Mrs. Raffetto’s Ruminations

I am happy to report that I am alive and well and have almost made it to the end of my first placement. YAHOOOOOOOOOOOOOOOO! It has been quite the two weeks since my last post so I’ll try to recap as much as I can.

Week 5 began with a frantic email to the wife of a former professor. She had very similar experiences when she was a student teacher and has been giving me some words of wisdom along the way. I’ve mentioned in earlier posts that my mentor (from here on in, I’ll be calling my mentor mentor #1 from now on as I will be changing mentor’s Thursday) has this habit of making me use old lesson plans because that English department all does the same thing and has done it that way for years and so on and so on. A couple of times I successfully snuck in some of my original ideas, but then I started getting jumped on whenever I brought up even the slightest change to the old lessons. So I was given the advice to just back down and not offer any modifications, and do exactly what I was told. Anyone who knows me knows this is not something I do easily. When I have an idea I know is good and is most effective, I don’t back down and will argue my point. On the flip side of that, I am also notorious for being obsessed with my grades. I did not want anything to affect my GPA. So if trying to be creative was going to get me bad comments, then I wouldn’t risk it. And so I pulled myself back even further and did exactly as I was told. Well, this system sort of developed where I would start the skeleton of a lesson plan and then on Friday, mentor #1 and I would get together and go over the skeleton I had, the old plans, and decide what I was to do for the week. It worked fairly well, until last week.

I was set to have my advisor observe me this past Tuesday. I knew the things she wanted me to work on (my timing and pacing of lessons) so I made sure to not pack the lesson with objectives that I would run the risk of not completing them all. Mentor #1 had approved my plans for the week and I thought I was set. Then, Monday after school, mentor #1 was reminded about this Power Point that had been made by another English teacher and that I now needed to work into my lesson. And it wasn’t just an easy slide-right-in lesson. It was the same elements that I wanted to cover, but in a completely different order. Then there were movies embedded that I needed to allow time for and so in short, I had to come home that night and completely re-do the day’s lesson that I was still being observed on. To make matters worse, mentor #1 never emailed my the Power Point so I had no idea how long the movies were, how many slides there were, nothing! Doesn’t go well for being sure you time and pace the lesson right does it? So another frantic email goes out, this time to my advisor, warning her of what she was in store for. The icing on the cake came during my post-lesson discussion with my advisor and mentor#1 - mentor #1 told me that I needed to be sure to preview all movies and rehearse Power Points so that I could fix my timing and pacing issues. WTF!!?!? Would be nice if I had the damn thing to do that!

I also need to add that the stress of this whole experience is beginning to affect my health. Without getting to personal, the stress has caused some not-to-pleasant changes internally so now I need to have a complete exam to be sure some major issues have not developed. I hate to place blame on any one thing or person, but that is the case this time. I love the kids; I get along great with the other teacher; the office ladies are great; and the administration is fine. The cause of my stress is traced back to one factor and I don’t think I need to mention it. But, looking at this positively, I know that I am fully capable of dealing with the major elements of teaching. I’m pretty sure that once I have my own room and class, I will be just fine.

Sorry I missed last week. I had it in my mind that I needed to blog but last weekend just slipped away, as do many of my weekends. So I’ll try to recap both.

I continue to struggle with not having the option of making my own plans. I understand my mentor’s concept of not reinventing the wheel and I know that the entire department does the same thing and has for years now, but I need a chance to come up with some of my own stuff. This first week I followed my menotr’s plans. Last week, I kept most of them but them tried to slip in something of my own. I created a webquest that sort of linked the two stories we were reading for the week and was also interdisciplinary crossing into history. I kept the number of sites limited and tried to factor in the time it might take some of our slower readers. What I didn’t take into account or was warned about by my mentor (or the tech lady) was that the students had to go through this 15 minute process to log on. The decided to allow students to change their passwords this year to create their own. So my time for the webquest was basically cut in half. If I had known, I could have adjusted for it. So no one was able ot finish. My mentor didn’t want me to have the laptops 2 days in a row so I couldn’t have them finish the quest. Instead, I checked out the LCD and finish the quest with the class observing. Overall, I think it was a good lesson and the kids took a lot from it.

