Rachel K. Poncho

A quick note:

I went and bought some clothes on sale after Christmas. Most of what I bought is something I would refer to as a "boho maternity poncho." I don't know why I bought things that are huge and billowy and comfortable, other than the aforementioned details. Maybe it's because I don't want the kids to ask me if I'm pregnant after lunch. Maybe it's because ponchos are secretly the greatest thing ever. Maybe it's that they have pockets. The world may never know.

Rachel K. TPA SUDDENLY

Student teaching began on January 3rd, which was only two days after my entire family left Seattle after a wonderful two weeks of overeating and enjoying each other's company (most of the time).

I am all about mornings. I love my breakfast routine, I love having coffee and reading ebooks on my kindle, and I love the quiet. The hard part for me is going to sleep on time, like around 10pm, like when I'd much rather be watching TV or petting the cats, or doing anything other than sitting around in bed hoping my brain will go into sleep mode.

The fifth graders are wonderful, as usual. One of mine was so wonderful she said this to me,

"You're 27? So's my mom!" 

The first week of student teaching has been the "week of Thursdays," or a week of days much like the ones on which I was intern teaching before the winter hiatus. It was the most boring week of all time. Mostly I sat around and watched other people teach and wandered around waiting for death to come the end of the day. It was planned that the following week I would start teaching my Themed Literature Unit, "Finding a Voice," with my teacher companion Cleo.

Then, suddenly, we changed everything around. The second week back was now to be used to teach Unit 5 of math (fractions, decimals, percents). This was a unit that I had planned only weeks ago while in TEED 521 at school, and I felt somewhat prepared to teach it. However, I was not prepared to start video taping my lessons and writing reflections for something called the TPA, or teacher preparation assessment (I'm 80% sure that's what it stands for).

The TPA is something I have to complete by April for my certification. A bunch of strangers in California are going to watch my video clips, review my lesson plans, and read my reflections and decide if I am fit to teach children. The other part of this was that we have not yet learned how to write the TPA at school. So, all of these changes created the perfect stress storm.

I spent the first week of the math unit teaching my brains out, video taping everything, and slowly getting better and better. I only had one lesson bomb, and that was totally my fault. Slowly I became accustomed to timing, teaching, and not starting every sentence with, "So!"Video taping oneself teaching is something I highly recommend to any teacher out there. I planned lessons every night and went over them with Kevin to make sure they were clear. I created charts for the students to fill with their observations and ideas, and I taught them about FRACTIONS all week. It was glorious, and I loved every second of it.

I spent this past weekend planning the second week of instruction, pouring over assessments and figuring out what students needed more help with, creating review homework, and beefing up the regular homework with more interesting word problems or charts.

And then the snow came. The snow came and we had a two hour delay and a two hour early release on  Tuesday and math was a bust. Now it's Wednesday and there is still snow and no school at all.

The best laid plans of student teachers + important certification materials  = snow.

So instead of describing my teaching this week, I will leave some teaching tips that I've come across during my first week of mathematics adventures:

1. Plan plan plan: For me, knowing my content and knowing where I'm going with it has been key for me as a student teacher. I am always able to answer student questions and I can anticipate their logic or where they might be going with their ideas.

I planned this lesson at home and then took a picture of the whiteboard. Then I simply recreated it!

2. Let the students define the vocabulary: Rather than supplying my students with boring definitions from the math book, we talk about words and then the students help define them with their own understandings. I think this is more interesting and it allows students to construct understanding of new words in a contextualized setting - and that's how we all build our own definitions in life anyway.

3. "Mathematicians!" I use this attention getter when I want my students to listen up and when I want to start a sentence. I simply say, "mathematicians!" and my students cross their arms and answer, "Nyeee-eeeeEEEEssss?" It's fun, it's simple, and it prevents me from starting sentences with arbitrary words like, "so!" or "now!" or "OK!"

4. Ask kids about what they already know to get them more interested in the world around them. This may be obvious to many people, but I don't see it a lot in the classroom. I have a "math in everyday life" chart that we add ideas to every morning. This gets kids to open their eyes and see the fractions or decimals or percents in their everyday lives. What, you mean math is SOMETHING WE USE IN EVERYDAY LIFE? Preposterous!

Rachel K. Something Something Instruction and Curriculum

Hooray! It is after December 9th and that means that I am finished with Block II, during which I had one class only, and it was entitled, "something something instruction and curriculum." AND NOW IT IS DONE.

Block II lasted from mid-September until December 9th (coincidentally coinciding with my lack of blogging). This course consisted of teaching at Gumball Elementary school every Thursday, writing three unit plans that required about 30-40 hours of work each, going to school four days a week for 6 hours, and having to turn in arbitrary assignments for art, PE, and the environment. I earned a feather in my cap by teaching my fifth grade classroom at Gumball, volunteering to teach 2nd graders at Echo Lake Elementary about car factories, and participating in an all-day instructional adventure about TREES with first graders. This block also solidified a friendship with Hannah, my all-in-one carpool driver and support system.

