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.

  • In Need of an Educational Time-Out

    School vacation week in Massachusetts started for me as of 2:50 yesterday afternoon.

    I know there are some in the private sector who will read that statement and disparage me. But here is why I not only need this vacation, I deserve it.

    1.  I am not paid for the days off. Contrary to popular opinion, teachers are paid to work a number of days per contract period.  No one is counting next Monday through Friday in the day count.  Hence, working the requisite 180 (actually it’s 181 in Lowell) days means we stop the clock on Monday at Day 106. The daily count will begin again on Monday February 22.  So you see, taxpayers, you are not paying for my days off. My official work year (more of that word “official” later) will end whenever we hit 180 days.

    2.  Since we returned to school on January 4, I have put in 10 hour days 5 or more days a week. It takes planning and preparation to engage children in learning. What it takes for me is 4 hours daily on top of the time I am with the students. That’s not poor time management people.  That’s the amount of time it takes to correct and analyze assessments, reset education goals – sometimes for each student, find resources to meet those needs, and then write the whole mess down using Language and Content objectives as required by my District.

    3. Official work week of course in not any where close to the hours spent with students. “Officially”, I am not working during the summer. I am definitely not getting paid. In reality, I am taking courses that not only update my professional understandings but help me acquire the needed Professional Development Point to be relicensed every 5 years. And no, you can’t get PDPs for sitting by the pool or mowing the lawn.  It takes about a week after the students leave to close out required paperwork. It also takes time to gear up for a new school year — I stopped counting last August after I’d spent 40 hours. It was too depressing.

    4. The amount of paperwork, testing, reporting, etc. in any given time period during an academic year would bury most anyone I know. Every year there seems to be more of it.  And I’m a classroom teacher – imagine the Special Education people who have legal documents to fill out! I’m pretty adept with a computer having worked with them since 1977 (no that’s not a typo). Even Excel can’t bail me out of time-sucking reports and data analysis.

    I am exhausted and slept a record 10 hours last night. I’ll probably take a nap today. Maybe by Wednesday I’ll feel like a human again. And on Monday, I hope to meet my students with some renewed energy and the ability to pull of another round of 10 hour days.

  • Reality Bites

    Over the last weeks, my hometown has had two incredibly sad instances of domestic violence. Working in an urban setting, teachers are always aware of the nasty underbelly of society. Certainly I have had students who have been impacted by domestic violence, but that was in the city. Not in my neat little suburban, monied hometown.

    In the first instance, a man shot his wife during an argument and then turned the gun on himself. The woman lingered for a day and then died. At least two high school age children were at home at the time of the shooting and a third arrived home shortly after. Now three children are without a mother or a father, who is in custody pending trial.

    Last week, a father shot and killed his 17 year old high school senior daughter, shot his wife, and then committed suicide by turning the gun on himself. By all accounts, this girl had a wonderfully bright future ahead of her; she had just been accepted to UVM. While the reasons for the shootings have not fully been revealed, the reality is that they happened. And they happened right here in the cozy suburbs.

    No one seems to have seen this coming. There had been a 911 call hangup and, following protocol, the dispatcher called the home back. The daughter indicated that all was okay and no police assistance needed. However, even as the dispatcher was talking with the daughter on the telephone, her father began using his gun on the family. Another family is destroyed by violence.

    Even though I did not know this family, or the other family affected by domestic violence, I feel an overwhelming sadness. Sadness for the families who must try to pick up the threads of their lives and continue to live. Sadness for a mother who, if she regains cognition and awareness, will now live with unimaginable grief, sadness for classmates who have lost a great friend to senseless violence.

    Such incredible sadness to this story and the story of  the other family in town destroyed within the last two weeks by violence. And it happened here in the safe, secure, suburbs. Were there warning signals that weren’t picked up because of our affluence?

    Domestic violence is all around us. Lulling ourselves into feeling complacent because of affluence is no longer an option.

  • 100 Days

    Yesterday, we reached the 100th day of school — triple digits.  From this point on the year will whiz by at the speed of light… 80 school days from now we will be all done. For kids, that seems like an eternity, but for me Day 100 is the point at which panic sets in.

    In Massachusetts – and in most of northern New England – we have a school vacation week coming up beginning next week. Originally put into the academic calendar to accommodate the ski areas, it morphed into a week of “energy savings” in some districts. No students = low(er) energy costs for buildings. I’m not certain I buy into that one. It seems like teachers and custodial staff both show up for chunks of time during “vacation” weeks to catch up.

