Virtual Tour: If you have not started the Virtual tour of your classroom, be sure and do that this week. In the comment section of the “Virtual Tour” post, send me an address where I can access your tour. I will make a post with links later this week so you can all visit each other!
Virtual Journal-later in the week: For Week Four, we are focusing on being more reflective about what we are actually doing day to day in our classrooms. We all have standards, mandates, and objectives, but how do the nut-and-bolt activities of our day play out? I would like for you to write about just that on the ASWC Ning which I am in the process of setting up for you this week. The Virtual Journal is essentially, however, on hold this week until I get the Ning groups established. I recall that some of you. Stay tuned.
The assignment is to examine your typical day. Write a narrative description. You might want to call this “A Day in the Classroom” or “The Good, the Bad, the Ugly.” This will be the only Virtual Journal for the week. I am hoping that your routines and realities will spark some conversation and response in the Ning groups which will not be available until late in the week. We had such excellent and divergent activity in the Virtual Journal last week. I am hoping that will continue in the smaller groups so that everyone has a voice and gets a response.
No audio scheduled: I am traveling this week and doing inservice this week so there may be no office hours. Just email or call if you have problems.
Keep up all the good writing. The class is moving along right on course.
I'm a 0.8 FTE teacher, so my classroom day is six hours long. Of course, teaching is not a nine to five job, so I usually put in more than the minimum. There are five one-hour periods with a ten minute break each hour. Lunch is one hour.
ReplyDeleteThe Johnson Youth Center Detention Unit, which is where I teach, is a short stay facility for teens from twelve to nineteen who are awaiting sentencing or space in other facilities. Our average resident stay is 7.9 days. I never know how many students I will face when I arrive in the morning. Due to the short duration of student stays, we can't do multi-day or multi-week units or work through textbooks. We do a lot of stand alone lessons and it certainly helps to be flexible.
This week began with two students, today I had four with an admit processing as I was leaving.
Students are frequently called out of the classroom to meet with their P.O.'s (parole officers), the nurse, the psychologist or to go to court. If the parole officer or judge gives them bad news such as being "awarded" a B-1 (treatment at the other end of our building or at another facility for up to two years), the students return to the classroom visibly shaken, catatonic, or in tears. Males sit in the front; females, when we have them, sit behind them and are marched out behind the males.
The students wear unisex uniforms with different colored jerseys to dente their status. New students wear orange marking them as "OR" or in orientation. Students who are either co-defendents or who don't get along wear purple and are NEVER allowed to be together. The rare student who is with us long enough to achieve Step Three can wear shirts from his or her personal wardrobe.
Students are marched in and out of the classroom by the staff. They are required to sit up, keep their feet on the floor, and not leave their seats without permission. Talking without permission is also not allowed. Classroom management isn’t much of an issue. Rarely a student will begin to act out. If I can’t calm the student down quickly, staff will escort the student out.
Classes begin at 9:00 a.m. I do prep during the previous hour. Part of prep is writing the day’s grammar practice sentences on the whiteboard. I have a wonderful book, Five Minutes a Day, which has short paragraphs with spelling, punctuation, and grammatical errors for every day of the year. Each day’s sentences describe a historical event, which provides a great opportunity for a social studies mini lesson. I place a copy of the sentences on each student’s desk.
When the students are marched in, I direct them to their desks, if they are new arrivals. We remain standing to recite the Pledge of Allegiance. Many of these kids come from horrific home situations. Structure and routines are important to them. After the Pledge, I direct the students to sit and correct as much of their sentences as they can. I usually give them three to five minutes, then we take turns correcting the sentences on the board. Everyone has to participate. I try to cheerlead grammar and language mechanics. I emphasize that they need to develop a sense of what looks and sounds right in language. We talk about punctuation marks as being written symbols to symbols that describe the pauses and inflections that we use when we speak. We analyze how the sentences are structured in terms of what “good writers do.” Sometimes we spend half an hour on the sentences and the historical events that they describe. The students seem to enjoy the morning sentences. Currently, I have a student who is working independently on credit recovery courses. We’ve made the morning sentences optional for him, but he does them every day.
JYC Classroom Procedures Part II
ReplyDeleteAfter sentences, we usually read a short story. We have an inventory of short stories and short non-fiction accounts. We do round robin reading with me taking the opening and often, the closing parts. Although new students are sometimes reluctant to read aloud, I need to know how well they can read. We make it as non-threatening as possible and it’s heartening to hear a longer-term student tell a new one that “It’s okay, you’ll enjoy it.”
