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.

  • It’s the vocabulary, stupid

    Well, not just the vocabulary, but for my urban kids, that surely is a major factor.  This week, our writing focus – visualizing a text – was driven by a poem written by Carmen Lagos Signes:

    Pumpkins in the cornfields,

    Gold among the brown,

    Leaves of rust and scarlet,

    Trembling slowly down;

    Birds that travel southward,

    Lovely time to play;

    Nothing is as pleasant

    As an Autumn Day!

    Such a seemingly bucolic text loaded with typical fall scenery. So what vocabulary did my third graders find to be a challenge? Scarlet, rust (multiple meanings get them every single time!), pleasant, Autumn and…. cornfield.  Without explicit instruction – defining, finding synonyms, antonyms, using the words in sentences – visualizing this text would have turned into a meaningless regurgitation of the author’s words.

    A simple text, one with which my students would have some familiarity and experience, and the task of writing what the mind saw during the reading, so impacted by challenging vocabulary, challenging especially for second language learners. I am humbled.

  • Reason #1: I touch the future… I teach

    Some years ago — probably more than 10 now that I think of it — I was eating my lunch at a MassCUE conference when Grace Corrigan sat down with her tray. That name may or may not mean anything to some, but it was an exceptional thrill for me to sit and chat, however briefly with the mother one of my education heroes, Christa McAuliffe.

    Sharon Christa McAuliffe may have faded from some memories, but not from mine. When the Challenger explosion happened, I was in the midst of my career rebirth — the M.Ed. program at University of Lowell — and my own child was a first grader. I still think of the day Challenger burst into flames to the horror of everyone watching and I’m willing to bet that any child who happened to be watching the event on the television that day, certainly can recall it vividly.

    While I did not know Christa McAuliffe personally, her choice to train to be the first teacher in space, was a huge impact on me. For me, teaching is not about following what is expected. It is about learning to take chances, to try new things, to have a curiosity about life and parlaying those opportunities into moments of educational euphoria.  It is not about the safety of doing what we’ve gotten used to; it is being on the edge of disaster or success and not necessarily knowing how things turn out until much later. And for me, that is what Christa McAuliffe inspired in me on day she boarded a space shuttle for what should have been the adventure of a lifetime.

    So many years later, I try to remember this when experts tell me to be successful I need to do this, that or the other thing. Education, even in the era of unprecedented scrutiny where taking chances on what might work seems tougher and tougher to do, needs to be about trying new things even while being mindful of standards and accountability.

    Christa McAuliffe’s mission ended in a tragedy that those of us on the sidelines can barely appreciate. The loss to her family, her friends, her colleagues, her students had to be immeasurable. But her courage, her insatiable curiosity inspires me to keep on taking chances no matter what the odds.

  • Daily Five and Math

    This year I’ve made an attempt to follow the “Sisters” in implementing the Daily Five and the Literacy Cafe. So far, I’m happy with what is starting to take shape. Conferencing is more focused. Tracking those kids who need more than a once a month reading conference, keeping kids accountable through the Literacy Cafe Menu, all are clearly going to be helpful when presenting a case at an RTI meeting.

    Now if the Daily Five can help me with getting to those students who need some extra one-to-one support, maybe it can help with meeting the needs of students in mathematics.  The Sisters are way ahead of me on this one — the Math Daily Five provides a way to organize “guided mathematics”.  In my classroom, the five categories that I’m playing with are: Math Fact Drills, Landmark Math Games, Exploring Data, Problem Solving, and Featured Activity.  The math fact activities are games – electronic and otherwise – that provide fluency practice in addition, subtraction, multiplication and division.  Landmark Games are the “go to” games we teach throughout our third grade Investigations in Number, Data, and Space units and include games like “Close to 100/1000”, “Capture on a 300 Chart” and “Fraction Cookies”. Exploring Data is a new category — our school has identified interpreting, representing, and constructing data as a focus for this year. Activities in these categories will provide students with activities for practice. I want my students to solve problems in context and I have been providing a problem for students to solve and later share solutions in this category. Finally, in the Featured Activity category, we will work on explorations that accompany the launches for the daily Investigations lesson.

