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Passing time

tinyteacher — Thu, 04 Apr 2013 00:36:22 +0100

I finally am coming back to this little blog to report that I passed my NYS certification exams with flying colors! I could lie and pretend that this comes as surprise to me, but the truth is that the education I received at an all girls independent school on the Upper East Side was beyond outstanding. The experience of taking this exam without truly studying or preparing for it (one diagnostic and a practice test do not constitute preparation) made me think about the opportunities that I was afforded and that my teachers found and gave to me. This definitely reenergized me and encouraged me to take a step back from the hectic and chaotic nature of my work during this time of year, as well as reminded me of the importance of an amazing kindergarten in a child's life. I am so excited to be an early elementary teacher this fall and am happy to share that I've finally started my pre work. A special thanks goes to the TPT Design team for helping accommodate my eye doctor's orders and getting hard copies of our readings so as to minimize my time spent looking at screens. In other news, I am so thrilled that I figured out how to post to tinyteacher from my phone. Peace and love, your tinyteacher

Triage

ashraya — Tue, 05 Feb 2013 14:47:51 +0100

Today, I'm heading to the NYC Leadership Academy for a training about programming and scheduling. It's good I'm going: I might be generating programs for 300 students next year and I'm certainly not prepared. It worries me, though. There's a contradiction between my developing educational philosophy and my expected course of action. My school needs someone to do this job -- and if it's going to be me, I have to be trained and licensed for it. It's part of why I'm applying for various administrative certification programs. But what does that say about how we're addressing the problems of education? If I leave the classroom after only four years?

The term "principal" is meant to refer to the "principal teacher" -- a master teacher with significant classroom experience, best able to support teachers and students to create successful classrooms of their own. In the post-NCLB, rapid-fire Race to the Top education reform climate of today, however, principals tend to be more like entrepreneurs: founding schools like businesses, encouraged to think of testing results as a product, competing with one another for funding and publicity.

What does this approach to education mean for students? How are they affected by having teachers and administrators of little experience and much ambition? While my school has had real success in terms of graduation rates and building a sustainable school culture, we're still struggling to prepare students adequately for college. It's reflected in their test scores and in the attrition rate: a number of students started college last fall, but aren't going back this term.

I thought about that trend when I read the Schott Foundation's report on education redlining in New York City from last April (http://schottfoundation.org/publications-reports/education-redlining). They frame their work with the idea of providing children with an "Opportunity to Learn": ensuring equitable access to high-performance school environments, enrichment programs, etc. It's desegregation 2.0.

In New York, the "Rotting Apple," we've ended strictly zoning schools, but students still generally end up at schools close to where they live. The Schott report uses a data-based calculation to analyze accessibility to well-performing schools, based on an "Opportunity to Learn Index":

"The Opportunity to Learn Index is calculated by sorting all New York City middle schools by their results on the New York State Grade 8 English Language Arts assessment. The schools are then divided into four groups by student scores, highest to lowest. The groups contain equal numbers of students. The percentage of students in the highest group in each Community School District tells us the opportunity that a student in that group has of studying in one of that district's schools that rank among the city's top quartile of schools."

A number of districts (including 18, where our school is located) don't have ANY such schools. Not a single school with test results ranking in the top quartile. Now, of course, there are many issues with testing in New York State, but as an indicator of an environment where the majority of students perform at or beyond grade level, it works. My students went to middle schools where the average performance on such assessments was consistently below grade level. Note: this does not mean my students are not at grade level. Instead, it means they were and are generally surrounded by students who are not. You can imagine what that might do to one's ability to grow and develop. Or to a teacher's approach to curriculum design and implementation. Education, in the form of collaborative classrooms, relies upon exchange and interaction with peers. We're expecting students to learn from one another, but segregating them in ways that prevent them from experiencing a full spectrum of ideas, opinions, and experiences.

Teachers can and will secure results for students even in such an environment. But the teachers we expect to do this are overwhelmingly the least experienced and the most underpaid. This graphic was particularly telling:

In schools with the greatest percentage of students qualifying for Free & Reduced Lunch, teacher salaries are a lower percentage of the average across the city. In effect, there's a disparity in per-student funding. According to the US Department of Education’s Office for Civil Rights, there's a difference of $8,222 in high school teacher salaries between schools with the highest and lowest Hispanic and African American enrollment in New York City. Our most experienced, best-paid educators congregate in schools with our whitest, richest population.

