Mr. Hardwick’s Education

Now that i have something to write about…
Yesterday I accepted a first grade long term sub position at one of the schools I have been working at.  Ideally, when taking over in the middle of the school year you’d be taking over a well-running productive classroom. That is not the case here.  This class has been pushed and pulled all year long and their regular teacher has some serious family obligations to address over the next few months.  So here I am.

I finished my student teaching at the beginning of May 2006.  It is now September 27th, 2006 and I am home with my children afterschool everyday because I am unable to find work in a public school.   Resumes have been sent to many districts ( I have lost count) in two states and I have had zero success in finding a job.  I did get one interview for a possible teaching position and one interview for an aide position.  Neither called me back.  I am trying not to be discouraged, but…

When I did my practicum teaching last fall, I kept a weekly online journal. The assignment was to keep a paper journal, however I thought that an online version would be more interesting and easier to share with those people who needed to see it. Unfortunately, I tried to upgrade the version of Wordpress that ran the backend without first saving the database. You know, IN CASE SOMETHING GOES WRONG. So months later I am trying to piece together what I wrote. Fortunately I wrote on a word processor and saved the files locally. What is missing are the generous and insightful comments left by the readers and some links to outside articles and pictures that I uploaded to Willy P’s servers and linked to.

Apples.
One of the early themes for Mrs. Koenig’s class is apples. Some of the ways Mrs. Koenig has been using apples includes making Johnny Appleseed puppets (after having read and discussed the legend/story) and today we had a taste test of four apple products:

* Apple Juice
* Apple Slices
* Apple Sauce (which the students had made on Tuesday)
* Apple Pie

The students were given little slips of paper with their names on them and were asked to draw a quick smiley picture of themselves. The adults in the room were also a part of the taste test and we were all collectively surveyed and the whole class interactively built a chart/graph with everyone’s choices. I had to hold up the chart (it kept falling down) and the children identified their choices one at a time while Mrs. Koenig glued up the portraits. Mrs. Ferrara (the full-time assistant) baked some fabulous pies which nine of the nineteen students (there are twenty in the class, one was absent) voted for as their favorite. It ended up being a tie between ‘juice’ and ‘pie’ . Once seven or so children had ‘voted’ others started to actively campaign for their choices saying “We’re going to win!” and others who had not even tasted the pie caved in to the pressure and tried to ‘vote’ pie. Mrs. Koenig stopped that and reminded them to vote for themselves and I chirped in with “Is your name ‘Apple Juice’ ?”. The students then read the chart, identifying which were the ‘winners’, how many voted in each category, which had the fewest (apple sauce) and the choice in the middle (apple slices).

Administration.
The apple product tasting activity, I think, nicely captures the educational philosophy and practices of Mrs. Koenig. Everybody gets involved, the lessons are interdisciplinary and there is some food and some fun. Mrs. Koenig is taking advantage of all that her school and district has to offer. For example, there is a full-time assistant, (Mrs. Ferrara) who takes the children to their specials and to lunch, staying with them for lunch and when they go outside afterwards. She also puts together their folders and sorts the breakfast and lunch orders, puts out the materials for the various activities and likely many other administrative tasks that I did not notice or did not come up during the day. There is also a one-on-one aide (Ms. Monica) for a classified student who functions very well on his own (this is his second go ’round in Mrs. Koenig class) freeing up Ms. Monica to help other students in little ways. The one-on-one aide is, of course, IEP driven and she is required to shadow her student. However, another set of eyes, even if she doesn’t say or do anything with the other students, acts as a deterrent to mischievous behavior. So on the days that I am there, there are four adults in the room with twenty children. On the days that I am not, there are three. It makes for a pretty well-supervised and enriching experience for the children.

Errata.

