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. Acronyms

I promised that I would write more in my blog, and here I am making an effort. 

I joined the staff of Gumball Elementary School for a meeting during which all manner of results and numbers were half-heartedly explained in attractive, powerpoint graphs. We were asked to pinpoint what "we did right," "what we didn't quite get," and "burning questions." Having never worked at Gumball, I had very little to say on these matters, but it was an insight into how boring real life teacher meetings can be. It was simultaneously disheartening and reassuring to see how confused the teachers were, and how many of them were content to sit at their tables and whisper things like, "what does any of this mean?" And the fact of the matter is, these people are teachers; THESE PEOPLE ARE SMART. So, rather than you, the reader, losing faith in the public school system, please instead consider how ridiculous standardized test scores can cause everything to appear. 

Students aren't kids named Aidan or Beverly or Tien, they are numbers that go in all manner of categories like "Pacific Islander or other," or "special education," or "ELL," or sometimes all three. These categories all have their own numbers -some percentages, some percentiles, and all of them color coded. I heard things like, "this is something to celebrate - the black kids increased their progress in reading by 14.2%!" But really, all black kids aren't reading better, it just means that the handfull of black kids in the specific 4th grade cohort had watched enough sesame street, whereas the previous cohort may have all been refugees from some African country you're pretty sure you've heard of, but pray nobody ever asks you what region it's in... because you're pretty sure it's in east Africa, but really it could be near the Baltic Sea for all you know about geography that is anywhere east of Europe and west of China. 

Geography aside, it is really strange to look at demographics and numbers and to think that a good number of kids who really need to know stuff like how to read and add sums aren't up to grade standard. Can we all just take a moment for those kids? OK, back to the numbers. 

Seattle Public Schools are apparently in trouble; only 35 schools in the state qualify as at or above standard on our standardized tests (all of them with horrible acronyms like the MAP or WASL or MSP, which I guess isn't technically an acronym although it could arguably be pronounced, "misp.")  

On the upside, the 5th grade team seem very happy to challenge their assumptions, change things around and never be set in their ways. Mrs. Cake is my teacher, Mrs. KLRZ is another teacher (she would fit in the "Pacific Islander or Other" category as a Samoan-American), and Mrs. Short, who used to be KLRZ's teacher intern back in the day. I am looking forward to working with them and seeing how on earth planning for 5th grade works when there are 3 people in charge of it. As I may have mentioned, Gumball is an open concept school, so our 5th grade classrooms are all in the same space and the teachers are very involved in one another's planning. 

Eventually the meeting ended, and my friend who will be working in the 1st grade classes (Hannah is her name) drove me home and we listened to Ludacris circa 2003 and it was awesome. 

I hope that I teach in Seattle long enough to create my own acronym for standardized testing. I'm thinking along the lines of FISH (fundamentals of integrated school humanities), RAIN (ritual assessment of intellectual (k)nowledge) or TSFTWHTT (that stupid ****ing test we have to take). I am open to other ideas, too. 

Rachel K. Rainbow Lodge

in North Bend, WA (Where Twin Peaks is!)

On Monday morning I embarked on a mini road trip with three of my cohorts for the arts and culture retreat at Rainbow Lodge in North Bend, WA. The girls I drove with are really nice; Hannah and Amber want to teach elementary school and Hilary is looking to teach math or English at the high school level.

The lodge was very beautiful, settled in the tall pine trees and looking smoky in the shadow of the mountains around it. It rained the whole time we were there, but it the moisture made everything seem cozier on the inside and lusher outside.

The objective of the arts retreat is to look at how visual arts, music, dance and drama can be incorporated into everyday classroom study. This, they tell us, is important in that it is a way to connect students' creativity into their learning processes (also it is of value since the arts have zero budgets in most schools and students don't have opportunities to learn them.)

We learned all about the cognitive development of children, young adolescents and teenagers and how movement and music is integral to helping students at these stages of life. We got to sing and play instruments and dance around, although dancing around after lunch seemed to have set off some kind of stomach bug that I had been developing all morning. Yes, I had a stomach bug AGAIN.

So, I was forced to retire halfway through dance class (and I was having so much fun, too.) I spent the rest of that evening in bed trying to feel better and falling in and out of fitful naps. My roommate, Aimee, also had a stomach bug along with another girl down the hall, Renee. It must be going around schools since I seem to have caught it twice now. In any case, the retreat sort of lost steam for me at that point and I really wanted to go home, but the show had to go on!

Drama was a lot of fun, and after resting in the afternoon I had the energy to participate during the evening activity. The teacher was extremely positive and encouraging to us and I think it will benefit how I manage my classroom in the future; the teacher told us it was important to keep kids active and to help them see mistakes in behavior or academics rather than pointing it out to them or to scold. I like that -- more smiling in class! Huzzah!

Roger Shimomura's Depiction of Ichiro Suzuki in an Internment Camp

The next day we had visual arts, which was less titillating than the other art classes we had participated in. The teacher was nice and gave us some tools to talk about visual arts, (we looked at some work from Roger Shimomura) but gave us no advice on how to teach visual arts as integrated through other subject matter. This is a damn shame; Roger Shimomura's artwork spans the history of Japanese internment camps AND pop culture (as seen above). There was also some tension between a few of the cohorts about eastern versus western artistic expression that was not led nor diffused by the teacher and left many of us feeling sour. The notion that our opinions may not be valid because someone of Asian descent says "you're wrong," without giving a supporting argument. Really, it was an example of how not to run a classroom, which may be as educational as learning how to run one well.

The last item on the agenda was to make and present our "culture boxes," which are essentially dioramas that discuss our family culture and sense of self. It was pretty fun, although we didn't do very much with the end result. Now I just have an amazon.com box covered in photos and stickers and nowhere to put it!

After a quick wrap-up, we left North Bend and yammered to each other all the way back to Seattle. All in all a good trip, but I'm starting to worry that doing new things seems to give me STOMACH DOOM. Since we had to present artistic projects at the end of the day, I wrote the following poem:
(something to note is that the "golden apple" award is a teaching award that was given to the movement teacher.)

Ode to Rainbow Lodge (and my Immune System)

Rachel Kay

The rainbow lodge is a magical place,

Where the arts and new teachers come face-to-face,

Yet alas, for one of these teachers was ill,

A week with the children did her immune system kill.

So what was in store for this invalid sap?

How would she manage to feather her cap?

The answer was art, drama, music and dance,

Though her body so ached and wobbled her stance.

First there was music – rhythm and song,

Who knew we had hidden our talents so long?

We warbled in languages nobody knew,

We stomped and we clapped and our confidence grew.

We then went to dance class and left the warm chapel,

To learn about movement from our Golden Apple,

We twisted and turned and jumped through our spaces,

We learned about math, and took our minds to new places.

In the evening we played with the man we called Barry,

We tried poems and costumes, though some were quite scary.

Though dressed like Steve Jobbs, he engaged us all night,

We were welcomed as teachers and cured of stage fright.

And though she did spend more time sick than time well,

And being bereft of the food was HER HELL,

She will remember this voyage with fondness, not ire,

Because it so strengthened her teaching desire.

Here is another one of my favorite Shimomura pieces for no particular reason.

Roger Powah~