When we finish the story, the students answer written questions. If we are short on time, or it seems like the right vibe, we go through the questions orally. At the end of the period the students are marched out to the dayroom for a ten minute break.
We do a variety of subjects throughout the day. We subscribe to a series of Scholastic and Weekly Reader magazines, so we may read Teen Health or Science World. Due to security issues, we can’t do lab work because many lab items could be used as weapons. I’ll discuss our security procedures later.
We do a lot of life skills and career activities. I’ve developed an activity with nautical charts that teaches the students how to find and use the huge amount of information found on nautical charts. Many of these kids are on the water and many will fish commercially. They need to know how to read a chart when the GPS dies.
Another favorite activity is our house unit. It takes four to six days and we seldom finish the unit with all of the students who begin it. We start with Ken Burns’ video Frank LLoyd Wright. Then, I bring in my collection of Frank LLoyd Write coffee table books and the house plans for our dream house, which was designed by John Rattenbury, who apprenticed under Frank LLoyd Wright. I have eight copies of the house plans and I’ve developed an activity that helps the students to learn what is in a full set of architectural drawings. They have to find what the specification for the foundation concrete is, what kind of switch controls the garage lights, and what type of nail is used for the sub-roof sheathing. After all of that, we ask the students to design their dream house. It’s a five stage process, beginning with a wish list. Then, each room is categorized as to use and “feel.” The students make bubble diagrams to work out traffic flow and room arrangement. We ask them to write a description of the house and its features. Finally, we give them graft paper so that they can make scaled floor plans and elevation drawings. Several years ago one student said to his friend, “Have you ever seen houses like this? I’ve only lived in apartments and trailers.”
JYC Classroom Procedures Part III
ReplyDeleteWe do social studies, some economics, math, health, and career development during the course of the week. Students who are with us for twenty class days receive a half credit elective in Life Skills. We try to coordinate with the student’s previous schools and get their course materials so that we can continue, not interrupt, their current classes. We put longer term students into individual and independent study courses so that they can keep pace with their peers on the “outside.”
Students do homework every night. Included is a nightly personal journal requirement. We also require them to do personal reading and keep a daily reading journal.
New students have an indoctrination process that the staff requires. We brief them on classroom procedures. Julia, the wonderful para who works with me, administers the MAP survey for new students or “frequent flyers” whose last MAP survey is out of date. PBS the organization that monitors the facility requires the MAP survey or the GED TABE survey. Julia also is a member of the facility’s food monitoring committee. PBS monitors the menus for nutrition and balance.
Security is ALWAYS a concern. Although the majority of students have substance abuse issues, we have the full spectrum of human behavior. Some students are psychopaths, some are severely schizophrenic or bipolar, some are sexual offenders or predators, and are awaiting admittance into treatment facilities. Several years ago we had a young man who truly scared me. He had empty blue eyes and a pixie-banged haircut that gave him a “Clem Cladiddle-Hopper” air. However, I corrected him about respecting his peers one day and he looked into my soul with raw evil. He was a low functioning predator who had spent most of his life in institutions. He was transferred to a facility in Texas. I hope that he never sees a day of freedom.
We remove the metal eraser bands from student pencils and replace them with push-on erasers. Our students are not allowed to use pens for obvious reasons. We remove staples from magazines. We don’t staple anything, which means student packets are loose leafed. Our students are only allowed to use computers to take the MAP tests. Our student laptops have the rest of the Internet blocked. We use kindergarten scissors, and plastic compasses with dull points. Art and science materials are screened to avoid anything that the kids could use against each other, us, or on themselves. We count scissors, compasses, and rulers before we issue them and count them again when we collect them.
There is a security camera in the classroom and we are locked in our section of the building. The admitting room is off the south end of the classroom and that door is shut during admit processing because the incoming student is strip searched and then given a supervised shower.
Staff is in the Control Room, about twenty feet from the classroom. They watch surveillance monitors. One day I was trying to demonstrate punctuation marks. I yelled “Help!” to show when to use an exclamation mark. Three staff members appeared almost instantly. I realized what I had done and apologized profusely, but I was also reassured that they were so vigilant.
Reading this, JYC sounds harsh and intimidating, but it’s not that bad. Security is really about common sense and safety for everyone, especially the kids. Some of them return to us because we offer structure, three meals a day, decent clothes, heat, and a non-threatening environment. When people ask me how I cope with revolving door attendance, I reply that I see my job as planting seeds. Seeds that may sit for years, but hopefully will begin to germinate and give these children who truly have been left behind, coping strategies and knowledge that they can use to become productive, contributing adults.
Rick, I appreciate your color coded descriptions.
