After An Educator's Journey

Out of the classroom & into the universe

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about

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.

  • Things I am Thankful For

    1.  My husband- who has stuck by me no matter what whackiness I’ve gotten him into. I’m remembering the unfortunate dining room wallpapering in our first house. … right out of the Three Stooges.

    2. My son who has always made me proud and who keeps me from taking myself too seriously.

    3. My parents and grandparents. I learned it’s easier to catch flies with honey than with vinegar. That a person’s reputation is worth more than gold. And that you need to work hard in this world.

    4.  My tolerant siblings who don’t take their B.S. too seriously.

    5. The teachers and administrators I’ve had the privilege of working for and with. I have learned so much every single day of my career. And I’m still learning 23 years later.

    6. Health care. It stinks that it takes a chunk of change to have medical peace of mind, but the health care I’ve received especially when things were quite scary has always been compassionate, caring, and just the right thing. Dr. Evjy, if you ever see this blog — I wouldn’t be here today without your expertise 20 years ago.

    7. A roof over my head and food on the table.  Working with children who come to school hungry or who don’t have a home to go to makes my heart ache. We may be doing more with less in this house, but we are not hungry and have a roof over our heads, and a beautiful one at that.

    8. The students I’ve gotten to know over the last 23 years. You may think I have forgotten you, but I really never have. A piece of you stays with me every day.

    9. Stars in the sky. There is something about the constellations and the night sky that makes me realize what a powerfully beautiful universe we live in.

    10. A day to remember how truly blessed my life has been.

    Happy Thanksgiving!

  • Is Anyone In There?

    I was in a good mood when I arrived yesterday. Really I was.

    Here’s just one of the problems:

    A 35-question District Math Benchmark.  The test, a 60-minute multiple choice-MCAS style-complete with bubble sheets (! for THIRD GRADERS!!!!)-mind blower was supposed to have arrived on November 9. It didn’t. In fact, it arrived last Friday after the students were dismissed which was — let me see now — November 20.

    Did that mean the deadline for administration of said test had changed. No it did not.  All results need to be transferred to “bubble sheets” for scanning and scoring by December 1 — which means ladies and gentlement that the test had to be administered Monday or: Tuesday of Thanksgiving Week OR Monday December 1.

    REALITY CHECK PLEASE Does anyone really think third graders can focus on anything other than Thanksgiving this week?And who do you think will transfer those answers from the test booklets to a bubble sheet? If the children do this, I’ll need to stop what I had actually planned to do – something that was let’s say educational and based on the curriculum – to line by line teach children how to color in bubbles on an answer sheet. Seriously? Is this a good use of academic time?

    No, the teacher can do this during the copious planning time during the day.  Or maybe you would  like to enter the data item by item on a nifty spreadsheet – one that croaks on the computer you are using.  Or perhaps you’d just as well take care of this at home?

    So I was in a positive frame of mind yesterday, but it evaporated quickly. I’ve lost count of how many time-sucking and seemingly arbitrary interruptions blow through my day. Interruptions that take away from the joy of learning and teaching children.

    Maybe today will be different.

     

     

  • CHOICES Character Education

    In my school, we have been grappling with student behaviors, choices and what to do about them.  Our Green Team – the staff guiding us to a cohesive K-4 plan – is incorporating and blending ideas from Ruth Payne’s outstanding book, A Framework for Understanding Poverty, Linda Albert’s book Cooperative Discipline, and Responsive Classroom. As a staff, we are exploring this further in a graduate level course offered after school hours.

    The deeper I delve into the topic, the more complicated things seem. A majority of our student come from trauma: financial, emotional, social, even academic. I am beginning to understand the role this plays in driving less-than-acceptable behaviors that appear in the classroom. Explicit and direct teaching and talking to children seems to be a key to helping students be and achieve their best. What does effort look like? What does it mean to work hard? What is a good choice?

