one day into week four
well, i promised that i would be good and actually post so that you will actually come and read my posts. so this is a day late but hopefully not a dollar short, and here i am. week three was off to a hectic but good start today as we prepare to do a schoolwide writing prompt in every english class in the whole school. it's a baseline measurement for students for the year. interesting concept, but it's just making it hard to really get into the curriculum content. that will be coming up soon--although next week we have a lot of wackiness in the schedule.
i did a ton of planning this weekend. some of you may be wondering what that actually means. well, i teach three different classes at two different grade levels. so i can either go through the week in two ways. one: plan for each day the night before. this involves being stressed out at the end of the day every day because i know i have to go home and construct a whole thing for the next day. two: plan out the week, at least on a basic level, over the weekend. this means i still have work to do during the week, but somehow my sanity is significantly maintained if i do it this way. (i did this last week, and it was great.) so on saturday of this past weekend i made a detailed plan for each of my classes for the whole week. that is 20 hours of teaching time. i teach five 50 minute blocks each day. i only have four groups of kids, though--one group is a double period of 8th graders. then i have two single periods of 8th graders, and one single period of 7th graders. i finally found a joke that the seventh graders were into:
question: what does snoop dogg use to keep his whites white?
answer: bliotch
they are always asking for jokes so finally i found them one that they liked. i have a few more for tommorow!
a highlight from the day: we are reading this short story about a mexican-american migrant farmworker family in california. the main character is a young boy, and the story basically talks about the places that his family lives and his experiences there. they are constantly moving just as he gets settled in and starts to meet people. the kids are pretty into the story. so, i have this one seventh grader who is kind of the class clown. he participates and asks good questions, but also tends to be very disruptive. he is latino, i think mexican, and as we started reading this story he got really into it. i began reading the story out loud to them and left them to finish it silently on their own. however, they all groaned and said that they would like to read it out loud themselves, or listen to me read. they agreed to read it themselves because i didn't want to read more. (i had been talking a lot with a brief bout of very loud, stern talking first thing in the morning.)so my student named angel volunteers to read where i left off. he reads well, loud enough for everyone to hear. there are spanish names and also spanish words in the story, and he pronounces them with ease. he is clearly really into reading. so when it becomes another student's turn to read, as that student approaches the next spanish phrase i say "would somebody who speaks spanish please pronounce that for us and tell us what it means?" angel enthusiastically volunteered and did a great job. it was exciting to see him get so into the material. it was like all of the moments where i saw firsthand the truth in the theory (and my intuition) that tells me that reading culturally relevant literature and affirming students' language and culture really help impact achievement. it's not that i doubted it but it was pretty cool to see it in action!
okay, it's 10:30, i still haven't written my little parent memo for back to school night, and i have to say that i am getting better and better at doing things a little bit on the fly--but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea. i will try to post later this week also, but don't count on anything til the weekend.
i did a ton of planning this weekend. some of you may be wondering what that actually means. well, i teach three different classes at two different grade levels. so i can either go through the week in two ways. one: plan for each day the night before. this involves being stressed out at the end of the day every day because i know i have to go home and construct a whole thing for the next day. two: plan out the week, at least on a basic level, over the weekend. this means i still have work to do during the week, but somehow my sanity is significantly maintained if i do it this way. (i did this last week, and it was great.) so on saturday of this past weekend i made a detailed plan for each of my classes for the whole week. that is 20 hours of teaching time. i teach five 50 minute blocks each day. i only have four groups of kids, though--one group is a double period of 8th graders. then i have two single periods of 8th graders, and one single period of 7th graders. i finally found a joke that the seventh graders were into:
question: what does snoop dogg use to keep his whites white?
answer: bliotch
they are always asking for jokes so finally i found them one that they liked. i have a few more for tommorow!
a highlight from the day: we are reading this short story about a mexican-american migrant farmworker family in california. the main character is a young boy, and the story basically talks about the places that his family lives and his experiences there. they are constantly moving just as he gets settled in and starts to meet people. the kids are pretty into the story. so, i have this one seventh grader who is kind of the class clown. he participates and asks good questions, but also tends to be very disruptive. he is latino, i think mexican, and as we started reading this story he got really into it. i began reading the story out loud to them and left them to finish it silently on their own. however, they all groaned and said that they would like to read it out loud themselves, or listen to me read. they agreed to read it themselves because i didn't want to read more. (i had been talking a lot with a brief bout of very loud, stern talking first thing in the morning.)so my student named angel volunteers to read where i left off. he reads well, loud enough for everyone to hear. there are spanish names and also spanish words in the story, and he pronounces them with ease. he is clearly really into reading. so when it becomes another student's turn to read, as that student approaches the next spanish phrase i say "would somebody who speaks spanish please pronounce that for us and tell us what it means?" angel enthusiastically volunteered and did a great job. it was exciting to see him get so into the material. it was like all of the moments where i saw firsthand the truth in the theory (and my intuition) that tells me that reading culturally relevant literature and affirming students' language and culture really help impact achievement. it's not that i doubted it but it was pretty cool to see it in action!
okay, it's 10:30, i still haven't written my little parent memo for back to school night, and i have to say that i am getting better and better at doing things a little bit on the fly--but that doesn't mean that it's a good idea. i will try to post later this week also, but don't count on anything til the weekend.
posted by Allyson B. at
10:14 PM
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