We have maybe five teachers on staff with more than five years of experience. Most entered teaching through non-traditional paths like Teach for America or Teaching Fellows. In New York State, alternative certification still requires a degree, but this means at least two years of teaching are spent while simultaneously training. No time is given to extensive student teaching under an experienced master teacher, instead we engage in on-the-job mentoring, which is often informal and sometimes non-existent.

Our students simply suffer through our growing pains. Will I be perpetuating this cycle if I make the leap to administrative work? Or do I accept that we have present, pressing needs that make my concerns about my own development irrelevant? My students deserve better than I can give them.

Employment

tinyteacher — Sat, 26 Jan 2013 01:10:15 +0100

I am beyond pleased, ecstatic, [insert any other word that expresses feelings of the utmost JOY] to share that I interviewed at Leadership Prep Brownsville this morning and will be joining their team this fall. My sample teach was incredibly fun and I was so thrilled to share the company with the most well behaved five year olds I have ever encountered. The objective for our lesson was onomatopoeia (which I am proud to report I can now spell without right-clicking for spell check). [caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="250" caption="Cows that type, hens that strike!"][/caption] This is a fantastic book for young learners and if you are half as dramatic as I am then you will likely capture their attention for the whole time and leave them wanting to learn more all about onomatopoeia. To be honest, I am really pleased with my laminated props and posters and am too excited that the Uncommon network embraces the level of perfection for which I strive. Thank you New York Regional office for all the supplies and color printer :) I would be remiss not to extend a thousand thanks to everyone at Teach For America that has inspired, motivated, coached, and supported me in this endeavor. Thank you ABC, my favorite home-schooled Texan ever, for giving me the #tinyteacher pseudonym. I also want to shower with love KBC (curriculum designer extraordinaire and mom of the cutest little boy on our IMT) for taking time out of her hard work to give me feedback on my lesson and share some excellent strategies with me to keep our youngest learners engaged. After these long two days of anticipation, minimal sleep due to nerves (too excited to sleep, what's up Disney?), and receiving an offer in addition to commiserating with another teammate on the intricacies of our staffing site, I am ready to sleep. Tomorrow morning I'll wake up bright and early to a snow capped NYC and my 4.5 hour long practice exam for NYS certification. Following that and pending weather advisories, I am excited to volunteer to ice skate (volunteering is fun everybody! DO it) with NYC corps members and their students in Central Park. -tinyteacher

Getting ready!

tinyteacher — Tue, 22 Jan 2013 19:49:12 +0100

[caption id="" align="aligncenter" width="488" caption="Treat yo self to testing fees"][/caption] There is a lot of work involved in getting ready to join the corps! I am so excited to have already accomplished:

registering for my NYS Certification exams;
starting the Violence and Child Abuse workshops;
preparing for my demo lesson at a phenomenal charter school in Brooklyn this Friday.

Gearing up for all these exciting steps that will lead to teaching has proven to require a lot of planning and attention to logistics. While I am used to balancing these in my work life (scheduling, budgeting, travel), I was a little blind sided by having to take lots of quick steps to do so in my personal life as part of matriculating into the 2013 corps. If there are any future applicants out there, I want to take this space on the internet to encourage you to plan carefully for these expenses. I am fortunate to live in New York, my corps region, and as such don't have to think about the travel costs involved for testing and interviews (which independently already can cause a strain). I do want to iterate that it is all reasonable - especially when I consider all the times I've opted to treat myself in life (thank you Parks and Recreation for the greatest theme ever). Also - big ups to the New York regional team for decorating my desk with lovely welcome signs and lending me a test prep book for the NYSTCE.