    After the vacation week, my third graders will be subjected to a battery of tests that rival the National Teachers’ Exam (remember those?).  First, each ELL will be evaluated for language acquisition using the MELA-O (more of an observation really), then they will take the more formal MEPA test. The District Math benchmarks are opening up on the Monday after vacation and all students will take those tests. Then there will be end-of-term assessments in the classroom, and last – but certainly not the least – we have the MCAS Reading Test, my students’ first foray into state-wide testing.  Just thinking about all the testing is making my head explode – imagine what it must be like for a 9 year old.

    But wait, that’s not all. We have another round of testing in May (MCAS for mathematics) and more required assessment.  After we hit the math MCAS, we’re on to end-of-year activities – field days, final field trips, report cards, Team Meetings…. yikes!

    So for me, Day 100, while a milestone in our academic year, is the start of stress season. Heaven help us all!

  • Connections

    Periodically, I go on a genealogical rampage trying to find — and understand — my family history.  For me, it’s always been slow going and each find is in itself a victory.  My people liked to hide under rocks.

    On one  side of my family, the Wyants and Lees (not of Virginia, but of Kentucky),  my great-great grandmother, Sophronia Lee Wyant, was born in 1836 (or 1830 if you ignore her changing of birth years in the Lee Family Bible). Sophronia Lee Wyant, the daughter of a Kentucky physician, was the wife of a Methodist minister in the Ohio River valley. Born in Indiana, Sophronia lived in Ohio, Kentucky, Indiana again, and finally Illinois. As I read aloud Little House on the Prairie with my third graders, I realized that Sophronia’s life coincided nearly exactly with Pa Ingalls’ life.  How strange!

    I recently finished Chasing Lincoln’s Killer by James Swanson. As I read this text, I couldn’t help but wonder at how my relatives must have reacted to this event in America’s history.  My g-g grandmother would have been a pastor’s wife in Crittenden, Kentucky at the time of Lincoln’s death – she would have been in confinement as my great grandfather Wyant was born in Cittenden in May 1865. At that time in her life, she would have been 3 years away from widowhood; my great-great Grandfather William Orrin Wyant became ill suddenly and died in January 1868.  Sophronia Lee Wyant kept a scrapbook of newspaper clippings which we have in our family. Would she have clipped out anything to reveal her feelings as Lincoln’s funeral procession made its way from Washington back of Springfield, IL?

    I wonder about my family ancestry and how they would have reacted to events of the day. As time passes, our history veils events in romanticism, often ignoring the difficulties of every day life. Reactions and opinions contrary to popular beliefs often are glossed over with cursory attention.

    All of which leads me to wonder more. How will my future relatives view our time in history?

  • A Reteachable Moment

    I’ve been using Lindamood Bell as an intervention with my struggling 3rd grade readers.  They are getting the labelling and the production – lip poppers, tongue coolers, scrapers and we’ve been working on the Vowel Circle. After nailing CVC  and CVCe (that’s short vowel and magic e words to the unintitated), I was feeling pretty confident that we could do blends — you know two consonants together and you can hear both sounds.

    Well, it took some doing, but we we working our way through a word chain full of  beginning blends by touching felt squares to physically segment each sound. Plan to plane, plane to flane, flane to flame — the “words”  don’t have to be real words in case you were thinking I’d gone off my nut.  And then I asked if anyone in the group could think of a word that began with the /pl/ sound.

    Plan – playground – play – please…. all good stuff, right? Until I came to my last little guy who very proudly and in a clear voice offered  prostitute.

    Must-keep-a-straight-face! Where in the world did this kid pull up this word? Usually when he responds to anything it’s with a monosyllabic mumble!

    As I said, you can’t make this stuff up. We’ll be revisiting blends next Monday.

  • Worry About The Quiet Ones

    As with every year, there are always kids that are easy to read and those that are “question marks”.

    It amazes me when kids are remarkably accepting of situations beyond their control. One of my students this year is a quiet unassuming kid. He struggles with some academics but works very hard. About a month ago, this student told me he would be moving to New York. That was a big disappointment because he is a pleasure to have in our class community; I joked with him that he couldn’t go and that I’d stand in front of the moving truck so he couldn’t leave us.  A few days later he quietly reported that his Dad told him he could stay, he wasn’t moving after all.

