ahora vamos a contar

regreso

2009-09-07T16:04:00.002-05:00

wow, it's been literally YEARS since i've posted! i'm actually having my husband (oh yes, i'm married now!) create a complete website for me so the blog will likely be left by the wayside once again in the next few weeks. in the meantime, let's get caught up...

school started two weeks ago. i'm teaching fifth grade for the fourth year in a row, this time with inclusion and transitional English students - no bilingual instruction! i'm working on my Masters in bilingual/bicultural education and want to do a study on the endless tutoring our students are subjected to because of TAKS. my inclusion co-teacher is awesome, and we have a great time working together.

i'd spend more time babbling but my copy of "Pedagogy of the Oppressed" is shooting daggers at me. i'm avoiding graduate homework, imagine that!

definitely a maestra

2007-11-03T06:44:00.001-06:00

the tables have finally turned...

I HAVE STUDENT INTERNS!

i was supposed to have a student teacher last year, but when i changed grades in december that didn't make much sense to have someone watch me do things for the first time. but this year i at least have some of the material down and am at a good place in my overall teaching (this is my fourth official year), so i signed up again with a local university. and now i have two bright, shiny interns that come into my room nearly every day of the week.

it started off rather strangely... they would come in right in the middle of a lesson and i'd be in the middle of FULL TEACH. so i'd ignore them. kind of weird, knowing they were taking notes and wandering around and not having the time to do more than a quick explanation of what was happening.

then one of them started being flaky. she would schedule a time outside of her usual internship hours of observation, then not show up. then she didn't show up for her regular time, either. THEN, she came one day when i had a sub (but was still on campus) wearing shortie running shorts and a t-shirt that showed a little belly. i had already notified her supervisor of the inconsistent attendance, but was totally pissed about her violating not only the teacher dress code, but also the student one. we put her on a growth plan, and as far as i was concerned, down two strikes.

the other intern was much more professional, but then she taught her first lesson. totally unconfident. totally flustered. no "presence" to her at all - doesn't know how to harness her energy to command the kids' attention and get them to listen to her above all other distractions in the room.

the flake, on the other hand, is a bit too confident given the already poor impression i have of her. but she's excellent at mimicking my attention-getting strategies in class and has quickly learned from her co-intern's mistakes.

it's strange being in the position of teaching the craft to others now. they hear when i misspeak, make stupid mistakes, and get upset with a student for severe misbehavior. they know some of my weaknesses as a teacher and in spite of that come to me for advice and guidance. like i'm supposed to know what i'm doing.

weird, weird, weird.

but as slightly irritating as they were at first, now that they're teaching lessons i get a lot of flashbacks of my time in college. and i feel old.

on the road... with teachers?

2007-06-12T14:37:00.000-05:00

i'm going on my first official teacher training outside of the city. we are going to a texas town out in the middle of nowhere, a place i would definitely never intend to visit on purpose (if you've seen a bit of texas, you understand what i mean). i am spending two nights rooming with my teammate (we're cordial, but not buddies), which should be interesting, and i've got two days of science training to get through. i've kicked back a lot these first two weeks of summer so i think i'm ready for a brief return to work, but --as i realize every summer at teacher trainings-- i don't like other teachers. they ramble endlessly as if they are experts (i'm talking about my peers, not the trainers), they're rude and disrespectful, and sometimes they're just plain stupid.

and normally that's just a fact of life, but i've never had to deal with them for 48 hours straight. we'll see what happens.

educating eric

2007-05-18T18:33:00.001-05:00

this has been my first year having special education students in my classroom since our school does not offer bilingual services. since i have a whopping nine students that qualify for various special ed services, this article definitely freaked me out... especially since i have a kid or two that walks that emotionally disturbed line. read it and forward to your friends:
http://online.wsj.com/article_email/SB117890885164700178-lMyQjAxMDE3NzE4ODkxMDg4Wj.html

one would think

2007-04-29T10:07:00.000-05:00

...that post-TAKS, the madness would have ended. it has not. the failing kids require daily tutoring, extended guided reading/math, and time with the instructional specialist (who is not so special given that they rarely show up).

primary grades, appreciate what you've got. intermediate grades are hell. i'm seriously considering full-time grad school after next year.

guau

2007-02-20T17:54:00.000-06:00

TAKS day is the most boring day EVER. and if *I* was bored out of my mind, my poor, poor kiddos. but alas, round one is over. if they knew it, they knew it. if not, the tutoring and practice test madness continues. sigh. at least tomorrow will be taks-free.

san valentin

2007-02-15T21:43:00.000-06:00

my favorite teaching holiday is usually the craziest day of the year based on sheer sugar intake. need to post a pic of this year's loot, replete with Homies valentines. cuz that's how my kids roll.

knee deep

2007-02-15T21:40:00.000-06:00

pre-TAKS preparations SUCK. covering all reading-related signage in my room is ridiculous. pray for my kiddos to pass the first time so actual education might take place in two weeks instead of half-education, half-test-teaching.

hrm.

2007-01-26T18:31:00.000-06:00

1. Starting to teach a TAKS grade mid-year with no training sucks.
2. Having to tutor TAKS stuff three days a week sucks.
3. Getting an apple, cookie and two donuts for breakfast from your ridiculously sweet and silly students rocks.

I really really REALLY love my new students but oh my goodness do i HATE all the test-related bullshit. and the stress it puts on me and my students and co-workers. it's fucking ridiculous. and Bush wants to make things WORSE?

I had a day of planning and data analysis this week where I was on campus but not in the classroom. I had the unfortunate experience of seeing exactly how shitty subs can be. I had randomly gotten someone from the district-wide system and had to get to my classroom early to finish typing out sub plans. This old dude wanders in and starts rambling about Latin and Hispanic kids. I go over the technical details and my bilingual students' needs and he continues to ramble about race and bilingual student behavior. I tell him to go ahead and teach as if I weren't there while I collect my stuff for planning and sort out a few things in the room. He begins to teach my ESL lesson but keeps trying to speak to the kids in horribly broken Spanish... ESL is English class, meaning NO SPANISH. I find him a little dumb (my lesson plans are very explicit) but whatever. Then he goes over a worksheet called "Who is Samuel Adams?" And THEN HE SAYS: "You guys know who Samuel Adams is, right? Like the beer? Have you seen the commercials?" Whaaaaaaa the ffuuuuuuuuuu... So I high-tailed it out of there figuring ignorance is bliss. I had to pop in awhile later to grab some materials and he was getting frustrated with my kids poor work ethic with an open-book quiz. He threatened them with "This is not like real life. In real life you'll flunk and be poor and have to beg for money on the street."

How? What? Huh?

You just can't make this shit up. I am, of course, going to blacklist the weirdo. Sigh. Sometimes it's just soooo much easier to avoid other obligations and just stay in the classroom rather than try to find someone capable to take your place. Not that I'm Superwoman, but geeeez... Some of these folks have no business in my classroom. Or anyone else's. Have a good weekend.

snowed in

2007-01-17T12:50:00.000-06:00

i live alone with two cats. after the second day stuck in the house, i decided to venture out into the slush. this is my cat, who had just taken a snowball to the neck like a champ. then he promptly went inside. enjoy your day off, if you're so lucky!

you know you're not in primary anymore when...

2007-01-17T09:31:00.000-06:00

1. ice days are bad because you lose two days of TAKS prep.
2. you spend your ice days reading up on the chapter books you're teaching in class. because you have to know FOUR of them.
3. independent reading time is a rare treat.
4. the principal visits your room regularly to give TAKS pep talks.

i have to say that so far, things have been pretty good. my students have been on their best behavior and are very receptive to my style and newly-implemented rules. i got a greeting card from one of them on my third day with a very sweet message pronouncing me the best teacher and hoping that i'm comfortable in fifth grade. and in spite of the massive amount of adjusting i have to do, things have been manageable and my teammate has been very patient and thorough in answering my bazillions of questions. quizás la maestra ha encontrado su lugar.

if you're ice daying it, too, enjoy... i had MLK, Jr. Day off and haven't left the house since Sunday night, so i'm going a little bit bonkers. never thought i'd say it, but i can't WAIT for school!

but of course

2006-12-13T20:19:00.000-06:00

they are moving me, mid-year, to an intermediate grade. because these things ONLY happen to me. (at least at my school)

haciendo progresos

2006-10-27T00:41:00.000-05:00

alright, here we go...

THE KIDDOS

La Chaparrita: One of my biggest challenges, this gal is reading far below level and Mom is essentially useless in terms of home support or responsibility. I taught her brother a couple years ago so I knew what I was up against from the beginning and used that to my advantage with both administration and her family. We're doing weekly tutoring and daily guided reading. She actually wrote a comprehensible scary story this week that had some semblance of a plot and even a little suspense. She is writing word problems that MAKE SENSE. I totally didn't expect this much progress in two months.

The Hardass: This guy is Mr. Bipolar - he's either totally on the ball, doing amazing work and participating constantly, or he's throwing a fit and refusing to budge. My patience is running dry with him although his fits occur with much less frequency. The frustrating thing is that he had an amazing teacher last year and this fit-throwing runs in the family. After many powwows with his sister's teacher, I'm beginning to think whatever is done at school will ultimately not make that big of a difference since whatever the hell is happening at home is just reinforcing this ridiculous behavior in all the siblings. I'm certainly not giving up, but I'm getting tired of behavior contracts and bribery.

THE ADMIN
Things have been mild. The principal has shown a surprising amount of faith in me and our assistant principal is right up my alley. I could deal with less insulting meeting topics but I doubt administrators will ever realize that treating several dozen teachers the same way we treat our students is not acceptable. Our reading specialist gets on my freaking last nerve but hey, you can't like everyone. Especially those that think with youth comes an inability to be responsible for test data (which I am) and to understand strategies and lessons (which I typically digest with the first explanation). It amazes me how limited the social skills of teachers can be when it comes to dealing with adults.

THE FUTURE
Not sure what I want to do next year. Our school demographics may be changing, I've acquired another certification, and I'm not sure what grade I want to teach. A friend went abroad to teach first grade at a private school. Tempting for sure...

quickly, quickly

2006-10-22T21:25:00.000-05:00

1. Jesus Camp is one of the most disturbing films i've seen in a long, long time.
2. the kids are improving, without a doubt. all of them.
3. personal life's been... interesting. sorry about the lack of blogging.
4. more details about the kiddos soon. ¡cuidense!

...and now the nitty gritty

2006-09-29T23:39:00.000-05:00

i have two students that are hands-down my biggest challenges. reading at beginning year first grade level in second grade. they were placed. and the thing that KILLS me is that they have been at my school since PRE-KINDERGARTEN.

not to say that i haven't already seen dramatic progress. at the beginning of the year, the girl swore she couldn't read. today she was the strongest reader in her group. still struggles with first grade high-frequency words, but definite improvement nonetheless. however, she thinks a penny is called a dollar. she said the number 27 was "dos siete". she can't structure a sensible response to unscaffolded questions unless i'm next to her the whole time. and of course, mom refuses to help at home.

it's fucking breaking my heart.

been awhile...

2006-09-29T23:36:00.000-05:00

i know i've been slacking, but i've got an after-school class i've also been neglecting not to mention trainings out the wazoo. i have a few blogs (yup, superdork like that) and realized that i inadvertently posted a teachery post there but not here. so here ya go:

I had to go to a stupid teacher training this morning. I wasn't super bitchy about things and I actually took some initiative in our group work. It was pretty impressive. Then I was assigned to another group to role play a "Writing Sentences" lesson, based on already-prepared lesson plans. This idiot teacher dude kept over-complicating things and wanted to write his own lesson plan, and turn the lesson from independent practice to guided practice. Once I kind of beat to death the point that we were supposed to follow the EXISTING lesson plan, he couldn't get a hold of his character... because, you see, he was an actor in the theaaaaaa-tah before he was a teacher, and acted much longer than he's been teaching, so he really needs to understand where this role is coming from... is he a frustrated student? Did he truly understand the insect book we read? Did it really interest him?

In utter disbelief, I muttered something about how I didn't think a character study was necessary for a 4-minute skit/presentation. Sometimes I really question the amount of intelligence necessary to become a teacher...

soooo excited!

2006-09-03T08:14:00.000-05:00

recent movies i loved: quinceañera and talladega nights: the ballad of ricky bobby. the former is a great film that reminded me and a fellow teacher friend of our students (back when i was in middle school... she's a high school teacher). the latter is just plain kickass, and i am trying to convince my snobby arty friends of this. i'm not a fan of dodgeball, anchorman, or old school, but i do think will farrell is funny and this movie totally met all of my expectations. plus there's a mos def cameo, and you all know i looooooove me some mos def!

upcoming movie i can barely wait for: the namesake. based on jhumpa lahiri's stunning novel, one of my favorite books of all time.

goodness me

2006-08-24T21:50:00.000-05:00

one of my kids has a blog.

