Month: September 2021

Closing Ranks

A month in to the new school year is a good time to take stock and make some in-game adjustments. Keep what’s working and throw out what’s not.

It’s not your average school year, clearly. In the classroom and out. I’m adjusting to a new building and a new schedule and getting back to teaching full classrooms (really full) of students and a new prep. I thought I had a plan, but maybe there’s a better way?

It could be that in an 85 minute block less is more. I started the year super-concerned about planning bell-to-bell, making sure I didn’t come up short. In reality, the opposite has been the issue. Every day I have too much stuff and have to decide what to cut. I still want a Thinking Classroom. I still want blended learning. I still need to decide how to marry the two.

Source

So we had a debrief opportunity at our last weekly math department PD. We all shared our highs and lows. And some things came into focus for me. Our first in-person class day after a week of remote and a week of hybrid was split into three segments: new vocabulary on angle pairs, then recognizing those pairs “in the wild”, then applying that ability to ID an angle pair to solving problems involving algebra. Students felt more prepared to do the algebra problems after the proper scaffolding. The direct instruction at the outset set the table for them to work on their own on the ID exercise, then they felt like at least they could start the equation writing and solving in small groups, and I could move around the room, check for understanding, help the stuck kids get unstuck, help the lost kids get started.

Woo, that felt good. No one was overwhelmed.

We definitely could do more of that.

The other gold nuggets that came out of the meeting was a plan for planning on our A/B block schedule, and a plan for pacing. We alternate “red” (1st-4th hour) and “grey”(5th-8th hour) days Monday through Thursday, then Fridays alternate between red and grey.

So a two-week schedule would look like:

  • Red-Grey-Red-Grey-Red
  • Red-Grey-Red-Grey-Grey
Source

My linear-thinking teacher brain looks at that and panics. There is a moment after school on Monday when in the two-week sequence that the red classes have met four times while the grey have met only twice. Then I see my grey classes three of the next four days. It all evens out after a ten-day cycle, but it’s terrible from a pacing standpoint. And I don’t even want to think about snow days. Or testing days.

Our department chair offered a solution: start the two-week planning cycle on a “grey Friday” week. Then the pattern goes:

  • Red-Grey-Red-Grey-Grey
  • Red-Grey-Red-Grey-Red

He pointed out that now you have five groups of two alternating color days (RG RG GR GR GR), the only kicker being that midway through you flip and your grey classes go first in the two-day cycle. As my instructional coach pointed out, once she could wrap her teacher brain around teaching her “afternoon” classes first then the “mornings”, it’s perfect.

Source

We’ve got a “grey Friday” week this week and the geometry team agreed to adopt this planning model. We’re going to try it out and see what happens. Worst case, we switch back, but I think we might be on to something.

Our DC also paces his classes as “two days of teaching, one day review/quiz”. We all love the idea of shorter, more frequent assessments, especially as we come back to full-on, in-person school, and he points out that at two sections a week for 36 weeks, he has had no problem matching the curriculum plan without having to cut sections at the end of the year. We may take a prep period together as a Geometry team to map that out just to be sure, but we are willing to take his word.

In conjunction with the two-week cycle, it looks like we have the basics of our regular schedule. Now we just need to dump the content in.

This school year may never look “normal”, but we are going to what we can to make sense of whatever mess presents itself, and be ready to teach.

I’ve said it before but it bears repeating: It’s good to have people.

And to not be afraid to look at what I’m doing and admit there’s a better way. For me and for my kids.

No Time To Go It Alone

Source

It’s been a year, this first three weeks of school. It is by far the most unusual opening to a school year in the whole time I’ve been doing this. We were open all of eight days before we flipped to remote for a week, then hybrid (one grade level per day) for a week. Nothing to do with Covid, by the way. Let’s just say it’s been a very rugged consolidation process in my city.

And 100% of the fix is out of the hands of the teaching staff. Which means we show up every day, and do what we do with what we have. The logistical and supply-chain issues were not the fault of the building-level or district administrators, they have been super-supportive and said all the right things, but when the bell rings and I close my door and it’s me and 40 kids, well, nobody else is coming to the rescue. You just got to roll that stone up the hill, every day.

We’re carrying a lot of weight.

I heard an anecdote once, maybe one of those Reader’s Digest things. A moving company is hiring workers. At the end of the interview each was asked to lift a 100-pound box. The first few muscled up and tried to show that they could lift the box and meet the physical requirements of the job. Towards the end of the day one man sat through the interview, dutifully answered every question, then was asked to lift the box. He looked at the interviewer and said “A hundred pounds? I can’t lift that by myself!” The interviewer said”you’re hired.”

And that’s where we’re at right now. It’s us to up to recognize our limits, and seek help to do the job.

Lots of wise folks are counseling teachers to find support in their buildings. Some of my Lunch Bunch are in my new building, and my department came over pretty much intact, so I’ve got backup here, plus early on I see folks reaching out to new colleagues almost daily. That’s good, right?

But like Laura Steinbrink said, you got to find your people. Or hope they find you.

This year it’s one of the things that’s going to keep us sane. It feels like the kind of year that’s going to call for regular Mental Health Days, but not actually calling off because No Subs. We’re just going to have to keep checking in on each other.

From what I’ve seen it’s gotta be intentional, this reaching out to each other. For for those of us who are here and have been here, it’s in our DNA. We All We Got, right? This week I saw so many examples of people just reflexively reaching out with a word or a gesture – a helping hand at the door for a teacher with her hands full, who just spilled her coffee into her purse, or a teacher volunteering to take the classes for a department mate who came up ill just before the first bell and had to go home. “Don’t make sub plans, just put a sign on your door and send your kids to me. I got you.” Teachers sharing ideas on how to plan effectively in our new A/B/Every Other Friday block schedule. And teachers planning an informal going-away pizza-and-drinks thing for our outgoing principal. We knew coming into the year we had to get the culture right first before anything else happened. We’re doing OK so far it looks like.

Though it’s probably not a good sign (or alternatively, a sign of advancing age) that it’s not mid-September yet and I’m already feeling kind of nostalgic for the carefree days of summer, and that I’ve made a “Sunday Night” playlist for myself. Even as a lifelong urban teacher, I don’t remember a year that has brought the challenges we face this year. Old buildings and tight budgets and equipment in need of repair and a lack of subs is pretty much the order of the day every day. But this year… hoo.

The saving grace for me since Day One is having a group who are shoulder to shoulder. And that’s really how you kill the Sunday Night Blues. Either “misery loves company”, or “we’re all in this together”, take your pick, but Monday morning we are all there, ready to go.

My local alt-rock station runs a “Saturday Morning Flashback” each week. This weekend it was two hours of 1985 (a very good year…) and while I love hearing the tunes that I’ve always associated with those days, the hosts always manage to sneak in an “oh, yeah, I’d forgotten that one” surprise. Like Clarence Clemons and Jackson Browne:

That made me smile (awkward bro-handshake and all). And made me think of good teacher friends. Which made me smile more.

And it goes without saying that the kind of teachers who are made of love for each other are the kind of teachers who are going to love their kids. Because it’s what we do. They’re our babies.

Now: back to work. Got to make an advisory activity (“Life After Morton”, styled after this display from an AVID school), and double-check my Monday plans, and make a review and quiz for segments and angles (not sure yet if Desmos or paper/pencil, need make sure all my kids have chromebooks first), and set up for my first week of teaching CCD at my parish after school, and and and…

Monday is coming.

Source