The Reverse Viola Swamp

In the book Miss Nelson is Missing, a sweet blonde Miss Nelson finally gives up one day when the kids just won't settle down. I seem to remember one page in particular where the paper airplanes whizzed by the shell-shocked eyes of the title character. The next day, Miss Nelson is gone, and in her place is the evil Viola Swamp. The children, so relieved that Viola is out of there a few days later, welcome Miss Nelson back as their usual angelic selves. The last page reveals Miss Nelson's closet, wherein hangs her trusty Viola Swamp costume, ready for the next flying paper airplane.

Ah, if wishing made it so. Instead, I left my students for three days last week (flu) and one day this week (in-service) and when I returned, they were coming down from a "substitute high" fed by too much free time and general rowdiness. Now Viola's back in town, and it is going to take a few days before all of the paper airplane materials have been confiscated. But, Monday is a new week, and I rescheduled a doctors appointment in order to whip their little butts into shape 24/7 next week. Unfortunately for them, this Viola Swamp has no sweet, blonde alter ego. But, she loves them even more than Miss Nelson loved her paper-airplane-throwing darlings.

Blue mood frowning at me

When I woke up this morning, I knew it was going to be one of those days. Even though I went to bed at the early hour of 9:30, I could not believe it when my alarm went off. I cracked one eye open, and the pitch blackness practically forced my eye to close again. I had heard rumor of a possible snow day, so I lay in bed hoping against hope that behind those closed blinds lay mountains of that heavenly white stuff, or at least enough for whoever decides such things to give me permission to go back to sleep. Alas, my force of will was not enough to turn the nasty, drippy weather into something more ominous. I say ominous because when it snows here, you would think it was the end of the word. People lose the ability to drive, and once again the city government wonders why they didn't buy any snowplows the last time this happened.

I finally dragged myself out of bed and stumbled to the shower, hoping that my mood would lift, but with no such luck. I went down stairs for my daily granola (pumpkin spice), yogurt (plain) and Sportscenter (Top 10 Plays). 10 minutes later I was out the door with my husband still nestled all snug in his bed. (To be fair, at least I didn't have to ride my bike to work).

I arrived at school feeling like I had been scraped off the bottom of someone's shoe. I prepared for the day on the verge of tears for no particular reason, soliciting a pep talk from our ever pragmatic academic dean. I like her for many reasons, but mainly because she never patronizes, yet finds a way to offer feedback that is helpful but not overly critical. I was hoping she would tell me to just go home, but much like my snow day, my illness was mostly in my head, so with a few wise words, she sent me on my way.

Two hours later, here I sit. Of course, if suddenly a blizzard erupted and we were all sent home and back to bed, I would not shed a single tear. However, as always, my students have picked the day when I feel the bluest to actually follow directions and (gasp) work quietly. I have big plans to leave promptly(ish) after school and go to bed at a time more fit for a toddler, but for now, thanks to my students, in the words of Miguel, "I need nothing".

Field trippin'

Two months and no posts...I am terrible. I swear, this is the week when I turn it all around. Or so I say. Today was the fifth grade's second journey to the National Museum of the American Indian. We took the city bus, but as this was the second time around, we seemed to have the hang of it. A shout goes out to our inclusion specialist Ms. Palmer, who bravely accompanied us today. I couldn't (and certainly wouldn't) have done it without her.

Last year I did not plan any of my own field trips, so these past few weeks have taught me many things. Here are a few:

1. Be sure to call when running late to avoid having the principal threaten to not let you go on any field trips again, ever. (Fortunately, after brief consideration, he relented.)
2. Read the entire bus schedule. The little dashes mean the bus does not actually go to your desired destination.
3. No amount of preparation can predict how the carefully crafted structure sheets will work when in the hands of actual students. Or flying out of the hands of actual students across the National Mall and probably ending up somewhere in Virginia.
4. Don't plan on actually having the kids eat the authentic Native American food from the food court when chicken fingers and fries are an option.

And so on, and so forth. We are going to the same museum again next week, and as always I will have to adjust what I had planned. The important thing, though, was that we all learned something. Just kidding. The actual important thing was that we made it back to school in one piece, with all of our coats, hats, gloves and notebooks.