THEY'RE IN SECOND GRADE! i wanna know if he bitches about ME after a long day =)

oh, vomit

2006-08-21T21:27:00.000-05:00

one of my kids threw up grapes today. not nearly as disgusting as it could have been. then another teammate had a vomit situation, this time in her room. i've never had a kid puke in my room and don't know if i would gag and then help or help and then gag. i love the mocosos and all, but i'm not into all the wiping and cleaning biznass. not that anyone IS, but some folks are just more accepting than others. i would fall into the "others" category.

today me and some co-workers were talking about how thuggy some of our kids are. one second grader who gets advanced scores in thug life was telling his teacher how his momma was gonna get him a grill (grille?). he drew a picture of a kid with a grill then drew him a t-shirt that appropriately stated "I got a grill". one of my kids was bragging that he was going to get his ear pierced today. i would have called him a liar, except i noticed a third grader with a diamond stud bigger than my shiniest rhinestone earrings. the truth will come out in the morning. this same guy said i look like L'il Kim (I DON'T) so he's not the most reliable person i know. anyhoo.

kids still crazy, and don't. trust. administration.

everyone just wants to cover their own ass.

on the verge

2006-08-18T22:46:00.000-05:00

classroom photos are up on flickr. a former student came by yesterday afternoon. his mother was concerned because they moved to a new home and transfered the boys to a new school. the entire family is unhappy and my former student spent the last two days sobbing and dreading school. she's at a loss as to what to do... leave the boys in the new school and see if they get used to it, but what if they decide that my school is a better choice but it's too late to transfer? she was calm and collected until i ushered her into my room to keep the baby out of the Texas heat.

then she lost it and started crying.

and i, being totally incapable of staying stoic when others are crying in front of me, lost it, too.

today at lunch i had to discipline one of my favorite, sweetest students. had to walk away because i started tearing up. against my better judgment, i stayed after school to work on some things to aid my extremely low students. one of which doesn't know the alphabet. and i went to the office to show the stuff i did to a teammate. my frustration and panic was obvious. and i lost it again.

i'm such a friggin' baby.

update: she enrolled him back at our school. he marched in this morning like it was the first day and didn't miss a beat. i love these friggin kiddos!

welly well well

2006-08-15T21:17:00.000-05:00

who knew the first day of school could not only fly by but go pretty damned well?

nice.

ps

2006-08-08T20:11:00.000-05:00

professional development still sucks, but it's astounding the stupid shit that comes out of people's mouths. to describe losing his temper, my principal said he "shot the wad." a co-worker presenting internet images searches suggested using school-friendly search engines instead of google so that when you do a search for "plants" you don't end up with a picture of "weed."

teachers, can you believe 'em?

fotos up soon!

2006-08-01T17:09:00.000-05:00

for those of you that are friends & family on my flickr site, i'll be posting photos of my new classroom later this week... it's got a great color scheme and brand new theme. i've spent the last three hours at a coffeeshop translating centers into spanish from the great 1st-3rd book "What are the Other Kids Doing? ...while you teach small groups" Tons of great ideas that keep the kids engaged and challenged while allowing for plenty of differentiation without tons of prep work. If you're a bilingual teacher who would like to see my Spanish worksheets, send me an email.

on the menu today

2006-07-16T11:04:00.000-05:00

Rethinking Schools' latest issue has a feature on what kids are eating at school. Child nutrition is an issue that is very near and dear to my heart... and an issue that frustrates me regularly during the school year as I watch my kids bring "lunches" that consist of a Coke and Hot Cheetos. The article ends on a hopeful note, but it's sad that nothing ever happens efficiently in the public school system.

in other news, mr. babylon got canned. he's a refreshing change from the "i love children and teaching is my joy!" bloggers that make my teeth ache, but sometimes (as i also refer to my teacher buddy that grew up in the Bronx) was a little rough around the edges. ah well. i'm sure i can find some Teach for America fish-out-of-water blog to fill the same niche. i stopped heavily reading the teacher blogger circuit at the beginning of last year so i have no idea who's out there now. any suggestions?

delinquent

2006-07-15T18:06:00.000-05:00

hookahs and swimming make for yet another lovely summer.

i have been quite disgruntled about my training last week... it was five days of fairly useful information (certainly the most useful training i've ever had) but the presenter was culturally ignorant and misused a helluva lot of words for someone with a PhD. mostly i've just been irritated about having to waste my day indoors with a bunch of teachers. since i overindulged in hookahs and XX one night, i showed up an hour late to my training, and was promptly assigned lunch detention. yesterday this woman set up a table to sell her handmade jewelry. at the district-funded workshop she is leading. FREAK.

funny story, while i'm on the delinquent track. just to remind everyone how irresponsible (and lucky) i can be, ahora les voy a contar algo... habia una vez una maestra que tenia que tomar un examen para recibir su certificacion de ensenanza (sorry about the lack of accents, i'm on a sketchy PC at the moment). tomo un examen por la manana y dos por la tarde.. una cosa bien rara, porque no es recomendado tomar mas de dos examenes en un dia. durante el almuerzo, esta maestra decidio que tuviera que divertirse y se echo un mexican martini - una bebida bien fuerte muy parecida a una margarita. pues, no es una sopresa que se emborracho. y asi regreso al sitio del examen. a causa del alcohol, se puso muy dormida y tomo una siestitita mientras los demas estaban trabajando en sus examenes. se desperto despues de un ratito, termino rapidamente los dos examenes y se fue.

y los resultados? mas de 90% correcto en ambos examenes. suerte o talento? quiensabe.

throwback

2006-07-01T23:52:00.000-05:00

i haven't blogged this much in months. i was reading stuff from last year and apparently i did lots of teaching reflections and list-making. in the spirit of the latter, these are the albums that have been rocking my world lately:

Stars, Set Yourself on Fire

Gotan Project, Lunatico

The New Pornographers, Twin Cinema

Clap Your Hands Say Yeah, Clap Your Hands Say Yeah

Julieta Venegas, Limon y sal

The last non-local live shows I saw were The Essex Green, The Roots, and The Twilight Singers (featuring Greg Dulli of the Afghan Whigs). I've got tickets for Bloc Party in August and I can't wait... I'm flying my 15 yr old cousin down from Philly so he can see them, it'll be his first concert!

Books I've read recently:

Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

Douglas Coupland, Eleanor Rigby

David Sedaris, Me Talk Pretty One Day

I'm in the middle of Asne Seierstad's amazing The Bookseller of Kabul and I've been reading Salman Rushdie's Shalimar the Clown on and off for the last two months. Last month's National Geographic had a wonderful feature on soccer, with stories much like this one.

The best new movie I've seen in awhile is The Proposition, written by Nick Cave. I saw Harry Potter and the Goblet of Fire and The 40 Year Old Virgin last week and loved them both. Nacho Libre was a guilty pleasure, The Omen was stupid, X-Men 3 made me cry, and The Da Vinci Code was disappointing.

...and i'm out!

planton en oaxaca

2006-07-01T23:25:00.000-05:00

This story is getting widely circulated. A struggle by teachers throughout the state has turned violent and chaotic. We're asked to write letters of support.

From: David Riker (forwarded through Monty Neil of FairTest)

Dear Friends,

I'm writing about the situation in Oaxaca. As I write, the capital city is under siege. At approximately 5 AM this morning the state police attacked the teachers occupation of the city center. Though reports are sketchy, it seems that three teachers have been killed, as well as a young girl. The teachers have taken three or four police hostage. A raging battle is underway to control the zocalo, the center of life in Oaxaca, and the heart of the teacher's encampment. In the dawn raid the teachers were forced out, but the local paper, Noticias de Oaxaca, has reported that at 9:30 AM local time the teachers, armed with rocks and sticks, re-took the main square. Police are firing tear gas from helicopters right now. Thousands (tens of thousands) of people are involved in running battles in the streets. And there is the fear that upwards of 3500 federal riot police -- deployed to Oaxaca in the last two weeks by Vicente Fox -- are about to enter the city.

I've just gotten off the phone with friends in the center. They described the scene on the streets this morning at about 7:30 AM. Hundreds of people crying from the mix of tear gas, smoke bombs and some other pepper spray. The men forming groups to launch the assault to retake the zocalo. Mothers telling their boys to take care of themselves as they fell into line. From the rooftops of the single story houses you can watch the helicopters flying overhead shelling tear gas canisters into the crowds. There is a heavy fear, but also, I was told, you could hear the sound of people marching and singing.

As a brief background, you might want to read:

http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1874.html or http://www.narconews.com/Issue41/article1888.html

The teachers occupation of the city, known in Spanish as a 'planton' began 23 days ago. More than 80,000 teachers from every municipality in the state had converged on the capital to press a list of demands for more resources for education. They have had two mass marches, the most recent bringing more than 120,000 people out, the largest demonstration in the city's history. The planton has become an annual event since more than a decade, and I will never forget last year's planton which happened while I was still living there. For about ten days the teachers occupied the entire center of town, sleeping on the streets under tarpaulins stretched overhead. They were extremely well organized and the city center was never more alive. The teachers and their families would cook large meals on open fires, play guitar and sing, rest on folded cardboard in the shade. They set up their radio station "Radio Planton" and played music on loud speakers. There were first aid tents, propaganda tents, mass meetings on every corner.

This year, many have remarked that the planton, and the teachers' mobilization generally, has been different. The question is: If the teachers brought 80,000 to the city, who are the other 40,000? I'm not close enough to give a good answer, but what I understand is that the teachers have offered an opening which hundreds of small community groups and social justice centers from around the state have chosen to follow. The past two years under the new PRI governor Ulises Ruis has intensified the level of state repression. Scores of activists in small villages have been killed, hundreds arrested and still in jail as political prisoners. The spike in repression was so great that Amnesty International sent a delegation to Oaxaca in May of 2005 to investigate. It appears that when the teachers marched on the capital three weeks ago they were joined by tens of thousands of others from the villages in what is becoming a broad movement to depose the governor. Ruis has refused to meet with the teachers, and has managed to pull in his party's promissory notes to about half of the state's municipal mayors who signed a decree condemning the teachers action. But there is a palpable sense that the social movements are converging and that something new is underway.

During the past three weeks, the movement has shown a great level of strength and creativity -- occupying the city's airport, smashing the newly-installed parking meters throughout the city center, occupying the toll booths on the main road from Oaxaca to Mexico City -- not to stop the cars, only to stop the collecting of tolls, and the very fact that they have occupied the zocalo has great significance as the new governor, after spending upwards of $100 million to 'beautify' the zocalo, decreed that it was now off-limits for any demonstrations.

Three nights ago, Ruis met with business leaders at a late night gathering and promised to use the 'mano dura' or hard hand. There were reports that the first 1500 federal riot police were camped in the nearby town of Tlacolula. This morning the governor appears to have proven himself a man of his word. Some reports have said that the tear gas in the city center is so thick you can't see the hand in front of you.

I have not seen any reports in the US media, BBC etc. There is some information on indymedia's Mexico site, some more on the online version of Noticias de Oaxaca -- both in Spanish. (http://www.noticias-oax.com.mx/) I know that the police have shut down the teachers' radio station 'Radio Planton' but as of 12:00 noon Oaxaca time the students' radio station 'Radio Universitario' was still broadcasting and "you can hear the broadcast from every window and door in town." The students themselves have occupied the university, but the latest reports suggest that the police are heading there now.

I'm writing this in the hope that you can help spread the word, and alert others in the network of media to turn their attention to the struggle ongoing.

In solidarity,

David

You can write directly to the governor of Oaxaca in English or in Spanish. Fill out a comment form on his website at: http://www.gobiernodeoaxaca.gob.mx/web/index.php?option=com_contact&Itemid=3 George Sheridan

new york photos

2006-07-01T20:22:00.000-05:00

can i get a hell yeah?!?

2006-07-01T19:50:00.000-05:00

many of you know that i paint and have a deep love for art. a month ago, i took the texas all-level certification exam to teach art. my score came in today:

Test: 005 Art (All-Level)

Total Scaled Score: 84
Status: Passed
--------------------------------------------------------------------------------
PERFORMANCE BY SUBAREA # QUESTIONS # CORRECT

Awareness, Basic Design & Organization 48 40

Indv Exprsn:Tools, Matls, Tchnqs & Mthds 64 48

Art, Culture and Heritage 40 31

Aesthetic Growth and Development 20 20

Art Instruction 28 25

WOOOOOOOOOOOOOO HOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO!!!

nueva york

2006-06-29T23:27:00.000-05:00

thanks to everyone that gave me suggestions about where to go and what to do. i leave the east coast in about six hours but it's been fun! pictures up soon!

la maestra goes on vacation

2006-06-15T06:46:00.000-05:00

new york, to be specific. any recommendations?

let's get caught up!

2006-06-12T17:16:00.000-05:00

alright, there's way too much to tell but the abbreviated version is all i have time for...

MAY: the school year ended quickly and quietly. i will be teaching my same half-english, half-spanish-speaking class again next year... in second grade. it's not exactly the same class, but i'm keeping the majority of my amazing kiddos from last year plus a few special picks. i was the only first grade teacher to not retain anyone, but next year i'll have one retainee and three kids reading far below 2nd grade expectations. as in, beginning of first grade. a little ridiculous, but apparently my disbelief wasn't enough to convince the administration to retain. i'm not quite sure what my retention philosophy is, but i certainly don't think a kid without special needs should be allowed to go to second grade if they're barely reading and definitely not writing. anyhoo, i got through the last day without crying until the very end (for a real tear-jerker, check out gustavo's blog). i said goodbye to my kids that were moving, and to hot dad (who gave me a lovely end of year gift... but that was all. we're both wusses.). then my kid whose parents are having all kinds of crazy custodial drama stayed late while said drama was resolved. no such thing as a simple end to things, but at least i was the only one crying at the end of the day. i packed up my room a few days later and turned in my keys. goodbye, first grade. you were a blast.

