After An Educator's Journey

Out of the classroom & into the universe

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Once upon a time, I taught 2nd, 3rd, and 4th graders. Now I’m retired and working on new ventures.
I taught second, third and fourth graders. Teaching was my passion and joy for 30 years. And it didn’t hurt that they called me “mom” sometimes.

  • Endurance

    This must be the word of the week as it has come up so frequently.

    I think of my earnest third graders enduring the grueling high stakes mathematics testing that we concluded this week. Their reactions ran the gamut from just filling in any random test bubble to get the thing over with to painstakingly writing and justifying each and every answer with back up calculations.

    One of my behaviorally challenged students endures those days when the medication he relies upon is unavailable.  This student endures a health care system that doesn’t allow for alternative medication or treatment. Take a pill. You can endure the day.

    Another student endures the daily stress and uncertainty of a gravely ill parent. The student endures the day’s lesson until, arriving home, the child breaks down into inconsolable tears. This child no longer wants to be in school; it is too frightening to think that her parent may not be there when she arrives home.

    We endure those things mandated by folks who do not know who we are or what we are capable of achieving if we are just given a chance to linger until we can know. We endure an educational system that does not allow for students who learn differently unless the numbers add up. We endure a social structure that blames us when our families come from other places, or speak other languages.

    Sad to say, I feel I am enduring this year too. The challenge of teaching in a highly volatile impoverished environment is wearing and this year more than ever. My own self-worth can not driven by what others think of me,that I understand. But the constant harping on “poor results” by those with ulterior motive – be it winning elective office or selling a consultation service – on the backs of hard-working educators worms its way into my very being and causes me to doubt.

    With 19 days left to this academic year, we are all enduring.

  • Educating Workers or Leaders?

    Today’s Boston Globe carried a thought-provoking article by Renee Loth, titled “A Needed Lesson in Citizenship”.  The current emphasis on stripped down, regurgitation of facts that is necessitated by preparing students (and now teachers) to deal with high-stakes testing has quite the trickle down effect: science, critical thinking, social studies…. all of these highly needed learning experiences have been given the short shift for years.

    Loth quotes Charles Quigley, executive director of the Center for Civics in Education saying

     country is “focused more and more upon developing the worker at the expense of developing the citizen.’’ The result, he said, is a group of “vulnerable, less-empowered’’ Americans at the mercy of political spin.

    By vulnerable and less-empowered,  Loth goes on to point out

    Informed citizenship should not become a luxury reserved only for those with elite educations. But with so much emphasis on teaching marketable skills, subjects like civics get shortchanged in most public schools. The danger is a bifurcated society with a “labor class’’ and a “leader class’’ that is inimical to the very idea of democracy.

    Marketable skill. Labor class/Leader class. Education for the benefit of corporate America. Disengagement of citizens when their participation in our democracy is so essential.

    Frightening?  Click the Globe link above and read and decide for yourself.

  • The challenge of teaching science topics

    So many years ago I don’t even remember the exact year, I participated in a summer institute in Boston. That’s where I learned a lot about engaging kids through thematic science teaching; one of the best things I learned about was 321 Contact. Sadly this show’s run ended in the early 90s.

    It was at the institute that I first saw a 321 Contact Special about the rain forest and biodiversity.   It was so impressive that I bought the video and boy, am I ever happy that I did.  I’ve shown this video in my classroom nearly every academic year and it never, ever has lost the ability to engage kids in learning about biodiversity and the importance of preserving earth’s resources.

    Yesterday, as I watched the video with my students, there was another, even more relevant segment on the video — the impact of excessive carbon dioxide on our planet and the resulting warming. That’s right…. a video from the 1990s explaining Global Warming. I don’t know whether to be excited or frightened.

    Or maybe saddened. Our students don’t get enough exposure to science. Including science activities in the day becomes more of an afterthought and time for something more than superficial background knowledge has to be carved out of a thoroughly packed day of mathematics and language arts.

    This is wrong. Somehow incorporating science into my curriculum needs to be rethought and refocused on. Science is more than (as one superintendent wanted us to do) reading about it through small group instruction.

  • Power of verbal language

    Lately I’ve noticed a lot of head bobbing in place of actual vocabulary with my students – and not just with second language learners.  It’s got me second guessing whether or not I’ve been as focused on oral language as I should be.

    My current crop of students are really quite chatty. I don’t think they’ve ever encountered a moment topic, social or academic, that did not trigger commentary 🙂 — quite a bit of it off topic.  At least it seems that way to me – maybe I’m getting tired and ready to cut the apron strings.

