A leap of faith

I inherited a school printer in the fall and bought a $150 toner cartridge for it, which was in itself a leap of faith since the toner was not returnable and there was no way to tell if the printer actually worked without trying the toner. It has been worth every penny. After heavy use (including running off a full set of handouts for the days when the copier is out of order and/or features a really long line), it now says its toner is low.

As a first-year teacher in a time of deep budget cuts, I almost certainly will be laid off this spring. My administrators claim it is a near certainty that they will be able to hire me back in the fall, but I am interpreting their stated 99.9% as more like 65%.

So, the big question is, do I order a new toner cartridge? Do I really push my luck and order the $220 high-capacity cartridge?

Caught up... sort of

I am finally caught up on grading, after falling almost 2 weeks behind. I dug myself out from under a 3" high stack of ungraded work in the past 2 days. That feels good.

I also made equation posters today for the "new" equations, some of which are now a month old. Nice to cross that off the to-do list too.

Unfortunately, it's 10:15 PM and I don't really have any idea what I'm going to teach tomorrow. Not as caught up on planning. Or sleep, it appears.

Holidays

Today I got my third holiday greeting from a student by email. First two were around the 25th from sweet studious girls. Not surprisingly. Today it was from a much tougher student, P, who failed my class first term due to severe lack of work turned in. Second term he started off with a bang (and was SO PROUD to have an A after about 2 weeks) but then missed a bunch of school and stopped doing any work and currently has a low F. Anyway, the message is:

H A P P Y ' NEWYEARS missss [Pippi] - have a goodONE &' take it easyy . OH & i was suppost to tell yuu Merry Christmas but i wasnt around a computer , sorry / but i just wanna wish you and your family the best & take a easy :] !

Of course I wrote back saying thanks and wishing him well and telling him to enjoy the rest of break because I'm going to make his life miserable in January so he can pass second term. Ha.

Resolutions for school

I think I will start class on Tuesday (our first day back from break) with a mini-lesson about resolutions. I'd like to present my planned crackdown on procedures and rules as "Ms. Pippi's Resolutions" and then I will ask the kids to make their own list of resolutions related to school. At the beginning of the year I had kids write goals but I never followed up with them - in fact I think that only some of my classes actually did it - but I would like to write resolutions and then find a way to follow up with them at the beginning of each month. Although maybe that's not a good idea if I fail on my own resolutions. Not sure if I want a monthly chance for kids to gloat that they STILL aren't doing their do nows or whatever I resolve to make my priorities for January.

Anyway, I'm brainstorming ideas about what my priorities will be. There are plenty of things that aren't going as well as I'd like them to, but I need to find some that I can actually tackle, and hopefully that will give me good payoff for the effort involved on my part. Some ideas:

1. Routines to start class. Kids come late and though I have some penalties for tardiness (sign in, then you are theoretically supposed to make up the time with me after school) they are not effective and I haven't been following through very well - plus kids have started to take my 2-5 minute grace period (longer or shorter depending on where kids are coming from) as a freedom to not even try to be in the room when the bell rings. Furthermore, kids are flat out not doing the Do Now, and I spend the first 5 minutes of class cajoling kids to take out their homework and at least READ what's on the board. Clearly this area needs some work.
2. Homework. I give it every day, and some kids do it religiously, but a lot of others do it sporadically, and some kids never do it. It's 20% of their grade so this is part of the reason some kids are failing. And I often assume that kids get extra practice on this so that they will be ready for quizzes but kids who don't do it obviously don't get that practice. Also there is blatant, blatant copying going on.
3. Uniform policy enforcement. Kids are supposed to have a school polo shirt and khaki pants on all day, every day. Kids take them off throughout the day and have a plethora of excuses. I spend a lot of energy telling kids to put their khaki pants back on (usually over their jeans, since that appears to be the preferred way to wear them). I would like this to be less of a struggle.
4. Make up work. I need a better system for making kids aware of what they missed and getting them to actually do it. This is also a big contributor to some of my kids' failing grades. My existing policy of "ask somebody what you missed and get it done within a week" is not working.
5. Student participation. My school district gave out a student survey for every kid in every class and one thing I ranked low on (rightfully so) is calling on different kids. I mostly let kids volunteer to answer questions and it tends to be the same few kids doing it all the time. I have popsicle sticks with kids' names on them but I haven't used them much this year. One of my classes consistently complains that I treat them like little kids so maybe the sticks are too babyish for high school, but I need some way of calling on kids with some semblance of randomness.
6. Rigor in class discussions. I'd like to spend more time talking about lab results and the conclusions we can draw from them, but I'm not sure how to make class discussions productive when only a few kids will talk and while that is happening most of the other kids are either zoned out, doing distracting things (talking about other things, out of their seats, etc). I have more success getting kids to stay on task when I am asking them to do something productive than when I am trying to hold a whole-class discussion together, but reading and writing skills are too weak (and/or kids are too lazy) to do much rigorous science on their own or in small groups - so whole-class discussions are my most promising idea to get more in depth about the science content.
   

In reality I don't think I can change all of this. At least not this school year. I have to figure out what I can actually work towards in January and then figure out how to clue kids in about my new plans and expectations.

Resolutions

I feel like I am saying this all the time in person, so I suppose it's natural to say it often on here too. Can't believe how fast the year is going by. It's almost 2011 and I'm in the middle of a blissful break. Blissful when I'm not having weird dreams about school or fielding emails about kids' grades or phone calls (only one) from a kid about how to finish an incomplete project.

School has so consumed me that it's hard to know what to do with myself on break. There are projects around the house to tackle but I lack the energy to choose one and get started. There are friends I haven't talked to in months but it's so hard to talk to non-school people about school that I put off calling them.