Hackensack is a title one district and has gotten a Reading First grant. There are lots of provisions to spending title one grant money and I know very little about it. However, Mrs. Koenig has to set aside a block of 3 hours each day for Reading First literacy programs and it has become a part of how the days are structured. Her school/class (I am not really sure if it is just her class or the whole school) has also gotten some computer equipment (3 pcs and a printer) with the stipulation that it be used with some interactive software from Pearson called Waterford. She would periodically send groups of three children off to the PCs for fifteen minutes at a clip and let them step through at whatever level they were on. She must have trained them because she did not go over there to set them up or really monitor them in any way. She did say that she gets a detailed report about their progress and what their specific answers to questions were. I glanced at the manuals but it was just that, a glance. One thing that happened that I am not sure about is the use of school PA for extended announcements after the pledge. Apparently, this is a primary means of communication from administration to staff and often takes the place of paper or email backup (like, there isn’t any). There were announcements until about 8:50 and everyone had tuned them out well before they were finished. The school is undergoing a renovation (and will be all year) so Mrs. Koenig’s class is in major disarray (and will be all year).

As an aside, I was the recipient of four spontaneous hugs (from kindergartners), I tied at least fifteen sneakers and two children told me they loved me. I woke up today trying to figure out how to go back and haven’t stopped thinking about the whole Jackson Avenue School experience since I left yesterday afternoon.

It was that special.

Curiosity.
The Hackensack school district had Tuesday and Wednesday off this week for the Jewish holidays. I asked to come in on Thursday instead my usual Wednesday and was allowed to without a fuss. After hearing about some of the experiences and situations other practicum students found themselves in I consider myself really fortunate in my placement. Everyone in the school has treated me very well, with courtesy and curiosity. When I go into the teacher’s lounge to retrieve my lunch, everybody wants to know who I am and, once satisfied with my explanation, they inevitably want to know what grade I want to teach. No matter what I answer, I get some variation on the “not enough men in the lower grades” speech. I usually respond with some variation on the “I will do whatever my principal wants, I am not tenured” speech. In reality it is much too early for me to answer that question with sense of its eventual veracity. While I like the little ones (I worked for two years in a pre-school) I like the idea of being able to talk to them about some thing with a little depth. I am curious to see what middle school students have to say.

Endorsement.
The spinning roulette wheel of rules about what the State of New Jersey will license us to teach at the conclusion of all of this is currently set to K-5. If your undergraduate degree is in a meaningful subject (english, mathematics, any hard science, others) you can get a middle school endorsement, which means you can teach in your particular subject in 6, 7 or 8th grade in addition to all subjects K-5. In my case, I would be able to teach social studies in the middle school after passing the Social Studies Praxis test(pdf).

Mrs. Koenig has been very accommodating and gave me a chance to do some small group instruction in math today. Mrs. Koenig is working on number sense topics and has gotten up to five with her class. The activities include worksheets with little illustrations and the children are to count the illustrations and write in the correct number. There are other similar activities and the occasional homework which includes practice writing the numerals and drawing the specific number of something. Mrs. Koenig and I talked about which kids were struggling with their numbers and those four students were given to me to work with. Using 20 cards (4 each displaying 0-4) I had the students take turns flipping them over in turn and say the number on the card and then put that number of counters on the card. As we went through them I arranged them in a grid face down and when they were all done I had them work through a matching game. Even after explaining the game and why paying attention to the cards that other students turned over would give them clues as to which cards they could match, they were looking around the room and not focusing on the game. It may have been the fact that it was after 2:00 when we did this, or maybe there is a reason these kids are struggling. It felt pretty good doing it, especially since it might actually help Mrs. Koenig and the children with their math.

