At the end of Year Two: Consistency! Professionalism! Humor!

We're wrapping up the 2010-2011 school year, and I'm feeling great. My second year teaching has been a lot smoother and more  productive than year one. This, despite some upheavals in my personal life that have perhaps been a distraction (aka divorce!).


As an intervention specialist at Rural Charter School, I work in small groups and often one on one with students needing remedial work in reading and math. (This is where the possibility of a math specialist endorsement starts to look good. Maybe a reading endorsement later on down then the line. Then... PhD?) In addition to getting to know these kids really well, I've been fortunate to see some real and measurable improvement from many of them in these oh-so-important skill areas. Despite my mixed feelings about standardized testing, I have to say I like to see some good solid at-or above-grade level scores!


I'm so impressed with the work being done at Rural Charter School that I've enrolled my youngest daughter here for next year's kindergarten class. Her older sisters will stay at their respective schools, Favorite Elementary and Urban Middle, mainly because of their friends and the fabulous music and theater opportunities they have there. Both older girls play in the band/orchestra, sing in choir, and participate in musical theater. Their academics are strong (straight A's in 4th and 7th grades this year!) and they like their schools. Ain't broke, so no fixing required. However, the budget stinks so bad I have no adjective for it. This will mean half day kindergarten in the city and probably about 30 kids in a class. Not so awesome for my special snowflake of an almost-5 year old. I'll bring her with me to work at Rural Charter and she'll get a ton of individual attention, differentiation, and a really wholesome atmosphere. No gang graffiti here! Yes, the other schools my kids go to have such ugliness on the playgrounds. I don't want them growing up unnecessarily naive, but that's a bit much. Plus, I have a tradition of taking my girls to school on their first day of kindergarten and then sitting in the car and crying. With Littlest here, I won't have to give that up! And with all the commotion in our lives of late (aforementioned divorce and an impending move to a new house this summer) being with Mom at school will probably be good for her.


I saw the principal of Favorite Elementary and let him know whose class I'd like Middlest to be in next year (the one with the awesome tech grant for iPads!). I also informed him that I'd enrolled Littlest at Rural and he was completely understanding. He said that when he could hire me for Favorite she and I could both come back! Such nice affirmation!


So I'm winding down the year with a comfortable sigh of contentment. Job well done, kids are reading, daughters are well taken care of, and I can spend the summer settling into the new house, probably working part time, addressing my ongoing reading list, and enjoying the anticipation of 2011-2012!

Education update...

I'm back in school this spring! OK, it's just for one class, but it sure feels great to be pushing my education forward again. I'm beginning a graduate level certificate course called PrISM Oregon (stands for Preparation for Instruction in Science and Math). I'll be getting a certification in K-8 math education. This may lead toward a future math specialist endorsement with TSPC. So this term I'm enrolled in SED 595 through OSU. That's Science Education 595, and it's also known as Assessment and Evaluation in Free Choice Learning Environments. The focus is more on the design of educational components of institutions like museums, national parks, zoos, etc. These are places where the "students" are the general public and they are freely choosing to encounter the institutions' offerings, as opposed to a classic school situation and the approach to teaching and learning that would happen there. I'm finding this interesting and informative both to my work as a teacher and to my other life in which I'm a visual arts curator for a nonprofit artists' collective. Looking forward to more of this! Also excited about math education and moving toward what might someday soon be an actual endorsement in Oregon.

Ahhh. Spring is In the Air. Smells like... State Assessments!

new cut scores are upping the
rigor of Oregon's state assessments.

In a rare showing of silence and the appearance of focus, the kids in third through eighth grade here at Rural Charter School have been tiptoeing into the computer lab to tackle their Big Fat State Assessments. Round one should be finished tomorrow or the next day (they get three tries here in Oregon to meet the benchmark scores; our district requires all students to take the tests all three times or until they earn an "exceeds" score). I was feeling pretty optimistic about our student body overall, until the day I had to monitor the testing session. Some people just don't test well, and it's heartbreaking to watch them click on wrong answers when you know a simple conversation would get them thinking about the questions and would lead to a much better score.

As an intervention specialist, I spend all my time with the kids who won't pass, or who will but by the skin of their teeth. Some of them are just so close, but won't stick it out to keep their attention focused for the last quarter or so of the test. It makes me tired just thinking about it.

This year 70% of the kids have to meet state standards (in other words, "Pass the Test") for the school to meet AYP. In our tiny school, each kid is a big percentage. No more than 9 kids can fail either test (reading and math) or we don't meet AYP! Third grade looks good so far, though. They all passed their math tests and only one didn't pass his reading. And he was really close.

On always needing to help...

The desire to serve the common good must without fail be a requisite of the soul, a necessity for personal happiness; if it issues not from there, but from theoretical or other considerations, it is not at all the same thing. -Anton Checkhov

How is it that this need to get inside students' heads and analyze their intellectual development in order to help them never seems to die down? I just want to understand, because I just want to help. Maybe that need is something integral to the human condition. How else would a species become so successful and so dominant? We do well because we do good; we help each other as a contribution to the common welfare. 

This month, I really just want my second graders to move past counting on their fingers (that one's complicated; a caveat: I do it too, but want them to increase their range of strategies) and my fourth graders to really grasp syllabication.

On a nuts and bolts level: great news. I no longer do weekly progress monitoring. It just might not be a great use of my time. I do it periodically as needed, but not on a strict schedule anymore. This leaves significantly more time for actual teaching and it's just more fun. After the Month in Heck that was our winter universal screening I'm more than happy to give up some testing. Fairly sure the students are OK with it too!

Winter Benchmark Screening Time

Back to school this January has meant mid-year benchmark screening for the entire student body at Rural Charter School. While I don't exactly relish the role that tests play in our school year, I do appreciate the access to data that these assessments give us. I've gotten pretty used to administering the tests now and can see the overall structure of our school's RTI pyramid. Though there are always a few kids to worry over, the student body in general looks pretty good so far. The majority are at or above their grade level benchmarks and only a few in each class are in Tier 3. I'll spend the remainder of this week and all of next (which is only three days) wrapping up all the tests. I can't wait to get back into lessons with my students. Doing this sort of work is informative, is a crucial element to public schools in the NCLB era, and is great experience for me. I'd still rather be helping kids learn to read and spending time encouraging them to work hard.

Meanwhile, back in town at Favorite Elementary, I'm moving forward with the after school math classes. The principal there asked me to go to last night's school board meeting and share some of the work I and the other after school  teachers are doing. It's developing into a great program. Favorite Elementary is a Title 1 school with a large population of English Language Learners and a history of a shaky relationship with AYP. Thanks in part to an intervention program we did last year (which I was part of) we met AYP, but are still in the danger zone for a couple of small demographics. So this year the interventions are after school, and I like what I'm seeing. I'm able to spend 45 minutes to an hour with my students, and we have great conversations about strategies and skills that should help them in math in general and on their state assessments in particular. I'm glad my kids go to Favorite Elementary. I guess if we lived further out, I'd opt for Rural Charter though. That place is growing on me! In a nutshell, I really love my work. I'm grateful to be working, even if it's still not quite full time, and I just love the jobs. I feel so fortunate!