An anecdote for today:
A challenge that I would have written about long before had I posted with any regularity is that I have a student in my class who is a brand new arrival from the Dominican Republic. Not only did he come in speaking no English, he is quite the lively (read: exhausting) fellow. At least now he asks if he can go to the bathroom rather than shouting "Voy al baño" on his way out the door. But anyway, he didn't bring money for the authentic Native American cuisines/chicken fingers today, probably because I did not actually tell him that this was something we were doing. I must remember to translate these essential items into Spanish. So, since he was the only one without money for a snack and I actually did want to try some Native American food, I bought him some food as well. I was thinking as we sat down that I should have gotten a soda for myself when out of nowhere Miguel (as I will call him) pulls out a plastic cup from who-knows-where and pours half his drink into it for me. What can I say about that other than quoting the great lyricist Brad Paisley. "Oh, I live for little moments like that."

As I say, or even think this, I am knocking on our hand-me-down, fake-wood IKEA desk, but this year is off to a roaring start. Today was my second full day of school with the children (all half days last week) and it has been great. Our Internet hasn't been working at school, so I can't attach any of my cool new lessons and such, but I'll share a few.

Part of our new charter school model is math workshop, which is great. We have 90 minutes of math each day, and the first forty-five are spent reviewing (and relearning) basic skills like adding, subtracting, and identifying even and odd numbers (today's topic). Then, though, in the second 45 minutes, the fun begins. The children are broken into mixed-ability groups (the same ones each day) and given a multi-step problem. Yesterday, they had to figure out how many M & Ms they would have after a week if they got one the first day, two the second day, etc. The trickiest part of the workshop is getting the kids to write about their answers rather than just putting down a number. Their answers have to include four things: a correct answer, a step-by-step explanation of how they solved the problem, pictures or equations and an interpretation of the answer (i.e. Mrs. Runge got 127 M&Ms for her birthday). Yesterday was our first math workshop and they did fairly well, but today some of them really rocked out. It makes me look forward to continuing with this group as the year goes on.

Whew. I am seriously tired and it's only nine-thirty. Not surprising that newly married + working at least 10 hours a day = exhaustion. Zzzzzzzzzzzzzz.

Is that chalkdust I smell?

Ah, yes. As summer draws to a close, the smell of chlorine and grilled steaks (or tofu) gives way to other odors that induce fond childhood memories. Even though I am beginning my third year as a teacher and have grown somewhat accustomed to being the one with the big desk, the smells of school always manage to take me back.
School starts for our students in a mere 13 days, but as teachers, we are already back in action. My fans have reminded me (okay, so maybe it was just one, and she's related to me) that with the start of school it is time for me to resume my more-infrequent-than-I-would-like blog posts. As I have discussed previously (I think), this year marks another period of transition because although my school building is the same, we have converted from Catholic to Charter, or, more simply, private to public. I also had to give up my prime location across from the girls' bathroom, but I am hoping that since my new room previously belonged to one of the greatest teachers ever, I am inheriting a good vibe.
Along with a new room and a new mission, I have almost a completely new set of coworkers. So far, so good, though. Each of them seems passionate about children (a quality that an alarming number of teachers lack) and I think I may have even found a kindred spirit or two in the bunch.
This summer was a trip, literally and figuratively. I am now joyfully Mrs. Kurt Runge, and in the past months I have spent time in Illinois, Michigan, Kentucky and the Dominican Republic, all on top of, oh yes, getting married here in DC. It was great fun, but I am glad to be home with my new husband, who will be starting his last year of grad school on Monday.
This week, I plan on finishing the setting up of my classroom and going door to door trying to recruit a few more students. One of my coworkers suggested I wear jeans so that I am not mistaken for a Jehovah's witness. As you can tell, these people are already concerned for my welfare.

Black like me?

Mondays always seem to leave me with a head so full of...stuff? that all I can do is come home, drink lots of water, stare at the TV (on or not) and then writing things like "stuff" before falling into bed. Today was great, especially considering that it was raining for the too-many-th day in a row (or maybe indoor recess just makes it feel that way). I left for 15 minutes to gobble some lunch only to come back to a shrugging PE teacher surrounded by some hostile looking fifth graders. Before I could deduce what had happened, someone told me that we were all out of incident reports for "the box". When I left for lunch, there were about twenty blank reports left. I knew that we were in big trouble.