Its a tie.
I tied a whole bunch more shoes today and am getting pretty good at it. I even double knot my own dress shoes now and can’t get the knots undone by myself. I have two suggestions for Mrs. Koenig’s class: Velcro and a collection of shoe tying lesson plans. Mrs. Koenig uses every opportunity to give her students more opportunities to enhance their number sense. For example, there are a number of ongoing graphing projects including daily weather, children’s height, the apple graph from last week and others. There is also a number line that goes up to 144 (I think…it may have been 130) and larger cards on the wall (from 1 to 10) with number written as a word, as a digit and with that number of brightly colored objects (in this case, fruit). From peeking into other classrooms, from my own visits to classrooms and from what I have read, these types of displays are very common. I have now seen how these displays actually get used. For one language arts lesson, Mrs. Koenig asked the children to write down (copy) some word or words from anywhere around the room. Because everything is labeled and there are books everywhere, you would think it would be easy for the students to find something…and most of them did. Others needed to be reminded. The adults in the room also needed to be reminded of the developmental levels of children. The children are 5 years old in this class. After six hours of being asked to go here and write this and sit down and be quiet and clean up and pay attention, they are done. The 50 minutes from 2:00 to 2:50 is a struggle for them. Mrs. Koenig has designated the end of the day as play time (when the “end of the day” starts is a moving target) and she can use the withholding of it a behavior modifier, though she seldom does.

1492.
The Jackson Avenue school had its Columbus day assembly on Thursday in the gym because the auditorium is being renovated. It was a little awkward though pretty well planned. The music teacher had coached and taught the costumed second graders to sing several songs about Columbus and to hold up numbers and signs at the right time. It was a lot of fun and, being new and male I was an object of some curiosity. It’s a whole new world out there for me.

Rain.
It has rained more than six inches in the month of October and Mrs. Koenig’s class has been inside…well, a lot. They were inside all day yesterday and unable to get all that energy out and brought some antsy-ness back in to the classroom. The children were actually pretty good yesterday, but we (the adults in the room) need to regularly remind ourselves (and we have plenty of evidence to support) that they really are just babies. Mrs. Koenig and I pulled out the class list (which listed their birthdays) and looked it over and discovered that the couple of kids who were behind developmentally, indeed had relatively recent birthdays. We also discovered that a child had a birthday today, though when I asked her about it, she insisted that it was the coming weekend. That is, of course, when the party is going to be. Infinitely more important.

Another Tie.
On the days when I do the practicum, my own two children have to get up earlier than usual and be taken to their various schools and/or classmate’s houses so I can get to Hackensack on time. And it’s pouring. We all made it on time, except that half way to the little one’s school I realized that my nicely coordinated sky blue-yellow striped tie was sitting on the dining room table next to the unwashed dishes. I brainstormed on the ride to drop off the little one ways to:

• Go home and get the tie.

• Stop somewhere (dollar store, probably) and buy one.

• Root around in the housekeeping boxes at my daughter’s school looking for one.

• Ask a male teacher in Jackson Ave., or Mr. Corrado if they have a spare.

• Show up without a tie and explain in humble terms why I am tie-less.

Mrs. Koenig, when asked if she had a tie, remembered about a couple from her own housekeeping boxes and provided me with a nice black and blue striped number. I put it on at 8:29 AM and got ready for the kids to come in thinking that they will never notice and maybe if they do, lets see how long will it take. The absolute first thing that a child says to me yesterday is “Did you get that tie out of housekeeping?” 8:37 AM.

Peeling Oranges-The Teachable Moment.
In the mornings Mrs. Ferrara collects lunch orders and gets the children their breakfast (I help). Today they had corn flakes, milk and oranges. Peeling oranges is a learned skill and mostly because some varieties peel easier than others. These were navels (or Valencia, they look the same) and peel pretty easily. I showed one boy an easy technique (stick your thumb in the round spot, pull off a little piece, peel the rest like a banana) and he went with it and did a really credible job. He then ate it like an apple, no sections. Others were watching and made attempts themselves with mixed results, but all at this particular table tried. There was much stickiness.

The Letter ‘D’.
The ways in which teachers address the different levels of comprehension and development in the context a lesson has got to be one of the hardest things to do successfully. There are always children who get it instantly, complete the hands on part and start looking for things to do. Others are instructed again, one on one or in small groups and still struggle to complete and/or comprehend. The discrepancies can be stark in the early grades, but getting them some intensive help early seems to be the recipe for success. Mrs. Koenig has those children who finish the hands on portion of an activity pick out books and ‘read’. At the table I was at, several were ‘reading’ and I wanted to extend the lesson in some way and not have them just kill time. I asked the kids to look for the letter ‘D’ in the text of the books they had and let me know when they had found one. Pretty soon a little hand would tap me on the arm and point to a letter (always correctly, too!) at which I would exaggeratedly praise their efforts and encourage more. One little guy who had been struggling found some ‘D’s and responded really well to the praise. After a while he was positively vibrating when he found a ‘D’ and showed it me.