I was also observed twice week 3 and once week 4. On week 3, my advisor and the vice principal came in (one Tuesday and one Friday) and the both visited during first block. Now, first block had not been pretty. They are a great bunch of kids but almost all of first, my mentor talks right over me. I guess it’s a way to make sure I don’t forget anything but I feel like I’m not even given a chance. My advisor picked up on it but the vice principal thought it was evidence of great collaboration. Luckily my advisor visited during blocks 5 & 6 this past week and my mentor tends to not talk over me as much during those times. The outcome of the observatiosn was pretty good. My advisor wants to see me slow down because she thinks the lessons are rushed. Of course, this goes back to the fact that I can’t make my own plans and must follow my mentor’s. I would not cram as much into a lesson if I was given a choice. But I’m not.

My troubled student from week 1, who had a turn around in week 2 when I talked to him/her, was suspended Thursday for a fight. He/she had been doing so well in my class with only minor outbursts. And they are never outbursts out of rudeness or insolence, it’s just that’s the type of persoanlity he/she has. The outbursts are usually in answer to a question or comment I have made. I really thought we’d turned a corner. The fight happened in PE and I don’t even really know what it was about. It’s so sad.

The end of the day Friday was super fun. One of the Civics teachers said at lunch that he was going to the front to high five the kids as they left. A few of us decided to join him and it was so much fun. The kids were great and only a couple looked at us strangely. Most were very into the whole thing and we were high fiving people left and right. I love middle school.

I can start by saying that week two went much better than the previous week. I’d like to think it is because my mentor is getting used to and comfortable with me in the room. But honestly I think it has more to do with the fact that I have changed how I behave. Normally, I am a very enthusiastic, go-getter type of person and normally most people appreciate that I take initiative. Not my mentor. So I have learned to sit quietly and wait for her to tell me what to do. When I do that, we get along fine. I already talked to my advisor to let her know what I’ve found I need to do that way when she comes in to observe me, she won’t wonder what happened to the real me. She told me she understands. The biggest obstacle for student teachers is that we are a guest in someone else’s classroom. There are a lot of things that we have to go along with that we will most likely never do in our own classroom. That is precisely the challenge I face every day.

This week was kind of kooky. Monday I observed because every Monday my mentor uses the newspaper for her lesson. Since this was the first Monday of the year, she spent it going over all the intorduction stuff. Of course, Murphy’s Law predicted that the paper wouldn’t show up but we muddled through. Then on Tuesday, I got to take the reins as my mentor was out. Unfortunately, I did very little teaching because we had to have a library orientation that day. The kids and I were bored to tears as the librarian talked for nearly 40 minutes straight. Considering the length of her spiel and her tone of voice, I think the kids behaved amazingly well. Wednesday we began the intro to our next story and I had a chance to co-teach by the end of the day. Thursday I had the opportunity to take over again as my mentor had to take a half day. I just followed her lesson plans, which included a movie and an audio recording of our story, and everything was fine. Friday she was back and I taught very little as we merely finished the story and she prepped the kids for their first real quiz Monday. Overall, I scored very few RAT hours. However, I had a few great opportunities arise.

On Tuesday, with my mentor not there, I had the opportunity to talk with the problem student I mentioned last week. He/she was very polite and admitted that while they liked school, they found it hard to stayed seated for 55 minutes straight. Understandable. We talked a bit about how we could help him/her stay focused and out of trouble with my mentor. We came up with a system that if I noticed they were starting to “act up,” I would come over and stand directly by his desk. That would be the signal that he/she needed to refocus. It worked for the rest of the week but I have a feeling he/she is going to need reminders throughout the year. I talked to my advisor about him/her as well and she realized something I hadn’t yet considered - I have this student the period following lunch. So by the time they get to my room, their food has been digesting and they are starting to crash.  That is something I can do nothing about so now I need to figure out how to work around that.

I also experienced the number one teacher complaint - kids not turning in their homework. Now my mentor is not a homework person and if the students do get it, it is a worksheet that honestly takes 5 minutes to complete. Day seven of the school year and out of almost 100 kids, about 15 did not do their homework. It’s disheartening. Was is the secret to making kids care???

