Miss Bennett in the Bay

Because it was only the first week of school, my students are not quite used to our school procedures yet. During recess one day, two girls, K and Y, had wandered all the way down the hallway to my classroom. Since they aren’t supposed to do this, I was ushering them back down the hallway, listening to their conversation.

K: Do you want to go play beer?
Me (in my head): What??
Y: Huh?
K: Do you want to play beer with me? There’s some great grass where we can play beer.
Me (thinking that I’ve got a little brew master on my hands): K, I don’t think that’s an appropriate game.
K (looking up at me with big eyes): Oh no, it’s a really nice game! You just go in the grass and pretend to be forest animals and eat the grass!
Me: Sweetheart, that’s called deer.

This first week went really well. I have a lot of students, but they all seem to want to try really hard and are following directions for the most part. I am really excited to start diagnosing them on reading, because from my informal observations this week I think I’m going to have a wide range of levels in my class. So far, my students seem much happier and more well-adjusted than my students last year. I am really much more excited about my job this year than I ever was last year. Things are definitely improving.

26 students + 99 degrees + no air conditioning = 1 very, very exhausted Ms. Bennett.

Some more interesting numbers from my first day of my second year of teaching:
Number of desks: 23 (note the disparity between that and the number of students)
Number of blisters: 4
Times I almost fell: 2
Kids who speak without raising hands: 6
Moments I really, really wanted the day to just end: 10.

It’s hot. I’m tired. I’m going to bed.

It is time for that moment that every teacher and administrator since NCLB was instated either looks forward to or dreads: the STAR (State Testing and Accountability Report) release.

On Tuesday, I was at school working on a project for my principal. I knew that the scores had been released to principals already, since the week before, at our math training, a teacher from another school had been told by her principal that their school had finally gotten out of P.I. Since I hadn’t heard anything about our scores yet, I figured since I was there, I might as well ask about them.

Me: Do you have our test scores yet?
Principal (managing to somehow nod and shake her head at the same time): No………. yes.
Me (mildly to moderately confused): You have them?
Principal: Yes.
Me: But you won’t tell us?
Principal: Well…… I can’t. Not until the 14th.
Me: Ok. Will you email them to us as soon as you can?
Principal: Sure.

Fast forward to Thursday, the 14th. I spent the morning at the DMV getting my California driver’s license (yes, a year late) and the afternoon planning and checking my work email incessantly. When 3 o’clock rolled around, and I still hadn’t gotten an email about the scores, I sent an email to my principal and the entire second grade team asking for them. Later that day, they finally came. Our principal says, “We need to CELEBRATE!”

In ELA, 49% of our students were proficient or advanced.
In Math, 50% of our students were proficient or advanced.

Is this worth celebrating? I am ambivalent. The ELA scores were 1% higher than the year before. The math scores were 10% lower than the year before. I can’t get the scores of my class yet, as they haven’t been uploaded into the system. My initial reaction to seeing the scores was to feel nothing. They didn’t do as badly as they could have, certainly, but I know we could have done much better as well. It will be interesting to see what the expectations are now that we have our very first scores as a school.

We are 2 weeks out from the start of school. I’ve been making posters, planning, and thinking about how I want to change my room layout for this year. In addition, Jess and I have spent time meeting with new 2008 corps members to talk about our experiences and unit planning, management, and whatever else they might need. It is very amusing to me that I can meet with people who are my own age, with the same level of education as me, who consider me (me!) to be an “expert.” I always try to bring my own humanity into the conversation and point out how I struggled at the beginning. The last thing I want is for the new corps members to see me as some kind of superhuman teaching robot without flaws. I was very amused yesterday when 4 corps members from San Fransisco were furiously taking notes on every word I had to say.

Being in this quasi-mentor position has re-ignited a part of me that I had forgotten in the whirlwind of Teach for America. When I was in college, I held various leadership positions in Phi Sigma Pi. The thing I loved the most about it was helping my peers become better at something they really wanted. This translates easily into what I’ve been doing this week with the new corps members. I know that as I improve my teaching even more, I can help new teachers even more. Even though the future is always uncertain, I’m wondering if I should find some way to use this strength to close the achievement gap.