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.

Summer School rumination

It's funny. I think "rumination" comes from the same root as "ruminant" which is a cud-chewing mammal, like a cow or sheep. I've been chewing over a few ideas regarding my work right now, and you, dear reader, are the Oh So Lucky Recipient of my conclusions.

I started this blog as a class assignment in grad school and continued it, thinking it would be about lesson plans and great readings and cute things kids said at school. In reality, it's been more about my career in general, recession, the resulting lack of jobs, and the weirdness of working lots and lots of extremely part time jobs right after getting a *&%&*#@$% master's degree... but I digress. It's pretty much been about my own navel.

So, as I examine the aforementioned navel, I find that I tend to freak out a little sometimes. I was grading papers last night, after a lovely summer weekend spent largely not grading papers, and when I sat down to get to work I pretty much dissolved in tears over the ridiculousness of the scene. I felt a bit like a fraud; I don't know how I'm going to teach these kids what they need in four short weeks and I'm not being told I have to do any particular thing, so all I'm left is "professional judgement". I'm thoroughly enjoying every minute with my class, but I worry that they're not going to show improvement on the post tests. Not that I have serious reason to worry based on their performance thus far, I just worry in general. Just ask my dear husband.

This summer session is like a regular school year in microcosm. Assess. Instruct. Allow some free exploration. Instruct again. Assess (and hope like heck they've improved so a good statistic can be reported on a spreadsheet somewhere). I just hope it's being done well, and above all else that the kids are getting what they need. I do have an awfully good class, so I have reason for optimism.

Summer School!

Well, I spent the first month or so of summer break doing a combination of relaxing and stressing about my job prospects. It has been nice to stay up at night with my husband and the other grownups around here (we've had some house guests), sleep late, and of course to have more relaxed time with my daughters. Fortunately, though my work situation for the fall is still in limbo, I did have summer school to look forward to.

Said summer school started this week. I'm teaching the fourth grade, and I love it! I already knew many of the students, or at least recognized them. Most are from Favorite Elementary School, which is where classes are being held. Students from the whole district can attend, though, so there are some new faces. This summer session is targeting Title I, Migrant, and Title VII students; this means basically no change in demographics from the regular school year, so it feels just like home!

This is the first time I've taught summer school, and for starters I'm so grateful for the opportunity! I was lucky to be hired: the administrator running the show approached me about it during the spring and I immediately told her I'd been hoping to teach in the summer and would be thrilled to do it. As it turns out, those jobs were never even posted on the district's personnel site, so I doubt I would have had a chance if I hadn't already known and worked with Ms. Administrator.

From a professional standpoint, though, summer school is an interesting  opportunity. We have only 16 half days: four, four-day weeks. I have to do superquick assessments and dive in to targeted reading and math lessons as fast as possible. There's not a lot of time in which to make a difference for the kids, but on the other hand there's not the rigid, punitive air of the regular school year either. I want to show growth between pre- and post-tests, but what I choose to do and how I do it are largely left up to my professional judgement.

This is an interesting point. As a recap for readers who may not care to re-read my posts of the past two years, I got my master's degree and teaching license in the summer of 2009. I then entered the worst job market in memory (the Great Depression being outside most people's memories by now). I was fortunate to be hired as a long term substitute teacher, a gig that ended up lasting fully half of the school year (pretty great for subbing!) in one of my own daughters' former kindergarten classrooms. It was great. The second half of the year was spent rushing about between four part time jobs: Occasional Substitute, Title I Academic Interventionist for Rural Charter School (K-7), Math Interventionist for Favorite Elementary School (prepping students for their state assessments), and Tutor. Whew. All these jobs and still not more than 25 or 30 hours a week! But they were all in my field and what with the way the schedules and the travel time lined up there wasn't room for any other gigs.

So with my interventionist work, I was quite beholden to state and federal guidelines, and found myself administering a number of assessments and generally fitting students of all shapes into neat square boxes in order to satisfy said state and federal requirements (such as compliance with Title I or getting enough of them to pass their state assessment that the school would get out of AYP jail). While I have absolutely no complaints about the administrators with whom I worked last spring, and while I do feel they treated me respectfully and as a professional, the way I had to run my classes was entirely different than summer school. Did you wonder if I was going to bring it back around to my main topic? But yes, I did have a point!

Summer school is up to me. If the kids attend to my lessons, some improvement can be recorded, and we all have fun, then it is counted as successful. So week 1 for my 4th graders consisted of some pretests, a number of cursive and grammar exercises, math facts memorization, and some arts and crafts. And a lax attitude about how long recess should be. I'm used to developing plans more slowly, but now that we're 25% through, I feel that I know where we're going. I'm going to throw the decoding lessons out the window; it's all about comprehension. I'm going to back off on the worksheets on equivalent fractions or ratios and probability; we'll focus on the multiplication table and then probably drill on all basic facts, along with some online math games. The kids will do some silent reading, but most of that time will be used  by my read-aloud: The Lightning Thief. I hope to also share a whole bunch of books and graphic novels I picked up at the library on Greek Mythology as an extension of the read-aloud. And at the end of each week we'll do some art projects. Last week it was pop-up cards; I'd found a reading comprehension exercise where they read a page of instructions and then answer questions. Naturally I felt they should be able to actually make the cards. I think next week it'll be origami. This will require a lot of preparation, and the parapro and I will have to know what we're doing ahead of time. Maybe I can find animated how-to's on the internet. If I can incorporate some reading and written responses in the activity like with the pop-ups, that would be great.