Next week is going to be exciting. I will be teaching solo for almost the entire week. I finished my lesson plans and turned them in to her Friday and she said they looked good. Now remember, these lessons I am creating are not my own true creations. I basically have to follow what she does and has done for over 10 years. (That’s the way the whole department does it and it works so blah, blah, blah . . .) However, because she’ll be out again Thursday afternoon and because I am being observed two days this week (once by my advisor and once by the vice-principal), I was able to sneek in a couple extra activities. On Tuesday we are doing small group work and on Thursday we are doing a webquest. Yay! I’m getting ready to create the webquest now. Keep your fingers crossed for me. I really need this to go well.

So I’ve managed to survive my first week of student teaching. Thankfully, my mentor treated me better than I had feared and even had me co-teaching by the end of the week. It was very nice to record those RAT hours on my time sheet. I accomplished most of my goals for the week and would say that I’ve learned about 75-80% of the students’ names.

The low point of the week actually came on Friday. Fifth period has already earned itself the label of the troubled period. There is one student in particular who is going out of his way to make ripples. I have been trying to figure out the best way to nip this in the bud and gain myself an ally. This student is the type that gets the other students to follow his/her lead. I was in the midst of forming a plan of attack when things blew up on Friday. This student forgot the textbook that they had just been issued the day before. My mentor’s way of handling it was to flip out and proceed to yell at the student, directly in their face, and in front of all the other students. The student, of course, shut down and had on an “angry face” the rest of class period. Now I am unsure how to proceed. I had hoped to talk to the student one-on-one, away from peers and other teachers, to find out more about them. Then I hoped to move into a discussion about their behavior and how we could turn things around and make a successful school year for the two of us. One recurring thing in all my education classes is to get to know your students - their lives, their ambitions, etc. - and use that to develop a relationship with them that will make them want to learn and be a part of your classroom. Now, I don’t know if that’s a good idea after having them screamed at and embarrassed. I will definitely be talking to my advisor about that one. Anyone reading this blog can most definitely let me know any ideas they might have as to how to handle this situation.

I also had my first TESL (Cross-cultural Ed) class in the middle of Tropical Storm Hanna Saturday. The professor and I have a lot in common and she teaches the class in a way I think would be most useful to me in the classroom. Though she was rushing through things in an effort to get us all back home, we did watch the most fascinating documentary I have seen ever. It’s called Journey of Man and deals with how the orgins of mankind were discovered through the Genome Project. Absolutely amazing. I won’t spoil it but I will say that now I know why creationists have been so fired up over the past few years. But honestly, I think if every person watched this movie, racial discrimination would have no choice but to shrivel up and die. Powerful stuff.

Autumn is just about upon us and it is a season of change - changes in nature and changes for me as well. When school starts on Tuesday, I will begin my semester of student teaching. I have been long awaiting the arrival of this moment and was brimming with high expectations. In the days since I have been in the school in preparation for the students’ return, those expectations have become severly deflated. Since I have no other choice than to endure my assigment, I will be using this blog to post my experiences, be they good or bad, and reflect on the hand life has dealt me. I am a firm believer that everything happens for a reason. I have also always said that I can endure anything if it helps me attain my goals. And gaining my Masters and teaching license is the ultimate goal. Why else would I endure a separation from my husband, who has been restationed in California, to remain in Virginia? If it wasn’t for attaining my goals, I would have left this state and never looked back. If I can deal with that, I can deal with a less than ideal assignment.

Wow, it’s been a while since I posted a blog. I’ve been a pretty busy girl so I thought I’d just post some random things about what I’ve been up to.

Movies - So far this summer I’ve seen Zohan, Get Smart, Hancock, and Wall-E. Zohan was a huge disappointment - great message about the need for Palestinians and Israelites to work together for a peaceful coexistence but dumb writing. I mean, I can generally deal with Adam Sandlar’s “fart humor,” but this was beyond dumb. I still like Sandlar, but I’ll never watch this movie again. Get Smart was much better. I remember my brother staying up late to watch the original way back when. I thoroughly love Steve Carrell and Anne Hathaway so that helped. Storyline was a little predictable though. The addition of Bill Murray was just hysterical. I love that guy. Hancock was . . . interesting. I didn’t love it and I didn’t hate it. Kind of a neat take on the superhero angle but . . . I don’t know. Something about it I just couldn’t put my finger on. Out of all, Wall-E has got everything beat - no question. Pixar is just unstoppable! An absolutely adorable movie and I loved every single minute of it, even the repetition of that annoying scene from Hello Dolly. It didn’t matter because Wall-E melted my heart.

