900 kids

I went to my new school today to check it out.  I haven’t been back since I was interviewed and I was curious.  So, after some technology training (Mantra: This wasn’t working this morning, so you may have to watch me do it), I decided to drive by.  I don’t have a security badge and I was hoping that someone would be there and would believe my story and let me in.

I was lucky, one of the crew let me in.  I wandered around a bit and ran into two teachers, neither of whom are on my team.  They had news about the portables: they haven’t arrived. No one knows when they will arrive.  This means that the teachers who will move into them haven’t moved yet.  For me, this means that I can’t move into the school because I will be moving into one of the displaced teacher’s classrooms.  My garage is stuffed with school supplies that are waiting to be moved.  I am in a more enviable position than many of the teachers as I don’t have anyone waiting on me!

There will be 900 students this year.  900. I can’t get over it.

I do not envy my principal this management job: organizing the school’s day. I am not a schedule person, subjects and activities ebb and flow. Unfortunately, lunch can not ebb and flow, it must march forward. I can’t fathom how he will organize 900 students into lunch, PE, art, music and recess.

The school is a Title I school, which means that a certain percentage of students live at or below the poverty line.  A large percentage of them are second language learners.  Many of them have learning differences or behavior difficulties.  These kids are the ones who most need small, supportive communities. 

I worry about this.  Will my new school prove to be such an environment in spite of the chaos that 900 students inevitably bring? 

Linking Literacies

The signals are all around us: school supplies on sale at Target, commercials about having cool new school clothes are on TV and pre-school staff development has begun.  School is about to start! (It may even cool off soon)

Today, we had the second of a three day Linking Literacies conference.  It was great to walk around the halls and chat with my fellow teachers.  It felt for me the way the first day of school must feel for my students: catching up, making social plans and finally getting to the business of work. 

My piece of the presentation was on Content Area Literacy.  It was so much fun to be able to share tools and strategies to deepen understanding that I’ve used over the past years with other teachers.  There was some reciprocal sharing: teachers adding to what was presented based on their own experiences.

The presentation was framed by Thinking Processes: Summarizing, Inferring, Questioning, etc. We asked the participants to consider two questions with regards to that after we presented each strategy:

What Thinking was fostered by this strategy?  and How can you make this Thinking more transparent for your students?

While we knew that these questions were very deep, we hoped that they would settle into participant’s subconsciousness and be examined periodically throughout the year.  Not only to answer the questions, but to let the questions inform their lesson design.

I know that I will!

Being In-Between

I have been involved in many conversations over the course of the summer with people about growing technologies and their impact on life. 

Some of this has sprung forth because I want to use more technology in my classroom and a few of the conversations have come from listening to the radio or watching stories on the news.

It’s odd to be in between: when I was a kid, we had “computer” classes that used Turtle.  We were supposed to type in commands and make the Turtle move across the screen.  My turtle never went anywhere near where I’d wanted it to go. My sister, two years behind me in school, always had success.  It seemed that she intuitively understood how to program that Turtle to move.

I ignored all computer classes offered in school until my senior year, when for some reason, I decided to take Pascal. It killed my GPA and convinced me that computers were not usefull beyond writing papers.  I continued to ignore computer classes until Grad school where I completed Intel’s Teach to the Future Program.  Which taught me that computers were fun and maybe were useful in middle school classes.

Now, according to this story from NPR’s Marketplace (http://marketplace.publicradio.org/shows/2007/07/27/PM200707278.html), little girls are using social networking sites to play house.  My students are expected to use Excel, PowerPoint and Access in third grade.  They deftly maneuver around the computer and even if they can’t articulate what they are using, they are flexible and competent.  When 5th graders are breaking through the ISD’s firewall to get onto MySpace, I know that these kids will always know more than me.

My parents’ generation is concerned that this new style of play  and interaction will prevent kids from learning how to work with each other.  My students look at me as if I have three heads when I mention that I didn’t have email until I was in graduate school. This is unfathomable to them.

Here I am, stuck in the middle again!