure I'll have a designated work area if not classroom, so I'll come up with a workable system. If I can just capture that commute time for productive lesson planning somehow, it could be great. I can't see myself talking into a little recorder, and obviously writing in a lesson plan book is out. Any ideas on how to work while driving and not end up in a ditch?

One must steel oneself to work in at Title I school

I was just reading this post from Elementary, My Dear...

She mentions hurting for her students who are so impoverished that a foam snowflake is enough to make their day, seeing as how they'd otherwise have no gift at all. I can relate. My students (and my daughters' classmates, as they attend the same school) are a struggling lot. Homes filled with extended families or multiple families. Parents without jobs. Parents in jail. Older siblings and cousins in gangs. Parents who've lost these kids to foster care. (Some parents who perhaps should lose the kids as they're not doing a heck of a lot of active or healthy parenting, but I digress). Homes without heat, where the baby's formula freezes solid when you set it down for a half hour. Immigrant families who don't speak much English and are hoping for something to improve for their children. Hard working, underpaid families surviving through the food bank and thrift stores and pawn shops and food stamps and unemployment (for as long as it lasts) and the free clothes closet at the school and Operation School Bell. Dustboard furniture and chipped plates and dollar store barbies and no time or energy for checking the kids' homework folders or reading a bedtime story.

And local legislators are planning to vote against tax adjustments on the wealthiest that would not improve the schools' budgets but would just maintain them at their current too-low levels. Disgusting.

OK, not exactly the end, but changey-changey

Today was the first day of our winter vacation. I about got "Merry Christmas"ed out by the end of Friday, but when in Rome...
     Anyway, I'm hoping to do very little work in the classroom over the break. I'll have two weeks worth of lesson plans to write (from home) for reading and writing. And number corner (for the Bridges Math calendar and numeracy work that happens in "my" part of the schedule). After the break I'll be doing mornings for the first 2 weeks, and Official Teacher will probably take over full time after that. I know I'm repeating myself, but I'm sorting this all out and hoping it will come out looking like gainful employment soon!
     So today I got a call from the charter school I interviewed with back in the summer. (shameless self promotion: I heard from an acquaintance that they'd had around 200 applicants for the two positions. Making it to the Final Four is pretty awesome. If 200 is accurate. But still.) So the director of the school called me to offer me a part time position with them as an academic interventionist. This is sort of a reading and math specialist, but slightly altered because I don't have a reading certification. And no one with the certification is likely to want to work 10 hours a week. At a little little town half an hour from my already fairly small town. So anyway, they found a way to revise the job description so it's kosher to have any licensed teacher doing it, and then they called me. Cool, as far as I can tell.
     My husband and I are discussing this and sleeping on it before I respond to the offer. Though some guaranteed hours each week would be good, and the work itself would be great, we're hoping it wouldn't get in the way of my ability to accept subbing jobs, since I'd absolutely need them to survive! I'm kind of thinking that it would be a doable scenario, though, because the director said they could adjust my schedule as needed so that I could take sub jobs, provided I had enough notice.
     The job does sound interesting. It would involve working with small groups,  no more than four kids at a time, and focusing on reading and math. There would likely be a bit of writing in there too. The school is K-7 (probably adding 8 next year or the year after), so I'd work with a wide age range. I think it sounds really challenging and interesting, and I would pretty much get to design the curriculum. I kind of think I'd like it as long as I can cobble together enough other gigs to keep the bills paid. I'm off to google response to intervention. Crossing Fingers!

The end is near

Well, the day I knew all along would come, has come. It looks like I get one more week with my little kindergarteners, then winter vacation, then two weeks of half days while we "transition" Official Teacher back into the classroom, and then I sub. I substitute my ass off. I substitute like it's my calling, like it's the greatest way to spend the second semester. I sub like I'm so grateful for the wide ranging learning opportunity that is not knowing when you'll work a day and when you'll stay home trying to not fight with your spouse because you're both really worried about money and why did this whole go into debt to get the degree so you can NOT get a job thing sound like a good idea anyway? I'll sub. OK. I'll sub like I don't miss the class. My class. Like I don't miss making lesson plans and going to staff meetings and hanging up the poster for the Letter of the Week. I'll sub like there's no tomorrow.

Or maybe I'll teach preschool. Head Start (a wonderful and valuable program if ever there was one) is hiring. If the pay is approaching OK, maybe I'll do that instead of sub. Which of course would mean stepping out of the school district a little and maybe not being quite as well set up for getting a contract if anything does open up. ARGH!

At least everyone was nice to me. A few teachers and paraprofessionals privately told me they thought I was doing well and should be there for the whole year. The principal was nice; he said I'd be #1 on the sub list, and so would be called first any time one is needed. That could pan out well, but there are no guarantees. We don't know when someone will be out. I can't figure out what to do. One more week of being their teacher. Better make it a good one, even if I seem to want to cry about four or five times a day.

Assessment time ... and holiday art?

Ten days to go, starting in about an hour, before winter break. Four days to administer assessments for progress reports. I sure hope a) I didn't forget anything critical from the 2nd quarter report card when I was writing up the assessment forms yesterday at my dining room table, and b) the little monkeys scholars can demonstrate more knowledge than last time they were formally assessed. I have a hunch they will; a bunch that started the year off in the "intensive" category from our DIBELS testing have shot right up to benchmark status in emergent reader skills, which is Very Promising. And of course there was Friday's awesomeness. General good learnin' all around. If only my little Bound to Repeat Kindergarten girl could wake up enough to understand that "cat" does not, in fact begin with /m/, nor do most of the other words I throw at her in our practice sessions. M was the very first letter of the week way back when, and it seems that it's never clicked for her that other sounds exist out there too. Breaking apart words into phonemic segments is weirdly challenging for kids this age, but Everyone Else in the Class has grasped it to some degree or another. Sigh. Upping her interventions so we can document all this in EBIS.

