Viva!

Not really sure what to say this week.

My submission of the first six parts of my Innovative Unit happened to coincide with Teacher Recruitment Day and mock interviews.  I wanted people to look at my work, both the Unit and my Portfolio, and say “Wow!  Stellar!”  Although those came out really well…  I have officially entered burnout mode.

This has happened a few times in my life.  Around senior year in high school when college stuff was coinciding with 6 AP exams…  Around May of junior year of college when I was overloading with 400’s level bio courses and organic chemistry, while trying to organize visas and flights to China for study abroad.

Now, mind you, this isn’t a suicidal, break-down, freak-out, cry at the drop of a hat shut-down.  My family actually has a history of that kind of thing:  Start crying one day, go over to the Clifton Springs institution, crawl into a bed and don’t stop crying for two months solidly.  When I reach burn-out mode on the other hand, I simply stop doing.  Why is this post late?  I just didn’t have enough energy to do it.  Why is my dorm-room a total mess and I am lying in my bed staring at the walls?  I just don’t care enough to get up and do anything.

I am really lucky I have this entire week to clean up, get straight, drink some tea, go for a walk, play with Frank, have an honest to God conversation with my boyfriend, and appreciate the sunny beauty that Rochester occasionally reveals.  I am not sure if I am totally going to shut-down, but I was definitely on the verge of it.

When I am going to do something, I give it my all.  My work has not suffered these past few weeks, but if I hadn’t had this break off to come up for air, it might have gotten drastic.  Just stopped showing up for class with no reason other than, “I can’t…”

I didn’t really understand initially why everyone was so nerve-wracked during February…  I applaud everyone’s success in finishing out their placements while getting all their work done.  I have been lucky enough to be able to space my work out, but you guys are gods amongst men.  (And goddesses amongst women…  Blah!  Stupid PC-ism).

That is all.

Well…   I posted this as a Facebook status a few days ago.  I found out last Wednesday that to get a handle on how our schools in Rochester are functioning, Jean-Claude Brizard was going to be touring my school and would actually be stopping in to visit our classroom and observe our lesson.

I had been set to kick off our Innovative Unit and was going to be taking the students down to the computer lab to complete our first activity and subsequent assessment on “What would happen if you didn’t have a [Insert Name of Reproductive Organ Here]?”  The activity was supposed to let students go to the computer lab to research their assigned organs’ structure and function, but due to the Brizard visit and needing to stay in the classroom, I ended up modifying the activity and assessment to let students use textbooks and YouTube videos on our classroom’s limited (3) computers.  We then had a whip around the room where the students shared out the roles of each organ with relation to fertilization, and each augmented their notesheet based on their classmate’s findings.

During the whip, Brizard showed up.  When I say Brizard, I mean ten people filing into the back of the classroom.  Older important looking people in well-cut suits and pearls.

I had had a chance to let some of the girls know that some important people were coming to observe the class, but the late notice we received about his visit didn’t give me a chance to tell everyone.  A few of the students who didn’t know that the observation was going to happen were pretty distracted at first, but as the entourage arrived, I broke from instruction and said, “Ladies (this was my all girls class), we have some people who have come to observe how very smart you are, so go on!  Say hello!”  The girls all warmly greeted them, and the entourage all seemed to sit unmoved and quiet.

I had been really looking forward to meeting Brizard, maybe even shaking his hand.  Even if I disagree with his organizational policies of RCSD, I respect his position and wanted to invite him to the GRS! celebration to see what kinds of growth and changes we are implementing, one teacher at a time.  I hoped that I would get a chance to even ask one of my observers for any feedback.

I’ll be honest; the entourage seemed like they were watching TV.  They were so removed from the whole thing.  Even though the students had moved on to working in groups and were working with resources all over the room, not one (NOT ONE) attempted to get involved or walk around through the desks and talk with they students to see what they were up to.

I know I am just a lowly student teacher and shouldn’t have expected too much, but to not even interact with the kids.  A verbal acknowledgment like “Hi everybody!”  It was stone cold.  Evaluating and measuring things up for easy mixing and chopping next year.