JUNE: i was supposed to teach summer school in june, but backed out for a number of reasons. moving to a new grade means i have tons of trainings i need to take, so that played a large part in my decision. yet somehow my friend finagled me into subbing TWICE the first week of summer school. i was in a pre-kindergarten classroom, and while the kids are crazy cute and sweet, it just reaffirmed that's totally not the age group for me. i can't handle the crying and slower pace... after a few hours, i was bored out of my mind. this week is filled with trainings... y'all may remember that i have little tolerance for teacher trainings (check out last summer's posts), so i may be posting quite a bit this summer. mostly i'm still irritated by trainers' need to treat us like students. fine, model away and do group teaching to demonstrate, but SERIOUSLY, i don't need to fill out the graphic organizer AGAIN independently. please pretend that my college degree and teaching certificate mean SOMETHING. they are hundreds of things i'd rather do with my summer "vacation" than waste 15 minutes coloring with a bunch of teachers and talking about character analysis and summaries of books that i've already read. call it a bad attitude, but i think it comes down to this: i'm all about learning about better ways to teach, as long as they're brief and written down for me to refer to later. i have no use for people reading aloud to me and making me get super hands-on in an artificial environment. if i have questions, i'll ask after i'm ready to put things into practice or after i've already tried strategies/techniques myself. so THERE!

and i just took the state art all-level certification exam. i get my scores in a little under a month. if i pass, that opens a few new doors for me as far as next year's teaching options. keep your fingers crossed. have a great summer!

i must be stark raving mad

2006-05-06T15:49:00.000-05:00

we've had some pretty serious storms this last week. one damp morning, several of my students noticed a frog along the walkway to our classroom. on the back of another frog. they were oohing and aahing and in spite of the humping i knew it was something all my kids would be interested in. so i yelled at the line of kids in front of my door and told them to come over. they gathered around to look at these two friendly froggies and the earthworms around them. hot dad was just dropping his kid off and wandered over to see what all the fuss was about. he looked at the frogs, then looked at me with a smirk. "hey, they like frogs!" i said in mock defense. "and there's TWO of them!"

i have no game.

sadly, this year is ending on a depressing note. one of my boys was in a bad car accident that left his grandmother bed-ridden and badly bruised his forehead and hand. another student's parents' custody war escalated when dad physically abused his estranged wife in public, landing himself in jail and resulting in her rushing a restraining order that forbids his presence in the 1st grade hallway. one of my biggest "project kids" who has made a complete 180 in behavior and work ethic is moving next year. i'm losing my babies. and their lives seem much too difficult for their age. three more weeks.

out of the mouths of babes, #432,168

2006-05-03T10:57:00.000-05:00

yesterday my kids were at the playground when i noticed a group of students sitting in a circle by the swings. two girls were doing all the talking and one was waving a branch. i walked up to check it out and they informed me that they were playing school: Girl #1 was La Maestra, Girl With The Branch was my university mentor, and the rest of the kids were students. To demonstrate, Girl #1 turned to GWTB and ordered, "Go make some copies! And make me a sandwich!"

To know my kids is to love them. Whenever they say they're bored, I tell them to make me a sandwich. Hasn't happened yet (I actually have a fridge in my room and if they TRULY applied themselves, they could make quite a tasty little sandwich in a matter of minutes) but clearly I've beaten the idea into their heads.

i'm easily amused, no doubt about it

2006-04-15T17:00:00.000-05:00

saw this on oso's blog, had to share it with the teacher folk:

A chicken and an egg are lying in bed. The chicken is leaning against the headboard smoking a cigarette, with a satisfied smile on its face. The egg, looking a bit pissed off, grabs the sheet, rolls over, and says “Well, I guess we finally answered that question”.

thank goodness for good friday. ladies and gentlemen, we have less than six weeks left!

well, it's not just me

2006-04-09T16:17:00.000-05:00

this weekend i lunched with friends who teach 1st bilingual at other schools. seems like everyone's kids are just getting burned out.

making things nice and rosy is the after school art class i'm teaching at an elementary on the other side of town. i decided not to tell my principal about it; i manage to sneak off campus two days a week right around 3 pm so i can make it on time and so far, so good. this class is a DREAM.. the kids were specially selected so most want to be there and the class was tailored to my specifications and artistic preferences. they just finished their first round of stories about their community, which are heavily based on the narrative/illustrative style of carmen lomas garza. i'll be posting some of their work soon. i have the most amazing feeling when i plunk myself down in my car after class. a feeling of satisfaction and contentment and pride. these kids are totally exceeding my expectations, and last week i made a point of telling them just that. i wish i could have that feeling every day, but twice a week is good enough.

hmrph

2006-03-30T18:25:00.000-06:00

it really gets my goat when my kids --who ARE in fact the smartest class in school-- slack off after 8 months of hard first grade work. out of 19 kids, only 8 turned in their homework after i broke it down yesterday afternoon. all kinds of talk about how they need to be responsible for their learning and ready for second grade. EIGHT kids. i'm pulling out all the stops this week... if things don't turn around, i'm going to get desperate.

..also making things less than super-duper: nannies that bring kids to school in the place of their hot dads. or just the one nanny who is taking the place of the hot dad =P no progress on that front, by the way. it's a nice little fantasy that i like to play in my head.

completely inappropriate

2006-03-25T22:36:00.000-06:00

i have a mad crush on a student's (single) father. i've had this crush for a long time. i see him out and about occasionally, but i've seen him THREE times in the last week. we ran into each other at the grocery store today. i just smiled and waved, he came up and stood awkwardly next to me for a few moments, asking about my weekend as his kiddo bounced around next to him looking bashful. i think the feeling may be mutual.

yeah yeah yeah, i'm pathetic.

spring break

2006-03-13T19:21:00.000-06:00

my long-awaited vacation has begun and i'm spending it out and about. i have gone to bed no earlier than 3:30 am the last three nights. i'm reading augusten burroughs' running with scissors. i'm going to shows and clubs. i'm drinking regularly. it's almost like college.

i went to old navy today and noticed a group of college students. they looked horrendous. i am not a fan of the casual gypsy look. i saw a gal wearing brown converse, a calf-length peach-colored broomstick skirt that looked like it was taffeta, a sorority t-shirt, a giant yellow bead necklace and a brown tote bag large enough for three turkeys. BLECH. kids today, geez.

..yeah, this post sucks. sorry.

whatever, i'm a badass

2006-02-28T22:23:00.000-06:00

i was chatting with a co-worker today when i needed my kids to stop what they were doing. before i knew it, i busted into some vanilla ice. which inspired a new transition chant:

la maestra sez: "STOP! Collaborate and..."
students say: "LISTEN!"

cheesy, but dammit, it works. they needed something new and fresh anyway. funny how old and contrived it actually is.

(add this to my other transitions: the unsuccessful "Freeze!", wherein all students exaggerate their motions before actually freezing; the half-hearted "Give me five" where students hold up one hand; the local university hand motto and hand signal response; and my most effective pattern clap to which students respond with a double clap)

me quedan tres meses

2006-02-27T22:35:00.000-06:00

it's an odd time of year. spring break is around the corner and things are getting serious. retention lists are being compiled (i don't have any kids who are possible retainees, and i'm the only one in first grade who can say that), parent conferences are being done, and i feel like i've already blogged about this before... hmmm. pardon me if i'm being repetitive. anyway, i've sent a few select students to kinder and second grade in the last two weeks so they can get a little perspective on the behavior and work ethic i expect to see in these last few months of first grade (cause they're not showing it to me). i'm noticing how much my kids have grown... how many teeth they've lost, how much taller they are, how outgoing and comfortable they have become with me and their peers.

today i spoke to a parent about how chatty her son is. i reassured her that it didn't bother me; on the contrary, this guy only had one friend at the beginning of the year and that student was moved to another class in october. i was quite worried about his ability to make new friends, but now he's socializing beautifully. he gets his work done and he rarely has conflicts with other students, so i'm quite happy to see him chatting regularly. then there's the girl who is always waiting in front of my room with a smile on her face ten minutes before the bell rings. she's always got a story to tell and is filled with spunk. mom and i had some conversations in the beginning of the year because she was a bit of a llorona; every morning, she'd burst into tears once her mother headed out. after a few weeks it resolved itself as i gave her lots of little jobs to do once she arrived in my classroom (she also had the option to write her mother little notes throughout the day whenever she missed her) but it would still happen from time to time. last week, my little chamaca had an accident in the cafeteria. when i asked her what happened, she bravely told me as tears filled her eyes... but they didn't fall. she's growing up and learning how to deal with her emotions.

it's amazing how well you get to know these guys. and it's amazing how quickly time flies. as much as i complain, i'm gonna miss the hell out of my little mocosos.

seniority senschmority

2006-02-18T11:35:00.000-06:00

i don't know what or where i'll be teaching next year.

there's all kind of flux at my school every year... an alarming teacher attrition rate and unpredictable student enrollment. however, next year they are getting rid of all our early childhood/pre-k programs and some of the teachers in those grades with a lot of seniority will likely be trying to stay at our school by teaching another grade. my job may be in jeopardy.

suuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuuck.

valentine's booty

2006-02-15T21:45:00.000-06:00

i love holidays because my kids get me the craziest gifts. this v-day, i went home with:

stuffed lion w/puffy picture frame
heart mug
oodles of chocolate and candy
yellow tulips
a feather rose (i'll take a picture, but trust me, it's pretty)
heart candle
fruit
crysanthemum
weird ceramic baby bootie with an angel inside

...and the kicker: a love shotglass.

even funnier because i came to school today with a decent hangover. classy, i know. my co-worker wore the same clothes she had on last night, so it could have been worse.

co-worker obligations

2006-02-08T22:15:00.000-06:00

i don't think that just because someone works with me i should feel obligated to throw them a party to celebrate something personal. there are four teachers on our first grade team. three of us were at the school last year, two of us in first grade. the new teacher got engaged in the fall and is getting married in march. i barely get along with her socially much less professionally (severe philosophical and stylistic differences in teaching, not to mention opposite personalities), so WHY should i help finance a celebration for her?

call me bitter and cheap, but seriously, you people know how little i make. i'm generally pleasant to everyone at school, albeit quite quiet around those i don't know well, but niceties should only go so far.

unrelated: this morning i was rereading a big book and gave myself the mother of all paper cuts. i love the fact that my class was totally unplussed when i shrieked, announced i was bleeding, and demanded that another student pick up where i left off. they can roll with the punches... and tell time like nobody's business!

in our midst

2006-02-05T14:35:00.000-06:00

first of all, cheers to gustavo for joining our ranks.

secondly, boo to school redesigns and restructuring. boo to testing and the fact that the amount of testing required of us is at odds with our school's non-educational video-showing policy.

...and that's it for now. hey, i posted. sorry it's so brief. i have a much more active social life these days =)

howdy

2006-01-22T10:42:00.000-06:00

i'm still alive... haven't felt the blogging bug this month so entries have been scarce. i've been immersed in a new art project, trying to take some classes, and figuring out relationship nonsense. i've also actually been trying to plan (gasp!) a lot of my lessons, and good freakin lord that takes a lot of time! this semester i'll be teaching an after school dessert-making class, so if you've got some good no-bake goodie recipes, please send them my way!

a cry for help

2006-01-12T22:43:00.000-06:00

it's been a crazy coupla weeks.

my kids are making good progress except for a couple that are really starting to stump me. we've been doing lots of new science centers and activities that have really been engaging my students, but in spite of that, these two just aren't performing as well as the rest. i beseech you readers and fellow educators... what do i DO?

Case #1: Leon
Leon is a kid with amazing potential. He can be very sweet and energetic, but more often than not finds himself easily frustrated and is quite moody.. bit of a temper on him. He has low self-esteem and little faith in his ability to produce good work independently; he rarely gets to work promptly and hardly ever stays on task, regardless of the complexity or interestingness of the assignment. I give him daily pep talks and spend more one-on-one time with him than anyone else in the class. I regularly talk to mom about his performance, making sure to emphasize when he does good work. We've tried a behavior contract based on him working "like a shark" and not being a "floppy fish" who doesn't take charge of his learning. It worked okay for awhile, but I'm not big on reward-based effort and would like to find something with better long-term effects. At this point, I'm trying to get him to perform under pressure... I give him time deadlines and that seems to work alright, but it's usually after he's wasted a substantial amount of time anyway. He has no problem working during recess, so no threat there. I've moved him to my table this week, but he remains mostly unproductive. I've sent him to complete assignments in other classroom in order to "earn the right" to work in our room with his friends. Same results. And he's terrible at paying attention during group time on the carpet, especially as the day wears on.

Case #2: Freddie
Freddie is a very charismatic and social kid. He's all about knowing everybody's business and consequently spends a lot of time out of his seat chatting instead of staying on task. He's prone to rushing through assignments with sloppy and/or incomplete results. He's not as naturally bright as Leon and many of my other students, but he's certainly capable of grade-level expectations. I give lots of homework and have been upping the number of assignments per day, but Freddie rarely does any of it. In fact, he often comes to school without his backpack or take-home folder. Notes home never make it there, so forget about anything else. I've given him the "be responsible for your own learning" lecture a bazillion times... I talked to Mom about homework in December and saw no noticeable change. Yesterday I sent home a bundle of papers and told him explicitly (in front of a peer and in front of another teacher) that he HAD to get these papers home and complete his homework, and if he DIDN'T (he was supposed to report to the peer in the morning), he had to call dad and explain why he wasn't being responsible for his work. This morning, once again, he walked in empty-handed. We called dad first thing... he rambled for a bit, then I spoke to dad. Dad tried to blame the lack of homework completion on Freddie's after school program, then said he'd talk to him. After school, I told Freddie's older brother to make sure that he did his homework and brings it back tomorrow. His overall behavior has improved significantly since he first came to my class; we did a behavior contract based on staying on task with increased peer-interaction rewards. I don't expect him to become docile and am actually okay with the fact that he's just a chatty guy who can't necessarily focus on his work for long periods of time, but the lack of effort and responsibility when it comes to homework and other stuff I send him is driving me INSANE.

There ya go. Comment away.

seven by seven

2006-01-08T18:42:00.000-06:00

i saw this on stepping stone, one of my favorite bilingual educator blogs. thought it'd be a nice way to ring in the new year.

Seven things to do before I die:

1. Have kids. Preferably at least two or three. And watch them blossom into adulthood.
2. Learn another language.
3. Get my masters.
4. Visit every continent.
5. Open a bakery/panaderíá.
6. Learn how to sew my own clothing.
7. Fall in love again.

