For those of you who haven't seen or heard from me for weeks, greetings! I have not disappeared off the face of the earth, just headed south of the Mason-Dixon line. I'm two weeks into my great Teach For America adventure, and in the few minutes I have before I head off to bed, I figured I'd give you all the quick update.
1) Getting to the South was an adventure in and of itself. I drove down here with my friend Toby, taking three days to see the country and pass a lot of Waffle Houses. We spent a night in DC with my cousin Kristin and her husband and (adorable!) new baby, then spent a night in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which I would recommend to no one. There is just nothing going on there. We got to New Orleans on Memorial Day and explored the city. Generally excellent way to start the summer/the real world, and I am proud to say that we managed the entire 1500-mile drive with no car malfunctions, tickets, or accidents of any sort!
2) Last Tuesday, I checked in for induction, and my two years with TFA officially began. Induction in New Orleans was super chill, particularly because I had already been hired before I got down here (for those of you who don't know, I'm going to be teaching upper elementary school (likely 4th or 5th grade) at a first-year charter takeover in New Orleans East). We had a few sessions, but most of my week was free time while a lot of my fellow corps members were doing interviews, etc.
The highlight of the week was getting to go on a school visit, though. My group visited the highest-performing non-selective admission school in the city, KIPP Believe. Even though the kids were already gone for the summer, it was eye-opening to finally get to see a school, talk to teachers, parents, and students, and start to figure out exactly what the achievement gap in New Orleans looks like. Although KIPP Believe has the best test scores of any non-selective school in the city, that still means that their average student only scores basic on the state tests. There's still SO much work to be done.
I spent the rest of induction meeting people, apartment hunting, and exploring the city. We had a few really fun nights out, and my roommate Thea and I also found our apartment, a really great half-house near Tulane. We're so excited to have a) found a place that we love and b) have it all squared away before we start work immediately upon returning to New Orleans next month. I also spent a morning volunteering at another one of my charter network's elementary schools, which was a lot of fun and got me really excited for the kind of environment I'm going to be working in come August.
3) On Sunday, we packed up the car and headed on another massive drive: this one to Atlanta. Though the trip did have its ups and downs (down mainly being the loss of Alyssa's wallet and phone in Shorter, Alabama), it was nice to arrive at our home for the next five weeks: Georgia Tech, base camp for the Atlanta Institute. Institute is basically a five-week teacher boot camp. We're each assigned to a school in the Atlanta Public School system, and we teach summer school there while also attending sessions and getting tons and tons of feedback. I'm teaching 8th grade math this summer to a group of eight kids who failed both the reading and math sections of their CRCT (the Georgia state test) this spring.
In Georgia, 8th grade is a high-stakes year, meaning that if students don't pass the CRCT, they do not go on to 9th grade. This is both exciting and terrifying for me. My collab (short for collaborative--usually a group of 4 people teaching the same group of kids, but in my case, just a pair of people) and I are responsible for essentially reteaching the entire 8th grade math curriculum in 15 days--30 50-minute periods. Yes, this is impossible, so our biggest task this past week was to make a schedule for the summer based on our students' pretests, what subjects are most heavily weighted on the CRCT, and what topics we considered foundational. This was extremely challenging, and I'm sure it will seem even more daunting once we have a better sense of what gaps our students have in their basic math knowledge (for example, my lesson on Monday is about finding slope from a line on a graph. This objective becomes much harder to teach if I realize halfway through my lesson that my students don't know what a coordinate plane is). However, I think we're both really excited by the challenge. We're also excited because from some divine coincidence, we are actually Jon and Kate plus Eight (yes, his name is Jon, yes, my name is Kate, yes, we have eight students). Hopefully our classroom will prove slightly more functional than the Gosselin household.
We don't start teaching until Monday, so this last week has been a lot of sessions, a lot of planning, and a lot of nervous preparation. I feel comfortable with the material I'm teaching on Monday, but I need to rock out tomorrow to make sure I'm prepared to execute it in a way that makes sense for my kids. The part I'm most nervous about is behavior management, but I'm hopeful that with a class this small, it will be a manageable issue. I'm mostly just really excited to try on my teacher voice for the first time on Monday and see where it takes me.
While institute has been life-consuming, I actually really love it so far. I'm drinking the TFA Kool-aid, and it tastes good. I love the people I'm meeting here and how excited everyone is about the huge challenge in front of us. I've already made some great friends and just came back from a dinner with about a dozen of the New Orleans corps members who will be my colleagues next year at our charter network. I know this week is going to be incredibly challenging, and I'm ready to jump in head first.
I'm going to try to update this blog as often as possible--we'll see how much free time I have once things really start kicking in. It's strange to think that I won't be crossing the Mason-Dixon line again until November, when I come home for Harvard/Yale and Thanksgiving, so hopefully this will be a good way to keep you all in the loop. As always, any communication from the outside world--be it texts, phone calls, email, or snail mail--is incredibly appreciated. Especially here at institute, we get pretty wrapped up in TFAworld and forget that there's a real world out there too, so any reminders of that would go a long, long way.
