snapshots of the day November 4, 2009

*Cherry and Chutney got bus write-ups last week that showed up in my mailbox only this morning.  They were defiant to the bus driver and refused to sit down on the bus.  And Cherry called Chutney the B word.

*A staffer whose grandson is in my class told me that he had really paid attention to my lesson yesterday.  I tried to remember what lesson that might have been.  She said, “he knows all the three-dimensional shapes now.  He told me, ‘did you know that the other name for a ball shape is a sphere?’ and also told me about cubes, cylinders, and cones.”  I was tickled.  Someone was listening!

*Plum showed up after two days at home and burst into tears.  “What’s wrong, honey?” “I…want…my…DADDY!” she sobbed.  She sobbed all the way to the local library, so, for the first hour of the morning.  At the library she sat on Miss Slinger’s lap whimpering, and then fell asleep in her arms.  I spent most of story time trying to track down her parents, who finally showed up when we were back at school.

*I got a new student, who moved to my class from the afternoon class.  She knows Miss Slinger, and the room, but not me.  She was dressed in a t-shirt and a thin sweatshirt today, and it was very cold out (in the 30s).  I tried to give her a jacket to wear to the library, but she refused.  I gave her a partner to hold hands with, and she refused.  So she held my hand all the way there.  Miss Mellow told me later that the new girl is very moody, that mom didn’t show up for her parent conference — twice — and that the girl came to school once with a warm jacket, and not again since.

*Because of very poor test scores, the third through fifth grade teams were shaken up, and a few teachers were removed from classroom teaching (they will be doing supplemental teaching instead).  At least one teacher was in tears.  Emotions were running high.  I wish the Prince had done this back in June, but I think he did the right thing, better late than never.  It’s inexcusable when certain teachers’ students don’t make a year’s worth of progress.  Our students are so far behind they really need to make well more than a year’s progress.  Less than a year?  Shameful.

*We read Knuffle Bunny for the second time (I’m back to doing Repeated Interactive Readalouds), and at the end, I asked, “have you ever lost something?”  After we heard about a lost ball and a lost car, I told them about a time when I lost my favorite mittens.  Pumpkin looked very concerned.  He raised his hand.  “Teacher, I can give you my red mittens.  Let me go get them for you.”  And he was about to get up before I stopped him, and assured him that I have since replaced the lost mittens.  He tried again at dismissal time to give me his red mittens.  So sweet.

*Zucchini had so much fun at recess that he forgot to tell me he needed to go pee.  He had a change of clothes in his backpack — but the pants were shorts!  So the poor kid went home in a warm jacket, hat, mittens, boots….and shorts.

*I visited Miss Mellow’s class, with her okay, to talk to them about all the stuff in the room, and how most of it is stuff I paid for.  I talked to them about respecting books, and how to take care of them, and where to put them (the Mo Willems books go in the Mo Willems box, not the ABC box, and the farm books go on the shelf, not in the color box).  I also showed them how to clean up the house corner and where everything goes there.  Later Miss Slinger told me that they did a much better job of clean up after their centers time.

*I spent two hours finishing writing up a post-observation report.  It made me cranky.  I don’t think I want to be a mentor next year.

letter of the week? July 21, 2009

I teach my students a letter of the alphabet each week.

Phew.  I said it.  I know that those are fighting words to some teachers, so I’m prepared to hear why some of you DON’T do a letter of the week.  And also to respect your arguments.  Here’s a little bit about why I do it.

When I got my master’s degree, I was taught to use a very naturalistic, child-centered, theme-based approach.  That’s what I did in my first year of teaching, and in my second year, I had to face the fact that I had sent my kindergartners off to first grade unprepared.  Sure, I’d talked about letters a lot, and we had played with letter puzzles and magnets, and we had read a ton of books, but none of it really sank in, and they arrived at first grade without being solid in the alphabet.  Granted, this may have had quite a bit to do with the fact that I was a first year teacher, but I also felt that my approach was part of the problem.