Seven things I cannot do:

1. Spend long amounts of time with my mother.
2. Snowboard.
3. Control the volume of my voice or laughter without using some sort of muffling technique.
4. Conceal my emotions well.
5. Have friends who I don't trust.
6. Read García Márquez in Spanish and actually understand it all.
7. Pray traditionally.

Seven things that attract me to... teaching:

1. Watching students' amazing progress over time and knowing I played a part in it.
2. Kids never get boring.
3. Kids are creative fountains who come up with ideas and drawings and explanations that boggle my mind.
4. I laugh every day. Repeatedly. Sometimes to the point where it's painful and I tear up.
5. I can put to good use my neat handwriting, drawing ability and organizational anal-retentiveness
6. Endless faculty meetings... just kidding. I am fortunate enough to have a whole hell of a lot of freedom in terms of what I teach and how I teach it. As shitty as my administration can be at times, they really do trust me to do what I must as I like.
7. I am a serious bookophile and I get to share all my favorite books/authors/illustrators/subjects.

Seven things I say most often:

1. Oh my GOD.
2. Fuck!/¡Chingao!
3. What are you doing?/¿Qué andas haciendo?
4. Dude! (often used with "Fuck!")
5. Yo..
6. Shut up! (in disbelief)
7. Ya.

Seven books I love:

1. The Kite Runner by Khaled Hosseini
2. Haroun & the Sea of Stories by Salman Rushdie
3. The Namesake by Jhumpa Lahiri
4. And the Band Played On by Randy Shilts
5. Fast Food Nation by Eric Schlosser
6. One Hundred Years of Solitude by Gabriel García Márquez
7. Veinte poemas de amor y una canción desesperada/Cien sonetos de amor by Pablo Neruda

Seven children's books I love:

1. A Porcupine Named Fluffy
2. The True Story of the Three Little Pigs by Jon Sciezska
3. My Little Sister Ate One Hare by Bill Grossman
4. Milton by Haydé Ardalán
5. The Peanut Butter Rhino by Vincent Andriani
6. Click Clack Moo: Cows That Type by Doreen Cronin
7. Animalia by Graeme Base

Seven movies I watch over and over again (or would if I had time):

1. Scarface
2. Singles
3. Keeping the Faith
4. Coming to America
5. Monsoon Wedding
6. The Usual Suspects
7. Zoolander

Seven people I want to join in, too:

1. Madhatter
2. Gustavo
3. Megan
4. Dree
5. César
6. Coco
7. Kait

i'm still alive

2006-01-08T18:36:00.000-06:00

i've been overwhelmed by low reading scores and intervention forms, meetings with administrators and my annual observation. but i'm alive and kicking and ready to begin my thematic unit on pandas, endangered species, china, and the chinese new year. i'm teaching money, maps, wood, nouns, and punctuation. and i'm working closely with two other teachers to make sure my kids' reading needs are being met. i'm going to get my shit together in terms of organization and planning and preparation. my observation stressed me the hell out but went surprisingly beautifully... my kids can be soooo good. They can also be sooo bad, as they were the following day when they went INSANE with the PE sub and almost knocked down a special ed student. After a long lecture and some absolutely silent work time (I never ask for silence unless i'm PISSED... i find it unnatural and unnecessary, and only asked for it because the little mocosos needed to prove their self-control), we went outside for the recess time i owed them. I was sitting next to a student who had to sit out for five minutes, and I guess I sighed or something because he looked at me with those big curious brown eyes and asked concernedly,

"Maestra, is it hard being a teacher?"

where to begin, my dear. where to begin...

goodness

2005-12-27T09:17:00.000-06:00

i was out of town for a week and came back home last night around 11. my answering machine light was blinking, but since the only reason i have a phone landline is because of my alarm, i figure it would all be solicitors since no one ever calls my home phone.

WRONG.

14 messages from a student. she sounded happy so i think she just missed me and wanted to chat. of all my kids, she'd be the one to be smart enough to look me up in the phone book and call to see what i was doing over the break.

kinda sweet, isn't it? i'll call her back soon.

music makes the people come together

2005-12-23T14:26:00.000-06:00

i hate new year's resolutions and reflections, but sometimes we all indulge ourselves in traditional stupidity. however, instead of getting sappy and emotional, i'll treat you to a few great lists of the best albums of 2005 followed by a very short list of my recommendations (some you may have seen before, i don't listen to a lot of new music, i'm lame like that).

Best of Lists:
El Mas Chingon: Ces has fantastic taste in music, despite his MIA misstep =)
KEXP DJ Top 10: My favorite radio station, in Seattle or anywhere else, has tons of lists to check out in a variety of genres.
Best Songs You Didn't Hear in 2005: I think this list is more mainstream than it thinks it is, and I still don't like MIA, but there are a few songs that I rather liked.

And my lame list:
1. Amadou & Mariam, Dimanche a Bamako
2. Ryan Adams & The Cardinals, Cold Roses
3. Gorillaz, Demon Days
4. Andrea Echeverri, Andrea Echeverri
5. Cafe Tacuba, Unplugged

...and I think Coldplay's X&Y was the biggest disappointment of the year. Snoozefest. If you've got any 2005 releases i should check out, comment away! Have a merry weekend!

done

2005-12-16T16:33:00.000-06:00

i've finished my first official year of first grade. looking back, it's been a pretty smooth ride, all things considered. sure, i've been stressed and sure i've had shitty days, but i haven't had any snags that seemed insurmountable. the parents of my former students have positive things to say about me, my administration is very supportive of me and puts a lot of faith in my work, and my former students themselves are proof positive that i can in fact teach kids how to read and therefore do not suck. my current students are at the critical point where things need to start clicking and things get serious... retention becomes a possibility, parent conferences are no longer to be avoided, and interventions are a necessity.

i'd reflect more, but i'm on vacation. have a great one! =)

vegetarian chili!

2005-12-12T20:47:00.000-06:00

last night i whipped together some chili with some pretty good results. if you're in the mood, here's my quickie recipe comprised mostly of convenient veggies and canned goods. serves 4-6 people.

1 can Hormel vegetarian chili
1 can Rotel tomatoes & green chiles
1 can diced tomatoes
1 can pinto beans
1 can kidney beans
1/2 onion, finely chopped
1/2 cup celery, finely chopped
1/2 green bell pepper, finely chopped
1/2 red bell pepper, finely chopped
1 jalapeno
1 tbsp chili powder
1 tsp black pepper

Sautée onions until golden, throw in celery and bell peppers for 2 minutes then toss in the rest-- do NOT drain liquids! Let simmer 20-35 minutes then top with chopped onions & queso oaxaca before serving. Super easy!

well you know i'm not in it for the money

2005-12-12T19:23:00.000-06:00

i have to admit, i love it when kids give me gifts. definite perk about being an elementary teacher, and at a primary grade at that.

don't get me wrong... i'm very lucky and gets lots of love on a regular basis. since my class switched, my old chamacos like to give me drawings and pictures (remember the tube top?) about once a week, and my students from last year are quite faithful with letters and random gifts (i got a mario --as in "and luigi"-- doll last week). but you gotta love how certain holidays, namely christmas and valentine's day, get everybody in a generous mood. last week, one of my most giving students told me that she had an xmas gift for me but couldn't tell me what it was. for once, i didn't press her, and about ten minutes later she came up to me and confessed that she got me xmas socks but don't tell mom she said anything! cuteness.

today i got my first gift bag: a snow globe and a santa candle. let the gift giving and getting begin!

tomorrow is also tamal day =) best week EVER.

it's not where you've been, it's where you're at

2005-12-09T16:25:00.000-06:00

thanks to everyone for their great ideas and activities... i'll be reading Tomie dePaola's Legend of the Poinsetta to all of first grade and doing a handprint cut-out poinsettia with construction paper. next week, the bilingual classes are going to read Gary Soto's ¡Qué monton de tamales!, which of course necesitated a letter home requesting tamal "donations" so we can "taste them". by "donations" we mean "by the dozen" and by "taste them" we mean "make sure the teachers have leftovers to take home".

one more week left!

almost there

2005-12-04T20:48:00.000-06:00

time's flying by... i've got some grade-level drama, an upcoming observation, and a navidad unit to plan. therefore, no time to blog! let me know if you've got any good end-of-semester or holiday activities and/or book suggestions.

blissful break

2005-11-27T23:12:00.000-06:00

i have never slept so much. i have never eaten so much. and when i say never, i mean not since this summer. i saw movies (two thumbs up to rent and walk the line), i had sushi repeatedly, and i drank a bit excessively. i saw family and friends and even made it out to the gym (albeit only once). and somehow, i'm ready to go back and greet my kiddos with hugs and a warm smile in the morning.

hope yours was pleasant and restful. now let's go back and kick some ass before the holidays begin!

no school nurses left behind

2005-11-25T23:09:00.000-06:00

(another article from Salon)

Once a comforting presence in most public schools, full-time nurses are increasingly scarce. Now teaching assistants, secretaries and other nonmedical personnel are trying to care for sick children -- with often tragic results.

By Laurie Udesky

Sept. 29, 2005 | On June 2, 2005, 15-year-old Clare McKenna was gripped by an asthma attack in the middle of her class at City Honors High School in Buffalo, N.Y. Within seconds McKenna -- an avid volleyball and softball player -- was gasping for breath. The teen collapsed as two friends helped her to the nurse's office, where her asthma medication was stored. Terrified, the students struggled to carry her the rest of the way. When they finally reached the office, however, the door was locked and nobody was inside.

Unfortunately, this was business as usual. In its last round of budget cuts, the Buffalo Public School District had slashed nursing staff from 40 full-time employees down to 15, which meant some nurses could only spend as little as 45 minutes a day at one school. Slumped on the floor, McKenna began to hyperventilate. School staff, looking frantically for the key to the health office but unable to find it, called 911, then Clare's mother. Ann McKenna raced to meet her daughter at the hospital as ambulance workers used a nebulizer to blow life-saving medication through an oxygen mask into Clare's lungs.

It was her daughter's fifth asthma attack at school. "I was praying, 'Dear God, please help my daughter,'" McKenna says. "I found myself thinking, Is it going to take a death for this community to start taking children's health issues seriously?"

But even children's deaths may not be enough to expand nationwide funding for school nurses. A full nine years before McKenna's close call, fifth-grader Philip Hernandez, who had asthma, began having trouble breathing in class. He made his way to the nurse's office at Lee Richmond Elementary School in California's Central Valley: By the time he reached it, he was in the middle of a full-blown asthma attack, according to court documents. The nurse, however, was at another school. Paramedics arrived and found Phillip on the floor in her office, surrounded by school staffers, his face and lips a purplish hue and his pulse failing. The paramedics tried to revive him, to no avail. The youngster died on May 13, 1996, four months shy of his 12th birthday.

School nurses -- once available every day in most public schools -- have virtually disappeared as a full-time presence in many schools around the country. At the same time, chronic illnesses among schoolchildren have mushroomed. Although there are no precise figures, experts say anywhere from 10 to 15 percent of schoolchildren suffer a chronic health condition, many of which require treatment during the school day. In West Virginia schools, for example, more than 16,000 children required healthcare plans in 2002, more than double the number six years earlier. These illnesses include life-threatening asthma and food allergies, diabetes, seizure disorders and cancers as well as mental health problems like severe depression and attention deficit hyperactivity disorder (ADHD).

It's well-known that the academic testing demands of the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind program has forced many already financially strapped school districts to make deep cuts in music, art and physical education. There's been little outcry over the impact the legislation has had on school nursing -- perhaps because few parents realize that a school nurse may be at their child's school as little as once a week, if at all.

But in this era of high-stakes testing and local budget constraints, "unless there is big pressure from parents and other community members, student support services such as nursing become vulnerable, because any extra money goes to academic support," says Julia Graham Lear, the director of the Center for Health and Health Care in Schools, based in Washington.

In place of nurses, teachers and other medically untrained staff are being put in the thankless position of overseeing the illnesses and emergencies of schoolchildren -- sometimes with severe or tragic consequences. Government reports say the nation has 60,000 full-time nurses to cover the approximately 90,000 elementary and secondary schools. Just how much time they spend at a school, however, is unclear. "Our best guess is that some schools have a full-time nurse, many have a part-time nurse, and many have no nurse at all," Lear says.

The likelihood that school nurses are often unavailable is particularly alarming because of the sheer number of children taking regular medication. Nine million students, about 13 percent of children between kindergarten and 12th grade, take medication regularly for at least three months during the year, according to a recent report by the Centers for Disease Control and Prevention. The types of medication can run the gamut from several kinds of inhalers and inhalation therapy by machine for asthma, to insulin pumps, glucagon or insulin injections for children with diabetes, to suppositories for children with seizure disorders and epinephrine for children with food allergies. Some schools allow children to medicate themselves. Because of budget constraints, the immediate health needs of schoolchildren are often put in the hands of school secretaries, minimally trained health clerks, teacher's aides, teachers and other school staff who lack medical training. If caught in a bind, they try to page a school nurse, who may be miles away.

Cory Sanfilippo is often mistaken for the school nurse by parents at Sutter Elementary School in Santa Clara County, California, where she works as a school secretary. "I always correct them," Sanfilippo says. But it seems to be a constant misconception. Sanfilippo takes her job seriously: She answers the phone, writes school reports and letters for the principal, responds to parents' questions, deals with children who've been sent to the office because they're misbehaving or have wet their pants, signs off on package deliveries -- and gives medication to students.

Because the school nurse is on campus only once a week, it falls on Sanfilippo to hand out medication to students and deal with emergencies. She's skilled in cardiopulmonary resuscitation, injecting epinephrine to prevent shock in food-allergic children, and has used her own familiarity with the care of a diabetic grandmother to help her respond to the needs of children with diabetes at school. But Sanfilippo is uncomfortable with the role she's been forced to assume.