    Now that should have perhaps set off some alarm bell, but it did not. Life moved on. At the beginning of last week, he was absent for several days in a row and I worried that he may have moved away after all. But he returned and very quietly, without much emotion, revealed that his Mom had moved out of the house. We talked about that and whether he wanted or needed to talk with a counselor. Being a quiet student, he shook his head no. We moved on, his demeanor didn’t change one bit despite an upheaval that had to be upsetting.

    Today, during a school assembly in which our fourth graders, our “seniors”, presented their annual play, my quiet student was sitting behind me. A casual comment, that next year I’d be watching my third graders perform as fourth graders, brought an unusally revealing response: Mrs. Bisson, my parents won’t be here to watch me. My Dad works. My brother’s in jail. My Mom left us.

    Here was this quiet stoic child looking at his future and knowing he wouldn’t experience it in the same way as most of  his peers. This four-sentence glimpse into his life, into what influences his being burned in my brain.

    It is the quiet student that I worry about the most.

  • Rediscovering Read Alouds

    Sometimes we, meaning I, get so caught up in teaching the required standards, that we forget.  We forget the simple pleasure of hearing a book read aloud. I’m not talking about picture books here — those texts are used over and over to illustrate a mini lesson or a book with enjoyable illustrations. I am talking about reading longer chapter books for a sustained period and letting students use the author’s words to visualize.

    I began reading Little House on the Prairie to my third grade students this week.  My class will be attending a Theatreworks production of the same name in about a week and I wanted to give them some idea of who Laura Ingalls Wilder was and why someone might think she would be a good subject for a play. At first, the students seemed puzzled by the lack of pictures on each page. Why wasn’t Mrs. Bisson stopping to show the illustrations on each page? There was some restlessness, some wiggles, and I wasn’t altogether sure the vocabulary in the story might pose a problem to my mostly-second language learners.  However, we plowed ahead and after reading Chapter 1 took a look at a US map to see where the Ingalls family started (Wisconsin) and where the two rivers were located.

    This afternoon I continued to read for another 20 minutes that I carved out of the day – right before dismissal got underway. Again, I was concerned that the vocabulary was over the students’ heads, but as I glanced up from the text to check, I noticed they had all crept forward from our usual circle and many were lying on tummies, chins resting on hands, to hear the next adventure in the life of the Ingalls family on their journey through the prairie. Calmly and intently they were engaged in the story of a long ago family on the adventure of their lives.

    For me, this was a moment of realization when I understood in a new way that all the standards based time on task in the world won”t hold a candle to students enraptured as their teacher reads a book aloud. The time we spent today, lost in the adventures of a pioneer family in the mid-19th century calmed the kids down. Several students expressed the thought that, though a long story, they were enjoying hearing each chapter.

    The kids I teach may not have a parent at home who has the luxury of time to read aloud to a child. Their parents often work multiple jobs, or they are still negotiating learning English, or perhaps their school career was not as positive as mine was and they never developed that love of words and story. Whatever the reason, students in this urban environment need adults to read and share books; sometimes the only person who can do that may be the classroom teacher.

    Honestly, I don’t know why it never occurred to me before today to say the heck with the schedule, let’s enjoy a good book; let’s read another chapter. Some of my favorite remembrances of elementary school are connected to books and read alouds. Charlotte’s Web was read to me as a third grader and I can picture my teacher, Mrs. Harrell, standing before us reading a chapter at a time.

    I hope that finding a few minutes each day to read a new chapter is something my students will remember with fondness when they grow older.  Meanwhile, back to the book – this is a really exciting part.

  • What are you doing the rest of your life?

    “What are your goals for retirement?” This is a question I dread mostly because I’m in denial that I’m ever going to want to retire. However, moving  across yet another annual milestone and watching as one after another of my colleagues readies to leave teaching, it’s a question I no longer have the luxury of ignoring. I do not want to be the clueless old hag in front of a class.

    I finally got the courage to look into the Masschusetts Teacher’s Retirement System website this week to see what my financial future might hold. While not ideal, the future doesn’t look too grim.  I’ve worked since I was 16 years old, so I have plenty of quarter credits in the social security system — all credits which I believe will not be of benefit to me as I’ve also worked under the MTRS pension for enough time to get a reasonable monthly nut.  For me, it looks like another 7 years will be needed to get in the 50% pension range (% x average of last 3 years salary), but 8-9 years will make a significant difference in pension checks. So right now, I’m saying I have 8 years 90 days left to go.