The kindergarten team was made up of four women, all of us relatively new to teaching, so we used our lunch breaks and our team meetings to hash out — and agonize — over what we had been taught to do, and what was actually going to work for our students, 98% of whom lived in poverty.  One woman on the team, who is African-American, started teaching her students in a more thorough, teacher-directed way, and we saw that it was working.  We read Other People’s Children, by Lisa Delpit, and we visited an Afro-centric charter school that was using direct instruction, and we started to modify what we were doing.  What I learned most from Other People’s Children was not to make assumptions.

What we think of as a “normal” curriculum for kindergarten or first grade, based on what teachers have been doing for years, works based on the assumption that parents do their part:  read to their children daily, talk to them, listen to them, take them places, give them educational toys.  Children in poverty generally don’t get these things, and they arrive at kindergarten almost completely unready for a traditional curriculum.  We can’t assume that they have been exposed to the alphabet, or that those little squiggles have any meaning to them at all; we have to give them what they are missing, and what they need.

For that reason, I spend a week on each letter.  I teach what the capital letter looks like, what the lower case letter looks like, and what sound it makes.  We practice the names and sounds of the letters daily, and my pack of letter and picture cards gets bigger each week, so we keep revisiting the old ones.  We look at a bunch of ABC books, just for the page of the letter of the week, and we compare the pictures for that letter in each book.  I sing their names in our good morning song, pretending that they all start with that letter.  We write it in shaving cream or we write it on whiteboards.  We look at our nametags, and figure out who starts with that letter, and who has that letter in our name.  I’m always looking for new ways to highlight the letter of the week, and revisit the letters we’ve already learned.

On the other hand, there are definitely some thoughtful reasons not to do a letter each week, like this page from Pre-K Pages, and this book at Amazon.  What do you all think?

Access to pre-K for Spanish-speaking children April 27, 2009

Here’s an interesting article about the barriers to getting Latino children into preschool.

I work at a school with a significant Latino population, but in the beginning, when my program was added, I attracted mostly native-English speakers.  Slowly, parents at the school with younger children learned about my classroom, and each year I have more and more children whose first language is Spanish.  (Why oh why did I study French in high school?!)

I’m always proud to send them on to kindergarten, knowing that they will do very well, and that they are much better prepared than their peers.

Ana Solano, who immigrated from Mexico five years ago, was unaware of the importance of early childhood education until the home-based visits began for her 4-year-old daughter, Ana. She said she immediately noticed a remarkable difference between Ana and her older son, Juan Carlos, who had struggled in kindergarten. “I just thought he would pick everything up in school. With Ana, I see how much it helps and how much better off she will be,” she said.

I hope that with a new administration in office, early childhood will get increased funding and attention, and ALL kids who need it, will get access to high quality preschool programs.

Thursday: neglect? April 24, 2009

I have a kid in my class — let’s call him Kid — who is one of several children at his home.  He’s got some issues.  He also has had green goo coming out of his nose for months, his breath is stunningly bad, and his adenoids are swollen and slimy.  If I were his mother, I’d have taken him to the doctor ages ago.

Miss Nelson has been concerned about him, I’ve been concerned about him, Miss Slinger has been concerned about him, the speech therapist has been concerned about him, and the nurse has been concerned about him.  The speech therapist says he’s so congested he can’t form the sounds correctly, and his infection is probably in his ears, because it seems like he can’t hear her.  The kids stay away from him because he smells so bad.  He’s needy and he bursts into tears at the slightest provocation. 

Miss Nelson and the nurse have been trying to reach mom for ages.  Finally Kid’s social worker went to the house to meet with mom.  Upshot is, she said she would take him to the doctor (she said she did, months ago, and the doctor said there was nothing wrong.  I find that difficult to believe.).

Then Thursday morning the social worker emails us and says, do we have enough evidence to file a report of medical neglect?  Miss Nelson promptly goes into a tizzy and we all try — and fail — to meet, so emails go bouncing around.

We decided to give mom one last chance.  She said she would take him to the doctor on Friday (today) so we’ll see. 

