Monday: STEP data analysis and teacher work-time. Tuesday: Hurricane effects in NE Ohio! Email sent out at 9:30 the night before saying school is canceled. For me, all-day at-home workday. Wednesday: Teacher workday. Email sent out about parking indicates there is too much broken glass to hold school, and emails sent out by some teachers…

There are so many updates to give and so little time in which to think about them. The first day of fall break, I went to school in the morning to get some things organized and under control because my pregnant co-teacher said she had about a 25% chance of returning to school after break…

I administered the KRAL yesterday – the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment for Literacy, which is scripted by the Ohio Department of Education. Most of our kids had been done but we had a couple new enrollees who didn’t have data, and I’m so glad I got to test the one kid I did. At the end…

and the bags under my eyes are UNREAL. I ran out of contacts so I’ve been wearing glasses every day, and that’s great because the shadows from the frames hide the bags and make it look like I might, you know, be a trustworthy person who’s competent enough to teach some kids. I just got…

I just met with my MTLD and she was wonderfully, refreshingly upfront about the fact that my school is full of crazies. (My words, not hers.) She asked me how things were going and I continued with my recent  trend of starting to tear up in embarrassingly public places, and we talked about the fact…

I was not aware that the most stressful part of getting ready for the school year was going to be putting my bulletin boards up. I’m at one of those crazy college-oriented charters and my classroom is Georgetown University. Georgetown’s colors are blue and grey, so in my classroom we’ve been going through and systematically…

After weeks of reflecting on what it means to be a Charter Corps, it dawned on me at orientation on Saturday that we weren’t actually talking about the fact that we’re all teaching at charter schools. We were talking about the fact that Northeast Ohio is a new corps and we’re the ones setting the…

Well, dear, hypothetical readers, it’s been a while. About a week before the end of the Phoenix institute, I got a package from my school with two books and a packet called Summer 2012 Pre-Institute Work. I panicked. In the middle of institute, the very LAST thing you want to hear from anyone is that…

I wanted to blog about Institute.  I really did. But you know what they say about the best laid plans. Or what they say about Institute being a total timesuck of every last second in your day. You know, whatever. I’m here now though, on the other side of Institute, and since I’m in a…

I’ve always hated watching myself on video because I find a million tics I never knew I had and I can’t believe my voice sounds like that in real life and I look awful in that dress, but I’m in the middle of watching  a video of myself from my science lesson last Thursday and…