I've been seeking projects that make me feel like a whole person again, rather than just a workaholic teacher. Exercise is on the agenda - I've gotten woefully out of shape this fall/winter - and my wonderful husband is embarking on a jogging program which I am joining. Also I will someday actually get around to going to a yoga class, maybe starting this break. And I just signed up for a neat creative project with a May 1 deadline that I will have to force myself to find time to do. And I just finished blocking a knitted baby blanket for my new niece or nephew due net month, and I'm starting a hat to replace my beloved hat that I lost on the subway a few weeks ago.

As far as school stuff, I intend to start doing some work tomorrow. Grading first, then high-level planning for the rest of 2nd term, then detailed plans for procedural changes (yuck) at the start of the new year to hopefully make things go more smoothly, then lesson plans for next week. Hope I get through it all.

I started writing this intending to write about what I am resolving for the new year, both in personal and professional terms, but I've been rambling instead. I feel like I make mini-resolutions for myself all year long, practically every day, thinking of things I want to change about myself or my life, so it's kind of an artificial construct to take my issues of the moment and declare them to be resolved for the entire year. Regardless, here are my two high-level resolutions for 2011:

1. Take better care of myself (make time for non-school interests, especially SLEEP!)
2. Figure out how to make my class better and then do it. I have some general ideas about what I would like to change but no brilliant ideas (yet) for how to implement. 4 more days until school starts back up to figure it out for this go-around, and 6 more months to keep incrementally figuring it out before the year is up. And something like 30 more years to keep refining it.

Bare Survival

Wow, can't believe the year is 3/8 over already - second quarter warning notices were due on Friday, which I think means second quarter is half over, though I'm too lazy to actually do the math to see if that's true - and I also can't believe I was so naive as to think I'd write on this blog once a week or so. While it is true I have been ultra-busy, it is also true that I have been too overwhelmed and uncertain to write anything even when I do have time.

I don't really want to try to summarize the year to date, but I will say that things are both better and worse than I expected. Some activities go well, some kids in some classes seem to be learning something, some kids like me and like science. Definitely not all. Maybe 20%.

I am exhausted all the time. I am unable to force myself to plan more than a day in advance, which means I'm often making worksheets at 11 PM. I'm getting somewhere between 4 and 6 hours of sleep most nights. Not enough. The stress and lack of sleep is really taking a toll. My husband is a saint for putting up with me. And cooking dinner. And keeping track of things like whether or not we have heating oil left.

I have a giant pile of projects to grade this weekend. I hate grading subjective work. And I know I don't put nearly enough comments on the work I grade but it's just hard to find the time and energy to do it for all my students. And after I grade the projects I need to make phone calls to parents of kids who are failing. I hate calling parents most of all.

Only 4 school days left before Christmas break, though. And we're doing a fun project in class all week, building Rube Goldberg machines. Which might be a disaster but also might be fun. Actually it probably will be both, alternately, or perhaps even at the same time.

Possibility

I am pleased to report that my first 3 days were good! None of my nightmares came true: no floods of 20 extra students I didn't have chairs for, no in-your-face defiance as I tried to go over my expectations, no schedule mishaps where I dismissed class half an hour early, no losing my keys, no mental breakdowns. For me or the students. I did lose my attendance sheet on Thursday, but that's the worst logistical problem I have had.

We did a scavenger hunt on the first day where the kids looked around for evidence of rules and key features of the classroom; on the second day we went into more detail about routines and procedures and built towers out of paper (which the kids LOVED); on the third day we talked about respect and responsibility and wrote goals for the year and did a second round of tower building (which the kids were weirdly not into... I either need to do the followup round on the same day next year or else pump it up better).

Monday will be less fun, we're doing a pre-assessment and some rules/routines followup. The rest of the week (and the year....) I still have to figure out. I think measurement and unit conversion practice on Tuesday and then we'll start the first unit for real on Wed. Tues will be kind of filler because I think I'll need extra time to get my hands on the textbooks and figure out a new seating chart (unit project will begin on day 1 of the unit so they need to be sitting in their groups from the first day, but I need time to go through the pre-assessments and figure out how to group them). But I think the measurement practice will not be a waste.

I know we're still in the honeymoon phase, especially since they're freshmen just testing the waters of high school, but I am really loving my kids. They are sweet and hilarious and brilliant. The towers they came up with? BRILLIANT. Lots of cool tiered towers, an awesomely stable cone, a wacky curved Eiffel Tower-ish structure, and more. I told them that the tower had to stand up on its own and they could only use the supplies I gave them (one sheet copy paper, 50 cm masking tape, 1 pair scissors). They did things like tape the paper to the table, wedge the paper in the crack between tables, and, my personal favorite, use the scissors handles for support. BRILLIANT, I tell you. The tallest tower was 104 cm. Freestanding. Constructed from a single sheet of copy paper in under 3 minutes.

Now, that's not to say I don't have my work cut out for me: only a single student out of all 4 of my classes scored proficient on last year's science state test, zero scored advanced, and well over half of them failed it outright. I have students with documented learning disabilities, students who are beginner level English Language Learners, and a student with severe anxiety disorder. And those are only the obstacles I already know about. There are kids who are already testing the limits of my bathroom policy, my hand raising policy, and my homework policy (and I am none too certain that I have set any of those policies correctly). And then there are the kids who haven't shown up to school yet, some of whom are repeating the 9th grade and probably won't be model students. I've already made several errors in judgment and I am sure I'll make plenty more.

But, the year has started, and it has gone fairly smoothly so far. I am hugely relieved. It's going to be a hard year but most of my anxiety is gone, replaced with a refreshing sense of possibility.