Megalopolis

1) waking up at 5:30 to go shower in the cold frigid fire hose blast. Only two more weeks of that, thank goodness! I am sitting here at 6:38, slightly ahead of schedule, slightly concerned that i’m forgetting something important.

2) I only have two weeks left. I don’t know how it happened. All of a sudden my golden girls alarm goes off and, waking up I realize its a 4-day week due to the Fourth of July. After that, its a shortened lesson planning week because we have to administer our diagnostics again, then closing ceremonies, packing up, and on my way!

3) My students. The ones I have now (all 23 of them, and the number declines by the day…) and the ones I’m beginning to dream about.

WHAT?!

Someone tell me when in all of this I learned how to become a teacher, because i don’t think i took notes on that day. I’ve been too busy trying to wake up (or stay awake), turn things in on time, make friends, not melt, “teach” things, get kids to walk in a straight line, and pretend like I don’t miss baseball.

So I guess maybe when I’m done with all of institute in two weeks I’ll look back on all of it, including the non-dairy creamer I put in my coffee to save me the 2 minutes of standing in line for milk, and realize that is what helped me to become a teacher. The skin-shaving showers, the bus-rides on which I can nap even though I feel like I’m going to ralph, and the friends that make me feel like I’m going to the right place, even though I’ve never been there.

There comes a point in every CM’s time at institute where they stop being able to function properly and start crying. By leaking, I mean crying at inappropriate times due to stress. For me, that point was today, June 24th, though I guess now it is already June 25th. Because TFA teaches us the value of asset-based thinking (propagandapropagandapropaganda) , I believe that today, Wednesday, will be better than yesterday. Today I will stop leaking. Today I will regain control of my life. We learned a helpful phrase to say instead of swearing at your students–”Get your life together.”

I am going to get my life together.

That involves getting a checkbook. Turns out that I had several checks due to institute today, which I knew were due, but did not have the date in mind. Writing and delivering these checks becomes increasingly difficult when you do not have so much as a bank account. Cut to me crying in the middle of a Delta session when someone speaks inspiringly of the change we are going to make and me thinking to myself, “I won’t make ANY change. I am a failure.”

The lack of a checkbook combined with the fact that I was observed for an extended period of time during my math lesson today made Tuesday even more stressful. Math, by far my least favorite (and least successful) subject from roughly 4th grade on, is turning out to be difficult and stressful to teach. It is stressful insomuch as I do not remember what 5th grade math things are. For example: congruent figures, or quadrant 1 grids. Or your 11 times tables. I used a calculator! I do not know them! I had to write the answers on the back of my flashcards that we used this morning. Moral of the story is that my insecurities in math are transferring to me being incredibly insecure in my instruction of math. This leads to me straying from my lesson, being insufficient, and generally just a pile of bad teaching. Pre-novice.

The lack of a checkbook combined with the fact that I was observed added onto the impending doom of my “debrief session” about my observation, which took place after my panic regarding the checkbook made my life miserable enough. To add icing to my german chocolate sadness cake, I got my Wednesday rough draft lesson plan back. On it was written, roughly, “THIS IS WRONG AND HORRIBLE. YOU WOULD LOSE IF YOU PLAYED ARE YOU SMARTER THAN A FIFTH GRADER. ” Turns out, I had not written my lesson plan wrong, but merely misunderstood the objective of my lesson. By which I mean, I am not smart enough to do 5th grade math.

All this makes me much more confident to go into the classroom in the fall! All together, I cried about the following things: checks, stubbing my toe, my lesson plan, my crappy lesson, my impending termination, my general feelings of worthlessness, and the fact that we’re all running on 4-ish hours of sleep. I have not broken my vow of never crying in school. I did, however, start crying in a room full of Delta people while talking about being inspiring. I feel like the message was lost on me at the time.

When I get nervous I end up talking (which is a clue that i am nervous probably 95% of the time), and so what I ended up doing to cheer myself up about impending doom was to discuss being CMIP’d. I’ve mentioned before TFA’s obsession with acronyms, and cmip’d is an acronym that, I believe, originates from corps members. It stands for Corps Member Improvement Plan, which to most people is seen as step one towards turning in your punch card and picking up an application to Borders. I decided that if TFA was going to CMIP people, they should do it like the tv show Punk’d, with bright lights and cameras, and then when the dejected ex-corps member is walking out the front door after turning in his/her room key, they will look dejectedly at the camera and say “awww mannnn, i got CMIP’d!” This talk of termination cheered me up considerably.