ReplyDeleteHere is my piece the evening before the plane to Kona
Of Classroom Tours and Such...
A typical Beginner bilingual classroom is like a support group. Once we had a boy who wasn’t used to sitting in a chair, so he would position himself on the floor and write on the seat. And we let him.
Another student spilled the Elmer’s glue on the carpet , and so I knew he wasn’t exposed to the all-American twist top. I didn’t even think about punishing or reprimanding him. The youngster’s embarrassment was painful to watch. After all, I didn’t know what a pound sign was on the phone, even though my English appeared quite comprehensible to the bank teller seventeen years ago.
This fall a student used a pencil sharpener under the desk discretely and emptied it on the new carpet. I explained that in my class she can get up and walk to the sharpener attached to the wall. I did my best using gestures and words. She jumped up in a jolt and crawled under the table picking the wood shavings with her fingers. The well-cloaked body exposed the forearms, and I saw deep ugly scars that made everything I just said petty and irrelevant. This child may have died, but somehow lived instead, and all my attempts at teaching social protocol were pathetic compared to her survivor wisdom. She is not used to wearing shoes. Not just closed-toe required winter footwear. Any shoes. Even slippers. I feel deep respect for her past, present, and future.
It was difficult to begin to read, because she was confusing low case L, I and T, and didn’t know what most words she was sounding out meant. She would burst into song in her language at random. Multiply that by the number of her classmates, and get the reason why I choose my substitutes very carefully. One very nice lady sub said that a student was very rude ignoring her explanation, no matter how loud she spoke, and kept speaking Spanish just to be rude. I reassured the nice lady that the student performed very well passing as an overconfident Hispanic, considering that she has come from a remote Asian country two months ago.
We made apple blossoms on bare birch sticks from a teacher’s yard yesterday. I cut the pink flowers, the leaves, and demonstrated. Children worked in silence, then burst into songs. In many languages that are far, far away from each other.
A Day in Mrs. Lloyd's Classroom:
ReplyDeleteBy Amy Lloyd
I have morning prep time. This is a great thing! It means that I arrive at 7:40 each morning (after the bus pulls away at our bus stop with my girls, I head to work). Students are "allowed" upstairs at 8:15 bell and they have 15 minutes to deal with their lockers, visit and get to their "exploratory" classes like gym, art, cooking, etc. by 8:30. We are blessed at our school with a daily, 90-minute prep time that is a common prep for our 6-person "house." This seems like a lot of time, but, boy, do we use it well! Our school truly embraces the middle school model and we do a lot of team planning on my six-person team.
So...I spend my morning frantically grading papers, prepping with my teammates, planning lessons, emailing parents, etc.
At 10:00 my students come upstairs for a 30-minute class called "Toolbox." On Mondays I conduct "Manners Mondays" and we have a different topic to learn and discuss. This is very fun! Usually Tuesday-Friday is silent reading, but March and April my teaching partner and I are doing a Toastmasters Unit to so the students can improve their public speaking skills. This is a great unit and completely student-led.
At 10:30, my 7th grade Advanced LA class begins with a "Quote of the Day" which they respond in their journals followed by 45 minutes of language arts. From 11:30 - 12:30 I have 8th grade Advanced LA.
12:30 - 1:00 is lunch
1:00 - 2:00 and 2:00 - 3:00 I have two classes of 7/8 mixed for World History.
Students are dismissed at 3:00.
This year is my first year teaching the advanced classes, and to be honest, I miss the regular classes more than I would have guessed. On paper, my day seems regimented and perhaps boring. But remember, my day is filled with interactions with at least 80 children between 12 and 14. Middle school children are the best! They are delightfully awkward, dramatic, hormonal, enthusiastic, curious... the perfect combination of laughing child and sullen teen. Each day I get to laugh -- real belly laughs, and I also get to give "the evil eye" to someone (usually the same 5-6 squirrely kiddos) but then follow it with a smile because they know I adore every one of them, even though I have a reputation for being "tough."
I love my job.
A Typical School Day with Mrs. Stoltz
ReplyDeleteI race out the door of our downtown apartment at 7:15. I walk to work, easily recognized in my bright red goulashes. I listen to upbeat music on my headphones, which makes me walk faster. I see the same folks every day, and we say good morning. I haven’t fallen on the ice yet. Lately, I’ve taken to walking down the street instead of on the sidewalks. If the drivers want to complain about having to go around me, I’d encourage them to shovel their sidewalks. I enter my classroom five minutes late almost every day, a curse I seem to have been born with. Some of the paras are already there, hootin’ and hollerin’ (how can they find things so funny so early in the morning?) I set up my computer and check for messages from parents. My paras check in with the general ed teachers about anything on the docket for the day, and then they report back to me and write it on my white board so that I don’t forget. I make copies, sometimes. If there is a sub for a para, it takes all my time to walk them through their instructions for the day.