I think I'm off to google origami now. And then a late afternoon iced coffee. Ahhh.

A new season commences

The beginning of summer. Our icky weather has finally warmed up. Climate change has done a number on my area this year. First we had such a drought that the governor officially declared it a disaster or emergency or whatever it is he declares things so as to make available money to help the victims (in this case the victims are farmers who are  trying to grow stuff in the high desert and will now be paid not to grow anything.). Then we had snow and rain all through the spring, which may or may not have been enough to officially change the drought situation but at least it made my dandelions happy. I'm talking Seasonal Affective Disorder in May and even the first of June. Now the sun has come out, the temperatures are in the 70s, but it's humid. I mean, we're east of the Cascade mountains, in the high desert beginnings of the Basin and Range Province. It's a dry place. But for the past couple of days it felt like East Tennessee in the spring: humid but not especially hot yet. At least I can go without a sweater now, but it's still weird.

School's out today. My sixth grader graduated yesterday, with tons of awards and a real live diploma. I cried through the whole thing, especially when the superintendant was reading Oh the Places You'll Go! as a last story for the sixth graders. I remember their first day of kindergarten so well, and now she's off to middle school. Sigh. At least I don't have any grey hairs yet.

In other news, the annual job hunt is in full swing. Got a "thanks but no thanks" letter from one of the elementary schools I'd applied to, and nothing yet from the other three. I'm branching out into not-as-much-in-my-field type jobs in this search. Our local theater and cultural center has an Outreach & Education director position, another social service type group has an education director, there are a couple of preschools on the radar, and I still have a lead on a not-yet-posted 5th grade position at Favorite Elementary. And adjunct teaching at the community college. So we'll see what develops.

I started this blog almost 2 years ago as a class assignment (ed tech, first quarter of the MAT program). I continued it mainly because it's kind of fun, but I can't help but notice that a disproportionate amount of the entries are all about Employment rather than Education. I guess our state's budget crisis (an additional 9% sliced off all state departments including Dept of Ed, on the heels of some other sort of big nasty cuts) means this will be a point of obsession for a while. At least I'm qualified if anything does open up, not that that was enough with any of the jobs I've applied for yet. Ugh.

Well, today's my 14th wedding anniversary. Enough doom and gloom. I'm going to bake a cake.

The end is nigh

The school year is almost done! I'm not looking forward to most of June and August without work. But I'll be teaching summer school in July, and needless to say I'm really looking forward to it. I'll be doing 4th grade, which is exciting (one of my own daughters is going into 4th, so it's personally meaningful too as I intend to help her along the way while I'm helping all those other people's children). It will be held at My Favorite Elementary School, and I'll get to collaborate with the sixth grade teacher my eldest had this year. The guy rocks. He's all about pushing the kids, creating poetry and sculpture (he has a kiln at home so they did a lot of pottery) and dramatic performances and pop-up books and so on to summarize their learning on all sorts of topics from forest biodiversity to Shakespeare. My daughter definitely grew in his class, and working with him will be fabulous. Also, if all goes exceedingly well, a sixth grade position could maybe possibly, but hush it's Not Official Yet, be opening up at that school and the principal told me this in secrecy and it sounds like he'd like to hire me but it's Not Official Yet so I can't count on anything (story of my life lately). If that sentence made any sense at all I'd eat my hat. Not really because it's still snowing around here and I'll need the hat.

Anyway. My daughter's 6th grade teacher was great and I'll be working with him this summer and possibly next year. There. Sheesh. There was also an elementary position at another nearby school that was posted in the middle of last week. I applied, and tomorrow (unless I get called to work) I think I'll pop in and cold-call the principal over there. I could walk to that school in about 15 minutes. That would be sweet. I don't really care what grade level it is, though I'm thinking I'd like upper elementary. I've been reading a lot about writing strategies and would really like to put it into practice. I know, I know. My day will come. It's just very frustrating right now because I'm not making anything like enough to pay the bills right now, the nest egg is rapidly depleting, and even with a full time contract job I probably will have us breaking even at best. I haven't earned any brownie points around here lately in the fiscal responsibility department. But full time work (I mean actual full time, not this working 5 days a week and somehow only netting about 19 hours routine) would be a big step in the right direction. I'll need a second job though. Sigh. At least in my state all the gas stations are full serve. I could put that master's degree to work pumping gas after school. And there's a station a couple of blocks from here. Sheesh.