On June 1st I was hired to a new job at a bilingual French/English private school as a third grade teacher.  Although I was happy at the charter school where I was working and proud of the work that I did this past school year, the fact that I was only a long term sub…

Throughout my teaching career, one thing has remained constant: what I’m trying to accomplish.  Back in the early 1990s there was no focus on test scores, thankfully.  My goal back then, as it is now, was for my students to like math more when they complete my class than they did when they began the…

Wow my brain is tired. After a long day of planning I have completed 3 mini-lesson plans on class culture, a final draft for my math objective 1, a rough draft of math objective 3, numerous class decorations/posters, our final outline of our groups class culture plan, and…. idk what else!? I’m done for the…

Day 175: As I’ve explained before, I have my students do a call and response chant before every quiz and test. I yell “work hard” and they respond “get smart.” I wonder if they actually remember this is supposed to remind them about the value of persistence and growth mindset, or if they just like yelling…

This quote, courtesy of Cornel West, was shared in one of our final sessions of Induction. The session – entitled A Vision for Teaching As Leadership – was one of the more tangible, specific sessions we’re had throughout the past few days. I loved it. But more on that later. The end of Induction has…

Last summer, I rode a bike from Charleston, SC to Santa Cruz, CA for affordable housing through a program called Bike and Build. It was one of the hardest and most amazing experiences of my life, and I am finding that my summer spent with Teach for America is quite similar to it in a…

So, from the last post you know that I’m taking classes here in Tulsa. But what is this summer really all about? We go to lots and lots of “sessions” where we learn everything that we can in a short time about education and leadership in the classroom. It is insanity, but we earn 9…

It has been such a week- a long week, an interesting week, an exhausting week, and a difficult week. It is easy to focus on the negatives, I realized last night as I was talking to Corey that there have been some really wonderful aspects to this week. First of all, I am surrounded by…

Miss Lora’s Story Prior to coming to institute, we were given quite a bit of pre-work to complete. Some people did it and some people didn’t. I eventually finished all of it, if a couple of weeks late. Some of it was interesting, some of it was boring, and some of it was outdated. The…