Test Anxiety

ashraya — Sun, 20 Jan 2013 18:09:21 +0100

Regents week begins this Tuesday. Students will be retaking the exams they failed last June -- and August, or January, or the June before that. We have students in their senior year of high school sitting for exams they first took in ninth grade. They have failed these same exams repeatedly. For a number of them, scores have actually declined -- particularly on content-heavy exams like the Living Environment exam. Now, in their senior year, these tests present the last hurdle to graduation. Many of them were mere points away. This year, the city is finally moving to grading off-site and I am thankful that I will no longer experience that shameful urge to find that "one more point" for a student. How often have I felt, "Oh but they know this, they meant that"? I'm glad I'll be able to avoid that conversation with myself this year. I'm striving to be a good teacher, but at the least, I can ensure I'm an honest one. Generally, though, I've been shielded from a lot of testing anxiety as a teacher. I teach upper-level science courses and while my students need the credit, the exams are not required for graduation. Besides, the credits could be met by any science -- forensics or anatomy are favorites -- so learning chemistry and physics isn't a graduation requirement, either. As a corps member, however, I needed some way to measure my success, some indicator that my time and energy was not wasted. I clung to the small numbers I had: my first year, six students passed the chemistry exam. No one scored above an 80%. Still, the other two high school chemistry teachers from my corps had lower passing rates, so if anyone was counting, I was in the lead. When we are striving to ensure students pass exams, when a 65% is what we're hoping for, we begin to actively work against real learning. We continue to press our students with testing strategies for multiple choice questions on reading passages we don't expect them to understand. We continue to teach them ways to complete short response answers without writing coherent paragraphs. I give them shortcuts for solving algebra problems so that they don't actually have to learn inverse operations. They know all kinds of ways to get the right answer without ever having to understand the question. In my fourth year, I've finally taken the luxury I have as an upper-level science teacher, and have shifted my focus from the exam to the content. It's been so freeing and so rewarding. My students can tell you the graphical and algebraic relationships between two variables, given a set of data. They can setup proportions. They can relate pH to [H+] and [OH-] concentrations and use powers of ten to determine how a change in pH affects that concentration. I swear: they're learning math. And true to my origins, I document the data. My school has been using the TFA-approved online student tracker, JumpRope, and I've followed my students' progress on specific outcomes throughout the year. There has been growth. Unfortunately, it won't be growth that results in a Regents exam credit. Only about 10 of them will be sitting for the physics Regents in June. It's a small number -- it's certainly not enough -- but they'll all be shooting for scores in the 80s and 90s. And for once, I'm reasonably sure they'll be getting them. A 65% on that exam doesn't mean much, but a 95% definitely does. It's part of what's so troubling about the emphasis on testing in many of the new teacher evaluation systems, including the one that's at a standstill here in New York City. Along with real concern about the validity of value-added modeling (see: http://garyrubinstein.teachforus.org/2013/01/09/the-50-million-dollar-lie/ and http://www.ams.org/notices/201105/rtx110500667p.pdf) and the possibility of score tampering (see: http://jerseyjazzman.blogspot.com/2013/01/rhee-lawyers-up.html and http://gfbrandenburg.wordpress.com/2013/01/15/details-on-those-dozens-and-dozens-of-schools/), is the uncomfortable reality that our tests are essentially flawed. Grading seeks to establish ranks -- testing seeks to assess progress and comprehension. Our current methodologies conflate the two and ultimately fail to do either. I hope my senior students pass the exams they need for graduation. But doing so won't necessarily mean they're prepared for graduation -- or for college. That takes much more than the Regents can assess.

Hello world!

tinyteacher — Wed, 16 Jan 2013 01:13:13 +0100

Welcome to my blog, the Tiny Teacher! I am currently a full time staff member at Teach For America and will begin teaching in Fall 2013 in New York City. Hopefully, I will have lots of amazing and riveting things to say in this blog. At any rate, I am so excited to meet my future students!

