Looking back

Looking back on my second year teaching I can truly say I've grown a great deal on a professional and on a personal level. How?

1. I had a positive and productive relationship with my administrator
2. I was able to collaborate with colleagues
3. Colleagues were emotionally supportive
4. I loved most of my students
5. I focused on the things I could change
6. I focused on student growth in relation to our big goals
7. I earned a masters degree!
8. I was able to attend workshops for professional development
9. I've learned how to keep students engaged
10. My interactions with students are much more productive

Fun with conjugation

To lighten the mood during state testing, I am combining card games + mental math + conjugating verbs in Spanish. How? Our first game is 21 Blackjack. 

Students play the game in groups of 3's or 4's. After each round the winner doesn't have to conjugate any verbs, but the losers have to conjugate verbs based on the cards they have in their hand at the end of the round. Each suit (spades, clubs, hearts, and diamonds) corresponds to a given verb, and each card value has an assigned subject pronoun. 

This is how it works

Global perspectives

How do I connect topics I am teaching to the real world?

One of our recent units was "la comida" - food. Food can either be very mundane and basic, or it can be unique and exciting. In order to make learning about food unique and exciting, one of the activities involved looking at an ordinary activity like grocery shopping from a local and global perspective. 

We compared grocery shopping the USA to grocery shopping in Venezuela.

Why did I choose Venezuela? Aside from it being a Spanish speaking country, Venezuela has a government and an economy that is very different from our own. On paper Venezuela has a republican form of government, but in reality the government has socialist tendencies and an economy that increasingly socialist with pockets of capitalist industries. What does grocery shopping have to do with socialism? In order to make necessities like toilet paper, flour, sugar, meat, and cornmeal affordable, the government subsidizes local farmers and manufacturers who supply government run supermarkets. This means that privately owned supermarkets do not have sufficient food or basic necessities. As a result, people are forced to shop at government run supermarkets. This sounds great except the government supermarkets are also low on supplies like beef, chicken, toilet paper, sugar, and flour. Why? The government subsidized farmers and manufacturers are not making a substantial profit by exclusively supplying government shops, so they only supply select items. 

Food shortages in Venezuela

What does this look like for the average consumer? People stand in line for up to 5 hours to get into the grocery store. Once they are in the grocery store there is no guarantee that they will find what they need. Some people wait weeks to get basics like toilet paper. My students' minds were blown at the thought of cueing up just to go grocery shopping. 

Toilet paper crisis

What was our classroom discussion like? We asked and answered some revealing questions. 

1. What is socialism and how is it different from our government?
2. What is supply and demand? How is this an issue in Venezuela's supermarkets?
3. How do we feel about necessities being available at a reduced price that everyone can afford regardless of occupation? 
4. What would happen to the EBT program if the USA adopted socialist policies?
5. What are some extremes we saw in the Venezuela supermarket crisis? How is this similar to and different from a trip to the supermarket in the United States?

The teaching and learning format for this lesson featured several video segments followed by open forum discussion on the issues presented in each video. At the end of class students answered reflection questions. 

My students will never look at grocery shopping the same way. 

What's conjugation?

We learned how to modify verbs in Spanish depending on who we are talking about. 

If you still don't know how to conjugate present tense verbs that end in -ar after multiple modes of presentation, you are beyond the teacher's reach. 

1st try: visual + auditory

Check out the awesome video

2nd try: traditional (some people like the no frills approach)

3rd try: kinesthetic (you made a foldable on neon green paper and stapled it into your interactive notebook)

OUTSIDE

INSIDE

I don't remember Spanish being this exciting when I was in high school.

No sub, no problem

Here in the county many certified staff use all of their sick time and then some. The problem is that nobody likes calling out sick ahead of time, so the school is always scrambling to find a substitute at the last minute.

If we are especially fortunate, one of the bus drivers will stay on as a sub, but when lady luck is not on our side we push for more innovative methods.

Option 1: send the students to the gym so that 20+ kids can disrupt the gym class that already has 40ish students.

Option 2: send the students to the library so that the librarian can babysit 20+ kids with nothing to do.