    This morning, I came across this resource. The CHOICES program itself may not necessarily fit with our school’s plan, but the literature lists for introducing and teaching character — making choices, honesty, integrity, caring, etc. seem to offer  some great ideas for creating a literacy link to classroom discussion.

    For more information, click on CHOICES Character Education.

  • Into the frying pan…..

    In Massachusetts, there is a bill before the General Court to eliminate or increase the cap on Charter Schools.  I don’t know how things go in other parts of the country, but in Massachusetts, Charter Schools pull their funding from the local budget.  The currently proposed bill lifts the cap on Charters — further privatizing public education.  The following is a letter originally written to my State Representative and State Senator, but truly, it is an open letter to those who are considering this legislation.

    Charter Schools

    Dear Legislator,

    I am a citizen of the Commonwealth, and I am asking you NOT to support lifting caps on Charter Schools.

    I am a public educator in the Lowell Public Schools. My students are a diverse group from many different native languages, they come from hard-working families and they come from families experiencing social, emotional and financial traumas.  Five of the 18 students in my classroom are identified as having special needs.  Within this diverse population, there is exciting learning taking place.  And here is one of the reasons why I CHOOSE to teach in a public school:  unlike a charter, public schools have the mission of educating every student.  Shouldn’t education be a right, a given, for our children? We do not hold lotteries to decide who is accepted into our school — we meet the students — all students, not just a selection — wherever they are and move forward.  And we are doing this important work with less and less financial resources; resources that are drained by charter schools.

    Academic growth, no matter how it is measured is slowly and steadily taking place. I am proud of my school, my colleagues, and my students. They all deserve your support of public education by the defeat of this attack on public education.

    Sincerely,

    Amy E. Bisson

  • Keeping Your Eyes Peeled

    Have you ever stopped to consider how many idiomatic expressions are used in conversation throughout a day?

    While waiting for one of my walkers to be picked up, I instructed the poor soul to “keep your eyes peeled” for a brother — her pick up person.  The confused and horrified expression on her face immediately told me I had ventured in to idiom land — a land strewn with language landmines for my second language learners — and also for some native speakers.  After I explained to her that keeping your eyes peeled was akin to watching for someone or something, her deep relief was hard to miss.  I think she was fearful her whacky third grade teacher might actually have some extreme measures in mind for children who were late being picked up!

    Alas, my fondness for idiomatic expressions has also been problematic for my spouse, who I can attest is not a second language learner unless you factor in translating Amy-speak as a second language.  One of my family’s favorite idioms is that someone is “burning hard coal”.  I can only guess how this expression came into my family dialogue — even people from my generation didn’t burn coal to keep warm!  Did you guess that it means that someone is steaming mad?

    One can hardly imagine the confusion caused by literal translation of some of my family’s gems, gems that seem to find their way into my daily dialogue. “Shoulder to the grindstone”, “in deep poop” (does shallow poop make a difference?), and a sentimental favorite courtesy of my Dad – “drier than a popcorn fart”.  Just typing that one “cracks me up”.

     

  • Veteran’s Day Thoughts

    The eleventh hour of the eleventh day of the eleventh month.  A moment of silent, quiet reflection.

    E. Puglisi Jr.Today, Veteran’s Day 2009, I am remembering.  My Dad’s generation was the generation that fought World War II.  We don’t know much if any of my Dad’s whole military service. Like many of his generation, it was not something to be shared or talked about.  Yet, over time a few vignettes were revealed to us. Glimpses into the past both funny and frightening.

    I look at the photograph of Dad when he was in the Army.  I am not sure whether this photograph was before or after he was shipped to the European Theater, but I do know it was taken in Buffalo.  In the fading photograph I can see a much younger version of the man I recall — and if my mathematical calculations are correct, this photograph was taken when my Dad was 27 or 28.  I have a son who is older than that and the poignancy of this thought puts tears in my eyes.