If within two weeks we see no evidence he is receiving medical care, we will file.

YUCK.

when parents can’t read April 2, 2009

On Monday one of my students came in halfway through the morning.  “I thought it was spring break starting today,” explained his always-harried mother.

“Oh, no,” I said.  “That doesn’t start until next week.  It was in the newsletter I sent home on Friday, and it’s in my monthly calendar.”

And then it dawned on me that this was the third time I had reminded her that all the school dates she needs to know are in my weekly newsletter.  Maybe she isn’t disorganized, I thought….maybe she can’t read.

The week previous, a mom had come to school with some formal papers for her to sign so that her son can get speech therapy at school.  The speech therapist and I had been waiting all week for those papers to come back to school.  When she came in last Friday, she was holding the papers.

“I’m just kind of confused,” she said.  “Could you explain this to me?”

I ended up going page by page, summarizing each one and explaining the process to her.  It occurred to me that perhaps she couldn’t read them.  She is very young — had her first child (the one in my class) at 15, and has had two more since then.

I’ve talked to the social worker, and she will call both moms and ask how things are going, and are they happy with the way they get information from the school?  I’m not sure what else to do, except call those mothers personally when there are things they really need to know.

As a book lover, though, I think it is indescribably sad.

Update — April 3.

I’m rethinking my position on the first mother.  I’m maybe back to thinking she’s just really disorganized.  Yesterday she told me that her son has been using our special words, and that he had said “disappointed” at least five times over the weekend.  (She was grinning with exasperation.)  I don’t remember talking to her about the words, which means she read the letter with the list of the three words.  Maybe.

Talking to toddlers December 29, 2008

At a science museum today with my two year old nephew (and various and sundry other relatives), I held his hand and showed him the antelope exhibit.

“See, that’s an antelope.  Can you say that?”

“Annalope!”  We walked to the next exhibit.

“Oh, this is a different kind of antelope.”

“Anonner one!  And anonner one!”  He pointed.  Then he asked, “What’s he eating?”

“He’s eating the grass.”

“Annalope eating da grass.”

I got bored of all the antelope displays, and looked ahead.  “Ooh, would you like to see a lion?”

“Wion!”  So we moved on to the lion display.  “Wion!  Anonner one!”

“Yes, there are more lions.  Shall we count them?  One, two, three, four.  There are four lions.”

“Four wions.”  He paused, and looked at the lions with interest.  “Toes.”

“Yes,” I said, “lions do have toes.  In their paws.”

“Toes in dere paws.”

And so on.  Later, walking back to the car with my brother-in-law, I told him how wonderful it was to talk to his son and teach him things, and how it made my kind of angry at the same time, to think of all the other two year olds who are not being talked to.

“No one is talking to them, or listening to them.  Their parents think of toddlers as sort of overgrown babies who can’t really learn or do anything.  They yell at them, tell them No! or Stop that! or Be Quiet!, they feed them, dress them, and they love them, but they don’t talk to them.  And so they don’t really learn how to talk all that well…..And then they end up in my class.”

I told my brother-in-law about the most important study/book about education and poverty, Meaningful Differences, by Hart and Risley.  Children from families in poverty are talked to so much less than children in families with professional parents that they arrive in kindergarten with a word deficit in the thousands, having heard millions of fewer words in their little life times.

“So, some kids are already screwed when they’re three?” my brother-in-law asked.

And unfortunately, some of them are.  Those of us who are their teachers need to do as much as we can to provide them with rich experiences and lots of vocabulary to try to address the word gap. 

And it sure would be nice if teachers and policy-makers and people who care about the achievement gap could figure out a way to encourage more parents to talk to their toddlers.

I want this book August 30, 2008

The book is Sweating the Small Stuff:  Inner-City Schools and the New Paternalism, by David Whitman, and it examines six schools that are succeeding, in part because they explicitly teach middle-class values.  The Core Knowledge blog and Thoughts on Education have thoughtful articles responding to the book.