TicTacToe.
The Everyday Math program is what they are using at Jackson Avenue. From what I understand, it has gotten praise from many professionals and is a top-notch program. The basic philosophy is to incorporate instructional mathematics using everyday objects and activities. One enhancement or aspect of this which I think would further engage the children is to use more games (or at least call the math lessons ‘games’). Near the end of the day when one lesson was winding down and some children were finished, I drew a tictactoe board on a piece of paper and played with one young lady. Pretty soon the other kids at the table wanted to play and were playing with each other. Tictactoe probably isn’t the right game to play (limited math enrichment) but I think the idea of using math games to engage them will work. I will look into it with my resident math teacher (Ms. Giumarra).

This Job is Really Hard.

Having been married to a school teacher for many years, I always sort of knew that being a public school teacher is a very difficult job. It is a time consuming, emotionally draining, administratively challenging, weekly grind. And yet, much like parenthood, it brings rewards unavailable in any other situation. Getting to breathe in the genuine sparks of discovery from these little people who seem to really like being here has been fun. Admittedly, these sparks only fly occasionally, but I would never get to see them if stuck in a cubicle somewhere.

Pumpkin Lessons.

Mrs. Koenig has a little handbook from the Everyday Math program with a year’s worth of math related activities mapped out. On Thursday I asked if I could address the class as the teacher and teach a lesson. Judy has been great about all of my requests, giving me opportunities whenever I want to do things with her class. I really appreciate her faith and willingness to do so. She had planned an activity from the Everyday Math handbook where the children would transform into a jack-o-lantern a using shapes for the eyes, nose and mouth. I asked the class to identify some of the shapes on the completed jack-o-lantern models that Mrs. Koenig had designed and glued up. These students know their shapes, one even explaining the difference between a circle an oval without prompting. In reflecting on what I did, I could have demonstrated some more techniques in making shapes for the children to cut and use and spent more time on that part of the lesson (if only because I spent the next 15 minutes doing it over and over with individual students).

Invented Spelling.

One of the regular language arts activities that Mrs. Koenig uses is to write labels and descriptions and on a flip chart under a rudimentary drawing of a familiar or easy to decipher scene. She uses invented spelling when writing, in an effort to model for the children that the sounds they hear have corresponding symbols that can be written down. This is an approach championed by Columbia University’s Lucy Calkins and I was initially confused by it. I have always thought that modeling correct spelling, always, would lead to correct spelling, always. Making a point of correcting beginning writers at every turn can’t possibly work…and I asked Mrs. Koenig about using invented spelling. She told me that the children want to do it perfectly and will spend frustrating effort to do so and will focus on getting it ‘right’ rather than listening and trying things. I think this identifies one of the most important aspects of what we do as teachers. These children have to know that the trying is the most important part and we have to make an atmosphere that encourages the freedom to do that for all the students.

Book Sale.

Scholastic sponsored sales is a big source of funding for PTA’s all over the country and Jackson Ave. is no exception. One of their book sales was this week and I think it’s a win-win for everybody. The kids get books to take home, Scholastic gets some revenue and PTA’s get a percentage.

MIA

This is one of the posts that is unrecoverable. I don’t have a local copy and I think I know why. I wrote this one during school when I was subbing at Leonia High School. It was the first time I had ever subbed and the post was about how high school students are really just kindergartners with bigger bodies. Oh and hormones. And bad facial fair. Also the curiculum is not trivial.

The Distributive Property

I remember trying to do a worksheet meant for the ninth grade geometry class last period. I did it by hand (with a little help from a student who didn’t go on the field trip to see ‘Julius Caesar‘) but it took a long time . When I gave to the last period freshman, they whipped out their calculators and knocked it off it just a few minutes. I am glad it was the last period though.