    The events this week at Fort Hood once again remind me again of the human toll of service to country.  No matter what the politics of war, no matter how much or how little I have in common with service men and women, today is a day of remembrance.

    So at the eleventh hour on the eleventh day of the eleventh month, I stand among the trees in my wooded yard. And to the toll of the churchbell on the Common at precisely 11:00, I stop to remember.  Happy Veteran’s Day.

  • Love in the time of cholera…..

    or is it Teaching in the time of H1N1?  The season of viruses has started.  While a part of me feels empathetic to parents who cannot take time from work to tend to a sick child; the other part of me is irate that the sick child is in the petri dish I call my classroom spreading who-knows-what to all of us.  Is there no solution to this?

    We teach students to cover their mouths and noses when they sneeze or cough.  We teach them to throw the used tissue in a waste barrel. We teach them to wash their hands with soap and warm water each time they sneeze, cough, or use a tissue.  And yet, we still catch the viruses. Or at least I do.

    There is nothing so pathetic as a visibly sick child — one with running eyes and feverish look — spending the day with the class because no one can be reached at home…. or at work.  Can we not do better for these kids than this?

    The flu vaccine is no where to be found at the moment.  Flu clinics – seasonal flu clinics – have been cancelled and not rescheduled.  H1N1? Who knows when the students will be vaccinated?  Most teachers and staff are not considered “high risk”  so there’s little hope of getting vaccinated.

    Think about that for a moment.  The adults in charge of the students wellbeing during the day – students who are recognized as high risk – will go through the next months largely unprotected from the virus prebilled as our next great pandemic.

    Does any of this make sense?

     

  • It’s the vocabulary, stupid!

    It never ceases to amaze me.

    I’ll be reading a story and out of the blue will come a question that knocks me back a step or two. “Why did the Pilgrims come from Hollywood, Mrs. Bisson?”  Now you and I know the Pilgrims never set foot in Hollywood — that word that was lost in translation was Holland.

    The importance of common academic vocabulary, and sometimes just basic social vocabulary, is a challenge for urban education.  It is easy to slip into complacency once English Language Learning students are able to verbalize responses on the most basic of levels. They are nodding their heads — wouldn’t you if you didn’t want to be called on — and, with one or two word responses able to keep up the appearance of knowing more language than they actually do.

    However, insisting on the use of nouns in place of demonstrative pronouns and the shortfalls in vocabulary become glaringly apparent.  “This hurts”, “What hurts?”, “This…” “What is that?” “This” (more insistently).

    Our Coordinator of Reading, Dr. Phyllis Schlicter, recently shared some statistics with us in a vocabulary and semantics workshop.  Students from different linguistic backgrounds, present challenges but so do Native-speaking children from  backgrounds of little exposure to vocabulary. At the Kindergarten level, a vocabulary gap can easily be in the thousands of words.

    This citation from , by Scott K. Baker, Deborah C. Simmons, and Edward J. Kameenui of the University of Oregon, points to the urgency of teaching vocabulary to our students:

    The enduring effects of the vocabulary limitations of students with diverse learning needs is becoming increasingly apparent. Nothing less that learning itself depends on language. Certainly, as Adams (1990) suggests, most of our formal education is acquired through language. Learning something new does not occur in a vacuum. Rather, new learning always builds on what the learner already knows. Adams suggests that new learning is the process of forming novel combinations of familiar concepts. Learning, as a language-based activity, is fundamentally and profoundly dependent on vocabulary knowledge. Learners must have access to the meaning of words teachers, or their surrogates (e.g., other adults, books, films, etc.), use to guide them into contemplating known concepts in novel ways (i.e., to learn something new). With inadequate vocabulary knowledge, learners are being asked to develop novel combinations of known concepts with insufficient tools.

    The implications to my students is profound.

  • Life in the Crazy Aisle

    It doesn’t matter what I intend to do, once the school year starts, all my good intentions for moderation and actually having a life are very soon forgotten.  Case in point: the last post was September 18th.  That was 6 weeks ago for crying out loud.  School start ups are always stressful, jam packed, and tiring: Resistance is futile.