On one such occasion when we resorted to option 1 (sending the kids to the gym), students used this opportunity to engage in "inappropriate activities" in the bathroom.

Such innovation, such preparation, such flexibility.

The struggle is real.

A typical day in the lunch line

Student: Ms. Smith, you take food stamps in between paychecks?
Teacher: No.
Student: How you survive without food stamps?
Teacher: I use my money.
Student: So you don't get food stamps?
Teacher: No, I don't get food stamps.
Student: Ms. Smith, I never knew no black folk that don't get food stamps.

Here in the county 100% of our students receive free lunch and most if not all of them receive food stamps.

The struggle is real.

CPR training...can someone help the nurse?

Sounds crazy, but this really happened. Our wonderful principal thought it would be in everyone's best interest to learn CPR and get certified. I also agree that learning CPR is pretty important especially when you work with children. So, we plunged into fall break with professional development ie. CPR training.

To speed up the process we broke off into groups of 4-5 people. My group finished demonstrating our mastery of CPR pretty early, so we sat back and watched the other groups in action. I noticed a middle aged woman seriously struggling to deliver the chest compressions and rescue breaths. I'm not the only one who noticed this because I saw other heads turn in see what was going on. Naturally, I was curious to find out who the poor woman was, so I asked my colleague sitting next to me. She leaned in close to my ear and whispered, "that's the nurse!"

I stared back at her with wide eyes. I couldn't believe it. My colleague noted my surprise and said, "girl, I'm dead serious, that's the nurse."I proceeded to shake my head in disbelief as my colleague then whispered, "if somebody passes out, you better say a prayer because the nurse can't help."

Apparently the CPR instructor noticed the struggle taking place, so she said, "can someone give this woman some assistance?" The look on her face was priceless when someone informed her that "this woman" was the school nurse for the school district.

Here in "the county" we have a long standing practice of hiring people who are under qualified and holding on to them even when there is evidence that the person is incapable of doing what the position requires.

The struggle is real.

seizures, strokes, what's the difference?

Say it ain't so. I wish it was a joke, but here in "the county" our esteemed psychologist, Dr. Z, just got through explaining that recurring absence seizures, which have gone undiagnosed, are akin to having mini strokes. Dr. Z, with his boundless beneficence, kindly explained to Billy's mother and grandmother that Billy is incapable of learning at the same level as his peers because of his recurring seizures. Let's clear up a few things first. 1. Billy has never seen a specialist ie. no neurologist 2. Billy has never had any neuroimaging studies 3. Billy suffers from absence seizures (drifting off/losing focus for a few seconds) not the dramatic tonic-clonic seizures which cause full body seizing 4. Billy has received seizure medication from the village general physician.

According to Dr. Z, since Billy "can't learn" he needs to be on the SpEd (Special Education) track (check out the post "SpEd is the new black"). True to form, Billy is now in SpEd and he now has an IEP (individualized education plan). Seizure problem solved...

Where do I come into this picture? I was on my planning period planning lessons and grading assignments when I got called to go to the "parent coordinator's" conference room. I'm thinking, "okay I must have a parent conference". Nope, the secretary tells me that my presence is required in an IEP meeting. At this point i'm extremely confused, so I ask what student this is for, and she tells me its for Billy. I'm thinking i'm in deep trouble for not following Billy's IEP even though I was never given an IEP for this boy, so I take his file and head down to the conference room. Dr. Z greets me warmly, as only Dr. Z can, and he tells me that my job is to sit there and listen. 

But I digress. So we arrive back at Dr. Z's analogy. If seizures are the same thing as strokes, then hunger pangs are the same thing as ulcers. In fact, I wouldn't be surprised if he tells a student that migraines are a symptom of permanent memory loss, or better yet, a fever means certain death.

                                                              seizures <-----> strokes 

                       (over excitability of our circuitry) <-----> (embolic or hemorrhagic)

I'm no neurologist nor am i a synaptic physiologist, but I happen to know a bit more than a thing or two about physiology and neurobiology. 

Well, when it comes to school psychologists I suppose the worst is better than none. 

The struggle is real