    I want to keep the launches down to about 15 minutes – whether it’s a model launch or a discussion. This isn’t easy for me. But by limiting my talk, and getting kids actively involved in activities while I meet with smaller needs-based groups, we should be able to make some progress toward students meeting Grade 3 Math Standards.

    Will it be noisy? I’m sure it will be. Just like the Daily Five and Literacy Cafe, I’ll need to build students’ stamina for staying on task. But in the end it should be worth the time it will take – hopefully we can work smarter not longer.

  • Life in the pressure cooker

    Elementary level teachers notice it. If the moon is full, if there it is a windy day, students seem more than a bit wired.  Are kids hypersensitive?

    I got to thinking about this idea because my students have seemed just a bit more unfocused than usual. There is no full moon and it hasn’t been remarkable windy, so what gives?

    Actually I feel like the explanation is fairly basic. It is no secret that educators are feeling pressure: pressure to raise test scores, pressure to overcome lack of materials needed for teaching, ever dwindling classroom assistance, pressure to be all to some very needy students.

    We rush to stay on task ourselves and get annoyed with students who balk at transitions. We rush, rush, rush to get from place to place, from lunch to recess, from the bathroom to our classroom. Is it any wonder that our kids act out, that their behaviors telegraph their resistance?

    Knowing, or thinking that I know, the root cause for students’ misbehavior is one thing. But until we all can get off the hamster wheel, students will balk and we will deal.

     

  • Standing on the shoulders of…

    Emily Rooney’s Greater Boston panel discussed the connection between a teacher‘s despondency and suicide and a recent LA Times article which ranked teachers by name. One can argue the stupidity of people who don’t understand educational issues and all of the things that impact students. One can argue about the current need to equate education with business practice, i.e. “value added”. But what I really don’t get is how anyone can think testing in one grade level isn’t impacted by what has happened before.

    Case in point: my current group of students includes 11 students reading at the first grade level. I teach third grade. I am not one of the two special education inclusion classes this year. This group of children is “regular” education, or as I prefer to say, my sped students haven’t yet been identified.

    Where I will start teaching this year is not based on some immovable starting line. Where these students finish may not be at “grade” level.

    Will they get better? Will they improve as readers and writers? You had better believe that they will. But I am not the second coming and it is statistically doubtful that we can close a gap of 2 years within the 10 months (or 6 until MCAS Reading) we are working together. In other words, my students’ learning and my ability to help them move along is based on what they have been able to do before they got to third grade.

    The class dynamic is quite a challenge even for a teacher with 23+ years experience. Traumas, poverty (2 of my students are living in welfare hotels), custody battles, ELL challenges, indifferent parenting….  this particular group of students, and their classmates in other homerooms are impacted by it all.  I often hear people talking about “last year’s second grade”; they don’t look wistful in their reminiscence.

    There’s a history here; there’s a dynamic with this group that has been present since they first arrived in the building. It spills over into the academics over and over throughout the day, impacting not only that one child’s learning, but the other children’s as well.

    What I am trying to say is that no one teacher is responsible for a students’ progress. No teacher should be singled out by name in a newspaper article as ineffective. Education is a collaboration. It starts the minute a student steps in to a school. We are standing on the shoulders of what has happened before and we are reaching for the sky.

  • Teaching Children to Care

    More and more I find myself talking to students about what is and is not socially acceptable. Oh I know that since the Stone Age kids have been playing cootie games. The level of nastiness, though, has been taken up quite a few notches; words and actions, put-down, all are becoming so hurtful that the behaviors need correction before any academics kick in.

    Yesterday after my students returned from recess, it was clear something had boiled up to the top. So we sat on the rug to have a class meeting. The kids could hardly contain themselves given an opportunity to air their grievances. Interesting, too, was the solution to the problems — “tell the teacher”.  Kids clearly don’t know how to advocate or stand up for themselves first!

    Today we will begin using Conflict Resolution, some teachers know this activity as “pretzel” or “M&M”, but with the food allergies I have always had in my classroom, we call it “Skittle”.  Here’s how it works – and I freely admit to co-opting this from other sources, particularly my good friend and former teaching colleague Paula Gendron:

    Students gather in a circle and are given a stick of 10 snap cubes. We introduce the first part of Skittle by talking briefly about how we all enjoy having a kindness shown to us and then one after the other, each student takes a turn “recognizing” a classmate for something kind that happened. For me, I need the emphasis to turn to giving positive attention to polite and caring behaviors, so I do not allow students to have a “pass” – everyone needs to notice a kindness.  After talking about the positive, the “recognizer” gives the “recognized” one snap cube.