At 8am I greet students in the hallway and visit with the ELL teacher whose classroom is across the hall from mine. From about 8:05-9:30, I teach a math group of five students with learning disabilities and ADHD, from four different regular ed classrooms. These fourth-graders are working on fourth-grade standards. I use a lot of repetition, hands-on exploration with manipulatives, and plenty of incentives (I dish out fake money, in a Behaviorist, positive reinforcement, “token economy” sort of way. They love to count their money, and I have a sale on Fridays, where they buy little trinkets, pencils, stickers, etc.).
From 9:45-10:45, I teach Functional Reading to my students with severe cognitive impairments. We use a variety of resources, technology, and curricula. Their behavior and social skills often take the spotlight away from phonics, street signs, and site words, but we’re making progress.
I take my prep from 10:45-11:30. I’m usually administering a test to a student in the referral process. (Right now I am in the middle of 4 new referrals.) The academic achievement test I give (the Woodcock Johnson) takes about an hour and a half to administer, usually about three prep periods.
My favorite period of the day is from 12:10-1:10. I teaching reading to a small group of boys with learning disabilities and severe ADHD behaviors. We have been using a direct instruction curriculum that is phonics based. The boys have made tremendous growth so far this year! It’s really beautiful to see pride in their surprised faces, as they become better readers.
This Monday I am beginning a new writing group from 1:30-2, or 2:30 on some days. I’ll be writing more about that group as it unfolds. Other days from 2:00-2:30 I have a social skills group with 5th grade boys with genius IQs as well as Asperger’s.
My schedule, as special education teacher, is never so simple as teaching one group at a time. My job is to make sure that the paras (or their substitutes) are doing their job, and that the students scattered throughout six classrooms + “specials” (library, PE, music, or counseling) are under control. At any given moment, a student or staff member might enter my classroom and require my attention. In addition to interruptions such as these, I am often pulled away from teaching for trainings and many, many, many meetings.
After school, I do the paperwork. I am here in my classroom that is three times the size of our apartment until 5 or 6pm or sometimes midnight. My first few IEPs took me no less than 15 hours to write, but I have gained speed and efficiency with the last ten or so. My goal is to clean my desk at the end of the day, so that my late night work has something concrete to show for it, the next morning.
I walk home. My husband mixes me a cocktail, serves dinner, does the dishes, and tends to the cats. I ascend into a blissful vacation-like trance until bedtime.
Are we supposed to put this on the NING? A little confused but slowly getting back in the swing of reality.
ReplyDeleteI am so incorporating Eleanor’s plan into mine…the husband, the cats, the wine!
Actually my husband is very helpful with the morning routine and helps us all get out of the house in a timely manner. My son’s school is just a mile down the road and right on the way to my school. My daughter is in my class this year and comes along with me. She is better than any TA I’ve had and gets the room ready each day, changing the helper chart, attendance check-in, schedule. So helpful. This year I am in charge of the student
I share two classes with a partner teacher so our time is very limited, the nice thing is teaching the same lessons twice. It is funny how sometimes the morning class gets the better lesson and sometimes the afternoon.
We start the day with independent seat work (although most of them are on the floor with clipboards.) Right now I am using Mountain Math and Mountain Language, I really like the skills reinforcement it provides. Because I don’t teach math it also keeps me connected to how the students are doing with their math skills and who I can give extra support to
We use Houghton Mifflin in our district so I pretty much stick to that bringing in supplemental literature and adapting lessons to fit our needs. I also have the “Write Traits” program that I overlap and use in conjunction with HM. Our days are jam packed in the mornings, we have at least one 30 minutes pull-out and sometimes more. After lunch is our science and social studies block. My partner and I try to coordinate and build on what the other is doing. The new swap classes and do the whole thing over.
On Thursdays our schedule is a little disrupted because of our gifted program. Of our 50 total students almost 20 of them leave for the morning. We have music while they are gone and then try to do fun, hands on activities for the ones that stay. A problem with this is some parents feel we just take a break on Thursdays and don’t do any “teaching.” I usually get out the old time English book and have them diagram sentences when we get too many complaints!
When I can, I take them out for a walk around our “health loop” or few laps around our classroom. This is especially helpful in the afternoon when they have had a full morning of Japanese and are worn out mentally.
Overall our days run smoothly and I am flexible to go off and follow that teachable moment.