    For the last 6 weeks I’ve put in 12 plus hour days to try to manage — and isn’t that an ironic word choice — life in school.  It takes at least 8 hours to plan for a week’s instruction. Add to that the assessments that need to be evaluated, logged in, and meetings to attend to and before you know it, you have no life.  The inevitability of this scenario is based on 22 plus years in the classroom.  There is no way around it.

    Needless to say, all this attention to work means there is little attention to other things.  For me, one of those “other things” was the traffic light at the intersection of Boston Road and 495 on Tuesday morning at (holy crap) 6:30 am.  According to the state police officer who stopped me, I blasted right through the light and it was red.  I sort of remember a different color as I started through the intersection (hence the stepping on the gas). However, the fact that another car in the lane next to me did stop made it pretty definitive that I at least was attempting to forgo a delay in my urgent appointment with planning.  License and registration please.  This  episode,  an attempt to put in my 12 hours, cost me 100 bucks.  And now I have to endure my husband’s continual reminder that I have embarked on a life of crime.  Can this woman be saved?

    So, having spent quite a chunk of what I may have made money-wise on Tuesday, I have embarked on a new regime of moderation.  I will not arrive at school before 7:00, I will leave school at 4:00, and I will pay attention to the traffic lights on Boston Road.

    Oh, and I will post to this blog more than every 6 weeks.

  • It’s the little things

    Teachers generally roll with the punches; lots of mid-step changes and revisions to policy, curriculum, means flexibility is one of the most important traits of a teacher. Even the most compulsive of us — and I include myself in that category — manages to get through the continual stream. Teachers react and respond to split-second changes in what has been planned in a lesson; reading the room and adapting accordingly is so natural that it almost does not appear to be happening unless, of course, you know how the teacher envisioned the lesson during the planning process. Last minute schedule snafus, newly minted processes to handle paperwork, new mandates from the school department — those changes never seem to bother teachers too much. They’re expected.

    And then, there are the little things. Last Tuesday the good feeling as a new day started, quickly evaporated in a nanosecond. Why? Because the breakfast milk crate was partly filled with expired milk. Not just old milk, expired as in a week-too-old milk. Given the date on the expired milk (9/12) and the date on the “good” milk (9/22), my guess is that someone at the milk vendor may need a quick lesson on place value.

    One would not think that such a small event would set a classroom on edge, but it did. Eight-year-olds are awesome kids — on the verge of becoming quite independent really. But throw in a spoiled milk or two…. in an instant the classroom is in an uproar.

    We eat a grab-and-go breakfast in our classrooms each morning. As it happened, Tuesday was cereal day. I was moving around the classroom greeting kids, reminding them of our morning routine which has yet to become automatic despite 10 days of “practice” when I noticed a buzz about milk. The buzz gradually, but with alarming speed, turned into a full blown roar — the milk was not only old, but sour. By this point it had been mixed in with most children’s breakfast cereal bowl. Curdled, smelly, disgusting tasting hunks of spoiled milk among the Cheerios. Ugh.

    The wave of panic that ran through my classroom rivaled that of a wildfire. Code orange, code yellow, code red! Energy level raised. Amazingly, the kids still tried to eat their cereal — we had to stop them from continuing. In the end, teacher-turned-surrogate-parent and helped the kids to throw away the spoiled breakfast.

    Of course living by the clock as we do there was no time to ask for replacement food — nor was any offered. And a quick mini lesson in, “if it tastes spoiled, throw it away” was implemented times the four 3rd grade classrooms in our wing. This seemingly minor event, however, set the tone for the day.  I was annoyed and cranky about the disruption and the kids were upset and hungry. It took several hours for some resemblance to calm, purposeful learning to return.

    As I’ve said, it’s the little things that either put us over the edge or keep us on track.