I can't make this stuff up

So, of course, it is approaching the end of the second quarter. Which means, I have stacks and stacks of grading to be done.

I don't hate this grading as much as years previous because I only have to look at an assignment 30 times, as opposed to 120 times. (or whatever it was.)

I have to share some hilarious (and brilliant) poems that were written in response to our visualizing poetry lesson. We read poems about the colors blue and brown, and then had to write our own poetry.

Here's some of the good:

"Green is the color of grass...the kind of grass you sit down and watch the clouds."

"What is red?
Red is the color of stop signs. Red is a hat color...red stripes on the American flag. You can smell the red paint on the walls, red flows in our body so quiet, so calm."

Here is one of my favorites:

"Purple. Purple is the color of the rainbow. Purple is the color of joy. Purple is the Wildcats, my future college!"

And here are the ones that make you go...what goes ON in your brain?

"Red is the color of blood. Red is the color of hot sauce. Red is the color of evil. Red is the color of juice."

"Red is ruby. Red is violence. Red is flame. Red is shirts. Red always be around you. (Illustration? Ninja's karate chopping a bleeding, dead body.)"

"Green is the color grass, green is the color leaves, green is the color of Yoda's lightsaber."

I heart assessments

I.

♥.

Assessment.

Creation.

Somehow I got onto the Literacy committee this year. Who knows how it happened. But it did.

So guess what we got to do today? Write the benchmark for our third instructional period.

My inital thought: Wait, why are we doing this? The standards didn't change. I'm pretty sure that my kids TOOK a benchmark last year.

Lo and behold, we realigned our pacing guides and standards moved. Now, with math, this was easy. We moved standards, we moved questions.

THAT SHIT DOES NOT SO MUCH WORK FOR READING. We cannot move questions without moving passages. We cannot repeat passages. We must use the passages and eeeek in the questions somehow.

Needless to say, writing questions for the reading benchmark is MUCH more difficult.

But, I'm going to go out on a limb here and say it is also MUCH more rewarding. My brain was in overdrive all day and I actually feel accomplished.

Breaking apart those reading standards is so much more challenging. And increasing rigor across grade levels? Holy. Crap.

I feel great about the assessments, though. (We added/changed about 26 questions to ours today.) Writing questions that assess how author's choice of setting influences the mood of a piece of literature made me SO happy today.

This situation just confirms that I need to work with this stuff daily.

My little minions...

I have created learning monsters.

I had a meeting this morning at 7:30 am. Well, the meeting ran long so instead of getting my kids at 8:05, I was running out to the basketball courts at 8:11 to get them.

They were the only class left on the courts. Even though school doesn't officially start until 8:15, everyone was already gone.

So I'm running frantically to get them when I hear one of my students yell,

"Hurry up, Ms. L. You're wasting learning time!"



I HAVE CREATED LEARNING MONSTERS! I LOVE IT!

Super Colleague

Okay. So I haven't paid homage to many super colleagues lately. But honestly, I don't think I could get through this year without this super colleague: Irish.

Irish teaches right next door to me. She and I get to "co-teach" this year with a phenomenal special education teacher. Basically, we split the special education students between our rooms.

But her class is insane.


How insane? One of her students was literally rolling in the mud during the fire drill. Like, was overwhelmed by the noises, sounds, and disorder - so runs away and begins to roll in the mud.

I don't know how she does it. AND SHE is brilliant. Truly an inspiration to us all.

Not only is she the greatest reading teacher of ALL TIME, she is an amazing planner and basically makes me able to function on a daily basis.

She has an intern, too...and is teaching the intern as well as she teaches her students.

Her birthday is on Saturday, so we're spending the next two days celebrating!

I'm really glad she's my super colleague. I might die without her.

I am calm. I am calm.

So today there was a major medical emergency in my classroom.

An ambulance, fire truck, and 7 EMTs were present. The EMTs had to come into my room, and we had a kiddo on a stretcher.

Did I mention that this was happening during Social Studies class?

Apparently I was very calm and handled this situation quite well. Do we know why?

Oh, it's because of my amazing training at a summer camp all throughout college. I've dealt with many situations that I wish I could have just freaked out about (cutting, swallowing glow sticks, gluing fingers together, asthma attacks at midnight with our inhalers locked in a locker a mile into the dark woods, lost camper searches, having to call therapists from camp, neverending bloody noses, etc.) but at least all of these emergencies helped me to keep calm in the worst crisis I've ever had to experience.

Oh camp. How I love you. Thank you so much.

Wow

Where's she going to go?

Completely deserved

Thank the lord for things like Fall Break. Yes, I had to go back to work in July. Yes, I've done a round of report cards and parent teacher conferences already. Yes, I'm pushing through trying to teach everything for benchmark two and being overwhelmed by fractions, decimals, and percents.

But holy hell, I'm on vacation for a week. Good job, Arizona.

I am currently visiting my favorites in NY City. I came in to visit this school (loved it, by the way), and to begin to make adult decisions about where I want to live. And work.

I've been having the BEST time visiting my loves. We've been frolicking around the city, taking in MOMA with Sarah Jessica Parker and Matthew Broderick (yes, celebrity sightings in the Matisse exhibit!), having amazingly ridiculous dinners with my sorority sisters (over 2 bottles of wine. On a Sunday night) and walking the streets just exploring.

Dear vacation, I love you.

Brilliant

This article is brilliant.

And true.

Read. Discuss. Start recruiting top people to be teachers. Start paying them more. Make it a career people want to have.