Time for bed so I can get up at 9 tomorrow, crush some lesson plans, make a Target run to get some sweet school supplies for our classroom, and hopefully get to bed early. Teaching starts in 36 hours!
1) Getting to the South was an adventure in and of itself. I drove down here with my friend Toby, taking three days to see the country and pass a lot of Waffle Houses. We spent a night in DC with my cousin Kristin and her husband and (adorable!) new baby, then spent a night in Chattanooga, Tennessee, which I would recommend to no one. There is just nothing going on there. We got to New Orleans on Memorial Day and explored the city. Generally excellent way to start the summer/the real world, and I am proud to say that we managed the entire 1500-mile drive with no car malfunctions, tickets, or accidents of any sort!
2) Last Tuesday, I checked in for induction, and my two years with TFA officially began. Induction in New Orleans was super chill, particularly because I had already been hired before I got down here (for those of you who don't know, I'm going to be teaching upper elementary school (likely 4th or 5th grade) at a first-year charter takeover in New Orleans East). We had a few sessions, but most of my week was free time while a lot of my fellow corps members were doing interviews, etc.
The highlight of the week was getting to go on a school visit, though. My group visited the highest-performing non-selective admission school in the city, KIPP Believe. Even though the kids were already gone for the summer, it was eye-opening to finally get to see a school, talk to teachers, parents, and students, and start to figure out exactly what the achievement gap in New Orleans looks like. Although KIPP Believe has the best test scores of any non-selective school in the city, that still means that their average student only scores basic on the state tests. There's still SO much work to be done.
I spent the rest of induction meeting people, apartment hunting, and exploring the city. We had a few really fun nights out, and my roommate Thea and I also found our apartment, a really great half-house near Tulane. We're so excited to have a) found a place that we love and b) have it all squared away before we start work immediately upon returning to New Orleans next month. I also spent a morning volunteering at another one of my charter network's elementary schools, which was a lot of fun and got me really excited for the kind of environment I'm going to be working in come August.
3) On Sunday, we packed up the car and headed on another massive drive: this one to Atlanta. Though the trip did have its ups and downs (down mainly being the loss of Alyssa's wallet and phone in Shorter, Alabama), it was nice to arrive at our home for the next five weeks: Georgia Tech, base camp for the Atlanta Institute. Institute is basically a five-week teacher boot camp. We're each assigned to a school in the Atlanta Public School system, and we teach summer school there while also attending sessions and getting tons and tons of feedback. I'm teaching 8th grade math this summer to a group of eight kids who failed both the reading and math sections of their CRCT (the Georgia state test) this spring.
In Georgia, 8th grade is a high-stakes year, meaning that if students don't pass the CRCT, they do not go on to 9th grade. This is both exciting and terrifying for me. My collab (short for collaborative--usually a group of 4 people teaching the same group of kids, but in my case, just a pair of people) and I are responsible for essentially reteaching the entire 8th grade math curriculum in 15 days--30 50-minute periods. Yes, this is impossible, so our biggest task this past week was to make a schedule for the summer based on our students' pretests, what subjects are most heavily weighted on the CRCT, and what topics we considered foundational. This was extremely challenging, and I'm sure it will seem even more daunting once we have a better sense of what gaps our students have in their basic math knowledge (for example, my lesson on Monday is about finding slope from a line on a graph. This objective becomes much harder to teach if I realize halfway through my lesson that my students don't know what a coordinate plane is). However, I think we're both really excited by the challenge. We're also excited because from some divine coincidence, we are actually Jon and Kate plus Eight (yes, his name is Jon, yes, my name is Kate, yes, we have eight students). Hopefully our classroom will prove slightly more functional than the Gosselin household.
We don't start teaching until Monday, so this last week has been a lot of sessions, a lot of planning, and a lot of nervous preparation. I feel comfortable with the material I'm teaching on Monday, but I need to rock out tomorrow to make sure I'm prepared to execute it in a way that makes sense for my kids. The part I'm most nervous about is behavior management, but I'm hopeful that with a class this small, it will be a manageable issue. I'm mostly just really excited to try on my teacher voice for the first time on Monday and see where it takes me.
While institute has been life-consuming, I actually really love it so far. I'm drinking the TFA Kool-aid, and it tastes good. I love the people I'm meeting here and how excited everyone is about the huge challenge in front of us. I've already made some great friends and just came back from a dinner with about a dozen of the New Orleans corps members who will be my colleagues next year at our charter network. I know this week is going to be incredibly challenging, and I'm ready to jump in head first.
I'm going to try to update this blog as often as possible--we'll see how much free time I have once things really start kicking in. It's strange to think that I won't be crossing the Mason-Dixon line again until November, when I come home for Harvard/Yale and Thanksgiving, so hopefully this will be a good way to keep you all in the loop. As always, any communication from the outside world--be it texts, phone calls, email, or snail mail--is incredibly appreciated. Especially here at institute, we get pretty wrapped up in TFAworld and forget that there's a real world out there too, so any reminders of that would go a long, long way.
Time for bed so I can get up at 9 tomorrow, crush some lesson plans, make a Target run to get some sweet school supplies for our classroom, and hopefully get to bed early. Teaching starts in 36 hours!
No comments:
Post a Comment