"I'm lucky that we haven't had a near-death experience. My greatest fear is: Is today going to be the day?" says Sanfilippo.

On any given day, Sanfilippo will have to deal with five to 15 children coming to the office because they need their medication or they don't feel well or because there's an emergency. "We have asthma big time," she says. "We have some visually impaired this year and 13 students that have autism. We have severe allergies to milk and peanuts and bee stings, five or six kids with EpiPens (injection pens to prevent anaphylactic shock), and a couple of children with cancer in remission."

Hard-working and conscientious, Sanfilippo distributes medication, making sure that the children swallow their pills or get the right number of puffs of an asthma inhaler. It's at this point that she enters an unknown -- and dangerous -- zone: "I can tell if a child with asthma is having trouble breathing, but I cannot tell what stage of distress a child is in," Sanfilippo says.

Sanfilippo's worries are well grounded. Mistakes are more than three times as likely to occur when an unlicensed person and not a nurse is responsible, according to a 2000 University of Iowa survey, whose results were reported in the Journal of School Health. Unfortunately, the vast majority of school employees handing out medications have no medical background, the report continued. The randomized national survey of 649 school nurses in 49 states showed that more than 75 percent of school nurses had to delegate medication administration to school staff lacking medical training, referred to as "an unlicensed assistive personnel."

The types of errors included "missed doses, overdoses, giving the child the wrong medication or not writing down that medication had been given."

Seeing those problems first-hand is Juanita Hogan, a school nurse in Pittsburgh, Pa., who circulates among four to six schools each week. She has seen the risks to schoolchildren when medically untrained staff that work in her absence are at the helm: "I had a student on Ritalin [for ADHD] at a school I visited once a week," says Hogan, a nurse practitioner. "The following week he had a protrusion on his tongue," indicating he was on too high a dose. The doctor, she explains, should have been notified immediately that the medication was at a toxic level and should be stopped. "That was very dangerous," Hogan recalls. "The child could have had trouble swallowing, choking and breathing."

In another survey compiled by the California School Nurses Association in 2003, a nurse who covers eight schools had trained a school aide to hand out medication. After a student with a seizure disorder died, she looked at his medication card, noting in horror that the student wasn't called in by school staff to take his medication, as he was supposed to, and had missed seven out of 15 doses. "I saw this omission three weeks late when I checked his card," writes the nurse. "The parent had not been notified of the omissions. He had a seizure when home alone ... He hit his head on a sharp table corner and was found dead by his parents."

This crisis in school medication errors has received little publicity, although teachers have pleaded for help in state hearings. "I sat in a room and watched a teen pass away, " says Curtis Washington, a science teacher at Mills High School in Millbrae, Calif. Pausing to compose himself at the California State Board of Education hearing in February 2003, he recounts the death of a student who suddenly fell unconscious during badminton practice in 2001 -- there was no on-duty school nurse, and paramedics could not revive him. "Would that have been different if there was a school nurse?" Washington asks. "I don't know. But that's a question I have to live with.

"We talk about how we have to have qualified teachers," Washington continues, his voice rising. "If I mess up on a lesson, I could have a negative impact on a child's future, but if we mess up their medical care or their medication, that child may not even have a future."

It's hard to understand why healthcare services in schools would not be automatically guaranteed. In fact, laws and regulations on the issue are a tangled maze, differing from state to state and even district to district. Only Delaware and the District of Columbia, for example, require that there be at least one nurse for every 750 students. States also interpret federal mandates differently. In some states children with severe chronic health conditions and those with learning disabilities are covered by section 504 of the federal Rehabilitation Act, so that schools are required to provide them with health services. Other states allow a child's chronic health condition to be covered by section 504 only if that child also has a learning disability.

Even if schools try to maintain health services for students, many have been forced to make cuts in those services in order to pay for programs to meet the test scores demanded by the Bush administration's No Child Left Behind program. A recent report by the National Conference of State Legislatures, for example, said that "in the best-case scenario, federal funding marginally covers the cost of complying with the administrative processes." However, the February 2005 report continues, "states still face a separate set of costs to reach the law's standards of proficiency." If states choose not to comply with the law, they lose massive amounts of federal school funding.

Yet schools also lose funding -- because of decreased enrollment -- if children have absences or drop out due to illness. Dr. Pat Cooper, the superintendent of schools in McComb, Miss., thinks the tie between health and performance is obvious: "No Child Left Behind is going to leave a lot of children behind if we don't start looking at the health needs of our students," Cooper says.

When Cooper became superintendent nine years ago, he looked at the high dropout rates, absences from the district's seven schools, and poor test scores. He found a significant link between the health needs of the children and poor performance. "I decided that we had to stop investing in stuff and start investing in people," Cooper says. "We had good teachers, great training, good textbooks. But we realized part of the problem was we weren't reaching kids because the kids weren't in school." The district was plagued with asthma, type 2 diabetes and childhood obesity issues, which cut into students' attendance. Such illnesses are more common among low-income children, which Cooper says describes the majority of students in his district.

Cooper worked with community and health experts to come up with a five-year plan to meet students' health needs and get them back in school. "First we hired two nurses in each school -- not as window dressing, but to treat kids and to do prevention," Cooper says. Daily attendance rates began going up, he says and, consequently, so did the school district's money from the state.

Cooper didn't stop there. He eventually hired master's-level social workers to help manage the emotional and mental health needs of students. Since the majority of students in his district are poor, the schools qualified for a Medicaid-funded clinic on-site. In the McComb School District, dropout rates were 30 percent when Cooper came; now they're down to less than 2 percent, he says.

Dr. Cynthia Mears, who started a school-based health clinic in an immigrant neighborhood in Chicago and three in other states, says that in order to get a clinic or even school nurses in each school, you have to have a champion like Cooper. "The problem is that healthcare isn't always high on a school district's agenda, because they have to answer to test scores," says Mears, who is on the American Academy of Pediatrics School Health Committee. "But you have to have healthy children if they're going to learn."

Regrettably, students in many parts of the country are not as fortunate as the students in McComb, Miss. In Buffalo, this September, Clare McKenna began her sophomore year at City Honors School. Although her mother, Ann McKenna, has worked furiously on state legislation to fund school nurses, her daughter started school with no nurse on-site.

Although Buffalo has one of the highest asthma rates in the nation, New York Gov. George Pataki vetoed a bill in early August that would have funded a nurse in each school in Buffalo and surrounding areas lacking school nurses. It was a bill championed by parents like McKenna, who was outraged by its veto. "We have this beautiful, vital child who goes to a wonderful school that's provided her with perfect potential," McKenna says. "But if kids' primary health concerns are being ignored, how safe are our schools?"

McKenna's advocacy has finally paid off. City Honors High School gained a full-time nurse on Sept. 19, after the local school board agreed to increase the number of nursing positions to 20. Most schools in the district, though, have not fared as well. "Right now I have some schools that don't even see a nurse," says Sue Ventresca, director of health-related services for the Buffalo Public Schools, who says she's hopeful that more money will be found. Presumably, the schools left without nurses feel the same.

guajolote, guajolote

2005-11-23T16:24:00.000-06:00

happy turkey day to you and yours. thanksgiving vacation is the BEST! extended weekend plus the knowledge that an even longer vacation is quickly approaching... AND killer food? it's almost too much to take... but i think i'll manage =)

saludos desde dallas

2005-11-20T09:00:00.000-06:00

scene from a bar:
random guy: hey, so what do you do for a living?
maestra: i'm a teacher.
random guy: (very enthusiastically) cool! what grade???
maestra: first.
random guy: (smiling) do you like it?
maestra: i'm on vacation right now so i stay sane. but yeah.
random guy: (done with teacher talk) cool.

scene from a bar, version 2:
random guy: hey, so what do you do for a living?
maestra: i'm a teacher.
random guy: (very enthusiastically) hey, my mom is a teacher! what grade?
maestra: first.
random guy: (smiling) how long have you been teaching?
maestra: two years.
random guy: (done with teacher talk) cool.

sin duda, tengo una de esas conversaciones cada vez que conozco a alguien nuevo en un bar. sometimes they even say something inane like, "man, my first grade teacher was HOT! Ms. Huntley, DAMN!" the best occupation-related conversations i've had have been with other teachers and with firefighters. why it's so hard for everyone else to ask me anything more substantial about my job is beyond me.

one-upped

2005-11-18T02:01:00.000-06:00

i thought i was cool because my kids are starting to learn café tacuba and groove to my nortec tunes. then a co-worker buddy had one of my former students start singing a smiths song that he's learned in class.

DAMMIT. i need something good. any suggestions?

neither here nor there

2005-11-18T01:33:00.000-06:00

do not ask me why i am awake at this hour. i desperately want to sleep but it's not gonna happen, so might as well blog.

i am saving teacher reflections and resolutions for the new year, but here's a short list of the things that make me me (most of these apply in my personal life as well, but we're focusing on my maestra identity):
1. i have a terrible memory. this is established and admitted very early on. my kids no longer get mad if i promise them pumpkins one afternoon and they don't actually get them until a week later. it's amazing how forgiving they can be. and how freakishly good they are at reminding me to do things. "you forgot about..." is one of the most common phrases spoken in my room.
2. i am obsessed with books. my favorite feeling is when i sit at the carpet with my kids doing a re-read and i don't even have to read the text because my kids know it so well. i feel particularly proud when this happens with english books and my chamacos with the least english fluency are chanting along.
3. i am all about the dumb catch phrases. when my english kids came, i started saying things like "are we ready to rock?" and "could you knock my socks off today, please?" before that, i taught my spanish-speakers useless phrases like "it's easy-peasy, lemon-squeezy" (said by my 7th grade english teacher from britain) and my all-time favorite question... after i give instructions and right before i send students to work, i give them this barrage until they start giggling and wiggling: "questions? comments? concerns? problems? chisme? money? flowers? coffee? mosquitos? smelly socks?" ad nauseum.
4. i am a spaz. at least five times a day, you'll hear me shriek "what are you doing?/¿qué andas haciendo?" or "is that respect?" i find it particularly ironic when i say "please don't yell at me, i don't yell at you!" because i am a very loud person and tend to speak in a loud voice at all times. however, my spazocity is generally not as negative as it sounds. when my kids give me gifts, i get very flowery and lovey... my 2nd graders are notorious for dropping by with letters and stuffed animals because they know i'll give them elaborate thank you letters. i also get very excited when my kids work productively or just generally kick ass. which is more often than not. consequently, my kids are very familiar with the words "amazing", "incredible", "outstanding" and "phenomenal."
5. i can't stop singing. we have at least one song a week. and i sometimes sing instructions. whenever it's work time, music is on. my latest obsession is playing them music in languages other than english and spanish. when they're hard at work, i sometimes test them by dancing and serenading. you'd be surprised how good they are at ignoring me. best practices? probably not. but it's awesome to hear a 6-yr-old say "be quiet, you're distracting me, teacher!"

no me digas

2005-11-16T21:13:00.000-06:00

this year has flown by. thanksgiving is almost upon us and i haven't gone crazy yet. cheers to that.

october was a pain in my ass. my perfect spanish-speakers-only bilingual class underwent complete upheaval and turned into a psuedo dual-language program. some parents were pissed that their kids were leaving me while other parents were pissed that their kids were getting me. simultaneously, i was also teaching four after-school classes three days a week. and my biggest co-worker confidante and collaborator turned into a serious bizsnatch.

november has given me time to establish routines and comfort (all over again). my new kids are adjusting and my old kids are, for the most part, comfortable with their english-only-speaking peers. we have a whole new set of behavior problems, but that's to be expected. families who have recently immigrated put the fear of god into their little ones very quickly. they respect their children's teachers. the more generations you've been here, the more you take public education for granted. but that's just my humble opinion based my humble experience.

i taught my last set of after-school classes for the rest of the semester. i've started working in conjunction with another co-worker. i have great elaborate plans for a room reorganization. i have a university mentor in my classroom who rocks the house. so things are looking up.

today i tripped over a cord in my rush to answer the phone and made a serious ass of myself. visualize papers and books flying, students wide-eyed and stunned. it was quite comedic. then i answered the phone and laughed hysterically when it turned out to be a friend. my kids' shitty morning behavior turned into blissful productivity in the afternoon. my after-school class ran itself and made for several great photo opportunities... check the flickr site once i track down my usb cord.

less than four weeks of school left in 2005. whew!

gulf coast esclavos

2005-11-15T11:45:00.000-06:00

Halliburton and its subcontractors hired hundreds of undocumented Latino workers to clean up after Katrina -- only to mistreat them and throw them out without pay.

By Roberto Lovato

NEW ORLEANS and GULFPORT, Miss. -- Arnulfo Martinez recalls seeing lots of hombres del ejercito standing at attention. Though he was living on the Belle Chasse Naval Base near New Orleans when President Bush spoke there on Oct. 11, he didn't understand anything the ruddy man in the rolled-up sleeves was saying to the troops.

Martinez, 16, speaks no English; his mother tongue is Zapotec. He had left the cornfields of Oaxaca, Mexico, four weeks earlier for the promise that he would make $8 an hour, plus room and board, while working for a subcontractor of KBR, a wholly owned subsidiary of Halliburton that was awarded a major contract by the Bush administration for disaster relief work. The job was helping to clean up a Gulf Coast naval base in the region devastated by Hurricane Katrina. "I was cleaning up the base, picking up branches and doing other work," Martinez said, speaking to me in broken Spanish.

Even if the Oaxacan teenager had understood Bush when he urged Americans that day to "help somebody find shelter or help somebody find food," he couldn't have known that he'd soon need similar help himself. But three weeks after arriving at the naval base from Texas, Martinez's boss, Karen Tovar, a job broker from North Carolina who hired workers for a KBR subcontractor called United Disaster Relief, booted him from the base and left him homeless, hungry and without money.