However, I had made a cool SmartBoard-PowerPoint Jeopardy game about sexual/asexual reproduction and the sexual anatomy.  The first question the entourage saw was the “scrotum” question.  Male anatomy – 300 points.  With the whole entourage there, the first question they got was, “What is the role of the scrotum in terms of sperm count?”  They nailed it, which was impressive.  Some of the older ladies looked a little blushy, but they looked like they were impressed by the use of the SmartBoard.

Much in the same way my mother looks impressed when I can install Firefox on a computer.

In any case, as to the nature of their visit, I felt a lot like an animal on display in a zoo.  However, I was lucky enough to not feel like I was dancing for my life.  Like my CT said, “This next month is going to get ugly… 165 cuts…  and that’s just the first wave.”

And that’s what’s on my mind this week.

Religion…

That nasty topic, along with politics of course, that seems to kill conversations.

Yesterday, the day before Good Friday, before classes started, I asked my CT how I should go about wishing students a nice long weekend.  The students had been talking about Easter, about trying to dye the fertilized chicken eggs with pastel Easter colors, about how they were going to their Grandma’s and Aunt’s houses for good food, about how every year they get a big chocolate rabbit.

So I asked, “Is it okay to say ‘Have a nice Easter break!’ to students?”  My CT responded that he usually just says “Happy holidays!”  And then, the Devil’s advocate side of me starts thinking… Aside from Easter and Passover, what holidays will be going on?

I have always been a big person for the simple “Happy Halloween!”, “Have a merry Christmas!” good-byes and greetings, but I didn’t slip up once yesterday.  I decided to go this route with the students:  “So, are you doing anything for the mini-break?”  This way, I wasn’t alienating anyone but students who celebrate Easter could still share their plans with me if they wished.  It was actually really cool to hear the plans from some of the students.  One was going to Alexandria Bay with his grandfather to go fishing and stay overnight on the family boat.  One was going to her grandmother’s house in Syracuse and she was going to have “the good bacon”.  I liked being able to hear about this kind of family stuff, far and apart from the humdrum of everyday.

I have always wanted to experience a holiday celebration with another part of the community here in the USA.  When I was in China, I had the opportunity to celebrate the Lunar Festival, which is an autumn celebration of the full moon.  In China, both in urban and rural settings, families will get together and partake in moon cakes and hot tea for the weeks surrounding the night of the full moon.

The moon cake, or “yuebing” in Mandarin, is a dense little thing a lot like a hockey puck, really heavy.  The outside is moist dense pastry dough and the inside is usually stuffed with sweet red bean paste or sweet lotus paste, sometimes even dense pasty custard.  In the center of the cake is a duck egg yolk, so when you cut the thing in half, you see the “full moon”.

I spent my lunar festival in Tongli, which is something like the Venice of China.  There are canals everywhere, and although parts of it are hyped up, most of it is relatively unchanged.  When I was there, there was a sudden downpour, and I darted into one of the open vendor stalls for shelter.

I came in and a nice older Chinese woman, the shopkeeper, smiled at me and used her only English, “Hello!”  I had only been in the country for 3 weeks at that time, and knew only the basics of survival Mandarin, but we still managed to communicate.  I told her that Tongli was “piaoliang” (beautiful), and rain is “bu hao” (no good).  She laughed and gave me some strange water chestnut things that she had been peeling and eating.  I showed her pictures of my cat and my family, and she introduced me to her husband in the backroom, who looked quite ill and was wrapped up in a blanket watching loud Chinese Godzilla movies.  We sat and tried to talk, laughing quite a bit, and she started bringing out little bowls of different Chinese foods she had cooked.  I am sure they were just leftovers to her, but I got an education.  It was one of the nicest moments I had in China.

I feel like a lot of times, it seems like it’s easy to be condescending towards marginalized groups, “Oh, you know, some of the students have it so hard…”  I don’t just want to hear the bad stories about “Well, her uncle got shot in a driveby recently, so be careful about mentioning that.”

I want to see the good things, what it’s really like; I want to eat what other people eat; I want to go to a African-American Zion Church on a Sunday; I wanna get a feel for family dynamics outside my own view of “mother, father, two daughters, two cats”; I want to surprise my kids and do the Stanky Legg on the last day of class.  I want to know what my kids are doing, how they live, where they live, what their houses look like, what they like to eat, what is special to them, what they value.  School is a strange lens to observe students through.  I want them to be people, not subjects.  I want to see the whole picture.  I want to know what “the good bacon” is.