    I find myself saying “use your words” more often lately and I’m wondering why.

    The way I look at it, the use of oral language has a huge impact on students’ written communication. I often ask the students to tell me orally what it is that they mean to say in written form.  And then, instead of words flowing out of their lips, I ask them to make those words come out of their pencil. This is not a new and unique strategy — I know teachers do this all of the time.

    What is troubling to me is that when my students resort to head bobbing, that oral language piece is, well, languishing and the proof often shows up in writing. Sentences are developmentally simpler than more verbal peers.

    There can be no let up. Even with just 7 weeks to go, there will be a renewed effort to insist on using verbal language on Monday.

  • Field trips are not just a day off

    The writing demands, and by that I mean the required monthly student work, in Grade 3 is driving me. We are asked to produce a student response to reading sample monthly – something that is sorely needed by my students. MCAS, soon-to-be replaced by whatever literacy testing the Core Curriculum invents, asks our students to read and respond to a text. On the surface that doesn’t sound too awful, but it usually end up being very challenging.

    Starting at “ground zero” as we often do in urban districts, our students seem to not have much experiential background, and therefore schema, for connecting texts to the outside world. With funding cuts, the schools are no longer able  provide the field trips needed to expand this knowledge base and that’s really hurting students, especially second language learners and high-poverty students whose families don’t have means to expose them to “things”.

    Most, if not all, of my students have never been to Boston – a 17 mile trip from Lowell. When we talk about the State House, when we talk about Lexington or Concord… these are all just theoretical places to them. How I wish we could take our students to walk the Battle Road, to see where the laws that impact them are made, to connect to the world around them. Even though we live about an hour’s drive from the ocean, many of my students have never walked along the beach front or heard its thundering roar.

    If I was in charge of education funding, I would be sure to include these experiences for learners. They provide invaluable schema with which to make connections and that is something the unending rounds of testing can never achieve.

  • Defining “Good” and “Bad” Teaching

    Since when does a nationally recognized newspaper purport expertise on what makes an effective teacher?

    Since this morning, April 19, 2011 when the Boston Globe published an uncredited editorial entitled: Ed Commissioner’s Plan for Teacher Evaluation Gets It Right. Apparently all that is necessary for teacher evaluations is some evidence of the following:

    Effective teachers routinely impart a year-and-a-half-gain in student achievement over the course of a single academic year. Three or four consecutive years of exposure to that level of instruction can eradicate the achievement gap between low-income and high-income students. Bad teachers routinely secure just a half-year of student progress over the same period.

    That’s right, unless your students routinely make a year-and-a-half gain in the course of one academic year, you must be a “bad” teacher. Really? Where did you get that particular piece of data, Mr./Ms. Globe Editorial Writer?  Because if true, those teachers at high performing schools may not be “good” teachers — their students may not be growing academically by a year and a half either.

    We all know that there is a real need for real evaluations of educators – and I include administrators too. I’ve taught under good ones and I taught under pathetic ones. I’ve also received children from teachers who clearly hadn’t a clue and that makes me crazy too. No child should have to put up with it either.

    Clearly some kind of evaluation that is constructive is needed – as opposed to the punitive “everyone in education is crap” platitudes coming from business types who really haven’t a clue what it is to deal with a human and therefore ever-changing “product” or from newspaper editors who simply and insidiously use their highly inflammatory language to sell more newspapers.

    So, Uncredited (do you really exists – show your face coward!) Globe Editorial Writer, if you have some data showing that “good” means a year and a half of growth please enlighten us. If you are pulling this data to support your thesis out of your rear-end or basing your editorial contribution on your own baggage and prejudices, you should be fired.

  • Uplifting the Soul

    This time of year, the weeks before “real” spring arrives, challenges me.  The winter debris, the salt and sand, litter, the ugliness of a still brown landscape make me anxious for a spring that arrives according to its own timetable.

    So yesterday, in an attempt to shake out of the depression that has been enveloping me, I took a personal day to visit the Museum of Fine Arts. For some weeks now, I have been anticipating Dale Chihuly‘s “Through the Looking Glass” exhibit. The beauty of glass – blown glass especially – has been a fascination of mine since I saw a glassblower work on a fifth grade field trip to Greenfield Village in Michigan. I have always found the molten mix of sand that begins as a bubble at the end of a tube and ends in shapes and colors wondrous.

    The exhibit, which will stay at the MFA through August 7, takes your breath away. The camera does not even come close to capturing the beauty of not only shape, but color. Here are some photographs from the exhibit. There are no words to describe the wonderment that “Through the Looking Glass” instills.