    A financial planner began working with us this week. I am hopeful that the aggressive saving we were able to do while Adrien was working in the corporate world, will be adequate for our old-age future. But one of the planners asked me a question that I had great difficulty with: what are my plans for post-retirement?

    Plans? Now I have to plan on something to replace the one thing I’ve lived to do over the past 20 years? Well, of course it’s no surprise I couldn’t answer it then — things like knitting and beading are things I already do sporadically already. They are not the things that could occupy me day in and day out. So the question remains: what are my personal goals, post retirement?

    Forty-eight hours later and I still consider this question without enthusiasm.  I have a couple of book ideas in mind. One that might prove to be a resource for teachers and another that would be a fun joint-photo project with Adrien. I’d like to continue to tutor or teach — but most definitely not as a substitute teacher. I’d like to do some traveling. I am interested in family history and I am compiling a genealogy. I played tennis (pathetically) at one point, but my shoulder issues make that difficult now. I have always wanted to do a build with Habitat, or go to a cooking school, spend a month at the beach — but those don’t seem to be retirement “vocations” do they?

    Maybe the problem is that I’ve never considered what to do with myself outside of education. Or maybe that the possibilities are too wide open – barring physical barriers, there is no limit.

    Whatever. At least I have another 8 years and 90 days to think about it.

  • In Need of a Laugh

    Fans of American Idol are already on to this, but I only heard about it 2 nights ago. Four words – pants on the ground.  The General is definitely the cool cat.

    And for CSNY fans, check out Jimmy Fallon’s  cover. Waiting for Dylan to cover it.

    Now it’s stuck in my head.

  • Healthcare and Tuesday’s Election

    Massachusetts will have a special election on Tuesday in order to fill the remaining term of Senator Kennedy.  The two contenders, Martha Coakley and Scott Brown are attracting state-wide attention and even the national media has an eye on this thing. An election on a January Tuesday in the middle of — and I write this as a storm is dumping up to 6 inches of heavy wetness on us — Snow Season seems ill-advised, doesn’t it? Timing is everything.

    The successful Senate candidate will, of course, be able to vote on the Health Care bill before Congress. I’m certain it won’t surprise anyone who knows me that being somewhat left of center; I don’t consider this current bill enough of a reform of the debacle that is the US healthcare system. But it is something.

    In my opinion, one of the most desperately needed provision of the bill being considered is the part that will not allow insurance coverage to be denied based on prior conditions or catastrophic illness. Most people in Massachusetts will not remember the time when our Commonwealth did not protect people from having their insurance denied or from pre-existing condition clauses. I do.

    Nearly twenty years ago, I underwent surgery and chemotherapy for breast cancer. Thanks to my spouse’s excellent health insurance — an HMO by the way– there was not one problem for me as far as insurance coverage. A treatment plan was recommended and I received it. At the time, I did not have my own insurance coverage because I worked for a parochial school. Needless to say, benefits in a parochial school are not on a par with those offered to corporate employees.

    Some years later, my husband wanted to change employers. The new employer offered a different, more traditional insurance only — and I would be denied coverage due to my pre-existing condition.  Luckily even in the 90s there had been some healthcare reform, and I was able to continue my original coverage through COBRA.  But, what was once free and included in our family premium, would now need to be paid for separately for 12 months until I could prove myself “worthy” of coverage.  I would still need to be part of the new employer’s healthcare plan (in case something new and unrelated to the cancer came up), but I could not receive coverage for any treatments that could be connected to my prior diagnosis of cancer.  I can still remember the cost per month of the continued COBRA insurance: $237.  Not a non-trival expense for a family.

    The fear of losing healthcare coverage was one of the biggest stress outcomes of my illness. I did not worry about the actual treatment or the possibility of recurrence so much as bankrupting my family and all that we had worked toward should my treatment cause the insurance to lapse and coverage to be denied.  No one should have to endure this worry on top of fighting through a major illness, but outside of Massachusetts, many people do.

    I am lucky enough to live in a state where I have protection from insurance coverage roulette.  Most states do not have laws on their books that prevent insurance companies from denying coverage based on pre-existing conditions. The US Healthcare Reform legislation will not greatly impact me at all, but it will improve things for people who live in other states where such protections are nonexistent.

    And our two candidates for Senate? Martha Coakley has clearly supported the US bill and the other, Scott Brown,  is hoping to become the person to prevent its passage.

    The importance of this vote is that the successful candidate will have an impact on quality of life for many, many people. Tuesday’s Special Election vote will make a difference. Vote!