New Placement!

sriese — Tue, 07 Aug 2012 15:18:25 +0100

So, I haven’t been posting about my placement process (which has finally worked out) because I didn’t want to jinx it before everything was finalized. With the help of TFA, I have secured a new placement for my second year at an amazing program. I will be teaching an Early Learn/Head Start class in a bilingual district public school in the Bronx. I had been told that I would be either in East Harlem or Washington Heights, so I was thrown a little by the placement in the Bronx, but I’m super excited. It’s a pretty good school (I obviously just Googled it) in terms of the programs it offers and the support it receives. Additionally, the program I’m a part of only means that the school has the opportunity to become even more, as my placement program centers on building so-called “Community Schools,” where they do much more than just educate students. The goal of Community Schools is to have a place where families can come, where they have access to health care (doctors and dentists), mental health services, financial services, parent and family education, after school and enrichment programs, etc. By placing the Early Learn/Head Start programs inside the district schools, and developing Community Schools within already existing district schools, families and students also become more comfortable within the school environment. By the time students go to Kindergarten, they just go across the hall; parents and students already know the teachers and administrators, and the way the school works. Overall, it’s a pretty amazing system.

That Moment When...

sriese — Fri, 22 Jun 2012 19:37:04 +0100

Today I gave a demo lesson at an amazing school in an amazing classroom. If I get the job, I will be really happy. It's an amazing school, amazing program, and amazing organization. I am a candidate for a Pre-K position within the school network. I was actually lucky, and got to give the demo in the classroom of a girl I know. Her kids are amazing! The best part of today was realizing I'd picked basically exactly the right book for the read aloud. The administrator who did my observation/interview loved it, and so did the kids. As we were leaving the classroom, she gushed about the choice of book, how engaged the students had been, and the way I went through the lesson. I read Harold and the Purple Crayon. I chose it because I didn't know what the kids were in the process of studying. In choosing Harold and the Purple Crayon, every student was able to use their knowledge, imagination and interests to answer the interactive questions I asked both during and after reading. The kids especially liked talking about what they would do if they had a crayon like Harold's. I then extended the conversation because a large number of students had said that they would draw a house. We talked about all the things they would put in that house, and how many rooms it might have. It felt so good to be in the classroom. Everything there conveyed a sense of joy and love. I was able to get all of the students to interact with me and the text in some way or another, some on multiple occasions. I am really hoping that I get this job, I would love to be a part of this organization, and I would definitely love to get back into the classroom.

NYC Induction, Day One

empirestate2012 — Thu, 21 Jun 2012 05:19:58 +0100

So, it's my second night of induction after my first day of programming. Being a compulsive organizer of all things abstract, I'd like to sum up my experiences thus far in a list: Things I've Learned About Induction Thus Far: 1. Come to induction as soon as registration opens. The lines are a lot shorter, and it gives you plenty of time to set up your room before the craziness of programming starts. I came right at 9am, managed to be the one of the first people to check in, and then was able to spend a few hours moving in and organizing my room. For the first time ever, I have a clean and organized room! Now I just have to keep it that way... 2. Sleep a lot before you come. With all of the struggles of moving my life halfway across the country, this was something I neglected, and I'm definitely paying for it now. It's only the first day of programming, but TFA jam-packs as much as possible into every day, so each day is exhausting. Combined with sleep deprivation, moving, and still feeling the aftershock of finals (I graduated last week!), it's tough. 3. Do the pre-institute work. There are a lot of valuable things to be learned by reading what they sent and I got a lot of ideas for my classroom. I'm just doing tomorrow's discussion reading tonight and I find myself highlighting a ton of things that I'm excited to use in my classroom. 4. Don't stress if you didn't complete all the pre-work. There will always be time to read things later and no one expects you to come to the sessions with a complete mastery of all the material, or anything close to that. I didn't have my story of self planned out all that well today, and I was super nervous about that coming into my discussion session. It ended up not being a big deal at all. : ) 5. Don't be afraid to take a little time each day for yourself. There are so many people you're meeting all the time and it can be really overwhelming, especially for someone as introverted and shy as myself. I left dinner an hour early today to take a nap and relax by myself and it was definitely the right decision. I'll have many more lists and musing in the days and adventures to come, but for now, time to sleep!

A Little Rant About (one of my) Grad School (classes)

sriese — Tue, 19 Jun 2012 17:36:46 +0100

Ok... I understand, and support, the idea that teachers need to be self reflective to be successful and effective. I'm all for it. But seriously? Do I really have to tell my professors about everything that's ever happened to me in 8 pages of short essays? Especially since I would really rather that this professor knew less about me? Even worse is the fact that she's actually having us turn in four papers over the next three classes, and they're all 8 pages or longer.