"They gave us two meals a day and sometimes only one," Martinez said.

He says that Tovar "kicked us off the base," forcing him and other cleanup workers -- many of them Mexican and undocumented -- to sleep on the streets of New Orleans. According to Martinez, they were not paid for three weeks of work. An immigrant rights group recently filed complaints with the Department of Labor on behalf of Martinez and 73 other workers allegedly owed more than $56,000 by Tovar. Tovar claims that she let the workers go because she was not paid by her own bosses at United Disaster Relief. In turn, UDR manager Zachary Johnson, who declined to be interviewed for this story, told the Washington Post on Nov. 4 that his company had not been paid by KBR for two months.

Wherever the buck may stop along the chain of subcontractors, Martinez is stuck at the short end of it -- and his situation is typical among many workers hired by subcontractors of KBR (formerly known as Kellogg Brown & Root) to clean and rebuild Belle Chasse and other Gulf Coast military bases. Immigrants rights groups and activists like Bill Chandler, president of the Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, estimate that hundreds of undocumented workers are on the Gulf Coast military bases, a claim that the military and Halliburton/KBR deny -- even after the Immigration and Customs Enforcement agency turned up undocumented workers in a raid of the Belle Chasse facility last month. Visits to the naval bases and dozens of interviews by Salon confirm that undocumented workers are in the facilities. Still, tracing the line from unpaid undocumented workers to their multibillion-dollar employers is a daunting task. A shadowy labyrinth of contractors, subcontractors and job brokers, overseen by no single agency, have created a no man's land where nobody seems to be accountable for the hiring -- and abuse -- of these workers.

Right after Katrina barreled through the Gulf Coast, the Bush administration relaxed labor standards, creating conditions for rampant abuse, according to union leaders and civil rights advocates. Bush suspended the Davis-Bacon Act, which requires employers to pay "prevailing wages" for labor used to fulfill government contracts. The administration also waived the requirement for contractors rebuilding the Gulf Coast to provide valid I-9 employment eligibility forms completed by their workers. These moves allowed Halliburton/KBR and its subcontractors to hire undocumented workers and pay them meager wages (regardless of what wages the workers may have otherwise been promised). The two policies have recently been reversed in the face of sharp political pressure: Bush reinstated the Davis-Bacon Act on Nov. 3, while the Department of Homeland Security reinstated the I-9 requirements in late October, noting that it would once again "exercise prosecutorial discretion" of employers in violation "on a case-by-case basis." But critics say Bush's policies have already allowed extensive profiteering beneath layers of legal and political cover.

Halliburton/KBR, which enjoys an array of federal contracts in the United States, Iraq and Guantánamo Bay, Cuba, has long drawn criticism for its proximity to Vice President Dick Cheney, formerly Halliburton's CEO. Halliburton/KBR spokesperson Melissa Norcross declined to respond directly to allegations about undocumented workers in the Gulf. "In performing work for the U.S. government, KBR uses its government-approved procurement system to source and retain qualified subcontractors," she said in an e-mail. "KBR's subcontractors are required to comply with all applicable labor laws and provisions when performing this work."

Victoria Cintra is the Gulf Coast outreach organizer for Mississippi Immigrant Rights Alliance, which recently partnered with relief agency Oxfam America to help immigrant workers displaced by Katrina. She says KBR is exposing undocumented workers like Martinez to unethical and illegal treatment, even though they are supposed to be paid with federal Katrina-recovery dollars to clean and rebuild high-security facilities like the one President Bush recently visited. Cintra is one of several people fighting to recover the wages owed the workers: She drives her beat-up, chocolate-colored car across the swamps, damaged roads and broken bridges of the Gulf Coast to track down contractors and subcontractors. With yellow legal pad in hand, she and other advocates document abuses taking place at Belle Chasse, the Naval Construction Battalion Center at the Seabee naval base in Gulfport, Miss., and other military installations.

I was with Cintra when she received phone calls from several Latino workers who complained they were denied, under threat of deportation, the right to leave the base at Belle Chasse. Cintra also took me along on visits to squalid trailer parks -- like the one at Arlington Heights in Gulfport -- where up to 19 unpaid, unfed and undocumented KBR site workers inhabited a single trailer for $70 per person, per week. Workers there and on the bases complained of suffering from diarrhea, sprained ankles, cuts and bruises, and other injuries sustained on the KBR sites -- where they received no medical assistance, despite being close to medical facilities on the same bases they were cleaning and helping rebuild.

More at Salon.

amorcito

2005-11-12T10:20:00.000-06:00

querido mos def,

i'm sorry that my current illness is preventing us from seeing each other once again. do not mistake this as a decrease in my faith and devotion to you. i still want to make lots of babies together.

besitos,
la maestra

apartheid america

2005-11-12T08:55:00.000-06:00

Jonathan Kozol, author of the necessary educational read Savage Inequalities, released a new book this fall called The Shame of the Nation: The Restoration of Apartheid Schooling in America. Salon has a great interview by Sarah Karnasiewicz that I just discovered. Here's a taste:

"Segregation is not something that happens by chance, like weather conditions," says Jonathan Kozol. "It is the work of men." So it is not without irony that it has taken a hurricane -- and the excruciating images of stranded black faces, beamed across cable airwaves -- for Americans to confront the reality that vast numbers of their fellow citizens live in segregated ghettos and suffer from abject poverty. But for Kozol, who has built his career on exposing the race- and class-based injustices endemic to the United States' educational system, the knowledge that we live in a deeply divided society has long been a foregone -- if heartbreaking -- conclusion.

For 40 years, in bestselling books such as "Savage Inequalities" and "Amazing Grace," Kozol has reported from urban schools across the nation, befriending teachers and students who, despite the promises of Brown v. Board of Education, still live and learn in crumbling buildings and in overcrowded classrooms with scarce supplies. "I cannot discern even the slightest hint that any vestige of [the Brown decision] has survived within these schools and neighborhoods," he writes in his new book, "The Shame of the Nation." "I simply never see white children."

The America Kozol describes in "Shame" is in essence an apartheid state. White suburban districts receive disproportionate funding and praise, while inner-city schools that serve minorities are denied equitable federal aid, threatened by repressive testing mandates, and drained of creativity and joy. The book is also something of a polemic. Kozol accuses the Bush administration of implementing sinister educational policies in which rote memorization is valued more than imagination and children are treated as capitalist commodities to be molded into an army of obedient entry-level workers. Using the voices of dissatisfied students and teachers as a rallying cry, Kozol calls upon "decent citizens" of all political stripes to rise up against social and educational segregation -- and reclaim the ideals of the civil rights movement.

Kozol, 69, lives outside Boston but was in New York last week on his book tour. I sat down with him and -- in between sips of coffee and puffs on his cigarette -- he explained why he believes that newspapers are partly to blame for America's reluctance to discuss race, "Winnie the Pooh" is more essential than standardized tests, and lazy liberals need to "get off their asses" and fight for educational equity.

In some of your earlier books you raised fears that the aims of Brown v. Board of Education were quietly being undermined. But "Shame of the Nation" goes so far as to call the contemporary American educational system an apartheid regime.

In earlier books, like "Amazing Grace," I certainly made it evident that the schools of the South Bronx were stunningly segregated. But it wasn't until the last five years that I realized how sweeping this change has been throughout the nation, and how reluctant the media is to speak of it. Newspapers in general, including those that are seen as vaguely liberal, by a convenient defect of vision refuse to see what is in their own front yard -- or if they do see it, they refuse to state it. So, in a description of a 98 percent black and Latino school, the newspaper won't say what would seem to be the most obvious starting point: This is a deeply segregated school. They won't use the word "segregated." They do the most amazing semantic somersaults to avoid calling reality by its real name. "Gritty" is the New York Times' euphemism for segregated; "serving a diverse population with many minorities" -- as though they might be Albanians! Then I go to this "diverse" school and there are 1,000 black and Latino kids, 10 whites and 12 Asians. So "diverse" has actually come to be a synonym for "not diverse."

Do you think the media is afraid of race?

Most newspapers, with a few notable exceptions, have a far greater interest in defending civic image and civic stability than in removing the cancer of segregation from the body of American democracy. It would cause them a lot of problems if they attacked school segregation in their own communities head-on, because then they'd also have to attack residential segregation. That would mean shining the spotlight directly at the prime architects of residential apartheid -- major banks, lending institutions and realty firms. A large amount of the advertising revenues for newspapers comes from real estate.

Newspapers tend to boost almost any educational policy that seems to offer redemption, so every few years there's a new one, and basically every expert has a seven-point plan to prove that segregated schools can be successful. I call it the myth of perfectible apartheid. Most of these plans are organized bamboozlements, full of unassailable banalities. For example, No. 1: "Principal should have clear goals," as though most American principals have a secret predilection for obscurity. Or, No. 2: "Teachers should strive for excellence," as though most teachers had a genetic attraction to mediocrity. I've seen dozens of these plans come and go; they're boosted, schools claim immediate success and scores go up 3 percentage points -- and five years later it's declared a failure and abandoned. I refuse to play this game.

Clearly, you're angry.

"Shame of the Nation" is a dead serious book, the angriest book I've written in my life. It is not a recipe book for polishing the apple of apartheid. It's a call for an all-out struggle for decent citizens to wage an onslaught on apartheid schooling itself. The percentage of black children who now go to integrated public schools is at its lowest level since 1968. If you took a photograph of the classes I visit in New York, Chicago or St. Louis, it would look exactly like a class from Alabama in the 1940s.

Your view of the government and prevailing American culture is quite scathing. But do you really think policymakers and suburban families are actively racist? Or is this simply a case of cruel indifference?

Look, whether it's cruel indifference or the natural predilection of a parent to do the best she can for her own child, or originates in some very profound racist suppositions about minority children -- it doesn't make a damn bit of difference to the kids that I write about. There are unquestionably overtly racist white folks in the country, but I don't think that is an accurate portrayal of most white people in America. I think there is something peculiar about the culture wars that thrive in New York City; there's a venomous atmosphere around racial issues here that I don't find in most of the United States. Most white Americans with whom I talk -- and I don't mean people who read the Nation and the New York Times, just regular Americans -- are fair-minded and generous.

For instance, some of the children I write about endear themselves to readers. One little girl in the Bronx named Pineapple, whom I first met in kindergarten, and still remain close friends with, was just an irresistibly charming little kid; she used to boss me around, like a pint-sized Oprah Winfrey. And people read about her in Ohio or wherever, and they fall in love with her. And if they met her, they would do anything they could to give her the same opportunities they gave their own children. The genius of segregation in America is that it never gives most decent white Americans the opportunity to meet a child like Pineapple. And because they don't know these children in their years of innocence, they are protected from their own best instincts. If they knew them, most good people in this country could not tolerate the destruction of these children's destinies. People are more decent than the politicians they elect. At the highest levels of government -- and especially George W. Bush -- our politicians appeal to the worst instincts of Americans rather than their most generous.

Read the rest of the interview here.

yay, i guess

2005-11-08T22:36:00.000-06:00

georgia finally has its first dual language school. i guess as a bilingual teacher i should be glad this is happening, but mostly i'm irked that it's taken this friggin' long. how people continually fail to recognize the benefits of bilingualism --especially at a young age-- will probably annoy me for the rest of my life.

awww

2005-11-07T17:54:00.000-06:00

they like me, they really like me!

presents waiting for me today since i was out on friday:
1. a velvet rose with an "I Love You" sticker
2. two delicious oatmeal cranberry cookies
3. a huge chunk of cake
4. 2 pages of lovely writing and pictures
5. four Irish Cream creamers for my coffee

kids kick ass =)

no burn out for me... yet

2005-11-06T22:37:00.000-06:00

supposedly this is the time of year when teachers start to burn out. now that my after-school classes are winding down, i don't feel quite as stressed. sure, i need to revamp my ESL program and make some accomodations for guided reading, but for the most part things are just fine.

days off are so rejuvenating. i should take 'em more often.

the other side of the river

2005-11-03T23:55:00.000-06:00

i don't teach at the poorest school in town (anymore). i don't teach at the richest school in town. but i do teach at a title I school, which means most of our students receive free or reduced lunch. and the friends i hung out with tonight teach at one of the richer schools in town. to compare: our PTA scrounged together $50 gifts for each teacher at the end of last year, and now they're barely able to pay for this year's expenses. my friends who teach at Richypants Elementary got $1,000 each from their PTA. just an example.

we went to a local artsy fartsy gathering that took place maybe 2 miles north of my school. i went with my friend J, who teaches at Richypants, and met up with three of his co-workers. collectively, they had run into at least half a dozen parents/mothers of students from their school. i thought about my bilingual kids' parents, who work in kitchens and factories and babysit. first of all, they wouldn't have a night off or away from the kids to spend at such an artsy fartsy gathering, and secondly, they certainly wouldn't be able to spend a thursday night shopping for overpriced artsy fartsy things.

of course, then i saw the parent of one of my english-speaking students. the one and only parent that i find slightly attractive. err.

so much for class divisions. maybe we can just call it racial.

my head is going to explode

2005-11-02T16:36:00.000-06:00

four students got in a fistfight on the playground.
we made pan de muertos.
four students walked out of my classroom to attend to a butterfly. no permission was asked.
i had no coffee this morning.
one student is having serious family problems.
another student was spelling bad words (but not SAYING them).
my retainee is driving me crazy by acting like a baby.
a new student is driving me crazy with his annoying let's-see-how-long-i-can-be-out-of-my-seat-and-off-task attitude.
and then i had to teach my after-school class, which i normally love but had no time to prep for because of the day's craziness and therefore did not enjoy at all.

i'm glad some kids can be self-sufficient. cause otherwise i would have gone absolutely insane.

aaagh.

el destino

2005-10-30T08:44:00.000-06:00

From Lemony Snicket's An Unfortunate Series of Events #12: The Penultimate Peril:

..."destiny" is a word that tends to cause arguments among the people who use it. Some people think destiny is something you cannot escape, such as death, or a cheesecake that has curdled, both of which always turn up sooner or later. Other people think destiny is a time in one's life, such as the moment one becomes an adult, or the instant it becomes necessary to construct a hiding place out of sofa cushions. And still other people think that destiny is an invisible force, like gravity, or a fear of paper cuts, that guides everyone throughout their lives, whether they are embarking on a mysterious errand, doing a treacherous deed, or deciding that a book they have begun reading is too dreadful to finish.

love/hate

2005-10-29T23:43:00.000-05:00

love:

Andre Dubus III, House of Sand and Fog

Paolo Coelho, The Zahir

Naomi Shihab Nye, Habibi

Secuestro Express

hate:

Prussian Blue supremacist bullshit

deciding on Halloween costumes

Sandra Cisneros (still)

Currrently reading:

Lemony Snicket, An Unfortunate Series of Events #12: The Penultimate Peril

José Saramago, The Double

Augusten Burroughs, Running With Scissors

At a friend's insistence, I started Revolt of the Cockroach People to school myself in Chicano history. Also plan on buying the new Salman Rushdie book Shalimar the Clown. Time to get literate again!

nobody likes a smartass!