Lather, Rinse, Repeat.
One aspect of what happened at my lesson observation, that both Mrs. Koenig and Mrs. Lebovits identified independently, was the necessity of repeating, restating and repeating again whatever explanations and instructions are needed for the class.

One aspect of what happened at my lesson observation, that both Mrs. Koenig and Mrs. Lebovits identified independently, was the necessity of repeating, restating and repeating again whatever explanations and instructions are needed for the class.

It’s a Pirate’s Life for Me.
One young man (who had to have been a pirate for Halloween) made a point of beginning every conversation with me by saying “ARRRRR!!, Walk the plank, matey!” I couldn’t help myself and responded with an “ARRRR!” of my own on every occasion. I don’t know if talking like a pirate undermines my position of authority in the classroom, but I really couldn’t help but respond the way I did.

Observations.
Ordinarily, the prospect of being observed would send me into a fit of self-doubt and sleeplessness. I slept great and felt no undue tension. I credit this to (mostly) being prepared and to the fact that the teachers and supervisors I am working with have been incredibly supportive and helpful. Laura (my wife, the math teacher) was also observed recently and reminded me about the public nature of teaching and how being pushed can be very motivational. She credits her principal for being ‘hard’ on the teachers in her school with making them all better teachers because of it.
Reflections.
Mrs. Koenig reminded me again today about being reflective on your practice and of being conscious of your methods, attitudes and behaviors in the classroom. In the theory classes I have taken, this comes up frequently as a primary method of enhancing professional practice. One other element of a teacher’s life we talked about was classroom management. Given that I have an assignment due next week, I was asking Mrs. Koenig about her classroom management practices. She claimed not have a formal program for classroom management…and then proceeded to show me like 10 things she had implemented that function as classroom management tools. She said that what you have done as a parent to control and influence behavior will work in the classroom. I will need to reflect on that because that is still a work in progress.

Nuts on the Floor.

One thing I occasionally forget is how physically large we adults must seem to small children. Try this: sit on the floor and have another adult stand right next to you and look up to see their face. Sitting on the floor or otherwise physically bringing ourselves down to their level can make effective communication more productive. One activity Mrs. Koenig had the children do on Wednesday was to take a basket of nuts, put it on the floor with identifiers and have the kids sort them by type. There were walnuts, pecans, brazil nuts, hazelnuts and peanuts and she had an open can of Planters® Mixed Nuts to fish out samples of what the nuts looked like inside. Even though I knew I probably shouldn’t have I started snacking and she caught me! They were tasty. There were only two or three children at a time sorting and they quickly self-organized and split up the tasks to finish quickly. It was good to see them getting along and working together without being told to.
Pardon the Interruption.

Because of the way I am choosing to complete this assignment, it is awkward to say critical things about what I see in my classroom. As a student and new teacher, I am observed or going to be observed many times. What I do in the classroom is always going to be examined, dissected, criticized and talked about in front of me and behind my back…but not maliciously. It is only done in an effort to make the learning experience more efficacious for the children. It’s a part of the landscape for teachers to examine their practice (and have it examined) in an effort to grow and get better and their profession. Should this extend to administrators as well? Seven or eight times on Wednesday the speaker crackled with possibly useful information. It was hard to hear and unwelcome every time. There has to be a better way to communicate with the staff and students during the school day.

Patterns.

Because Thanksgiving is coming, a flurry of turkey-Native American-pilgrim-fall crafts and activities are popping up all over the school. On Wednesday, after reading about Squanto Mrs. Ferrara and Mrs. Koenig distributed some colored macaroni and taped down some cut lengths of string for making pattern necklaces. Despite the taping, several students still managed to dump their carefully (maybe) organized and patterned necklaces all over the floor, but they rallied and picked up the droppings without much complaint. Several students made well conceived and executed designs, while others, well, did not. Once we were all done the students (and teachers) held a little fashion show, displaying their designs and strutting nicely about the classroom to much amusement. I got an uproarious response for my stumbling pirouette while showing my design.