Wow, it's been a long time since I wrote anything on here. Since my last entry, I have had a baby (he's seven months old now) and almost finished my first semester of teaching 10th and 12th grade solo. I have grown a lot in the last year and a half. Although this blog may have just died out when we got really busy in the schools last year, I thought it had kind of an ominous tone to the final entries. I stopped writing because I was crazy busy not because I didn't have anything good to say. So I wanted to write one more entry to say that although the residency year was hard and stressful, I learned a lot and I feel more prepared for this year than I would have otherwise. I feel better prepared for classroom management, stress management, planning and especially with familiarity with the way our school district does things. I was able to learn all those Richmond operational things last year, so this year, I can just focus on teaching. I also learned a lot about collaboration and professionalism. If anyone reading this blog has any questions about the program from someone who's been through it, feel free to send me an email at cat.ennis@gmail.com. Happy trails! Oh, and if anyone from future or current cohorts wants to open this blog back up to be a collaborative space, please get in touch.

Waivers from NCLB

Virginia has expressed its intention to seek a waiver (made available in an exectutive action by Obama) from parts of NCLB, in exchange for higher standards, and the use of test scores to evaluate teacher effectiveness. What do yall think?

With no child left behind waivers, Obama turns some powers education back to states

"Mr. Obama’s blueprint for rewriting the law, which Congress has never acted on, urged lawmakers to adopt an approach that would encourage states to raise standards, focus interventions only on the worst failing schools and use test scores and other measures to evaluate teachers’ effectiveness. In its current proposal, the administration requires states to adopt those elements of its blueprint in exchange for relief from the No Child law."

Post from September 5, 2011

I wrote this the night before the first day of school and ended up not posting it.

September 5, 2011

So on the eve of my first day in the schools, I just wanted to write a little bit about what I was feeling.

I’m nervous because this is the first job I’ve had that I think I will stick with. When I taught freshman composition at Emerson, I knew it was just for the time I was a graduate student. I expected to move on to a different school in a different state. But I’ll be in Richmond for at least the next four years, and probably for a long time after that. It feels like more is at stake.

I feel conflicted sometimes about the program’s high expectations for us. I know that we’re going to be inexperienced student-teachers, and then next year, inexperienced first-year teachers. Yet, sometimes I feel like we should be ready to “revolutionize” RPS from the get-go. To me, this seems unrealistic and, in my opinion, a bit arrogant. I’m coming to RPS to learn, as a student first. Yes, I'll be a co-teacher, but I need to learn from those who have more experience.

I’m worried about the demands that teaching, as a profession, will place on me. I just read an amazing zine called TruckFace about a teacher's first year experience in Chicago’s public schools. She writes:

“A Typical Week: Monday. Wake up at 5:40 a.m. Coffee, bagel…Carefully plan out bathroom time throughout the day…Eat lunch at my desk during ninth period. Get home at 6:30 or so…Plop down on the sofa. Watch TV. Cry. Occasionally talk to roommates but usually don’t want to talk to anyone at all. Eat dinner. Take shower at 9. Try to go to bed around 10:30, if lucky. Tuesday, Wednesday, Thursday: repeat all.”

Is there time for a family, time for my husband? Does it all get postponed to the summer? I sometimes feel selfish to ask this question because aren’t teachers supposed to be selfless, totally dedicated to the calling? But the human development text we read seemed to cast teachers as social workers, psychologists, guidance counselors, surrogate parents. I’m very curious to see how many hours per week a teaching job is.

And I’m excited about learning through experience. We’re teaching three different classes and I know that it will be difficult and busy this year. But I can’t wait to dig in, and see what it is really like.

I'm not missing, just buried.

Well, this past couple of weeks have been exhausting, to say the least. Everyone told us we would be exhausted, but I guess I didn't really expect how tired I would be. For me, it's been hard to balance a full time job in the schools with full time classwork. I've been annoyed at simple time-wasters in ways I usually wouldn't; posting things to Blackboard aggravates me to no end, traffic is interminable.

I guess a good example of the stress I've been feeling is my reaction to something small that Main Street Realty did this week. We used to have a beautiful grassy spot outside of our window, with flowers in it. We chose this particular apartment for the windows and for that grassy spot. I loved having our own private green space right outside of our window, especially in the manicured atmosphere of the recently gentrified Bottom. I came home from school and class on Thursday--I got up at 5:45 a.m. to finish a lesson plan, was teaching/observing till 2:15, faculty meeting till 3:00, VCU classes from 4:00-7:00p.m.--and then came home to find that they had put grass killer on the spot. It's now a brown patch. I was so upset at our lack of autonomy. That we have to live here. That I have to work from 6am to 7pm. I was definitely at a low point.

So one of the reasons I haven't written on this blog is: should I just write about the "high points" of this program? Or should I be real and write about the frustration I felt coming home after that long day, hungry and tired, and having something so small set me off? I think it's good to be honest about the highs and lows of RTR.

