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!

How I Spent My Winter Vacation

Well, I'm still not a full time employee of any one school (though I do manage to work approximately forty hour weeks between my three or so different gigs); this means I'm paid hourly and therefore am coming up $hort this month, what with that whole Christmas/oops: separation of church and state Winter Vacation thing. Not that I'm not loving it. In between the hacking cough, runny nose, achy head, and sore throat, I've managed to squeeze in some nicely spiked egg nog, some gift wrap tearing extravaganzas, and some mighty late mornings.

Of perhaps more interest (to myself, obviously, as no one reads this blog as far as I can tell) is the lesson planning I've been working on for math. I teach math interventions for first through eighth graders at Rural Charter School and in an after school program for third and fourth graders at Favorite Elementary. I've had my students take the easyCBM progress monitoring tests to get a handle on where the holes are. These came out this year from the University of Oregon and are aligned to the new Oregon math standards, which are in turn aligned to the NCTM common core standards. Bureaucratically this is tricky this year, but it's essentially a good idea to move to the common core. The tests the kids took can be pulled up in a usable report with details of what skills are lacking. I've been going through the reports for all my students at both schools and generating documents with areas of concern listed out. Then I can target their weaknesses with select activities and worksheets (yay!! worksheets! who doesn't love 'em? but it's what I do). My biggest complaints with this approach are that it's tedious to pull all the data for the twenty five or thirty kids I teach and that the management is a bit tricky when I've  got a group of students all doing different pages and all honestly needing my attention in order to pull it off. And by attention, I really mean that often that's the primary thing they need. When not given the option of spacing out, passing notes, or  otherwise picking answers willy nilly in order to just be done with it, my students tend to do well and to show improvement.

So I'm getting prepared both for Monday back at school and for this Friday evening, when we host our New Year's Eve party. We've done it enough times now to call it our Annual New Year;s Party. Better go get rested up for it while I can. In the meanwhile, I think I'll feast my eyes on my lovely 1965 retro My Favorite Careers Barbie (aka The Teacher with the "PhD in Fashion"). Check her out at the top of the post. Other than the horribly Not Sensible Shoes, she's pretty rad. Thanks Dave! Made my xmas cheerier!

Examining the pedagogy of rti

I've thoroughly settled into my role as an intervention specialist. I do about 30 hours a week in Rural Charter School, doing direct instruction on reading and math at-risk kids in grades K-8. Then I hustle back into town to do an after school math intervention at Favorite Elementary. Then about three times a week I rush over to the local Young Adults Transitions House to tutor college kids who are in a residential treatment/ finding yourself/ figuring out how to grow up program. So it turns out that though I thought I was getting my master's degree to teach sixth grade, in fact it was so that I could work with all manner of at-risk youth, ages 6 to about 22.

The tutoring is quite simple; I just keep track of the students' syllabi, assign them the reading they're supposed to do anyway, make time management and study suggestions, edit papers, and give moral support. No outside prep required and I enjoy it.

The after school math at Favorite Elementary is slightly more complex because the goal is to boost kids who didn't pass their state assessments last year into the passing category this year. And this year  we have a fully revamped set of state math standards (finally aligned with NCTM standards and generally well thought out) and a new state assessment to go with it. So materials that worked well last year aren't quite right this year and I'm doing a lot of research and cross referencing to get the right stuff to these kids. But their attitudes after school is quite good and my Middle Kid gets to join us. So of course I like it.

My main job at Rural Charter is going well. I'm given a lot of autonomy and professional judgment about how to run my interventions and progress monitoring. The part that's on my mind right now is trying to be sure I'm following the spirit of the Response to Intervention model while working within the limitations of a tiny budget. I pretty much have one program for a given skill/grade level, and if it doesn't work the only response I can think of is trying to apply that program differently. I've managed to tweak the schedule here and there to give certain students one-on-one time. This works well, I think, for kids with certain distracting behaviors, or a certain type of noncompliance. I'm still relying on the same curriculum to reach them, so I'm pretty much just crossing my fingers.

I am seeing some gains though. A couple of seventh graders have been graduated out of my groups due to dramatic gains in their progress monitoring scores! And I feel like I'm hitting a good rhythm with the majority of the rest of my students; I can tell how to express to them that we're sticking with high standards. Basically, if you're not 6 or 7 with a certain level of unmedicated hyperactivity, I'm going to use that "SLANT" technique. In a nutshell, this is requiring students to sit up, participate, and show that they're paying attention. It's amazing what a difference in performance I see when I require them to scoot their chairs in to the table and sit straight.

Any thoughts or recommendations on RTI out there? I'm basically a general ed teacher by training who is sort of functioning as a special ed teacher, so I'm constantly looking for good ideas.

Off to school I go

Getting really into the new year (and kids haven't even started yet). I even had another job interview yesterday and was offered the position, but I'm going to turn it down and stay with Rural Charter. (It was a preschool teacher job, with future expansion into kindergarten and, probably, other elementary grades as this new school grows into a full private elementary school. Not for me though- I'm a bit too immersed in my mission as a Title 1 teacher- and the pay is half what I make now, so it's not an option anyway. Great to get the offer though.)

So it looks like I'll be the intervention specialist and an instructional coach at Rural Charter. Not sure what exactly this will entail, but it looks like it will be things I've already been doing, like getting the new math standards out to all the teachers, and so on. Very interesting work, and hey- I'm up to 27+ hours a week, which unfortunately still looms large as a worry. I need about 50 hours, but whatever. With some tutoring and possibly an after school intervention deal at Favorite Urban Elementary, I'll be significantly closer to full time this year than last.