2005-10-27T16:33:00.000-05:00

this monday we will have our first of two permitted class parties. the class vetoed my idea of holding off on a full-fledged party and instead having a "Bat Fruit Feast." natural sugars, be damned! being the comilona that i am, i immediately started suggesting things their parents could bring: enchiladas, tacos al pastor, and of course my all-time favorite, pastel de tres leches. one kid's response to the latter request:

"Te traigo TRES GALONES DE LECHE."

maleducada

2005-10-25T21:15:00.000-05:00

i had an interesting night, that's for certain. i didn't get a lot of sleep and i got ready for school in less than 15 minutes. i put eyeshadow on in the car and lip gloss as a afterthought in the classroom. but i was nicely dressed and quite chipper, so i was a little peeved when a student walked in late, plopped herself on the carpet, cocked her said to one side and, with scrutinizing eyes, exlaimed,

"You look weird. You need makeup!"

later this morning, we read a book called "A Hug Is Warm." We discussed times when we might want to give someone a hug. One of my kids said, "I gave my dad a hug before he went to jail." Dad and Mom seem very nice if not a little strung out from time to time... sometimes being a teacher puts you in a weird place.

jinxed

2005-10-19T19:07:00.000-05:00

this morning my kids saw a bigass cockroach. i asked one of my boys to step on it and instead he grabbed a pencil box. a PENCIL BOX. resourceful, eh?

my pathological liar who had been doing so well flicked off two students this morning. so many stupid little things have happened that she got sent to pre-k today and the next step is suspension. i told mom and she seemed astonished that all this is happening. she's never been like this before.

my unspoken response: my ASS.

in the afternoon, my kids did a helluva job in math. they did centers quietly and stayed on-task the whole time. i asked them what was going on... was there something in the ketchup today? why were they being so incredibly well-behaved and productive? my kid with a driest, frankest sense of humor ever given to a six-year-old cocked his head and told it to me straight-up: "Because we're focusing on our work."

oh.

suerte

2005-10-18T23:32:00.000-05:00

reasons why i shouldn't complain so much:
1. i am very much a morning person, but on the rare days when i wake up grumpy and mad at the world, i know that once i get to school my chamacos will make me feel better
2. my kids are AMAZING writers!!!
3. i no longer have jehovah's witnesses in my classroom who freak out at the mere possibility of celebration (i seriously had to force the "friendship week" i used to replace valentine's day) and we will be studying BATS, SCARY THINGS, Halloween AND Día de los muertos! i am a holiday FREAK this year, who knew?
4. i got a lovely pumpkin mug =) my kids are painfully aware of my coffee addiction, it's quite sweet how they go searching for my mug when it is inevitably misplaced.
5. Target's Halloween party favors are already discounted.
6. of my three slight behavior problem students, one has chilled out, another is making much better decisions, and at least the one with the bad temper is very honest and up-front when he harasses other children. i hate the ¿me estás echando mentiras? speech.
7. while one teammate is a certifiable pain in my ass these days, the others are still wonderful. and my other buddy was a great help around report card time. yay for pleasant co-workers!

...to be continued.

oh bother

2005-10-16T20:28:00.000-05:00

it's the time of year when we complain about report cards and lesson plans. everybody does it, don't feel bad. but if i may preach to the choir briefly:

don't come to work everyday full of piss and vinegar. don't yell at your kids because YOU are frustrated with teaching. don't be bitchy to your co-workers because you're dissatisfied with administrative decisions. don't act put out because you have to differentiate your teaching. don't neglect your lower students because they require more of your attention, and don't be resentful because of it. and definitely don't expect me to commiserate when i've got a full plate of my own and it's just my second year and you're on your fourth. i'm sorry, did you think teaching was a walk in the park? what planet did you just come from?

and for the love of all things holy and good, don't make first grade all about worksheets. don't insult your students like that. a little effort won't kill you.

..stepping off soapbox.

heavy-lidded

2005-10-11T22:31:00.000-05:00

day 2 of online defensive driving. 8 sessions left. grr.

i am seriously exhausted. i am at school for no less than 10 hours a day. i teach all day long then do after-school enrichment classes. i love the after-school classes because the kids ROCK and love being there (especially today's class, which consists almost exclusively of my former and current students), but after everyone clears out, i've got even more to clean up, plan and prep for. so i'm reminded why i love working with kids, but it's wearing me the hell out. i try to stay social, so i'll meet up with friends for drinks or dinner. i'm home past sunset and by that point all i can manage is some painting, tv, or maybe lesson planning or computer stuff. bedtime? between 10 and 11 pm.

lord help me, i'm only 24!!!

don't stress and drive

2005-10-10T21:55:00.000-05:00

I have made the horrible mistake of taking defensive driving through an online course. But at least i'm "learning":

Stress is something most everyone experiences as part of daily life. We have all felt the pressure of busy schedules, deadlines at work, problems at home, bills to pay, and so on. When stress reaches extreme levels, it can seriously affect our physical and emotional state. Stress can cause adrenaline rushes, muscle tension, increased breathing and heart rates, sweaty palms, headaches, and extreme fatigue. All of these effects can impair your ability to operate a motor vehicle. You should avoid driving anytime you feel you are under high levels of stress. Because driving itself can cause stress, you should plan ahead of time to minimize the chances of getting stuck in stressful driving conditions such as rush hour or adverse weather. If driving to an appointment, always give yourself enough time so you do not find yourself rushing to get there. If traveling to an unfamiliar area, get directions and plan your route ahead of time.

Someone please forward the boldface sentence to my principal when i call in sick tomorrow because my driving to school is a public safety hazard.

i say a little prayer for you

2005-10-10T21:40:00.000-05:00

federal holiday, HA. i called my parents' house at lunch and both of them were at home taking it easy. must be nice.

i found that mr. tube top loves me so much, when he gets home he insists that his mother help him correctly spell my name on the drawings he makes of me. when they say their prayers at night, i'm the only non-family member he's ever mentioned. am i good or WHAT? it's kind of freaking me out.

report card time is nigh. i've received 8 english-speaking students. my stress level increases daily and i have to force myself to leave before 6 pm. i need all the kids praying for me that i can get. does that sentence even make sense?

is the neighborhood or the culture?

2005-10-06T16:56:00.000-05:00

one of my students is leaving my class despite his and his family's wishes for him to stay. today he gave me a lovely card with a *real* rose taped to it (last year's class was very fond of giving me fake velvet roses), a huge photo of himself (with nunca me olvide written on the back), and a GIFT... in the morning, he told me that his mother had cut the tag off the shirt: "Qué camisa?" "Tu camisa!" "¿Esta?" (pointing to the shirt i was wearing and feeling very confused) "NO, ¡la que te di!" "Oh. ¿Me diste una camisa?" "Sí, ¡mira!" I didn't look other than a marginal glance that showed it to indeed be a black shirt of some sort. After school, I stopped by a friend's room and made him see the card that made me cry just a little bit... he wanted to see the shirt, so we pulled it out and lo and behold...

IT'S A TUBE TOP!

...interesting.

on the ball

2005-10-04T23:31:00.000-05:00

tonight i met up with a couple co-workers to vent and lesson plan. one of my co-workers refers to herself as "word-retarded" in regard to her inability to effectively use "teacherese." not very PC, but whatever. in that spirit, i will confess that i am totally lesson plan-retarded. i am absolutely incapable of planning my lessons ahead of time in ALL subjects, writing it all down, and actually doing it all. i am a fly-by-the-seat-of-my-pants girl that keeps curriculum focus and themes in mind at all times. i am a leap-up-and-grab-a-book-that-has-to-do-with-a-kid's-random-anecdote kind of teacher that will completely rearrange my morning to accomodate a teachable moment. i base the following day's activities on the current day's performance. ALWAYS. sure, sometimes i do exactly what i plan to do in math or guided reading, but never never NEVER have i gone an entire day doing things as planned on paper.

for some people, i'm sure it's just a matter of style. the ladies on my first grade team have a wide variety of styles, and mine happens to match that of the teacher next door who has been teaching for 8 years and is still in a perpetual state of open change* and paper craziness. our rooms aren't messy, per se, (some have even been so bold as to call me organized, although surely they are smoking crack and are therefore missing the multiple piles of random shit i have everywhere) they just seem... actively used. i'm an anal-retentive person, but teaching has made me realistic. and a bit lazy. i expect the students to consider the classroom theirs, from their stuff on every wall to the fact that they have access to all materials, books, etc.

hmm, got a little lost there. my point is this: big changes are happening to my class (tiny perfect class, goodbye...) and i think it is imperative that i get my lesson plans (or lack thereof) in check. as soon as humanly possible. BUT... considering i am lesson plan-retarded, this will be quite a challenge. any advice???

*she/we are constantly rearranging her room/student seating/organizational systems/behavior management approaches to best meet students' needs. she's rearranged her centers four times this year. and yes, it's only the first week of october.

2 more reasons to take the GRE ASAP

2005-10-02T23:12:00.000-05:00

1. you have to attend mind-numbing trainings "facilitated" by someone that attended summer trainings with you and spent the entire duration of that training reading a book and showing off her portfolio (i had a long post about her which paranoia will not allow me to link.. just think back to july when i bitched endlessly about annoying professional development). even worse, this person feels the need to circulate around the room making sure YOU are not lesson planning as they read things aloud to you verbatim... because we all know as teachers that the best method of instruction is pure regurgitation. furthermore, the training is drastically short of materials AND space, so you neither have access to any of the materials you are being trained to use nor can you see any of the video clips that are being shown. and of COURSE, the kicker: not a damned thing is in spanish, despite the fact that you certainly are not the only bilingual teacher in the room.

2. after-hours/weekend calls from administration can NEVER be good. let's face it, administration never takes the time to call you up just to say "Great job! We LOVE you!"

...if i hadn't made my identity obvious enough, i just dug myself in a little deeper. ah well.

and just to keep things R-rated:
FUCKIN' MONDAYS.

have a great week. i assure you that mine will be lousier than yours.

fotos

2005-10-02T13:08:00.000-05:00

old friends & readers: photos of literacy centers and student work have been uploaded. you know where to find them, and if you've forgotten, email me.

subibaja

2005-09-30T18:00:00.000-05:00

there's a lot of shit going on at school these days, but given the dramatic increase of hits to this blog (two sarcastic thumbs up to NEA for putting my anonymity in jeopardy) i don't feel comfortable spilling the beans... particularly because my hit counter has shown visits from people in my district. that annoyingness aside, i'd like to share two things that children from other classes told me today:

"My mom's gonna use her food stamps to buy me a horse. A real horse!"

"I like your brown thing." (referring to my dress)

my chamaco fresh from the rancho with no alphabet sounds mastered the letter o today. after he finished reading his book, me and my watery eyes had to walk out of the room to keep from crying in front of him. i love first grade. too bad politics may make this my last year teaching it.

NEA, yikes!

2005-09-27T19:18:00.000-05:00

i've been mentioned in an article with a potential reach so big i'm frightened. because brutal honesty does not go over well in a public forum... particularly when my boss has access to it. i thought i learned my lesson from dooce, but obviously my big mouth replaced all rational thought. not that i remember saying what i was quoted for (since i clearly DON'T blog as soon as i get home each day), nor doing an interview for them. lo que sea. point is, archives are gone indefinitely to protect the not-so-innocent. sorry, chimosos!

*re: my "R-rating" - mejor que diga todas las maldiciones en español para evitar ofendiendo la buena gente. para Uds. que me entienden sin traducción, qué opinan: ¿debo cambiar de sitio para quedarme anónima o no más borrar todos los detalles específicos? la verdad es que ahora estoy bien preocupada y ya no me siento cómoda echando toda mi vida escolar al público. ¡la ironía del internet!

the blahs

2005-09-26T17:48:00.000-05:00

today was your quintessential terrible monday. i woke up late, slapped myself together in 15 minutes and was forced to get fast food coffee. i was totally unprepared for today. i didn't pack a lunch and was starving all day, and my small variety of junk food was not cutting it. i had a training and meeting during planning and a meeting after school.