And if I can squeeze in two handprint calendar pages a day for the holiday craft/gift we're making, we will have it done in time to be all put together and sent home with the kids before the end of next week.  And we have the annual winter concert this week, with much disruption in the schedule. Oh, and I need to put up some sort of holiday crafty art thing in the hallway display area before Thursday. I'm thinking poinsettias made from red paper and maybe some glitter. Seasonal yet secular.

Woo Hoo! Monday here I come.

We are a Well Oiled Kindergarten Machine

So we start every morning in my kindergarten class with a routine of letter and number practice (with the kids all sitting on the rug, of course).

Disclaimer: Actually, we really begin the day by taking a trip through the cafeteria, grabbing take-out "food", trouping back to the extreme opposite side of the school (including climbing a staircase with food in hands-- no way to use handrails there!), setting down food, unpacking backpacks, stowing backpacks on backs of chairs, hanging up jackets (on hangers...ugh. Takes forever.), eating breakfast, wiping up spilled milk, opening those maddening little foil topped juice containers, pouring out unfinished drinks in the sink, stacking the paper "boats" all this glory came in, putting wrappers and unfinished food in the alotted trash bucket, setting the bucket in the hallway for easy pickup, and finally settling down on the rug for some learnin'. And I take attendance and occasionally wolf down a granola bar during this period.

Then the day begins for real. We have a calendar routine which is part of our math curriculum and which is pretty comprehensive. It includes, in addition to the expected purely calendar aspects, pattern recognition, counting and numeral recognition, some science, some art, and so on. Quite cool actually. Then we go into a fairly rote but useful alphabet and phonemic awareness routine. We focus on a different letter each week and review it and the rest of the letters, along with our growing word wall of high frequency words. After this we take a bathroom break and get ready for an hour of literacy center rotations.

Most of these exercises are designed for whole-group choral response. We've been doing this since the first week of school, with its current, revised and improved format since about a month in to the school year. Of course, I haven't always had full participation, or heard everyone in unison. But yesterday, the Kindergarten Goddes was smiling upon us. Everyone assembled at the appointed time, enthusiastically offered answers and predictions at the calendar, moved around the area (mostly) smoothly, and recited the admittedly rote material Perfectly and In Unison. Without me reciting along with them! I was so proud of the little monkeys scholars! And best of all, one of our building specialists (the speech & language pathologist) was there to observe it! I think we're getting somewhere with all this learnin' business.

Next up: progress reports. Then, start using the new digital projector. Which of course doesn't have its outlet wired yet, meaning I'll have to rig up an extension cord. But if I can get 28 kids to perform that well on their ABCs and so on, I can string a cord across the ceiling and down a wall of windows to get it plugged in. (We're back to 28. 3 days after Poor Little Ward of the State moved away, a new student arrived. He brings with him what appear to be good foundational skills, especially considering he doesn't speak English!)

Shiny new things for the classroom!

The good news: I'm getting a digital projector installed in my classroom tomorrow! (a Smart Board is "soon" to follow. read: sometime this school year).

The not as great (but ultimately insignificant news: we have to relocate to the computer lab for the day! I have to take a bunch of portable activities and squirmy kindergarteners out of our fortress of solitude and somehow teach them something in the process! 

I think we'll be taking periodic walks outside to burn off energy that can't be sustained around that expensive equipment.

Maybe with enough crayons (and the aforementioned exercise breaks) we'll have a good day. Hope so! 

Now I'm starting to think about things I can do with the new gear. Air PBS (or similar) video clips of phonics-related material? Make a class video (something with counting maybe?) My husband suggests collaborating with older classes to have them make Power Point presentations about the alphabet, or other appropriate stuff, for my class. It could then be easily shared with other classes, and the tech-centric teachers in the upper elementary grades could have good assignments for their kids in the process. So cool!

Losing Sleep

My little guy who's been moved around with one of his siblings was moved again yesterday. They called the classroom from the office telling me to send him down there after school. Later I found out that he and a sister were picked up there by DHS workers and taken to a new foster home outside of town. This time he won't stay at our school. I kept waking up last night thinking about him and his siblings; two of them are still with foster parent #1, while he and the one other sister have moved to #s 2 and now #3 just since the school year started. I don't know why they couldn't stay at #2, or why the siblings have been separated. We were holding steady for a while there, since they still all attended our school and could see each other a bit. I had all his sisters dropping into my classroom during the day, when their classes were at recess or just when their teachers OK'ed it. They'd sit with my little guy and work on his projects with him. He just glowed whenever they got together. Now I don't know what will happen to these kids. If I'd known they were sending him away, I'd have at least given him a hug on the way out. They must be so scared, and angry and lonely. It just makes me want to cry. In my delerium at 3 am I pondered the possibility of becoming a foster parent so I could just magically step in and make everything better for these kids. But now's not the time for that, and of course I  couldn't be his teacher and mom. I guess what it boils down to is that all I can do at this point is care, and that does very little.