Rachel K. Setup

I have started going to Gumball Elementary to work with Mrs. Cake every day, and we have been preparing for the new school year together. Mrs. Cake is a prepared and organized person, so her set up was mostly finished by the time I showed up; this left me free to help the other two teachers, who were on vacation or simply out of town for the time that Mrs. Cake was setting up. The majority of my responsibilities were to write names on things. I wrote names on plastic bags, folders, and note cards to put in "tote trays," which are storage drawers that exist in lieu of desk cubbies. The work has been perfunctory, but has been helpful in getting to know many of the students' names (there are almost 90 in the 5th grade whom I will be seeing at least once a week for the next school year). 


A few tips on organization that I have picked up: 


Index Cards:
 Index cards with students' names written on them will serve as notes for the entire school year. Mrs. Cake had prepared 28 note cards to bring to our meetings with the 5th graders previous teachers. The 4th grade teachers talked about students that need special attention or are falling behind in certain subjects. This way, Mrs. Cake will be able to access quick references on the students at any time.


Plastic Bag Collection: 

Take a large Ziploc bag and two small Ziploc bags. Write the student's name on the large bag (Gary, for instance). Then, one one of the small bags, write "Word of the Day," and the other bag, "Vocabulary." As students learn words and Latin or Greek roots, they will write the definitions or examples down on note cards and place them accordingly in the small bags. Next, the small bags will go inside the large bag. The student's small whiteboard also goes inside the large bag, along with two colored markers (green for Greek roots, red for Latin). Now the student has a system for their word learning and for their white boards. 


Colorful, Appropriate Magazines:
Mrs. Cake saves magazines over the summer to bring in for the 5th grade. The students will decorate their composition notebooks with cool images that excite them. Many of these magazines are food-related or science and world culture themed, like the National Geographic. 


Seating Chart: 
Mrs. Cake makes a few seating charts. One of these is written on a laminated diagram of the classroom and has the names of where students are going to be for the first part of school. The other diagrams help her with collecting things like permission slips or school supplies. The school supply diagram has abbreviations by each student's name: K for Kleenex, $ for $2.00 that they need to bring in, N for notebook, B for binder. As Mrs. Cake collects these supplies, she simply circles K when the student has brought in Kleenex. 


There are a lot more ideas for organization, but I will put up photos of the classroom instead of writing about every little thing! 

On the board, Mrs. Cake has set up a purple border for students to know what math to do, and a green border for spelling words and Greek and Latin roots. This helps students to be accountable and responsible for making sure they know that is going on if they miss the directions.

A place for every thing, and everything in its place. 

There is a cup for each table group (all labeled with numbers). If a students needs scissors,  he or she will bring the entire cup over to the table and make sure all the scissors are accounted for before it goes back. 

Markers follow the same logic as scissors. 

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. Camp

After a summery blur of headaches, white polos, kids, Jersey and too much sleep, I went to an orientation for my student teaching internship at Seattle University; this event represents the end of my summer and the start of the rest of my master in teaching program.

I spent the majority of the summer working at a private technology camp for privileged "indoor children" at the local, big-name university (it lasted 8 weeks, but to say 56 days or even 1,344 hours seems to capture the camp essence more aptly). I was hired to be the assistant director, which is the glamorous office manager position that I held the previous year, in which I did a lot of work and nobody knew who I was. I prefer "backstage" work like that, but I ended up being unexpectedly promoted after pushing the director down a flight of oiled stairs the director fell suddenly ill. It was a daunting position this year because the university elected to close the only nearby, working cafeteria on campus, which relegated 110 people per week to buying our lunches at a glorified 7-11. As the weeks slugged by, my initial enthusiasm for young people and healthful eating subsided and I found myself thinking aloud, "I guess beef jerky is a well rounded lunch, Aidan," or "Sure thing, Aiden (a girl this time), you can totally have 3 sodas today... cuz camp is supposed to be fun. Just don't tell your mom, kay?" The way children choose food and eat it is generally appalling. However, after my third complaint that "the management is too strict on the children eating vegetables and fruits," I gave up and decided that most parents are terrible human beings who want their children to develop scurvy so Angelina Jolie will consider adopting them and they, the parent, will finally have that opportunity to be a career gal. I realize I'm being unfair, but parents can be demanding and ridiculous. Plus, I'm not a parent and can judge other parents freely and without remorse. I had the pleasure of working with some industrious and creative young people, and enjoyed policing their unbridled lollygagging. I also was at the advantage, as being the most in charge person dictates, of being harangued by police officers about negligence (I will deny it until my dying day), sending kids home at 3am for bullying, writing kids up for cyber bullying, writing kids up for punching other kids after an argument about Pokémon, writing kids up for calling each other "fag" on a LAN server, having upset parents scream racial slurs at me, comforting grown staff members as they cried/had stuff stolen/were fired, and playing apples to apples ad nauseam. It was an eventful season, and now it is over, and it is likely that in my deranged condition of liking children and hating free time that I will be raring to go again for camp by March.

For now, it's time to get back into the swing of my masters program. I'll be working at Gumball Elementary (name changed to protect the innocent/be awesome) in a 5th grade open concept classroom with a kindly woman named Mrs. Cake (protecting the innocent!!!) I have no idea when I'm expected to show up for work there, but I've been told in as many words from the folks at SU that I won't be expected to show up for my masters classes again until September 17th. It is likely that I will have some sort of child-related, educational experiences with Mrs. Cake between now and the 17th, which will be a welcome change to me playing video games all day, napping and playing more video games. I have also watched about 90 movies on netflix instant, and will continue to use its fine product while complaining about the price increase. $2 more a month? Highway robbery!

I will do my best to write more, and to keep an account of this program and my blossoming into teacherhood.