Three weeks into the great New Orleans adventure and I can feel myself starting to settle in. I can get from point A to point B with relative ease (even when point B is something other than my house, school, Walmart, or Target) and the heat, while still oppressive, is no longer an unpleasant surprise every time I step out of an air-conditioned space. But as I've settled in, I've started to realize just how much this city is still defined by Katrina.
In my previous visits to New Orleans, I saw Katrina everywhere I looked--in the houses and neighborhoods I was doing reconstruction work in and in the stories of the people I met. I thought I had at least some understanding of how much the storm affected this city, but after three weeks of living here, I realize I had no idea. Even when it's unspoken, Katrina is a very real part of every day in New Orleans. It's there when I look outside my classroom window and see one of the canals that sent water gushing into New Orleans East, leaving a wake of destruction in a tight-knit neighborhood. It's there in the passing conversations, like the one about bad cell phone service that led my coworker to remark "Yeah, I learned that in the Superdome"--and the realization that if she was in the Superdome, her two kids, who would have been a toddler and an infant, were there with her. It's there in the simple existence of my school, which was opened after too few elementary schools in the East reopened after the storm. It's there every time the cafeteria ceiling leaks, every time I walk into my kitchen (which was renovated after the storm), every time I see a 13-year-old fourth grader and wonder how many years of school they missed in the wake of Katrina. I think that's one of the things that's most daunting to me--not being able to completely understand Katrina and knowing that its aftereffects will be a part of my daily life.
My students were two or three years old, for the most part, when Katrina hit. I don't know what that means for them--what they remember, how much it has affected their academic progress, what kind of homes they came back to. But I know that it will be a part of them, just as it is a part of every New Orleanian. I can go to the Katrina museum, read as many books as I can put my hands on, watch Treme (Mallory and I watched the first episode last night!), and try to learn as much about the experiences of my students, my neighbors, and my coworkers as possible, but I know that it's something that will always be unfathomable.
My classroom is almost ready (pictures to come soon once I get my trackers laminated and put up on the walls), and the first wave of kids arrives on Monday (7th and 8th graders--pre-K through third grade doesn't arrive until the 15th). I'm not entirely sure what the next two weeks are going to look like for me, but I'm imagining a lot of literacy testing and a lottt of lesson planning. I'm going to be so excited to actually have students in my classroom--while I know it will probably never again be as clean as it is this week, I'm soo ready to get my hands dirty and actually jump into teaching. Every training we get reminds us about how hard the first year is, and I feel like with every passing day (I had the earliest PD start date and one of the latest first days of class) I am just getting more and more intimidated. The sooner I can get in the teacher mindset instead of the planner mindset, the better.
I did get the chance to observe a third-grade math classroom at one of the other schools in our network on Friday. It was really nice to get a sense of just how little third-graders are--when one of the girls walked in the door, I swore she had to have been a kindergartener because she was so tiny, but she hopped right up into a seat and crushed the place value review lesson. The kids in Mrs. R's classroom were enthusiastic and well-behaved, which made me really excited for this year. I know that my job is a little bit more daunting--being a first-year teacher at a first-year takeover is harder than being a second-year teacher at a second-year takeover--but third grade seems like a great age. Old enough to be engaging with concepts a bit more complex than counting, but still young enough to be relatively unjaded. I can't wait to get started.
In my previous visits to New Orleans, I saw Katrina everywhere I looked--in the houses and neighborhoods I was doing reconstruction work in and in the stories of the people I met. I thought I had at least some understanding of how much the storm affected this city, but after three weeks of living here, I realize I had no idea. Even when it's unspoken, Katrina is a very real part of every day in New Orleans. It's there when I look outside my classroom window and see one of the canals that sent water gushing into New Orleans East, leaving a wake of destruction in a tight-knit neighborhood. It's there in the passing conversations, like the one about bad cell phone service that led my coworker to remark "Yeah, I learned that in the Superdome"--and the realization that if she was in the Superdome, her two kids, who would have been a toddler and an infant, were there with her. It's there in the simple existence of my school, which was opened after too few elementary schools in the East reopened after the storm. It's there every time the cafeteria ceiling leaks, every time I walk into my kitchen (which was renovated after the storm), every time I see a 13-year-old fourth grader and wonder how many years of school they missed in the wake of Katrina. I think that's one of the things that's most daunting to me--not being able to completely understand Katrina and knowing that its aftereffects will be a part of my daily life.
My students were two or three years old, for the most part, when Katrina hit. I don't know what that means for them--what they remember, how much it has affected their academic progress, what kind of homes they came back to. But I know that it will be a part of them, just as it is a part of every New Orleanian. I can go to the Katrina museum, read as many books as I can put my hands on, watch Treme (Mallory and I watched the first episode last night!), and try to learn as much about the experiences of my students, my neighbors, and my coworkers as possible, but I know that it's something that will always be unfathomable.
My classroom is almost ready (pictures to come soon once I get my trackers laminated and put up on the walls), and the first wave of kids arrives on Monday (7th and 8th graders--pre-K through third grade doesn't arrive until the 15th). I'm not entirely sure what the next two weeks are going to look like for me, but I'm imagining a lot of literacy testing and a lottt of lesson planning. I'm going to be so excited to actually have students in my classroom--while I know it will probably never again be as clean as it is this week, I'm soo ready to get my hands dirty and actually jump into teaching. Every training we get reminds us about how hard the first year is, and I feel like with every passing day (I had the earliest PD start date and one of the latest first days of class) I am just getting more and more intimidated. The sooner I can get in the teacher mindset instead of the planner mindset, the better.
I did get the chance to observe a third-grade math classroom at one of the other schools in our network on Friday. It was really nice to get a sense of just how little third-graders are--when one of the girls walked in the door, I swore she had to have been a kindergartener because she was so tiny, but she hopped right up into a seat and crushed the place value review lesson. The kids in Mrs. R's classroom were enthusiastic and well-behaved, which made me really excited for this year. I know that my job is a little bit more daunting--being a first-year teacher at a first-year takeover is harder than being a second-year teacher at a second-year takeover--but third grade seems like a great age. Old enough to be engaging with concepts a bit more complex than counting, but still young enough to be relatively unjaded. I can't wait to get started.
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