Freedom Writers and the First Day of School

Two things to go in this post.  First, my thoughts on Freedom Writers and other general “feel good” teacher movies….I love them and hate them.  I love that they are often inspiring and help teachers and non-teachers believe that a difference can be made in the lives of troubled youth.  I hate them because that difference is most often made by the struggling single teacher or teacher who sacrifices his/her personal life for the good of the children.  I do believe that much of good teaching comes simply from putting in more time.  It seems to be impossible to be a really good teacher and only put in the contract day.  Though I am a GREAT teacher, I could be better if I put in more time, but I am not willing to sacrifice my marriage to be a better teacher.  Recently the husband and I have been discussing how we seem to be living separate lives at times.  We each go off to our place of employment, put in our hours, and come home to take care of the dog and the house, and then find MAYBE 2 hours to spend together before we have to crash and get up to do it all over again.  I committed this year to not take work home unless it was ABSOLUTELY necessary.  ABSOLUTELY necessary is defined as must happen tomorrow or all hell will break loose in the classroom.  Otherwise, it can wait until tomorrow, and I can afford to spend more time with him.  What do you all do to maintain balance with your personal life?

 

Secondly, today was the first day of school.  One of the PE coaches made fun of me for being dressed up as he seemed to remember me wearing jeans every day of last year.  In return, I made fun of him for putting on his “Sunday best” aka a polo shirt and kakhi shorts.  A student of mine has this FANTASTIC German last name, and I will procede to refer to him by this name for the rest of the year.  Of course I won’t use his real name, but it’s something like Schlopolch.  New principal came in and left a “warm & fuzzy” note on my desk.  I appreciated it, but find it hard to believe this will continue throughout the year.  One of the assignments I gave today included the students listing the jobs of students, families, teachers, and principals in the success of a school.  Some of their answers were hillarious!  Apparently it’s the parents job to go to school and be nice to each other, I need to dance and sing for my classes, and the principal is in charge of paying me and cleaning up the school.  Silly children.  Tomorrow we begin working in notebooks and textbooks.  It should be fun!

Blogging more

So I promised I would blog more, and here I am 10 days away from my last post.  Oh well.  I’ll try more now that I have more to blog about.  Also, I have yet to upload pictures of the classroom.  Hopefully that will happen by the end of the week.

Setting Up the Classroom

I pretty much have my room set up.  I’ll have to post pictures later as I forgot the camera.  The room looks great this year.  I changed just enough things to make it different for me.  Now I’m on to my ginormigantuan list of things to do on my computer!

Staffing Change

Sadly, I found out today that my principal has been involuntarily transferred to another school in our district.  The principal from that school is coming to our campus Monday, and we start the new year with a new admin.  I have mixed emotions about this.  My former principal was awesome!  Most of our staff would jump through fire for him because, though he has always expected a lot from us, he was always supportive.  As I’m a fairly new teacher and have not ever changed jobs, this is my first change in administration and supervisor.  For the most part, it will not change what I do, but there is a small part of me that is very nervous.  I’ve read a lot about other teachers either not liking their principals or teachers who never see their principal.  Our former principal was in our classrooms nearly every single day.  He knew what kind of teacher each  of us was and he did his best to bring the best out of us.  This new person…I’m not sure what she’ll bring out of me, but I do know that I work for the success of the kids, and that is what I need to keep in mind.

What do you do with state test scores?

The CST scores were released for California this week.  A friend of mine and I went in to visit our principal and get the news.  He seemed to be in a generally good mood, so we felt it had gone well.  Little did we know how well.  Every department at every grade level experienced growth on last year’s CST’s!  It is all very exciting.  This is the most growth my school has seen since I’ve been there.  Additionally, 7th-grade math, which I teach, had a 20% growth!  Very cool.  I am one of the more neurotic people about test scores and was sad to find out that we did not have the itemized scores for each student as of yet, but they will come soon enough.  Then I will sit with my highlighter and see which students went up or down and by how many.  Obviously I obsess over how much my previous students went up or down, but I quickly let them go when I get my class rosters.  From there I color-code each student in my gradebook based on their CST scores from the previous year.  This color-coding is for the purpose of seating charts.  All of my seating charts are strategically based off of student personalities, grades in my class, various physical/mental needs, and CST scores.  This way it is easy for me to follow a student all year long by comparing their grades to their color-coding.

All of this to pose the question, what do you do with the scores when they come in?