Car Time

One of my favorite parts of road trips is being able to read and daydream uninterrupted. Today's in-car reading was a bunch of essays that I'm thinking about using in my Senior Seminar class next year. I read three essays and then sat and pondered how I was going to integrate them into my class, what the linking ideas were across the texts, and how I was going to help the students see the connections among them. I ended up with a list of four essay of varying lengths and difficulties for my students to read, but I'm still working on how, exactly, I'm going to guide them to linking all these ideas together. I'm also debating whether or not I want to have the students start looking at text structure and organization so early in the year. All told, I think I worked for about 40 minutes (I read really fast).

Additionally, my morning was spent having a discussion-debate with my family about other issues in education - funding, magnets, bussing for racial diversity, and local school councils. It was a good conversation, but definitely highlighted why a one-size-fits-all model is a bad idea. What works for Akron, OH is not necessarily going to work for Chicago, IL; the experiences and expectations of the people in those two places are just too different.

Dear world, please let educators educate and doctors doc and lawyers law and stop trying to tell people how to do their jobs!

On another note, over 500 CPS teachers are being laid off. So far neither my partner or I are on the list, but it's only June 27th.

I Come By It Honestly

One of the best things about being a teacher is that I am not the only one in my family. My partner is a teacher, my grandmother was a teacher, my Bubby was a teacher, my aunt was a school social worker, my other aunt is a docent, and my mom was a girl scout leader and did train-the-trainer stuff. So there are plenty of people in my family who understand how challenging it is to get a large group of people doing the same activity at the same time and actually getting something out of it rather than just occupying themselves with busy work.

So when I was visiting my grandmother today, I was talking with her about some of the changes that are coming to the standardized testing that my students will be experiencing in this coming year. We were talking about how I have to go back and re-design all the exams I'd written in previous years and create new ones in order to help students become familiar with the style of the PARCC exam. After I explained, very energetically, for about 10 minutes, my grandmother smiled at me and told me how wonderful it was that I love my job so much.

I am never not a teacher. Even when I'm talking to my family, I'm teaching them about teaching.