quote of the day

"We give the kids with the greatest challenges the crummiest education, and then we say poverty is destiny." - Joel Klein

There is a lot I want to say, but it is time for bed, since I am planning on running centers tomorrow and that takes all of my mental energy, plus about three times more. I am happy, exhausted, excited about the changes happening at my school, intimidated about all I have to do.

But my homeroom won the Thanksgiving food drive competition, so the ultra-competitive side of me (direct quote from me at some point in November, to my homeroom during breakfast: "Guys, keep bugging your parents about bringing in cans. You're in Harvard, and we don't lose.") is very pleased with our juice-and-cookies reward that is coming on Friday afternoon. Sometimes, it's the little things in life that make you smile.

being the strong one

It was another trying week in third grade, as most weeks are these days. Not only am I exhausted from five going on six straight weeks without a break, but everyone around me--staff and students--is exhausted too. It's been compounded lately by concerns about budget. People are being laid off left and right, we ran out of copy paper today and evidently won't be getting any more until December, and it's evident that the pressure is being put on the principals to do something about it. There has been a lot of frustration and anger at students and teachers alike.

It's tough to be in such a pressure-cooker situation, where you feel like you're constantly being judged on your test scores, your behavior management, your relationships with students, and your professionalism and enthusiasm. It's also tough to improve on all these things when the support staff you thought you were able to rely on shrinks every month as more and more layoffs are necessitated. In many ways, we feel like our school is a target within our network. As the newly-opened turnaround, we seem to be getting the short end of many sticks--CMO attention, layoffs, support--even though our scores on benchmark tests are almost identical to the scores of the second-year turnarounds. As we talked about in our weekly staff meeting today, that turned into a bitchfest, this isn't really about performance anymore. It's about money. And that is a little bit nervewracking--that if they're not going to look at what we're achieving with our kids and the limited resources we have, what are they going to look at when they decide who to keep and who to let go?

But, as always, I am reminded every day why I am there--for the little people.

give them your best, not what's left.

Well, it's been forever. I'm 2/3ds of the way through one of my longest uninterrupted streaks of teaching of the year, and it's taken a toll. Don't get me wrong, a lot of things are going really well. My principal and TFA PD have given me good feedback, somewhat alleviating my fears that I'm doing more harm than good in my classroom. After their rough performance on their first ANET benchmark, they bumped up to 35% basic and above (from 9%) on a network-wide quiz retesting the material. And yesterday, after a really rough week, my kids somehow managed to put up their best weekly quiz scores of the year: 42% basic and above, with 21% at mastery and above, even though the quiz was mostly on word problems.

These are all things that I'm really proud of. The culture in two of my three classes, the enthusiasm my kids have for after-school tutoring, the progress I've made with one of my kids with an emotional disturbance, both academically and behaviorally, with some well-placed positive calls home. As my principal and PD keep reminding me, my perception of how things are going in my classroom is usually skewed negatively from what they're seeing. I know that this is true: I'm hard on myself by nature, and I don't like to settle for anything less than perfect. I tend to focus on the three kids who are off-task rather than the 18 who are, or the five kids who don't get a problem than the 15 who are making progress. To keep myself sane, I'm trying my best to stay focused on the positives: the 3 kids this week who scored basic for the first time this year, or the girl who got an 80% on her quiz after struggling through word problems for two hours the day before in tutoring. But when there is still so much going wrong, it's sometimes hard to keep sight on the good stuff.