  • Busted…. and giving it up

    There is nothing like returning from a sick day to the chaos that has gone on in a classroom. Oh I know there are wonderful substitutes out there – and I’ve actually had the pleasure of experiencing one or two of them – but lately, whenever I’ve had to be out, it hasn’t been a pretty re-entry.

    I know children aren’t exactly on their best behavior when the regular teacher is not present, but what went on in my classroom yesterday was incredible, IF the children can be believed.  Despite rewriting my plans to be more “user friendly”, i.e., more on the worksheet and packets, less of the inquiry-constructive, despite my colleague laying out all the materials needed, what went on in my classroom yesterday was a puzzlement. The substitute reportedly came 15 minutes into the school day (okay, maybe there was a late call), and sat at the desk while the children did whatever. Seriously? Oh, and none of those carefully constructed learning activities, the ones I dragged myself out of bed at 5 am to rewrite while my throat throbbed uncontrollably? Not a single thing was touched – nope, not even the homework was distributed.

    What did the kids do all day? Again, if the kids are truthful – they are very skilled in truthiness – they played games with each other, talked, and otherwise wasted a day. Which brings me to the next topic of this rant.

    Noticing that nearly all of my paper in our Writing Center had disappeared (about a ream and a half), and noticing that fans, paper airplanes, and other crafts continued to pop up in the room, I used my powers of deduction – that’s why I am the teacher – to figure out that the kids had been taking this valuable supply.  They know the rules so, sub or no sub, they know they shouldn’t have been wasting school resources on airplanes. So, I stopped what we were doing and confronted them.

    The story became so squirrelly with he-said-she-saids liberally distributed into the conversation that everything had to come to a halt.  I sadly have a group of students who find it challenging to admit to mistakes; they find it much easier to throw their peers under the bus, even when the peer’s participation in the “crime” seems out-of-character. After giving the kids a blast about wasting our valuable school supplies, along with a does of guilt (“I am so disappointed with the choices you’ve made…”), I asked each student to write about anything they witnessed that would help me discover the truth — and if they had anything further to say, they could include that as well.

    I got the gamut of course: boys accusing just the girls, girls accusing just the boys, children who “don’t even know how to make a (sic) airplane”.  My favorite letter is this one:

    Dear Mrs. Bisson

    I am not going to lie to you. I did not use alote (sic) of your paper I used a little and now I see I am wrong. I am so sorry to dissapoint (sic) you. I hope you can forgive me.

    Oh and almost everyone was using paper

    Sometimes it’s hard to keep a straight face.

  • Courses, of course

    I hope to hit Masters + 60 next year — which is the highest achievable salary lane for me.  It is also preparation for retirement. As of today in Massachusetts, my retirement will be calculated on the last 3 years salary averaged together. I “plan” to work 4 after this year, and with no new contract — and thereby no cost of living or other raise possible — whatever the amount +60 gets me will be it.

    So a couple of weeks ago I signed on to take one of Patty Nichols’ courses, Museums Across the Curriculum. Last spring Patty led a course using museums and historical sites in the Concord and Lexington area — perfectly suited for Grade 3 History and Social Studies in Massachusetts.  This new course will take us to several museums in Lowell — the Boott Mill programs are part of our curriculum here in Lowell — and to the MFA in Boston and the Isabella Stewart Gardener Museum, also in Boston.

    What makes these courses a pleasure is the opportunity to explore local resources and a chance to be a tourist right in my own back yard. And a chance to develop some curriculum using these wonderful resources. As we make our visits and build our classroom activities, I’ll post on this blog.

  • Braindropping

    We all have them, those puzzling dreams that we can remember in the morning. Well, I just woke up to a nasty alarm after spending pillow time with a rather puzzling one. My mind can be a scary place.

    I’m not sure what I was doing, but it seemed to be some kind of math lesson – naturally. I love teaching math! I have the vague impression that people weew watching it for some strange reason….. whatever.

    And in that lesson a teacher’s greatest fear started to come to life. The group got so out of control that teaching was next to impossible. I’m not sure what was going on anymore – I hate when the details of a dream get lost to awake time! – but I do recall having to take the activity away from one cooperative group. A group that included Charo (what????) and Queen Elizabeth II (double what????). For the record the Queen was very gracious and totally understood why the teacher was stopping her participation. Charo, however, pouted.

    Just as I was about to resume the activity, the alarm broke in. So many unanswered questions; did the rest of the lesson go okay? Most of all I hope I never experience one of those deja vu moments starring this dream. Analyze this one if you want Dr. Freud, but I’m guessing I made need a vacation.