Teaching on the Titanic June 26, 2008

What a discouraging week.  The lead master teacher at my school has decided to work elsewhere.  She wants to work at a school with strong leadership and a staff dedicated to improving results for children.  That witch!!!  Seriously though, can you blame her?

So I am left contemplating a return to work in the fall, minus the one person who knew what we needed to do to improve, minus 3-4 great teachers who have left for better schools, and with a principal who seems utterly incapable of providing the leadership we need.

In one of her last acts as a master teacher at my school, Wonder Woman sent out a report on how we did meeting our goals for the year.  Only K, 2, and 3 did well.  Everyone else actually increased the number of students failing the state test.

I want to quit the mentoring program, go into my classroom, shut the door, and focus only on my kids, to the exclusion of every single freakin’ adult in my building.

ahh, summer June 16, 2008

Things are looking up.  Finally.

After my not-so-great last day of school, I had a not-so-great last day for teachers.  My children came to work with me, and I thought they might be helpful, but instead they were bored and underfoot.  I tried to keep them busy and slogged away at taking things down, cleaning, organizing, covering, labeling.  At last I was able to palm the boys off on a friend — having promised to take her sons the next day — and managed to finish up.  At the end of the day my pedometer read 19,000 steps, which was a personal record.  (My previous highest was 18,000, and that had only happened once.)  And most of those steps were in my classroom, just trudging around, cleaning up.

I said goodbye to people, but not with any real sadness.  It was one of my uncomfortable realizations this year that I don’t have any really close friends at work, and that I never have.  Odd as it may seem, I just don’t have that much in common with them.  Ah well.  My close friends exist, they are just not at school.

Then, Friday came.  My first full day of summer vacation, and it was wonderful.  I had four boys in my care who immediately went out back and started playing with water.  The weather was gorgeous, the boys were happy, the grass was green…it was great.  I can’t remember a single thing I did on Friday, just that I enjoyed it.

After a very full weekend — which included both a visit to the theater for a play AND a trip to the movies to see “Hulk” — I had a nice quiet Monday.  I slept in, got one boy ready to be picked up for camp, drove the other boy to his camp, accomplished a few things, went to a wonderful yoga class, and just breathed in the cool fresh air that was coming in through the windows.

It was a good year.  I accomplished a lot as a teacher, and I learned a lot as a mentor.  I know I have a long way to go to be a good mentor, and I’m going to give it another year.

In a little while, I’ll start reading about reading, and I’ll think about the fall, but for now it’s going to be sleep, novels, and yoga.

A bad ending June 12, 2008

I’m glad we had Monday at the park, because the last day of school wasn’t so great.  Our plan was to walk to the library for storytime, which would have been really fun (and would have taken up most of the morning).  Alas, it rained heavily, so we were trapped inside our small, humid classroom which we were all thoroughly sick of.

David was hyper and I actually yelled at him.  Twice.  Miss L. stayed under the house corner table for a long time, where I later found she had shredded several tissues.  David and A. were even louder and more shrill than usual, C. and the other boys switched centers (leaving messes behind) continually, and I felt frantic.

What was worst was that J.’s sister came in at the start and told me in halting English that O. had exposed himself to J. on the preschool bus, and then the behavior lady, the social worker, and the assistant principal all got involved, and my baby O. got suspended!  On the last day of school, no less, and he never even got to say goodbye.  The poor guy is still four years old, he’s never done anything like this before that we know of, he can barely form a sentence let alone hold a conversation or tell a coherent story about something that happened on another day, and he’s probably a candidate for special education.  And J. wasn’t upset.  AND HE’S FOUR.  I told the AP I disagreed with his decision and he said that the punishment was consistent for anyone who exposes themselves, even if they’re only four, even if it’s the last day of school.

Having that happen just put me in the worst mood all day.

Now I’m back at work to clean up and seal up my room, and I find out that Jan has been laid off.  So I’m losing my wonderful wonderful assistant teacher, on top of everything else.  (I’m already losing Ali, who is going to be a preschool teacher at another school, and I might lose Nan, who wants to finally use her social work license.)

I wrote O. a love note, saying what a good boy he is and how much I enjoyed having him in my class, and sent it home with his older brother.  I decided to skip the staff party, being totally not in a party mood or in a mood to hang out with coworkers.

I went home, had a glass of wine, and read the notes I got from two parents, and they were lovely.  It was nice to be appreciated.

Now it’s summer.  Once I adjust to the reality of being just a housewife (it always really bugs me the first week of summer), I will relax and enjoy myself.

Diary of a preschool teacher, pt. 2 June 6, 2008

It’s Friday night, I’ve got three days of teaching left, and I’m one glass of chardonnay down so far.  In my role as mentor teacher, I did an observation cycle (pre-observation conference, observation, post-observation conference) with a teacher who didn’t want me in her room all year, so it came down to the last minute.  So far in the last week she has ranted & raved, sent me a rude email (upsetting because seriously, I never get those), and complained about me to the principal.  I was DREADING the observation.