    The next part of Conflict Resolution is to give students who are bothered by someone’s behavior – words or actions – to “mention” it. Students are told they need to listen without comment or argument because the “mentioner” feels what he/she feels. After listening, the person who was mentioned gives a snap cube to the mentioner as an apology of action.

    At the end of the Conflict Resolution meeting, each student gets the same number of Skittles as he/she has cubes.

    Does this help? In the past it sure does. I’ve seen students with 4 or 5 cubes at the end, recognize that their behavior is bothersome and increase their cube take to 8 or 9 in a couple of weeks. And, students quickly learn that an option for taking care of minor infractions is to “save it for Conflict Resolution”.

    This is just the beginning of our work toward a more peaceful classroom. Because, without peace, my students really will not be ready to learn the academics.

  • Writing within the Daily 5

    I was never much of a writer as a student, so working over the last 4 years within the structure of the Writing Workshop has sometimes posed a challenge. As a professional learning community, we’ve explored Lucy Calkins, Regie Routman, and other nationally known experts  in writing literacy. We’ve incorporated these ideas in to our Writers’ Workshops and the level of writing for our students has definitely improved.

    But my dilemma in rolling past writing practices into the Daily 5 has been that I don’t want to mess what has been successful with something else that I’ve become interested in. And I don’t feel very confident in my teacher-of-writing abilities.

    Yesterday, I took another look at Lucy Calkins and Ted Kesler’s First Hand book for writing in Grades 3-5.  Our grade level team will begin writing personal narratives with students in the coming week, a two-month writing focus that will take us in to November.

    This time, as I read Lucy’s and Ted’s words, I had the structure of the Daily 5 in the back of my mind. In place of trying to blow through teaching students how to select a topic for a small moment narrative, I’m thinking of taking 4 to 5 20-minute mini lessons based in mentor or touchstone texts to practice gathering the seeds or ideas for possible narratives. We won’t be incorporating everything from this book; as it is intended for teaching writing to 3rd through 5th graders, I don’t believe that is necessary.

    We’ll use Patricia Polacco’s Thundercakes as a mentor text for a memorable event in one’s life, Jane Yolan’s Owl Moon to explore the first/last time the author did something important or meaningful, and finally Mo Willem’s Knufflebunny to highlight picking an emotion (frustration) to write about. If things turn out the way I hope, students will have many ideas for personal narratives; ideas that can be used for independent writing throughout the year during the Daily 5 writing periods.

    Throughout the rest of our focus on personal narratives, I plan to use successful mini lessons based on modeling and shared writing before gradually releasing the responsibility for the task to my students. Will they be able to perform these writers’ tasks independently. After the unit ends I hope so. And they’ll have plenty of their own ideas ready for writing and practicing some more.

    As I fleshed out what I want to teach throughout this unit, I realized that the  Daily 5 will most likely be a great way to structure the elements of narrative writing for my third graders. We will target an idea in the mini lesson and then use the balance of the 45 minute block to practice it while, at last, I will be able to pull students who need extra help with a skill into a smaller support group. For me, that’s the most exciting part.

  • If You Think You Can “Get Over It” Think Again

    For anyone who knows me personally, you know my story. Twenty years ago, I was diagnosed with breast cancer and started my treatment.

    For 20 years I’ve tried to be brave, and mostly calm when it comes to my annual foray in to “does she or doesn’t she?” However this week’s visit for a mammogram sent me over the edge again.  While I have managed to maintain decorum through past surgery, testing, surgery again, and 6 months of chemo, an insensitive radiology policy caused me to melt once more into a puddle of tears and terror.

    For the last 19 years, whenever I go for mammograms, I am always asked to wait for the radiologist to make a first reading. While this is never a pleasure, it has nearly always resulted in a second – or third – set of films taken on the spot. And a definitive answer to what is going on with the girl. This time I was told that because I’m more than 5 years post-surgery (yeah!) my mammo has somehow morphed into a screening and that I would not need to wait. When I questioned this, I was told it was “policy”.