Moral of the story? Things are ok. I can turn the checks in by Friday. I fixed my lesson plan. My debrief was productive and helpful. I finished everything I needed to in time to blog my heart out for nobody in particular and be asleep by 1:30. It’s 1:18, I’m planning on being out of it in 10 minutes or less.

Someone mentioned to me today that we’re at the halfway point of institute. That was another time when I started leaking, but it was a good kind of tears, the happy kind.

I am excited, somewhere under all this.

Because it made me laugh, and because each of my students appears to have their own writing style.

Question:Draw the Earth tilted on it’s axis toward/away from the Sun during winter. Write a sentence about the picture.”
Student Response (because every class needs an environmentalist): “The sun is located to North and there is glaciers there going to melt. Texas doesn’t have a lot of sun.”

Do i give partial credit for truth? Or because I’m in Texas, do I say she’s not telling the truth at all and that global warming doesn’t exist…

If you ever doubt that there is an education gap, think about the fact that I was asked that question by an emerging 6th grader the other day. She lives in Houston, Texas. We talked through where Houston was located (in Texas) and where Texas was located (in the United States) and she still couldn’t come up with the answer. I couldn’t find a map of the United States in my classroom or the school’s resource room to show her and I had left my own computer at home. We hear all these stories at TFA institute, I guess you could call them testimonies, from veteran corps members. They all end with “and thats why I….Teach. For. America.”

I guess I’m figuring that part out, along with the drinking the kool-aid, sleep-deprivation, culture-shock advantage that institute has on my mind right now. Its interactions like that and the press I feel to find a map and explain that Texas is a STATE. That’s why.

Assessments
I am not sure how long my students have been filling out assessments. They are just being asked to answer a few questions at the end of class to figure out how much they absorbed and how much time they spent goofing off because Abraham farted. Seriously, I lost 6 minutes of my class to that today. And I had to act like it didn’t smell awful.

Tonight I entered my first three days worth of assessment data into the computer (we have an end of lesson assessment every day to see how well the students absorbed the data). I like to have the kids write answers, mostly to promote better writing skills but also because it causes them to think more about scientific vocabulary. The problem is I think some of them don’t read the questions. Here are some of the answers I’ve had to grade:
Question: From the astronaut’s perspective, explain night and day.
Student Response: “If the sun not exist the people not can live and are not planets no oxigen and not exist planets because planets neat the sun.”
Student Response: “because if there’s day time all the time we will probably not have water but we need night time but they happen because we need to survive.”
Isn’t that considerate of night and day to occur so that we can continue surviving? All of this gleaned from a lesson about the Earth’s rotation.

Or we have the students who don’t write assessment answers but choose instead to write op-ed pieces. One of my favorite answers from the assessments was a response to a question asking to describe “What is revolution and how does it relate to Earth and the Sun?”
Student Response:“The Earth has to revolve around the sun for 365 days. That is so long.”
Seriously, can’t it be like 150 or something? Maybe make it a school year. TFA tells us all the time that elementary students don’t understand sarcasm, but I’m pretty sure mine can write it well.
Question: Does the moon “light up”? Yes or no and why.
Student Response:“No because the sun lights it up. It is not a light bulb.”

If I had gotten more than 3 hours of sleep last night, I’d write about how I was feeling. If I had not spent the last 2 hours intermittently grading and weeping, I would probably write more. That being said, I’m in a good place and in a good state of mind and looking forward to the fact that tomorrow is Friday, the end of my second week. Every day I feel a little better about jumping off the teacher cliff.

I have to admit, I have a crush on my teacher self. I do! Even though I’m sneezing/coughing up one of my lungs, I somehow find a way to be “solid, calm and firm” (according to my CMA–corps member advisor–) in front of my students. All 24 of them, 16 of whom are boys. One of whom is at least 9 feet tall. Two of whom are the biggest flirts I have ever seen. At least 20 of whom are off track 75% of the time. I’m not good at math, but I think that means my class is off track 879% of the time…

To focus this entry, I will describe my biggest accomplishment of the day. After we finished my diagnostic (which I was afraid we wouldn’t finish after hearing horror stories from other teachers earlier in the day), I found myself with 5 minutes to spare before the regular teacher came back. Not quite enough time to thoroughly review the line-up procedure, the one thing we seem to really struggle with, I decided to focus on something else with which the class seems to struggle. Noise. While I recognize that its difficult not to make noise when there are 24 of you, during a diagnostic test I believe it to be only courteous to not feel the need to make frog noises while reviewing the science question about frogs. I am teaching 5th grade, right?