The question is, are these techniques widely replicable?  Or are they succeeding only because they are able to be selective, they are able to expel students who misbehave, and they have young, underpaid teachers who devote most of their waking hours to work?

Adequate yearly progress August 6, 2008

My school has not made it off the list.  We’ve been on it for years and now we have arrived at the last stop, restructuring.

Why haven’t we made it off the list?  Is it our failure?  Did our mentoring program fail us?  Or is one year too short a time to make changes?  Would replacing the staff help or hurt?  Is it impossible to make it off the list, given our demographics (large numbers of children who fall into one or more of these categories:  poverty, special ed, African American, Hispanic, English Language Learners)?

What will the Prince, our kind and well-meaning principal, do with this information?  What will he tell us at the beginning of the year?  Will he tell us, as he has each preceeding year, not to worry about it?  Or will he get serious, set standards, hold teachers accountable, and start fighting?

And how am I going to let go, emotionally?  My summer is draining away rapidly, I still have things to cross off my summer to-do list, and I feel like I’m about to go over a waterfall.

Why I teach preschool (instead of kindergarten) August 4, 2008

Splatypus’s comment about my last post got me thinking about the days when I taught kindergarten in one high-poverty school after another.

Kindergarten can be high-stress for a teacher.  And not just because her students are living in poverty and have all the problems that go with poverty.  Kindergarten can be high-stress because districts are now putting a lot of pressure on the teachers to close the achievement gap and produce results. 

Your kids should be doing these things at the start of the year, and if they’re not, you better catch them up.  Then in January you better show these test results, and by the end of the year, they better know how to do every single one of things things on this long list here.

When I taught kindergarten, my children showed up years behind, and I had to try to get them through all the educational and social experiences that they missed in the first five years of their lives, plus get them through kindergarten to be ready for first grade.  In many instances, it wasn’t possible.  I would be trying to teach the kids to read and they would go to the bathroom and not come back.  I’d go see what they were doing, and find them at the sink, lost in rapture, playing with water and bubbles.  When they were toddlers, they never got to play with water and bubbles, and here they were, making up for lost time.

I tried really hard to teach preschool and kindergarten simultaneously, but that was hard.  I tried to be their teacher, their mother, their father, their social worker, their therapist, and their disciplinarian, but that was hard, too. 

I went home every day feeling like a failure.

Now I teach prekindergarten, and while I work with a similar demographic, it’s a different experience entirely.  My kids come to me missing all sorts of things they should have gotten in the first four years of their lives, sure, but for some reason, getting them one year earlier makes a world of difference.

I can get them through preschool, and I can get them ready for kindergarten.  In fact, I can send them off to kindergarten even a little bit ahead of the game.

I go home every night feeling like a success.

So that’s why I’m a preschool teacher.

(image from superdairyboy.com via Google images)

KIPP schools & public schools July 21, 2008

I have long been intrigued by KIPP schools and what they accomplish.  As a public school teacher, I am chagrined by the way my school in particular — and my district in general — are failing our African-American and Latino students.  KIPP schools work miracles, and I support them whole-heartedly.

I wonder, though, how what KIPP schools do can translate to the public schools.  At a KIPP school, you go to school from 7:30 am until 5 pm, and you do 2-3 hours of homework each night (during which time your teacher is on call by phone at home), and you go to school on Saturdays.  The curriculum is rigorous, which means that teachers, in addition to working all day and on Saturdays, presumably need to spend every evening and a good part of Sunday lesson planning (while fielding calls from students).  How do they do it without burning out?

I want to do for my students what KIPP teachers do for theirs.  However, I’m not in my 20s.  I have two children I’d like to spend time with and pay attention to, and I have a marriage I’d like to enjoy and nurture.  Teaching is so emotionally involving and physically exhausting that I really need time to be by myself to rest, replenish, restore.

Are the mostly young teachers at KIPP schools going to be able to keep up their grueling pace for years to come?  Will they be able to fit families into their demanding schedules?  And will the public schools ever be able to do what KIPP schools do if it means asking their union members to work even longer hours than they do now?