    And that’s where I lost it.

    A person who has overheard the bad news through a thin wall at a doctor’s office – which I did as the radiologist was discussing my initial diagnosis 20 years ago – needs to have some peace of mind on the one day each year that is hell on earth. For me, it doesn’t matter that what I’m feeling is illogical, I am feeling vulnerable and scared. My need on that day last week, was to either hear good news and move on or not-so-good news and figure out what to do next. Clearly this “new policy” which was meant to move mammogram patients through quickly, was not going to be much peace of mind for me.

    So, sitting in the parking lot of the medical center after having been told to go about my business and I’d hear in 3-10 days (!) , so unhinged that I was unable to talk with my dear spouse, I finally regained enough composure to drive home where I was convinced to speak up for my self and call my internist to see if she could get somewhere. Can you believe I had to be talked into it? I’m an adult, not a pushover. Yet that’s how conditioned I have become to  just accepting “policy”.

    Lucky me that my doctor and her staff are far more compassionate and a good deal more sensitive. The nurse I spoke to knew immediately that, even after 20 years of living with this disease, I was unnerved and made a call to the head of radiology. The news was good and all ended well, make no mistake I am grateful for that.

    But this event shows once again, that no matter how far you get from cancer, it still comes back to bite you in the behind at least once a year. No one is a “pro” at this. Especially me.

  • Inviting Parents In

    There is no magic bullet for creating partnerships between home and family. How I wish there was! However, once in a while I hear another teacher’s idea and borrow it to suit my own purpose.  Isn’t that something we all do?

    In this case I borrowed my colleague Kim Bonfilio’s idea of seeking parent input on what they hope for their child in Third Grade. It’s a great one, built upon the Responsive Classroom activity of students’ Hopes and Dreams.

    In my case, I sent a 6-item questionnaire to parents — remarkably I got about 75% of the questionnaires back the very next day. Many of them had thoughtful, introspective answers. The sheer number of returns was a pleasant surprise: conventional wisdom tells us that urban, high poverty parents are disengaged from their child’s school life.  In this case, conventional wisdom would be largely incorrect.

    Hopes and Dreams for My Student

    1. What is your child’s strength in school? What is something he or she does well?
    2. Is there an academic area (math, reading, writing, etc.) in which you feel your child needs help?  Be as specific as you can be.
    3. What do you hope that your child will be able to do in Third Grade?
    4. What overall goal or dream do you have for your child?
    5. How do you see us – teacher, parent, and student – working together to reach this goal?
    6. Is there something else you feel it is important that I know?

    In addition to the questionnaire, I am trying to contact parents of students who seem to be well-below grade level in reading – reading is my focus at this time because that is what we are benchmark testing at this moment. Many students seem to be about one and a half to two years below grade level and this is a place where a home-school connection is not only necessary, it is essential. We will need to work extremely hard – and smart – to start to close the gap.
    How I wish I had the courage of Jonathan Kozol to make home visits. I need to get parents working with me pronto.
    This survey is a step toward that partnership.

  • Transitioning

    For whatever reason, this group of students is having a heck of a time dialing things back after any unstructured time. I noticed it almost immediately which, given all the other chaos accompanying the first days of school was quite an accomplishment. Some of the problems that are interfering with getting back to work: excessive socializing and inability to stay focused on the afternoon’s lessons and activities. We use a behavior chart as part of our positive discipline climate: for more than two days in a row I’ve discovered one or more students who have moved a classmate’s behavior card instead of their own.

    It appears that the students have developed some less-than-acceptable work habits, doesn’t it. And before we can begin purposeful work on the academic gaps, there clearly  needs to be a correction – stat.

    Many of the students in my room — possibly 50% of the group — are reading at the first grade level and their math skills are pretty low as well.  Are the behaviors at the root of distracting student? I don’t think it takes a PhD to say yes. So, like most teachers I know, I’ve spent the weekend obsessing over the situation and how we can get on track.

    Tomorrow I plan to begin a more purposeful outreach to parents of my students. Although we are not scheduled to conference with parents until the first report card in December, I hope to reach out to each family.  If we are going to make up some of the ground lost, there needs to be lots of hard work at home and at school.

    I am hoping the parents will agree.