So, once the last student finished the diagnostic and handed it in (he spent at least 8 minutes coloring in the frog picture), I expressed my pleasure that “for the most part, the majority of the students were quiet and respectful during the assessment and I really appreciated that.” I could not have BEEN more vague. I was greeted with blank faces- exactly what i wanted- and thats when I told them what I was disappointed about.

“The problem I heard was noise,” I said, “and a lot of it. I think that even though you are about to be 6th graders, I don’t think you can be quiet for very long. I’m guessing you guys couldn’t be quiet for even a minute.”

Oh yeah. I got them. All that listening last week in CS (curriculum specialist) sessions paid off in that I took away one key thing- challenge children! At least 15 of them instantly demanded to be put to the test, and the games began. The first trial lasted 3 seconds before David (one of the two) started talking. My plan for classroom/team behavior is kicking in already in that kids instantly jumped on him for making noise.

“let us try again!” they all yelled. We tried two more times before they got to a minute, when I politely applauded them. I waited until it got quiet, then I said,

“yeah but…can you do two?”

Today is Friday the 13th. It is the last day of my first week of institute. I began the week with a birthday, my own, which is something I never really enjoy. From this point on, my mood level could be classified on the a color scale of yellow, if we’re doing the behavior chart color scale (blue-orange-yellow-red-purple). Did you know colors could mean consequences in addition to terror levels? Or are they really one in the same? My brain is slowly filling and blending my old knowledge with my new teacher knowledge, which makes for all sorts of interesting combinations of thoughts.

The point is, I have finished my first week of institute. I am sitting in my room in Moody Towers at 6:37 debating going to sleep. I say this because I have been awake forEVER. I did not realize it was acceptable to start complaining about being tired after 9pm so soon after graduating from college, but apparently the transition to adulthood starts earlier than I thought. I aim to be lying in my bed in the dark, listening to my ipod to block out the sound of the computer lab door slamming, every night by 12:30. My alarm goes off 5 hours later. That’s enough, right?

I shower (because I have to), then put on my work clothes that I laid out the night before. I walk downstairs to get my breakfast while my hotpot boils water from the tap. I don’t know Houston’s water quality, but as long as nothing is swimming in my coffee, I’m happy. Breakfast is fast and my bus is the last of all the sites to leave the dorm at 7:08 am. The rest of the corps members (CM’s from this point on) are jealous.

This brings me to my one complaint for the entry. For karma’s sake, I think I’m going to limit my complaints. I would say I’d try to limit my word count, but i HIGHLY doubt my ability to do so. I feel totally separated. I am on a floor in the North tower with two other regions. There are maybe 6 rooms of Delta CMs, but the majority of them are living in the South tower. For those of you lucky enough not to live at the University of Houston, that means that they never have reason to see me, hear me, or talk to me. For me, a person who thrives on social interactions and will depend on these people as friends over the course of the next few years, this is devastating. I do not know what to do. My big goal for week two of institute is to make friends. This is going to be just as hard as teaching, because underneath my incredibly annoying facade, I am incredibly nervous. Wish me luck.

Anyway, we get to the school, and this week, once we got there we LEARNED. All day. We had sessions about lesson planning, we had sessions about leadership, we had sessions about literacy. We had sessions about assessments, we had sessions about investments, we had sessions about procedures. We had sessions where we practiced our teacher “look.” I think I might take a picture of mine on my Macbook. It’s intimidating. I could make you stop your bad behavior no matter where you are in the country. I have learned a lot from these sessions, thanks to the people with various acronyms for titles (CS, LS, CMA, WWF, MLB, etc). Do I feel prepared for Monday, my first day of teaching? No. Am I excited? Yes.

I think on a percentage scale, I am about 70% about to throw up, 30% ready to take on the world. I think that’s good enough for the first week. Now if only I could take those percents and turn them into a fraction, then write a lesson plan about it…

If any of you are reading this just for content so you can say something to me about it later, I guess the most important thing you should take away is that I got an email from my soon-to-be principal in Lake Village, Arkansas. I will be teaching 5th grade there at Lakeside Upper. Feel free to take a break now from your computers, then come back and google image search to your heart’s delight.

You’ll be hearing from me soon.
-Megh