Cheer - My team is up to 17 now but it will be interesting to see how many I keep as the season progresses. Cheer has such a stereotype and so many kids join thinking it will be just wearing cute uniforms and doing little chants. My world of cheer is nothing like that. It is a truly intense sport and not for the faint of heart. Our choreography starts Sunday so that’s when the real fun begins. Up until now, it has been just the basics. Now it’s time for hardcore.

School - One more week to go! I’m closing in on the craziest summer semester ever. I took FOUR classes and worked my butt off in all of them. I guess you could say that I am both intrinsically and extrinsically motivated - I want the A’s but I have to do it for myself.

Family - For the first time in my baby’s life, I will be away from my youngest for two weeks. He is visiting his grandparents and I am miserable. I just can’t stand having him away from me. Of course, he’s having a grand time but I’m still sad. My oldest is home but spends most of his free time with his girlfriend. The hubby is on the other side of the country so what’s a girl to do? Watch sad girly movies and study for her social studies Praxis. I watched Becoming Jane yesterday and bawled my eyes out. Lovely movie. <sigh>

Okay, now it’s time to get back to work on my final projects. That research paper is gonna kill me!

Web 2.0’s chapter 9 talked about how in order for teachers to most effectively incorporate web 2.0 tools in their classrooms, schools would need to make some changes. Man, ain’t that the truth! Reading this book has made me realize all the great things we could do with our students using web 2.0 and that it is so much more than taking our kids on the Internet for research. But something that has always frustrated me when ever a great idea pops into my head is the lack of resources in the schools. For example, I know I want to have my students keep portfolios. Most recently, I fell in love with the idea of ePortfolios. But many of the teachers I know gave me a “good luck” look because they knew the schools don’t have enough computers to ensure that I will get them frequently enough so my kids can update their portfolios. And even though we can’t imagine any child who does not get online when they go home from school, the book confirmed that almost 40% of households in the U.S. still don’t have Internet access (Solomon & Schrum, 2007, p. 187).  So there is a good chance my great ideas will never come to full fruition because of the lack of resources in the school.

Another great point the book made is how schools absolutely need to consult with the teachers before purchasing new software programs. I can’t tell you how mnay times I’ve been in a school and seen the software the distrct has bought just lying on a shelf unopened! The book touched on this a quoted a teacher as saying the software just didn’t fit her students (Solomon & Schurm, 2007, p. 182).  That is exactly what I was told.  This sort of thing goes right back to what David Tyack and Larry Cuban said in their book, Tinkering Toward Utopia (1995), a reform of public education must start within the schools, mainly with the teachers, to produce a reform that works.  A full integration of web 2.0 into our classrooms is a necessary and vital reform that will never work unless the teachers come on board and the schools look to them to make the changes.

How great would it be if our students didn’t have to carry all those textbooks or if the schools didn’t have to spend all that money on them! And how wonderful would it be if teachers and students could access the school’s shared drive from home so those that did have Internet could continue to work on things at home! And how fabulous would it be if the federal government would pass one of those laws it so loves to make that would help get high speed Internet into those rural areas just like it did for the telephone! Web 2.0 is changing the world everyday and public education cannot drop the ball on our students.  With the dynamic web, we will never catch up if we don’t make it happen now.

Taking 4 summer classes can really bog me down. But in an interesting twist, 3 reading asssignments all interconnected for me today in a way I don’t think my teachers intended.

