kung pao kosher komedy

happy christmas
merry hannukah
or, as my mother and stepfather are wont to say, happy solstanukamas (may be misspelled)
and HAPPY BIRTHDAY TO MY DEAR BROTHER NATE AND MY WONDERFUL STEPFATHER ERIC!!

yes...tonight is my first foray into that which is jewish comedy at a chinese restaurant on christmas day. my dad thought it would be fun so he is treating jesse and i. i believe we are dining in chinatown first. should be a fun evening. i am getting all dressed up and such. but literally, the show is called Kung Pao Kosher Comedy. they are careful to explain that the comedy is kosher, not the food.

but the most important announcement is I AM ON A 16 DAY VACATION!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

it's day 3. we had a spontaneous 7 person dinner party last night. we haven't finished cleaning but we're almost there. it was a lot of fun. i haven't started working yet but i begin tommorow in full force. i have a lot of planning to do. i think we have just enough things planned to fully entertain us yet leave lots of time for working and tidying and taking care of business. we cleaned our whole house (it's a big one--6 rooms including the bathroom) on saturday and sunday. we (well, jesse) mopped all the floors, including the wooden ones. it really made a big difference to clean up since the last few weeks have been so crazy.

i believe that it's time to get dressed for the jew extravaganza.
more later.
ab

the light at the (almost) halfway point in the tunnel

so in oakland, there is a tunnel that goes under several big wide streets with fast traffic. it goes between the lake and the henry j. kaiser convention center. it's kind of a creepy tunnel, but it's better than playing in traffic which is often what you have to do if you don't want to go in the tunnel. there is also a tunnel entrance at the median between the two roads. so you get halfway through the tunnel, there is light from a staircase, and then you go through the rest of it. i'm almost at the staircase. i get to climb out of the tunnel for a little while, in one week. whoo hoo!!!

the last few weeks have been a total roller coaster. i have been working on that assessment for my credential program which i finally finished last wednesday night. oddly, wednesday was this incredible day of teaching. i had probably the best class i've ever had with my period 1/2 class. i did have a pretty cool lesson, to my credit. my kids (i think) are getting what i am teaching, which is mood and setting. my TFA mentor came and observed me and as jesse said, i have a "teacher crush" on her. if you don't operate in the land of allyson's brain, that means that i really look up to her and think she's incredibly cool and helpful and smart and competent and neat and i know she was a great teacher. it's an "i want to be like you when i grow up" crush except that, oddly, we are exactly the same age. she feels like she's 5-6 years older than me, mostly because she has so much more knowledge about teaching. also, she just got married. she has grown up very quickly, as TFA staff members often seem to do. it's very interesting.

anyways, she observed this cool lesson i taught and here is a quote from the email she sent me afterwards:
"Thanks for having me in your classroom, Allyson. What a phenomenal way to teach the concept of mood. I definitely wish I had used this when I was teaching 8th grade! I’m really excited to meet with you and to figure out where your kids are at. I have FULL CONFIDENCE that you’ll be able to get them to wherever they need to go. Your hard work is clearly paying off…"

um--wow, what a compliment! this made me feel incredibly good in the midst of a very hard and tiring week. that same day, i had a meeting with her which was very helpful and got me all jazzed and motivated to do more planning. currently i'm writing a test that i will give my kids to take on thursday. once i finish writing the test, i basically have the whole week planned out. it's a pretty cool system. the thing you're REALLY supposed to do is write the test before you even begin teaching the unit.

so that was the high of the week. the lows were plentiful. basically, they amounted to incredibly tight shoulders and a tense jaw for the six days that i was working on my assessment for my credential program. i did minimal planning and no grading for those six days. the time i spent working on it was like pulling teeth. on the bright side, finishing it gave me such an incredible mood change that i feel like a new person now.

so the last week was really hard overall, but i finished my assessment which was a great feeling. i had a work holiday party thursday night, and then a good friend flew in from texas on friday. she is visiting until christmas day. i had dinner with her and some other friends on friday night, and then just had a quiet hanging out night with them.

yesterday (saturday) was an incredible, glorious, heavenly day--it was the first day that i took off of work since thanksgiving break. i got letters and cards and care packages together to send out, went to the farmers market, out to lunch with (with friends including the one visiting), did some fun errands, and then went to sacramento to the holiday party of an old friend.

i didn't really know how the party would be--but it ended up being incredibly fun. there was a trivia quiz (which jesse is very good at, and was a fun structured social opportunity with people who we didn't know) and overally it was just sooo fun and renewing. i realized this morning as i was emailing my mom about it that one great thing about it was that we didn't talk about work at all. that is rare but it was refreshing and i think we should do it more often!! :-)

now i am back in hyper fast-forward planning mode. it's not so fun but somehow it feels worth it. it's hard to explain why.

so back to the tunnel metaphor. i don't always feel like i'm in a tunnel, at least not in the negative way that you could interpret that concept. and the staircase halfway between the lake and the convention center is the semester mark, but really i see it as the winter break. it is not the exact halfway mark but it is close and it is going to be wonderful. we have a lot of fun things planned as well as a lot of relaxing. it's likely that my next post will be next weekend, once the week is over. it depends on how the week goes. i hope that yours is great!

ah....glorious day...

i don't even care that it's raining! i am off school today. i have taken care of a few key things that needed to be dealt with today. unfortunately, instead of doing schoolwork, so far i have only been working on a take-home test (basically) for my credential program. it's very long and not very fun.