Don't forget, there is not a "prestigious careers that pay way to much money to do less work than that of a teacher" gap. There is an achievement gap. Let's close that. Immediately.

New Obsessions

I have recently become addicted to this game:

Who Wants to Live a Million Years?

Please play. Darwin would be proud. And it is definitely hilarious. (It may only be hilarious to the people that witnessed me say, "It's random selection, like Darwin.")

I do claim that I was very tired when I made that "selection error."

Dante and video games

My lawyer friend enjoys hearing bi-weekly updates about his favorite student, Predator. Today was one of those days where we were laughing for a good 5 minutes about Predator.

Predator and I have an interesting relationship during Writer's Workshop. With the help of an aide (my coteacher is away being fantastic in the other coteaching room) most of my kids can fully function and write. We're enjoying working plot elements into our own narratives, showing that we fully understand conflict, rising action, climax, falling action, and resolution. Our stories are, for the most part, fantastic.

Except for Predator. Putting words on paper is all but impossible for him.

Yesterday, we sat together during workshop time and discussed ideas for his story.

"Predator, what do you want to write about?"

"POSEIDON." (he yells this during quiet time, by the way.)

"Really? Why him?"

"He's awesome! He lives in the ocean. Oh that's the setting. The ocean."

"Okay, well then can you describe the setting for me on your paper? Make it come alive."

"Wait. There's more settings. THE UNDERWORLD. With HADES."

"Oh and his three-headed dog?"

"HOW DO YOU KNOW ABOUT THAT?"

"I'm amazing. So describe the two settings then."

"HADES. IN THE UNDERWORLD."

"Predator, here's what I mean. When I picture the underworld, I see a river of death flowing. This river flows down through 7 layers, each with more and more pain and suffering on them. There are souls who cannot escape, screaming at the boat. Then, at the bottom of the underworld, in the worst spot ever, is Hades. What do you see?"

His eyes get bigger than I've ever seen. "You've beaten God of War?"

"What's God of War?"

"Duh, Ms. L. A video game."

"Oh no honey. There's this guy named Dante who described the underworld in The Inferno."

"Dante wrote a video game? He must be cool."

Showering is a must.

Today I got to see Ivy (my favorite!) in the copy room today.

Don't even get me started about how I lovelovelove my current job but hatehatehate that we no longer share a door. Or 3x daily conversations. Or window peeks or licking elbows or sighs of ridiculousness when her "observers" come in. I never get to see Ivy. Since she works in dangerous minds and I work across the courts in happy land.

She was dilligently cutting copies for her lesson on combinations versus permutations. I was reading her word problems, and I just starting laughing.

Question: In the morning, you shower, eat, and get dressed. In how many orders can this occur?

Me: "Ivy, do you expect to tell me that you should get dressed before you shower?"

Laughter. Much laughter.

Ivy: "OH. (Laughing.) The kids won't even NOTICE that."

later in the day...

Email:

This is what the kids said about the problem:
Kid 1: "what if you took a shower, ate, then got dressed. You’re sitting around eating breakfast like “yeah they like my body."

Kid 2: "why would you take a shower in your clothes?"
Reply: "Cuz its America."

Out of control

You know what is out of control?

When you loose power at 12:30 pm and you don't regain it until 3:30.

Oh and you are at work.

And you have to keep schoolchildren occupied when there is no power.

And no power means no air conditioning.

Oh, why did we lose power?

Because of the torrential rain. And hail. And wind. The sky opened up and rained the contents of the Pacific on my school's campus.

So we couldn't go to specials, and we couldn't go to the bathroom (outdoor school. No lights in the bathroom. Torrential downpours.)

Needless to say, it was a ridiculous day. And the topping on the ridiculous hat? The superintendent called an emergency meeting after school in our library (where we all thought we were going to get fired, by the way) to tell us that WE MAY NOT HAVE POWER TOMORROW but we are STILL GOING TO HAVE SCHOOL.

And, because we will still have school, we each need to call our students and tell them that we may not have power...but we will still have school....but don't come if you think you'll get hot....and we don't know how we're going to have food....because we don't have electricity....

FOR CHRIST SAKE. How do you expect me to call the parents when a) our phones still don't work and b) the internet doesn't work for me to look up my kids numbers?

I "did the best I could."

It was a fricken mess.

...I'm not even going to go into the fact that I had my formal observation this morning and could barely stop shaking with nervousness...

I'm irate

I was livid mad today.

I got an email at 4:40 that said I was getting a new student. I refuse to go into details that just make me more mad, but I'm not supposed to get an email at 4:40. If I'm getting a new kid, WE AGREED AND IT HAS BEEN SAID that the latest an email can go out is 3:00 pm. So I can get ready.

So I went to my principal, knocked on her door, opened it, told her I was "enraged" and said I would wait until she was done with whoever was in there. So when she was done, I walked in, and said, "I'm enraged."

She replied: "With who? Useless? " (I've decided that Useless has to be the new name for the most USELESS pile of space ever, the "special education" academic coach who is, in fact, the devil. A USELESS PILE OF DEVIL.)

I said, "Yeah, her too. But..." then I proceeded to tell her about the new student. And after that, she asked me, "If I were to have a conversation with Useless tomorrow about how you guys are feeling..."

And my reply? "Well, I doubt you can tell her that we want to stab her in the face with a fork?"

"No, I don't think I can say that."

"Well, can you tell her that she's useless?"

"In my own special way I can."

I feel quite accomplished in this conversation. I got her to get mad about what happened to me at 4:40 today. AND she's going to tell Useless to stop being Useless.