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!

Mission Accomplished: summer birthdays all done!

Big news from the home front: all our birthdays for the year have been successfully accomplished! The eldest turned 11 this week, and our as-yet-unfinished upstairs made a fabulous roller rink for her party. The area will soon be our actual home, but for now it's one big big big room with no furniture and a nice smooth floor. Great fun was had by all.
In other news, I've got no news to report. Still job hunting, still looking at substitute teaching, still haven't heard from the charter school. Hoping I can stand the suspense until it all gets settled within the next few days.
Fingers crossed. At least they say I come highly recommended (they being people who've checked my references)! If it were a normal year I'd have a job or two by now. It's not normal, so I'm just grateful for the affirmations.
fingers crossed

teaching my favorite students

With the oldest daughter away this week at SOU's Academy camp for fabulous above average talented and amazing kids (I'm so proud of her!), it's just the little big kids here at home. And with grad classes only two days this week (plus an interview on Wednesday! Crossing fingers!) I have a lot of time to spend with my 8 and almost-3 year old girls.
My 8 year old is a willing guinea pig and experimental mathematician, so we've been playing with multiplication and trying out some new (to me) ways of finding these types of math facts other than rote memorization and the old fashioned standard algorithm. She eyes me skeptically when we try the array model I learned recently, but she's game and lo and behold the answers are correct! I think she'll do well in third grade next year.
Littlest kid is mostly running around sans pants and working on remembering about that special potty chair in the bathroom. I'm trying to introduce some more alphabet games, but the formal education stuff is mostly mom reading to kid. That's the most fun anyway, and it's like finding out that your most favorite comfort food is nutritious and slimming. We'd rather just read a good stack of library books anyway. To her credit, Littlest has been exhibiting some good self analysis. When questioned on her reasons for a half hearted bite she gave her poor sister, she allowed that she'd been bothering 8 year old and should go play by herself. After a mandated apology, she happily bounced off to her play kitchen, and peace again reigned in the living room.
My sweet husband's out filling a box full of helium balloons to send to Eldest Daughter at camp. What better way to be reminded that your quirky family misses you than to open a box and have a swarm of balloons randomly fill your dorm room?

And a big sigh of relief marks the vernal equinox

A few key points. The winter term has finished. I completed a 175 page work sample (sort of part 1 of my master's thesis- part 2 to follow in the spring term). I accomplished my research project on assisting students spiffy up their organizational skills, complete with cool graphs and charts. I finished the student teaching with the sixth graders, and only teared up that one time. I accomplished all nineteen credits, from Implications of Poverty to Human Relations to Special Methods in Science and Math to the aforementioned Action Research.

And here's the kicker: I still want to be a teacher! The winter term was full of twelve hour days, including many weekends when I had to leave the house to get work done. It was full of unwashed dishes and laundry. It was full of thirty distracted minutes a day with my kids. It was full of my husband getting really annoyed with me for being so busy and distracted and not asking for help enough! And then my car broke down! I certainly don't want to relive anything like the past three months, but I sure do still want to be a teacher.

So spring break is here. The weather is nice, sunny-snowy-sunny. I've been spending all day every day with my beautiful daughters. We made banana bread. We started digging our garden (a good faith move on my part, seeing as how we may end up needing to move away for work and I don't want to and maybe if I'm invested in the veggie garden that will somehow mean a school here will magically hire me). We walked to the library. In an hour or so we're going to visit my parents for a couple of days. In short, aaaahhhhhhh. Sure, I'm bringing the laptop along, so I can do some revisions on papers for my faculty adviser and streamline the social studies unit I'll teach in the spring. But I'll be doing it sitting in the sun by the creek on my parents' farm while the girls run around with the dogs!

Spring term will be a most welcome change, as predicted by faculty back in the summer when we first started this adventure. Student teaching for the whole school day (only a little more than I was already there, since the schedule ended up being about 2/3 of the day during the winter) and one class. One! And as much as I don't want to move away from my little town, my little hometown, my kids' only home, I am going to Portland in two weeks for a job fair (wow, we art majors never got anything like that!). I'll get to see old friends, and I'll get to give the whole applications to other towns' schools thing a shot. If we have to relocate, we're prepared for that (although packing up this house will be nuts). But I'm hoping that veggie garden does the trick.

taking time to breathe before the fall quarter starts

It's a rare quiet weeknight tonight, one of the last for a while with a fairly light workload hanging over my head. Classes start in five days, and though there's a paper due on the first day of one of the four classes we're taking, there's not much else to do this week but turn up for the fall practicum hours in the classroom. I've been squeezing in some volunteer time at my daughters' school, getting caught up on the family's eBay business, and trying to give my two-year-old as much extra attention as possible after a month of being away forty hours a week!
I'm enjoying the peace immensely: my husband crashed out really early tonight after a long day of running all sorts of errands, taking my car to the mechanic, and putting the finishing touches on a rental house before the new tenants move in this weekend. I'm letting my ten-year-old be distracted from practicing her flute because the distraction at the moment is working with the seven-year-old to scrub clean the stairwell! Weird but true. And the two-year-old who spent all afternoon fussing and insisting on constant attention is making abstract art with her crayons, and actually on paper this time!
This week has been eventful in the sixth grade class where I've been assigned for the fall practicum (and where I'll begin student teaching in a few months). One boy in particular has been acting out like crazy: milking a minor injury (perhaps even faking a bit... I'm just saying...) whenever he thinks it might get him out of work, throwing fits and crying when he gets called on it or reminded to just do his assignments, and even pestering and kicking one or two classmates. I'm hoping to be able to give him a little attention when he's not being naughty; I told him the other day that I'd caught him being smart (I really had: he had some insightful and even almost philosophical answers to what could have been a super simplistic assignment) and that now I'd know what to expect from him!
Time for bed; got to manage the kiddos and be fresh in the morning!