i just had a really cool interaction, though. i was talking to a very old, close friend (old as in we go back very far) who teaches at a girls middle school in the east bay. we were chatting on gmail chat. just as soon as i got off that chat, i started talking with the man who i was sharing a table with at the cafe where i am doing my work today. for some reason it came up that i am a teacher and he has a daughter--oh, i was sneezing and he was commenting that maybe i was coming down with what everyone has which is an annoying cold, including his daughter and my students.

he asked what i taught and i asked what grade his daughter is in--6th grade. she attends the girls middle school where my friend teaches. he knew who my friend is, even. it was a very funny coincidence, especially as i think there are only 200 or so students there. he is the second person i've met who has a child or grandchild at that school.

it's especially funny because i was thinking the other day about how hard it is to be teaching classes of 28-34 students at a public middle school that is under so much pressure to show success on standardized tests. private schools don't deal with any of that crap, scuse the language. i love the kids but i wish that i saw half as many of them at any given time, and that all of us weren't under so much pressure. it's complicated...but there is definitely a part of me that could see teaching in a different environment in the future. i don't know--after all, i'm only 14 weeks into my teaching career. but i see things that i'm not sure go away, even with time as a teacher. anyways, the grandmother of a student there once suggested to me that i think about teaching at this private girls middle school, and i felt slightly offended because she is a tutor in my classroom and i felt like she was saying that i wasn't that well suited for my kids. i think that remains to be seen, but it's certainly an interesting idea. i would definitely consider a different type of teaching environment when my time with teach for america is over...even if that sounds horrible to say. i don't consider teaching a way of "saving" my students, and while i would like my teaching to be social justice work, i think that can apply to teaching in any environment.

anyways, it's just something interesting to think about. a private girls school would especially be interesting since i attended private school k-7 and a private women's college. i certainly come from an appropriate background.

well, i should get back to my work. i am going to enter my students' percentages on the standards for the quizzes that they just took into my tracking database--because they MUST master the standards for true success this year. (okay...i am a little bit facetious about that.) there are so many competing theories in education, it's pretty amazing.

i hope that you enjoy reading, as always. you have have noticed that i tend to write when i am slightly calm but also trying to work on something that i might not want to work on. have a great weekend and if you're in the bay, stay dry!

post-Thanksgiving dedication

well, thanksgiving did me a world and a half of good--now that's some serious hyperbole. but well, i realized that it was my first vacation in so long, and i truly did relax at least part of the time. it was an eventful vacation: i had two "thanksgiving day" days (thursday and sunday), bought a new car (!!!!!), did a ton of planning, attended multiple parties and get togethers, slept a ton, hosted my mom and stepfather for 3 nights, hosted jesse's brother and his girlfriend for one night, baked 2 pumpkin pies and one pumpkin spice cake....is that enough for one week?
notice work did happen but not in the massive quantity that it could have (but didn't need to).

however, since i didn't do as much planning as i had meant to during break, i have been planning as i go this week which i don't like as much. it really takes a lot out of me on any given day to not know exactly what i'm doing the next day--i mean, i always know what objective/standard i am focusing on, but not actually knowing what i'm going to do with it is a chore.

one great thing is that with my 8th graders i've begun the novel "let the circle be unbroken" my mildred taylor. it is the sequel to "roll of thunder, hear my cry" which most of my 8th graders read last year, and in general they all seem to be liking it okay. i LOVE having something consistent to do with them each day. it is so much more meaningful than reading story after story in the literature book. i'm not totally sure how much of it they are understanding which does concern me a little bit, but i'm working on giving them reading comprehension questions to help monitor their work.

one of my big things this marking period (6 week grading period) is keeping up with students' grades and making sure they know where they are at. i know that it is motivational for some although not all of them, plus i really didn't keep up with grading at all during the last few marking periods and it was very frustrating when the end of the marking period came, all the kids were asking about their grades and i couldn't tell them anything very clearly about what their grades were and why they were getting them. i know that this probably sounds totally weird and counterintuitive to you--why give them work if you don't read and assess it. well, i was sort of just struggling to stay above water and not have things erupt into chaos on a daily basis, so all my planning pretty much was with that goal in mind and since i didn't have a great sense of where i was going with my kids and what exactly i wanted them to be able to do by the end of any given lesson, their work wasn't as meaningful to me.

teaching is such a process...there's no way that anyone can truly explain to you what to do and yet you are thrown in and expected to do it. luckily, no one is looking over my shoulders in too extreme of a way, either, so it's not disastrous. but it is truly mind-blowing what i was expected to do all within the first week of school. truly amazing. and of course i did a lot of it because you have no choice and i am gradually learning to do a lot of other stuff--like doing a good job of assessing my students' progress, for example. so all that being said, i collect at least 120 papers per day from my 120 students, if not hundreds more than that. the trick is figuring out what you can give done/not done credit to, and what is worth actually grading to see if they understand the content/can do the skill. that is a very important distinction when my students do as much work as they do. basically, i have to grade all of the practice work for completion and yet monitor that at the same time, so i can re-teach what i need to go back to. then, i have to grade for content on the assessments, either formal such as quizzes/tests/papers or things like exit slips or quick individual activities that are cumulative practices of what we've been doing. it's a tough balance because i need to be grading 2-3 things for content each week as well as basically collecting and holding them accountable for all other work. it's a paper nightmare and it's getting better but it's still very difficult to get a grip on.

add to that the fact that i had credential class this evening, dinner with a friend, and a trip to kragen for some car items for my new car (!!!) and i didn't even start on my work until 9 pm. however, i did a bunch of planning/thinking at school before i left for the day so all will be well.

sorry it's been so long since the update...i really appreciate knowing that people like reading this, so i will try to write again soon. this is a 3 day weekend for me so i should be able to squeeze it in. :-)