AND NOW I HAVE TO GO TO THE FREAKIN GYM.

have to, because my new personal trainer says so. sigh.

y ahora esto

2005-09-21T20:21:00.000-05:00

my two favorite co-workers are being hostile as all hell. a few weeks back, another catty co-worker insinuated all kinds of insulting things about me and a friend. luckily, the more experienced teacher next door is actually asking for MY advice regarding classroom management, reminding me that the catty co-worker is smoking crack (cause we all know i kick ass). i'll keep nodding my head and smiling politely, but for fuck's sake... can't we all just get along? why must teachers behave more immaturely than their students?

bleeding hearts

2005-09-20T20:31:00.000-05:00

now listening to "Goddess on a Highway" by Mercury Rev: "and i know it ain't gonna last..."

sometimes teaching breaks your heart.

we've all heard stories about the kids without shoes and clothes. kids whose only meal is the cafeteria lunch. kids who become latchkey at 6, 7, 8 years old. kids whose parents can't/won't read to them.

these things i can deal with. there are obvious ways to help these kids. but what do you do about the children whose parents are in the middle of a bitter yet unofficial (nothing legal yet) custody battle and you have to watch your student scream and shriek because she doesn't want to choose between her parents after school? what do you do about the child who is repeating another grade because her parents don't make her go to school (and when she is in school, she has lice and must be sent home) and has now developed a lisp --in addition to all her other academic problems-- because all of her teeth have rotted out? what do you do about the child who is trying his damnedest every day to work at grade level despite having been identified and tested as having at least a couple learning disabilities, but whose mother refuses to have him change schools in order to receive special services because his siblings attend the same school and it would make things too difficult? what do you do about the factors that are completely beyond your control and realm of influence?

these days, i just try not to cry. and i've been a little extra generous with the hugs and attention. too bad that's not enough.

p.s. i know about the community outreach and in-school counseling opportunities available. i and my peers have made the necessary recommendations, filed the paperwork, sat in meetings, voiced our concerns. but the fact remains that these kids are only ours for about 7 hours a day. turns out, that doesn't count for much.

oh my

2005-09-18T15:36:00.000-05:00

i usually feel like a misfit in the world of teacher blogs. i curse like a sailor, i'm not all smiles and positivity when it comes to my students (although this school year's posts may have you fooled!), and i'm bilingual brown fish in a sea of white, middle-class english-speaking-only teachers. oh, and i'm liberal as fuck. so i make the assumption that most teachers have no interest in this blog.. just the cool "edgy" folks and my raza blogeros. yet SOMEHOW, esta maestra made it into Ms. Frizzle's edition of the Carnival of Education. wonders never cease. and hamsters never stop biting my friggin' fingers. speaking of which, time to head to school and make sure the little fuckers are still alive. guess who forgot to tell someone to feed them on friday?

who knew?

2005-09-17T09:12:00.000-05:00

apparently the pledge is unconstitutional. funny, the "under God" part always seemed so secular to me!

in other news, looks like we teachers aren't the only ones who are blogging about school life. if i'm talking shit about my administration, i wonder what their blogs have to say about me...

lastly, my favorite education news source joanne jacobs has a post about how some high schools try to appeal to the new generation of students that purportedly "puts leisure above the work ethic." madhatter, you may want to mention to your school board that lattes and pound cake help motivate students to do more research. maybe they can do a starbucks-style makeover and really turn your classroom into a true learning environment.

viva mexico!

2005-09-16T17:48:00.000-05:00

i love days when you throw curriculum guidelines to the wind and just let the kids immerse themselves in something culturally relevant and fun.

the bilingual teacher next door and i began switching groups for language arts based on reading ability. i've got the high group and we've been doing a lot of writing practice since all of my students are on if not above and beyond the appropriate reading level. yesterday, we practiced doing interviews in class... i modeled it with a student, then they did guided practice in class. last night's homework was to conduct an interview with a family member or friend in order to learn about 16 de septiembre. every single student brought their work, and every single student did a perfect job. did they retain any of the information this morning? not so much, but for just 5 weeks of first grade under their belt, i can't complain. anyways, we talked about their interviews this morning and summarized what they learned. i had to get pretty in-depth about why the mexicans wanted freedom since oppression isn't a concept they're familiar with (lucky them), but eventually it seemed to at least make sense if not stick. SO... after an Hidalgo book-making and mexican flag-coloring break, we used our BILINGUAL skills in ESL to make a presentation about diez y seis to the two English monolingual classes. it was like pulling teeth at first, but soon we got things summarized and broken down into individually-presentable parts. after 30 minutes of rehearsing, we presented... and they were GREAT! they even led a grito at the end.

throw in perfumed paper flowers, red, white, and green polvorones, and 95% passing on today's spelling test... i couldn't dream up a better way to celebrate today.

i am slowly going crazy

2005-09-07T21:23:00.000-05:00

i love my class. i LOVE my class. my job would be totally perfect if administration was completely hands off and i could forget that they exist to make my life miserable.

oh, and if i made twice as much money. then my job would be totally perfect.

in the meantime, i have to count my blessings and lean hard on my many wonderful teacher buddies. you guys give me strength and resilience. thank you. i also have to be grateful that my students are such wonderful kids with tons of heart and pretty damned impressive work ethics. they are so good, i let them convince me to have a class pet. tomorrow, we will go pick out a dwarf hamster. they are from china and russia (dwarf hamsters, not my chamacos), which will give them great exposure to countries far, far away. they are living things, which will teach them about life, sickness, and (hopefully not anytime soon) death. they are fuzzy and cute, which will teach them that fuzzy cute dwarfy things are absolutely irresistable. and they stink when dirty, which will teach them that the teacher is leaving these fuzzy living foreigners' cleanliness in THEIR hands.

hey, i tried guppies last year and i hated it. we had a big talk and the kids said they'd do all the work if we got a hamster, so they better keep up with their end of the deal. my end was buying the supplies.. the rest is up to them!

there was a very well-dressed man on campus today who was telling teachers about ways to invest our retirement money. i was in love for awhile, it was a nice change from the maintenance man lying on his belly fixing the water fountain saying hi to me. not that i have a problem with maintenance men, it's just a pleasant surprise having a man in expensive pants with a palm pilot flirt with you instead.

oh my, i think i'm rambling. it's almost friday, it's almost friday...

goodbye bliss, hello bitchery!

2005-09-01T23:23:00.000-05:00

ahh, you knew it wouldn't last...

let me be frank: fuck this required overtime bullshit. i work my ASS off. i spent three weeks of my summer at trainings. i spent another three weeks IN my classroom before the year even began getting it ready... spending my own money all summer long to give my kids a warm, inviting learning environment. no, the green apple magnetic word wall and happy fabric aren't necessary for their learning, but it makes them happy to be there, this i know for certain.

N-E-WAYZ, as my old middle school students would say, i put in hundreds of extra hours over the summer, before and after school, and on weekends. lucky for my principal i'm young, single, and willing. but i've been asked to attend countless trainings and meetings since school began... for example, an all-day weekend training. i was given notice that i should attend the day before the training at 3 pm. ridiculous. and today i was chastised for leaving a last-minute meeting early because i had scheduled a doctor appointment a MONTH before. i was also chastised for planning on missing another training. apparently i need to give advance notice when i can't attend things, but the administration is under no circumstances expected to do the same in regard to notifying me about aforementioned things. what a lovely double standard.

so in addition to messing with any and all appointments in my personal life, i am --of COURSE-- not getting paid overtime. and i'm slowly realizing that i put in a whole fucking lot of VOLUNTARY overtime. that's fine. but this supposedly REQUIRED-yet-FREE overtime is BULLSHIT. what other professional field gets away with this shit?

i talked to a high school teacher friend about this (correction: vented) and apparently it's the same situation there with meetings out the ass and back-to-school nights. maybe it's just my district? is this normal? if so, why the HELL haven't more teachers made a stink? we know we're grossly underpaid as it is... c'mon now!

there's also some petty bullshit i learned about tonight... if the AP deems it necessary to mention it to me, expect more bitchery in the coming weeks. blah! thank god for labor day!

out of the mouths of babes

2005-09-01T11:56:00.000-05:00

"We make you smile, don't we?"
"Your coffee's over THERE!"
"¿Tarea? ¿Qué tarea? Yo no hice tarea porque no tuve tarea. ¿Qué?"
"Mami-digo, ¡maEStra!"

yeah, i've heard cuter, but these snippets weren't half bad. another good week down!

bueno pues

2005-08-29T19:34:00.000-05:00

i know i don't post anymore... blame it on utter teaching bliss and a much-improved social life. i have 13 students, one of whom claims he will be leaving tomorrow, and the rest of which would compose a near-perfect class. i hate my school's new ESL curriculum, but that aside, my lessons have been loosely planned and generally well-executed given that i leave plenty of room for adaptation and my crazy "oooh, wait, no let's read this great book instead!" whims. i went to the public library today to return some videos and ended up leaving with over a dozen children's books, two audio tapes with books, and two new videos. i am a serious children's lit FREAK. anyway, seems like there's little time for blogging these days, but i'm sure it'll pick up if/when things start to get annoying and/or frustrating. i did all of my beginning-of-year testing in THREE DAYS, while showing minimal movies and making sure the kids were on track with the lg. arts and math curriculum. i'm getting awfully good at this juggling shit, but then again, my small numbers sure helped.

so yeah. not a lot to talk about. i have, however, been going music crazy. i am a total child of the 90s, so yesterday i bought 2 cornershop CDs, a bjork album, Café Tacuba Unplugged, and a José Alfredo Jimenez CD. i've been jamming out to Tori Amos and 10,000 Maniacs in the car. a friend loaned me Damian Rice and Thievery Corporation albums and they're not too shabby, but i just can't get over my obsession with music that was popular ten years ago.

OOH! and i sold three paintings last week and will be submitting work to two shows in october. see? i TOLD you i've been busy!

hope everyone else's years are off to a great start. and i hope the texas legislature gets its shit together sometime before i RETIRE.

ms. congeniality

2005-08-22T21:49:00.000-05:00

there's been a serious shift in teachers this year... new teachers, recent additions changing grade levels, and old veterans moving elsewhere. it's resulted in my blossoming... most of my favorite people have stayed and even moved to my wing, so we interact constantly. the new people are all very nice and friendly and the general staff rapport is ten times better than before. wow, i actually really LIKE my co-workers... almost all of 'em! and i'm even super friendly with most of them now. craziness.

*this post was instigated by a call i just received from the team leader... she said i'm her new "confidante" and we proceeded to talk about all kinds of school-related chisme. i'm getting chisme from all sides and grade levels, it's great! =P

lovely

2005-08-21T19:09:00.000-05:00

it's been an interesting week. there was minimal stress, a frightening amount of socializing, and a lot of prep and planning.

my kids are great. most of them have a really good understanding of english, in stark contrast to last year's group. i have two kids that have some difficulties waiting their turn to talk and getting to work, but they're all about trying their very best so it's hard not to love them. one kid is so desperate to help everyone else that she never gets her own freakin work done, but better that than being mean and picking fights. and my favorite is the chamaco who has never been to school before and is fresh from a rancho in mexico... his first two days were a bit of a nightmare (as soon as he was done with lunch, he got up and left... luckily he was intercepted by the principal, then handed off to me. he's definitely marching to the beat of his own drum and sees no point in asking permission or doing as others do.), but he's getting the hang of things. unfortunately, he have zero letter/sound knowledge so i've already met with a kinder teacher about having him join their class for language arts. we'll get him on track soon enough.

two of my fifteen will be leaving in the next week or so in order to receive special ed services at another campus. this means my already small class will be officially tiny. i LOVE it. they are super hard-working and looooooove the fact that they have TEXTBOOKS! friday we made a graph of our favorite foods and they had to copy it in their math notebooks. i was very impressed by their work ethic as they all sat quietly on the carpet and copied diligently. one kid started talking, and the student next to him hissed, "Stop talking and do your work!" really, i could have left to go get a milkshake and they would have been fine.

the new first grade bilingual teacher next door and i have great lofty dreams of team teaching. we've already begun a little swapping... last week she read social studies to both classes and i did a math lesson for both. ideally we'll start with 4-5 reading groups in september and try to work our way up to switching based on ability level in ESL and math. it'll require a ridiculous amount of planning at first, but the benefits for the kids would be extraordinary.

so there you go. a surprisingly smooth first week. we did some alpha knowledge and math testing but now we have to pull out the big beginning-of-year assessments that we all HATE. they absolutely require busy work. blech.

sidebars: first, at breakfast yesterday, i overheard a parent tell his spouse to buy their kid a gumball instead of a bouncy ball. what the hell? since when is sugar preferred over something that might inspire physical activity? lazyasses. second, today i went to the mall with a friend. as we waited in line at the cashier, a mother who appeared to be on the verge of self-implosion kept grabbing her kids by the ear and yanking them into line behind her. the first time i know the shock on my face was evident... the second time, i had to walk away or else i was gonna start lecturing her. what do you guys think of criticizing bad parental discipline in public? i've never done more than make a face, but now the teacher in me is way less tolerant of bullshit discipline methods.

back to my classroom, this week we'll work on retelling the fantastic book Tuesday by David Wiesner. it's one of my all-time favorites, check it out! we'll also be using My Little Sister Ate One Hare by Bill Grossman for rhyming practice and ESL. hmm, speaking of books... anyone willing to email me and teach me how to put that stuff on my blog that allows others to know what i'm reading? i love sharing great children's books and think that might be a good way to do it.

sorry for the lack of updates, but it'll likely continue as i try to maintain a social life =) more classroom photos will be up on flickr this week, so make sure to add me as a friend if you'd like to see them since i'm no longer making those photos public. ¡cuidense!

i'm still alive

2005-08-16T23:47:00.000-05:00

just too exhausted to think coherently. in a fabulous twist of fate, i have the smallest class in first grade with fifteen students. someday, when i'm not at school for 12 hours, i might actually post about my new chamacos.