I just don’t know how to inject myself into another culture here in the States.

Well, things are finally looking up.  The work pile is looking less and less and the “completed” pile is getting higher and higher.  I am finally getting firmed up on my Innovative Unit.  We are going to have a CHICKEN INQUIRY!  We will be hatching chicken eggs in our classroom and creating science around it, finally evolving into a full-scale research project for my Living Environment students.

WARNING – I AM GETTING REALLY AMBITIOUS WITH THIS AND I AM NOT SURE HOW MUCH WILL PAN OUT!

Today, I officially added our little eggs to the incubator!

The farm which provides the fertile chicken embryos has offered to post my students’ work and pictures on their website.    I want them to feel like they are getting somewhere in this world.  If they can log on to the Internet and see their work and inquiry published somewhere, even somewhere unofficial, I think they will gain confidence as fledgling scientists.

Next, I want to do personal interviews with my students to accompany their work.  If I were to start a Wiki or a website, which I am still considering, I want each of my students to be personally acknowledged.  I know this will involve getting permission from the school and the students’ guardians, but I think that having their picture and mini-bio posted along with links to their published work will make science feel more real to them.

I will be posting a live webcam of one of our chicken embryos with the shell removed so if my students want to check up on the chicken at any point, they can simply log on from home.   I have emailed back and forth with Mike Comet to ask him how to best facilitate something like this and it looks like I can simply use free internet tools to post this kind of stuff, then I can embed it in my blog.  I bought a Logitech webcam and will be working on wiring it into the incubator.

I also have the opportunity to use another program called Flix to create timelapse video of the chicken embryos growing.  I can set it to take pictures every 5 minutes and would result in a 2.5 minute video, if we time-lapsed for 14 days.

HOWEVER, I cannot do both at once.

To those of you who read this…  What would be more meaningful to the students?  Having 24/7 access to the video of the embryo developing or making a 2.5-minute timelapse of actual growth happening?

(PS – Turning off the camera for now…  Will be setting it up this week in my classroom.)

Eek!  I am an hour late.  I was watching a really cool Discovery documentary about bringing back the extinct Tasmanian tiger with cloning, got distracted, and ended up falling asleep without having done it.

Teaching for my current placement just started up.  Considering it’s been a while since I actually got to teach, I feel like my technique was a little rusty.  Well here…   Let me just start by venting a laundry list of arrows.

• Preparedness - I had a very clear idea of what I wanted my students to accomplish the first day, but I spent so much time last-minute tweaking the scaffolding sheets I had constructed and my ticket out the door that I did not script it as carefully as I should have.  I didn’t plan for student ideas or misconceptions, and I really should have because some of the dialogue we generated would have really been cool to build off of.
• Timing - My CT wanted to punctuate his unit with a quiz and told me it shouldn’t take much longer than 20 minutes of my 84 minute block.  So I planned for 64 minutes exactly.  Mr. P’s quiz actually entailed 5 minutes of transition time into the classroom, 10 minutes of review and 30ish minutes of actual quiz.  By the time my section had actually begun, the bell had gone off.  I ended up with about 40 minutes total.  Even so, I see my planning was overly optimistic.  I wanted to cram so much stuff into my time.  I will have to break this up.
  
• Classroom Management - My classroom management technique is really rough to begin with.  I had only finally gotten a hold on working the crowd and gaining the respect of my students in my last placement when it suddenly ended.  My morning section of boys were very focused on the activities and discussions, but the afternoon section of girls, on a Friday afternoon no less, were so chatty!  I was getting so upset and I made the mistake of letting it show; my cheeks got pink and my voice got louder.  I feel like I got off on the wrong foot with the girls and I really regret that it came out this way.  I am coming in next week with a seating chart.

I did the new teacher thing and came home and started thinking about all this and finding weakness after weakness.  I guess this is part of being critical.  To improve practice, we take a deep look at the weaknesses and figure out how we can improve.

Let us not forget what Scarlett O’Hara told us so long ago: “Tomorrow is another day!”