Experiences like Block II create so much blog fodder that it is impossible to remember any of it. So, I will bullet point some things I remember and maybe expound upon them later.

• I am good at grades •
I always managed to get straight As as an undergraduate, but I generally assumed this was because I was in film school and the professors probably chose grades at random via some kind of dartboard/AVID contraption. For those of you who don't know what an AVID is, it is somewhere in between Final Cut Pro and a washing machine. If you don't know what Final Cut Pro is, you have probably already stopped reading this paragraph. Anyway, I found myself getting grades like As and A+s this quarter, which at first boosted my confidence in new and exciting ways, but then threw me down the irritating path of being Hermione Granger. Remember Hermione Granger BEFORE she saved everyone's butts in Books 5-7? She was annoying. She was annoying because all she cared about were A+s and outdoing everyone. I was like Hermione Granger this quarter (bushy brows and unkempt hair included). As it turns out, doing really well on things makes me feel like doing less than SUPER AMAZING will be letting myself down. What do grades have to do with being a good teacher? Probably not a whole lot. And so, my goal for Block III: Student Teaching is to chill out, concentrate on the important stuff, and to have more Hermione moments from books 5-7.

•I am a Pretty Good Teacher, I think• 
With all of the teaching practice I had this Block (including with the primary grades, which I am hesitant to teach), I felt pretty good about my abilities to plan and perform lessons. I say perform because I feel that I am perfecting my stage presence with kids in order to maximize task engagement and positive learning experiences (and other things that sound good in unit plan descriptions). The kids seem to like me cuz I'm young and hip and make references to Legos and Pokemon as much as possible. Glee's cool, amirite??!  I am pretty excited to be student teaching with my grand lesson plans and fifth graders come January. But for now, I'm also very excited to be spending some time with my couch and netflix.

•Gee, I hope I can get a job after all this•
'Nuff said. That's going to be coming up next Block, too.

Rachel K. AFK

Things are busy beans right now. I'm finishing up the last two weeks of my formal teaching education before becoming an official student teacher while having my boyfriend and his two cats move into my apartment. Needless to say - THINGS ARE CRAZY BANANAS right now.

I promise a blog post soon (possibly today), but until then please enjoy pictures drawn by Tristyn Pease, my BFF from Los Angeles who needs to work for some animation company that will let her draw more stuff like this:

It's true: Babies are the WORST. 

Rachel K. Doing History

We've begun our social studies methods strand in my Master in Teaching Program at last! Our instructor is the head of the MIT program, and she is the inventor of Storypath, which is an amazing social studies curriculum. 

Right now we are "Doing History" in class. We've created personal timelines and yesterday we wrote about specific events in our lives in class. Then, for homework, we each had to talk to someone about our historical event (a primary source). I talked about the nine months of my life that I refer to fondly as "Lifeapocalypse," during which I had absolutely no idea how to become a teacher. I had just quit my job at Starbucks, and I was trying to figure out what direction to tumble in next.

Today we had to write a historical account of our event that comes from multiple perspectives, or primary sources. Here is my combined history as remembered by myself and Kevin:

Lifeapocalypse: A Brief History 
     Lifeapocalypse describes the months of March 2010 until around June of the same year, during which a 25-year old called Rachel K. Sreebny quit her job at Starbucks and began her journey in pedagogy. The events that led up to Sreebny's resignation from the coffee conglomerate are not clear, though it is documented that Starbucks introduced a line of lunch sandwiches during the same time. Reports also show that the weather in Seattle during this time was cold, and an unseasonable bummer.
     Upon leaving Starbucks, Sreebny was reported to have spent two straight days on her couch watching Jeopardy on her DVR; the Direct TV account was canceled a month later, though it is speculated that this was due to financial constraints more so than a proclivity for sloth. In fact, Sreebny was said to have been rather "industrious" by those who knew her well.
     In a personal account by Kevin Costello, Sreebny's boyfriend at the time, she was said to have spent only a short time on the couch during Lifeapocalypse. Not long after she had formally severed ties with her barista position did she begin, "plotting, scheming and color-coding..." in an alleged wall-sized calendar constructed by hand, and affixed to the dining room wall.
     Costello recalls fondly that Sreebny studied a lot of math, which he helped her with in his spare time outside of being a Microsoft employee. "(She) seemed like she felt she wasn't doing enough, but she was already on track for graduate school like a week after talking about it." Costello also remembers that Sreebny spoke often of graduate school notions, sometimes while donning a makeshift cape made out of a Snuggie.
     According to Sreebny's blog entry, dated March 8 2010 and entitled, "Rachel K. Restart," Sreebny claims, "I need to start focusing on what I need to do to find the path I know I want to take in life." This informal goal statement marked the beginning of Lifeapocalypse, which would unofficially come to an end the following March in 2011 when Sreebny began her Master in Teaching Program at Seattle University. As Costello summarized in his personal account of the event, "[She] went from job to no job, but it was the good kind of job to no job."