Then I go into her room, watch her do the lesson, and guess what?  It was beautiful.  She complained all year, but boy did she learn a lot in the end.  Afterward I told her, “you know what?  You are full of shit.”  She looked surprised, but grinned when I told her how good her lesson was.  So I gave her really good scores and we survived today’s conference relatively unscarred.  I still haven’t told her off, the way I’ve wanted to all week, but maybe I never will. 

I just know that in the fall, if she tries to use me as her punching bag again, I’m not going along with it.  We have a really weird relationship; it’s not a close friendship, but it’s definitely a close something.  She’s the one whose shoulder I cried on when my son was having trouble in school, and I knew I could say “you’re full of shit” and have her understand what I was talking about.

Anyway, on to the diary of a preschool teacher.  This week in preschool:

• One of my students — I am reluctant to say who — mouthed the toilet seats at the end of a rough morning.  It wasn’t a deliberate action, but more the action of someone who was not in control of his/her emotions, behavior, senses, or mental health.
• J. laughed today, for the first time all year.  She is a quiet girl for whom English is not the first language, and when I heard her delightful laughter from the block corner, I was thrilled, but also chagrined that I hadn’t realized I’d never heard it until now.
• We’ve been singing the ABC’s all week.  Then we started singing the ZYX’s, which I learned from Ralph’s World, and the kids love the part where we sing, “Next time let’s all move to Texas.”
• In keeping with my tastes in snarky humor, we read Do Not Open This Book, and Good Boy, Fergus, and Don’t Let the Pigeon Stay Up Late, and my kids understood all the humor and participated in reading with great enthusiasm.  No boring books in my classroom!
• Mysteriously, two or three books each day have ended up on my desk needing repairs.  A few are probably beyond repair.  I can’t figure out what’s happening, as my class LOVES books, and all year we’ve had this happen about once every two or three weeks at most.

On Monday we have our end of the year party, on Tuesday we’re going to take down and put away and clean clean clean, and then on Wednesday we’re going to the library for story time, and then we say goodbye.

a sad thing to see May 26, 2008

A few years ago, I was in the teacher’s lounge, feeling exhausted.  A middle school teacher (my school is preschool through 8th grade) asked how things were going, and I told her all about how difficult my kids were being.  I then asked her how she was doing, and she told me, “I’m really depressed.  My 8th graders are starting to have sex, and I can’t stop them from being so stupid.”

That silenced me.  Nothing on a bad day in preschool is quite like that.

This Friday started out inauspiciously, with a migraine at 5:30 am.  When the kids arrived off the buses I still felt pretty bad.  Then I saw something I’d never seen before at any school I’ve ever worked at:  a pregnant student.

I asked around, and she is in 8th grade, but is 16 and really should have moved on to the high school.  Still.  She’s in 8th grade and she’s pregnant.

I had a hollow feeling inside me all day.

On not being safe May 19, 2008

How’s this for a headline?  “Teacher tries to help preschoolers stay alive.”  I nearly spit out my coffee this morning when I saw that one.

Preschool teacher Marisol Sierra, who teaches in the Chicago neighborhood where schoolkids are getting shot, has incorporated gun- and gang-safety into her preschool curriculum.  That’s worlds away from the usual curriculum of colors, shapes, ABCs, friendship, storytime, and counting, but it makes perfect sense.  It’s just incredibly sad at the same time.

I remember my first year of teaching kindergarten, in one of my city’s worst neighborhoods, when the little girls in the house corner would play “call 911 — my boyfriend is coming over to kill me!”  I had a police cap in my dress up box, and would put it on and come over to reassure them and let them know that they were safe.

I also had to put on my police cap when I saw the children in the house corner doing the “duck and cover”, dodging bullets.

I don’t care how great you think you are May 1, 2008

Yesterday a kindergarten teacher in my mentoring group turned to me at our weekly meeting and hissed, “you should just come and observe me and get it over with, I don’t care when. Actually, just skip it and give me all twos, because I don’t give a shit!” Her voice was filled with anger, but her eyes were filled with tears.

I was speechless. I think I babbled something like, “uh, okay” and then the master teacher started the meeting.

So this morning I went to her room and asked if anything was wrong (the tears seemed to indicate stress at home), and was there anything she wanted to talk about, or anything I could do. She started ranting about our teacher quality program, and how stressed and overwhelmed it makes her. She said the program is unfair, because she has been comparing her observation scores with other teachers, and that it is inconsistent. You know, another teacher got 4s and she got 2s, and she was sure they did everything the exact same way.

I told her that comparing scores was a toxic thing to do, and tried to get back on the subject of how I could help her this quarter. She said, “I don’t care how great you think you are, but don’t even try to help me. It’s too late. I don’t give a shit.”

But it really seemed like she does give a shit.

And I give a shit; I was a little bit sick to my stomach all day.