My first day was the best! I got up early and did the ritual:

1. Start coffee

2. Shower

3. Drink one cup of coffee

4. Blowdry hair while watching Colbert

5. Drink another cup of coffee

6. Get dressed

7. Eat a fried egg over-easy (dipping the whites in the yolk), a string-cheese stick and some apple-cinnamon Cheerios

8. Wash down with more coffee

9. Make sure the cat has enough food and water for 10 hrs

10. Get packed

11. Get movin’

I take off at 6:30 to walk over to GVP (Genesee Valley Park) and catch the #4 bus up Genesee Street.  The bus driver lady was really nice; I am looking forward to see her everyday.  I get dropped off right in front of the school by 6:55ish, head on in, and am in the classroom by 7am.
View My First Day in a larger map

At 7am, I was there for maybe a minute before my CT showed up.  While I was expecting a really formal discussion of classroom etiquette and general procedures in the classroom, Mr. S. came in, looked around the room a little as if he was visualizing his day, then seemed to realize I was there and said “Hey, wanna prep some pigs?”

Within 5 minutes of being in the classroom, I was up to my elbows in preservative and dead piggies, getting trays and tools prepped for the rest of the day.  The other student teacher is wrapping up his placement with the organ systems and was getting observed that day.

When I came into the classroom to help him prep the classroom for his observation, I had preserved pig placenta under my fingertips.  I had dressed so nicely for the first day, but spent the whole day helping students slice them open.

I came to find that my two preps are block-scheduled 84 minute blocks of Honors Biology, one boys class and one girls.  The first class up were the girls and they really rose to the occasion.  No screaming, no “OMG that’s so grooooss!”, they were loving it!  There is a 42 minute break in between the blocks, so we scrambled around and reset the room.

The boys class was also a blast.  One boy removed the heart from his pig, took a cross-section of it, showed me the two ventricles and asked me, “So one’s for oxygenated blood and one’s for deoxygenated?”  I nearly fainted I was so excited.

I didn’t bring my camera to take pictures, otherwise I would post some.  Come to think of it though, I don’t think I would have been able to with pig liver ground into my fingers.  When lunch finally came around at the end of the day, I was putting gloves ON to eat.

We were all pretty worn out from running two 30-student classrooms on dissection day, and there wasn’t much more to do in prep for the next day (Day II of Piggies), so we headed out.

I know piggie day was atypical, but for a first day, I saw what the kids were capable of.  I am really looking forward to the rest of this placement!

Afterward, I popped on my headphones and started hoofing it over to campus.  Timed the walk, it’s only about 20 minutes; getting to class won’t be so bad at all.

Life is rosy.

I don’t really know if I would call this a reflection or what.  On this blustery snowed-in day, I managed to wake up at 5:30 and decided to start getting ahead on unit planning, readings, cleaning, and cooking up a bunch of food so I don’t have to cook for a few days.

To make some background noise, I decided to put on Cheers.  Never seen Cheers, but I know that when my mother was living in her own apartment in the early 80’s, she loved this show.  Now that I am a twenty-something and have my little apartment and my little cat, I decided, “Why not complete the picture and officially become my mother?”

Watching Cheers, hearing the theme song “Where Everybody Knows Your Name” then watching the group dynamics transpire between each of the characters, I keep thinking of Warner.  If you trapped ANY three members of our science cohort in an elevator for hours, we’d be easily set for conversation.  I feel like over the course of the year, our group has really bonded through common experience.  I have such a feeling of community.  Not just the students either; Jo Ann, Kim, Michael, Joe, Lisa, April, Mort, and all those other adults who are guiding us and inducting us into their world.  I am grateful for knowing that our supportive community is just a phone call away.

I will be honest that when I got into this program, I had no idea how mentally exhausting these 15 months would be.  We are not just learning how to transmit information; we are the movers and the shakers.  When I think about the lonely lecture hall atmosphere we had in undergraduate studies, I don’t think that I would have survived the Warner program without my cohort.  Even when we do have free time, we are obsessing about Warner…  But we’ve grown to enjoy it and even need it.

GRS is where everybody knows your name; through the good and the bad, we’re there for each other.

Thanks for being around, guys.