Being in the schools does make RTR worth it. I've already received a lot of valuable experience. After talking to some of the regular Master's students about how much observation / teaching they do, I've realized how different the residency model is--I've already received more experience in the past two weeks than a Practicum student would. I'll be ready in a year for my own classroom in a way I woudn't have if I had chosen the regular Certificate/Master's program. So it's worth it. I hope I can get settled into this schedule this week.

Daunting Task

I started at TJ this week...

Wow! What an exciting year this is going to be! The only problem is, I already feel like I'm irreparably behind. There's so much to think about, and so much to keep in mind, I don't know how I'm ever going to get it all to behave itself inside my head. How can one person possibly think about textbooks and reading assignments, syllabi, classroom management strategies, teaching styles, annual plans, lesson plans, hands-on learning, constructivism and child-centered teaching, lab experiments, homework policies, seating arrangements and room decoration, etc. etc.? I just know that I'm going to neglect something - even though my CRC has 11 years of experience. I'm afraid that I won't be as effective as I imagined I would be. It's so easy to imagine everything going exactly like you planned it to, and so easy to forget that things seldom do.

But then there are a few moments when I get a glimpse of what it might be like next year, or the year after. Will I be in the same building? Will I have a better room than the oversized closet we have this year? TJ has a separate chemistry laboratory, built in the old style, with rich woodwork and cabinets for the glassware. It's in desperate need of some TLC, and I feel like that would be a great project for me. We helped a new earth science teacher move into her room, and I realized that that will be me next year - sorting through the relics of the room's former owner, designing my classroom as if it were a blank slate. TJ has a planetarium, which we visited, and I must say I'm truly impressed. I peeked into a biology classroom, and I found myself coveting all of the amazing things the teacher had collected over the years. At the back of the room was a wasps' nest that must have weight 25 pounds or more. It was three times the size of my head!

And I feel like that's the way school is supposed to be. Classrooms should be filled with distractions, and the chemistry lab should make students feel like Michael Faraday or Marie Curie. There should be marching band practice all day during the summer and the science club should be both a time for kids to just hang out and a way for kids to go on amazing field trips. I believe when someone scribbles across a row of lockers, the math teachers should get together and turn it into a graph of a sine wave.

I'm excited to start school, and I'm excited for next year when I'll be building up my classroom from scratch. In the meantime, though, I just hope I can get all my homework done! Ok, enough procrastinating... time to get it done!

Interesting article from the LA Times

The Myth of the Extraordinary Teacher by Ellie Herman, a teacher at Animo Pat Brown Charter High School in South Los Angeles.

I thought this article was interesting in pointing out the context of teaching and the realistic, material grounding of the classroom.

"I'm willing to work as hard as I can to be an excellent teacher, but as a country we have to admit that I'll never be excellent if we continue to slash education budgets and cut teachers, which is what's actually happening in California despite all our talk of excellence, particularly in schools that serve poor children. Until we stop that, we'll never have equal education in this country.

Getting used to central air

I'm sitting on a really comfy couch my husband and I got at a thrift store today, with boxes, a banjo, bags and mismatched furniture piled up all around me. My cat is lying next to me and he seems pretty happy with the AC in our new apartment. We moved to the Atrium Lofts yesterday from the Fan, where I've lived for six of the last eight years. (The two other years were in Boston). Moving to Atrium was a big transition for me; I was nervous about living in a different part of town and nervous about the apartment complex because it's so different than the apartments in the Fan. Our old apartment was big and open, dishwasher-less, washer / dryer-less, no central AC, radiator heat, clothes hanging on a line on the back porch of an old creaky house. I loved the dark, leafy streets, the hole-in-the-wall bars, the quiet. I was nervous about moving to a place that was "too nice" for me (pool, gated community, gym…my mom told me that there were worse things to be worried about.) I was nervous about moving to Shockoe Bottom, because my primary form of transportation is my bicycle and that is one big hill.

But today, once we got everything in and settled, I looked out the window and could see the high rises. The sun was setting behind them--shades of pink that slowly faded to blue. Earlier today, I had biked to the Pipeline, an amazing part of the James River Park System that is only half a mile from Atrium, and went swimming. The bike ride was so fast that by the time I got home, I was still dripping wet from the river.

I put every single dish we own into the dishwasher (which miraculously fit them all--not sure if it's a freakishly large dishwasher, or if maybe we should own more than two forks). Then I put on a load of laundry in my own apartment for the first time in eight years (I haven't had a washer /dryer since I moved out of my parents' house). The AC feels amazing and our cat, who has spent the summer being hotter than a cat should ever be, is playful for the first time since the spring.

Yesterday, five people from the program (and my parents! :) )helped us move. I was so happy and surprised with how much support we had--we borrowed boxes, a dolly, asked for heavy lifting. It only took us twenty minutes to unload our truck. It was so great to have so much support.

Despite my initial hesitation about the intentional community part of the program, the strange feeling of moving into an almost dorm-like situation when you are married and have been out of college for four years, I'm thinking that this apartment is going to work out for us just fine.