Chapter 6 of Web 2.0 focused on principals being the leaders ofr more technology use in their schools. The auhotrs suggested using blogs to communicate with parents and teachers because blogs, unlike web pages, are interactive and allow a conversation to happen. Excellent idea. I’ve already been sold to its use as a teacher. Also discussed was the use of more open source for software and operating systems on school computers. They are free and the mostly costly investment is time. Though time is precious, it is the one thing we can give to overcome continual budget cuts. But for either blogs or open source to become commonplace in the schools, the school leaders must buy into it and advocate it with their staff. Teachers can individually effectively use web 2.0 tools in their classroom, but the real benefits come when the principals believe in their use and integrate it throughout the whole school.

In an article for eSchool News, Robert Brumfield wrote of a new Virginia law which went into effect on July 1. Bascially, Virginia has ordered new mandates for schools to cover Internet safety in schools in a more comprehensive manner. The schools’ leaders, superintendents and principals, must go beyond the standard acceptable-use policies and integrate into their currciulum instruction on being safe on the Internet. Interesting except that every school I have ever been in in Virginia already teaches Internet safety at the beginning of the shcool year. What this article left me wondering is that are Virginia officials calling for more days spent on Internet safety or just that they do it?

The pulling-it-all-together moment came when I read the end of the article. Parry Aftab, a leading Internet safety expert had this to say,

“All schools already want to deal with these issues of internet security,” said Aftab. “I don’t think legislators should be telling educators what to do. I think educators know what to do when it comes to education…I think it would have been a better move to come up with an online resource for such a program,” she explained, “and if you’re going to mandate it, then you definitely need to fund it.”

Now this comes back to the book I just finished reading, Tinkering Toward Utopia, by David Tyack and Larry Cuban. State and Federal leaders can mandate all they want with their laws; but real change only happens when it starts inside the schools. And so if effective integration of web 2.0 tools into a school is going to happen, principals need to take lead on that. It all comes full circle.

References:

Brumfield, R. (2008). New VA law: tech web safety. eSchool News. Retrieved July 3, 2008, from http://www.eschoolnews.com/news/top-news/index.cfm?i=36946&page=1.

Solomon, G. & Schrum, L. (2007). Web 2.0. Eugene, OR: International Society for Technology in Education.

Tyack, D. & Cuban, L. (1995). Tinkering Toward Utopia. Cambridge, MA: Harvard University Press.

I am scheduled to do my student teaching in the fall. I’ve contacted my mentor already to find out what kinds of things we will be doing and one of the books we’ll be reading is The Outsiders. I hadn’t read that in years so I Googled it and ran across this site http://bionicteaching.com/?p=130. It is a blog by a teacher who posted her plan to help her kids understand the 60s vocabulary in the book. Her thought was to have the kids do a vocab blog. Other teachers responded to her idea and some even posted other ideas that they use to, including wikis. I’ve already been emailing my mentor these great ideas hoping she will allow me some freedom to incorporate some of these great tools into her lesson plans!

So I am on a little vacation with the kids and we are visiting NYC and Philly. They are very quick trips but they are also things I very much wanted to do before we move back to the west coast (June ‘09). Anyway, today it was the Statue of Liberty and Ellis Island. The Statue was amazing and I sort of teared up as the boat passed the Statue and headed to Ellis Island. I could feel why she had become such a symbol of hopes and dreams. But what I found surprisingly fun and got me so pumped up was the Immigration Station. It wasn’t only that I adore old buildings and architecture, but the exhibits - whoa! It was just filled with primary documents such as photographs, diary entries, birth and death certificates, luggage! They had some of the written responses to the immigrants’ ”intelligence” tests. Then there was this room filled with all different types of graphs and maps. I came up with a slew of ideas on how to have my (God-willing) students make these graphs to make the charts 3-D, interactive, and so much more eye-catching and easy to remember. But that wasn’t the best part.

I was trying so hard to take pictures of the graphs and charts to recreate them in the classroom, but couldn’t make it work too well. So I asked at information on how I could get my hands on the nuts and bolt of doing such a thing and was given the name of the curator to call after the holiday to talk more about it. I was also given the name of the web master who sometimes posts actual photos of immigrants on the Park Service website so I can get my hands on those. But what I loved most is that they let me put my name on a list and they are going to send me a Teacher Treasure box filled with all kinds of things I could use in a lesson on immigration. How cool is that?! I know I am going to be sitting by my mailbox. I am so itching to get my hands on that. Yipee!