Got to get ready for work now. Today is the first meeting for the Title 1 transition team: we're going from Targeted Assistance to Schoolwide this year (as in, 2011-12 will be schoolwide) and have to jump through a ton of hoops along the way. This morning, hoop #1. Bring it on.

Back to School

Well, I was lucky enough to get interviews for two different jobs here in town, but got neither one. So I'll be heading out to Rural Charter School five days a week (versus the three a week it was last year) and keeping my spirits up by doing an after school program at Favorite Elementary and possibly adjunct teaching at the community college. I like the charter school OK, but it's 45 minutes away and I don't have my own classroom up there. I've been too adrift for the past few months what with it being summer and all. Even teaching summer school in July didn't anchor me enough. I'm ready to go back to work. I won't get my own beautiful perfect classroom this year, but I might be able to almost pay the bills without leaving the profession. We have a number of folks living with us who will pitch in and help take up the slack on money, so maybe we'll survive this worst year yet of the recession. Worst for us anyway. The states have received their stimulus money, but the districts are holding on to it, so probably no hiring.

Anyway, off to think about intervention plans.

Summer's wrapping up. Time to look forward to September.

I've agreed to return to Rural Charter School and continue my Title 1 interventions. This year the job will be about 20 hours per week (last year it was 14) and the board was going to buy a reading curriculum, so lots of improvements. Frankly, I was looking for full time work, but those positions are few and far between around here.
One of my main hopes is that I can establish myself with a set classroom. This would improve the flow of students through the day's schedule immensely. Last year I sort of camped out in the director's office and then moved around the school, pulling kids out of their classes at the appointed times. This wasted a lot of time and the older ones (7th grade) often put on a big show of resisting coming with me. This is sort of understandable; if you don't feel great about being pulled out for extra help you're likely to try to resist. If you're 12 years old anyway. This year the school is adding 8th grade (so it's  now complete as a preK-8 school). I see even more of this silliness unless I change my methods. The school is housed in two converted houses, and space is at a premium. They're working on grants to convert and take possession of a third house on the property, but I don't expect it to be ready by September, or maybe not even this year. However, if I could stake a claim on even a small room, probably in the primary grades building, I could pretty much have the older students show up for our sessions on their own and I could get the younger ones from their classrooms across the hall or whatever without wasting any time. Then my transition time between sessions could be spent on work instead of on walking back and forth across the property.

I'm also hoping my 20 hours a week at the charter school can be condensed into three days, so that I can have two days for other work. This could bring my weekly schedule much closer to 40 hours. I may have an intervention gig at my own kids' Urban Public School, prepping students for their state assessments. If that's two full days a week, I'm in great shape. This scenario is basically how last spring semester went, only with more hours per day. I did about 5 hours at Rural, three days a week, and about 3 hours at Urban, twice a week. That added up to around half time, but spread out in such a way that it was pretty tricky to do any other work. If I do my 20 hours at Rural over 3 days and get two other 8 hour days at Urban, voila! I'm working full time! Still no benefits, but whatever. I'm going to push for this schedule. The Urban job likely won't start in September, but could be lined up to start in October. I think I'll contact the principal at Urban and propose this. It's based on an idea he presented to me back in May or June, and this would be a great solution both to my own income and career needs and, I think, to both schools' intervention needs.

The recession has thrown everything into a tizzy. I started grad school thinking that if I just applied myself and presented myself well to the powers that be, I'd be given at least a couple of job offers and my biggest dilemma would be choosing which grade level I wanted to teach. Then, while I was in school on my way toward my degree and  teaching license, everything went south and no one's retiring and the few teachers who do leave aren't being replaced and some are even getting RIF'ed and someone like me who's just entering her second year is pretty low on the totem pole. As a result, this blog has become much more about the job hunt and the economy and ohmygod how am I going to pay the bills than about education. Now that I'm somewhat at peace with the direction I'm headed for 2010-11, I will allow myself the luxury of talking for a minute about Actual Teaching. How novel!

I spent the month of July teaching summer school at Urban Public School. A caveat: I use the word urban rather loosely. I do not live in a big city. I live in a rural county; I'm in the downtown area (really downtown in a loft in a converted commercial building) of the town that is the county seat, and my kids' school (which I'm calling Urban Public School) is a few blocks away in the 'hood of our community. I like this and wouldn't have it any other way, but truly my town has a population of about 40,000 and is not contiguous with any other towns. It's the smallest place I've lived for more than about three months. It's not a big city. But within that context this is the most urban area of the whole county and we have a proportionate amount of the ills of most cities. Heck, I live directly next door to the local Gospel Rescue Mission- basically a soup kitchen and homeless shelter. I hear a lot of sirens. My daughters are familiar with gang graffiti. It's by no means a bad place, and I'm not going to make it out to be truly Inner City or anything.



The rest of the language arts block was spent reading The Lightning Thief to the class, with required brief written responses each day. Then during the second half of the month I brought in a dozen books from the public library on Greek mythology, and the students did a small written description and a portrait in markers and construction paper collage of their favorite character or  type of creature from the myths. We had quite a few Medusas. The draw of decapitation was too much to resist. Poseidon also loomed large. It was sort of an abbreviated version of Project Based Learning. We read some literature, did some research on pretty freely chosen subjects (any character they wanted was fine) and created a final presentation that was then put on public display at the district office. If I ever find myself with my own classroom of kids around this age I think I'll do a more in-depth version of this project. It was tons of fun, but the subject is so huge it would be better with more than a few hours worth of time.

All in all I was pleased with how the summer session went and how the kids responded to my lessons. It was really valuable.