A side note - After trying all manner of disciplinary techniques throughout the course of the year, one that I have settled upon for arbitrating minor grievances works like this: A student who has an issue with someone else records the pertinent details along with the names of all involved on an incident report. Before recess, I go through "the box" (quotation marks compliments of the ever dramatic 5th graders). All parties not mentioned may go out for recess, and all others must stay until things get sorted out. If nothing else, it forces the students to consider whether or not their problem is serious enough to warrant missing part of recess. Also, I find that by keeping all relevant persons detained, I have a chance to get all aspects of the story before rendering, or arriving at, a potential solution. A copy of the blank incident reports (4 to a page in the interest of the environment and the encouragement of brevity) can be found by clicking the link below.

Blank incident report

So, anyway, apparently someone touched someone who said something about someone who in turn said something about someone's Mama. Yep. Hence the indoor recess brain overload.

Bedtime is upon me, but I don't feel like changing my ingenious title of this post, so one last story for the night. David is doing his country report on China, which led to a discussion of Chinatown in DC. Amazed to find out that there are real, live Chinese people living in his city, David comments, "So, it's like black people and Chinese people, mostly?" I look at him a little sideways and try not to laugh as I boggle his mind further.
"Well, there are other people, too. For example, by Naisha's house, there are lots of people from Mexico and other Spanish speaking countries." (Insert brief digression on the part of Naisha re: loud dance club and parking shortage in her neighborhood.)
"They speak Spanish in Mexico?" David asks.
Trying to distract myself from thoughts of my failures as a social studies teacher, I say, "And, I mean, I live in DC, too."
"So?" says David, looking quite confused as to the point of my comment.
"Well," I say, now somewhat confused myself, "I'm not black."
"Then what is you?" (Yep, there go any illusions about my grammar teaching as well).
"Naisha," I say, wanting to be sure that not all my students are as ethnocentric(?) as David, "How would you classify me, racially speaking?"
"Um, I think, uh, you're just white, right?"
"Yes, yes, I am."
"You is?" (David, again. At least, I tell myself, he stopped saying "I'm am" about mid-October)
"I am. Why did you think I was black? Am I just cooler than most white people you know?"
"Yes."
Well, okay then. Where were we? Oh yeah. The landforms of China. At the very least, I will tell myself as I fall into bed tonight, I allow my students to fully flesh out their misconceptions before I attempt to unravel them. And, at least, as white people go, I am pretty cool.

P.S. I wrote a paper in college about how I did not wish to racially identify myself based solely on my skin color. I got a B- and a comment from my TA that it is a privilege of the white race to be able to decide not to racially identify oneself. Three years later, I am happily unsure of what box my students might check for me. Go figure.

6 weeks (or so) and counting

It has been forever since I've posted, and of course I feel bad about that. It reminds my of my junior high pen pal and I, who liked the idea of writing letters, but when it came down to it, were never as dedicated as we hoped to be. Consequently we started pretty much every letter with, "Sorry it took me so long to write back". My favorite hard-time giver gave me a hard time about this here blog yesterday, so I decided to spend my recess time casting my thoughts in to the "blogosphere". (I heard someone use that word in a sentence for the first time last week, and it is too cheesy not to put in quotation marks when using it in written form).

Today, as a part of our mystery unit, my class explored the elements of a book review. I have created this nifty sheet for analyzing genres (a term I use loosely to mean forms of writing), and for the two genres we've broken down so far, it has worked quite well. You can download the form by clicking on the link below.

Genre analysis sheet

To use this sheet, my class reads a few examples of a certain kind of writing, such as a book review or a mystery. (For the mystery analysis, I chose a book that we had already read as a class, James and Deborah Howe's Bunnicula, or as one student insists upon calling it, Binocula). Though a discussion of the pieces, we come up with 5 or 6 elements of the genre. For book reviews, we chose the following elements: summary, favorite part of the book, quotations and details, recommendation (or not) and leaving out important information. We record the elements on the genre analysis sheet, define the elements, then look at two example works and pick out the various elements. Finally, the students write, in their own words, what the purpose is for writing in that particular genre. Author's purpose is something that was on the standardized test that they just took, and I think that this sheet is a way to teach that using authentic examples.

That's enough teacher talk today, so I'll end with an amusing anecdote. One of my students had his desk moved yesterday because he would not stop kicking the student sitting across from him. When I talked with him and his mother this morning, she asked him if this has been a problem for awhile. He said, "No, but it was a problem yesterday. I think I grew a lot overnight."