Miss Bennett in the Bay

When it rains, it pours.

That has certainly been true here in the Bay Area for the past week. We’re experiencing that classic Bay Area winter- a few weeks of rain, followed by spring.

Rainy day after rainy day is making everyone nuts. When kids get wet, the extra crazy comes out. I believe that their energy reserves are water activated. If you’ve ever been to a water park in the summer, you know what I’m talking about.

But that figure of speech also applies to the amount of work once has to do, and the work is certainly pouring on me right now. I have taken on more responsibilities at work and now I’m in charge of a math data project. I’m very much enjoying it, but it is causing many more deadlines to occur much more quickly. I’ve been working late every night for the past couple of weeks (at home, but still) and the next round of report cards and conferences are right around the corner. After that we’ll have a big push before the CST.

Sigh. It’s a never-ending carousel ride going at 100 mph. Are all jobs like this?

I’m also getting into the thick of wedding planning. This weekend we are hoping to address and send out our save the date cards, which is no easy task.

And, in the interest of feeling like I have more of a life, I’ve booked several weekend trips this winter, both near and far. I’m booked clear up to the beginning of March. I could cancel some of these things, but then I would just do more work. And one thing I realized before Christmas break was that I could literally spend all of my time just working, eating, and sleeping, and still not get everything checked off my list. So, it’s about priorities. Get the things done that must be done, and then take time for myself. Because ultimately, a sane teacher is an effective teacher.

I know much of my regularly-scheduled programming is much more meta-analysis than some other teacher blogs out there, which sort of helps me keep my life in perspective. I try to be a big-picture kind of person, particularly when reflecting on my practice. Otherwise, the day-to-day would totally wear me down.

But, much of teaching is present in the details. It’s the little, itty-bitty things that make the difference for the kids and make up my day. Since my day is not what you would call typical, I thought it might be fun to take you through a day in the life of Ms. Bennett.

5:00 am: Alarm goes off. Hit snooze for 20-30 minutes. Yes, I know, just set the alarm for 20-30 minutes later. But then, I wouldn’t get up until 20-30 minutes after that. It takes me a long time to wake up, ok?

5:30: Take dog out. Freeze. Get ready and waste lots of time checking email and Facebook.

7:00: Arrive at school. Perform various morning duties (which can range from hurriedly making last minute copies to wasting more time checking email and Facebook.)

8:00: School’s morning procedure begins out on the blacktop. Freeze again.

8:20: Begin first class. Spend 30 minutes warming up inside classroom. My first class happens to be one of my more challenging classes, so I usually spend a good deal of time pulling individual kids aside to try to put out some fires. Different strategies work on different days- some days, it’s making a deal with a student that I’ll have lunch with them later. Others, it’s timing them to see how much they can accomplish in one minute. Still others it’s bribing them with the large dice I have to practice math facts with. It’s a constant barrage of random requests and odd behavior.

9:40: First transition. At least 10 minutes are spent arranging various lines of kids into a decent, workable line.

9:50: Begin second class. Much calmer than first. Have a minute to breathe and eat an apple. Management in this class pretty much just consists of, “Here, do your work.” Sure, the occasional squabble may arise, but after the first class, it seems like a piece of cake.

11:20: Lunch. Ah, the joys of sitting down quietly for 40 minutes.

12:00: Pick up next class. They are always wound up after lunch. Spend the majority of the class period managing wild students. By this time, my script for my lesson is memorized. I have a sort of out-of-body experience in which I feel I’m sitting in the back of the room watching my lesson on videotape since I’ve already said it so many times today.

1:40: Last transition. Usually by this time I am simply thankful that I’ll survive the day. The last class can be really well-behaved or really crazy, depending on the alignment of the planets and how much sugar was pumped into the water supply that day.

3:40: School ends. Take students to cafeteria for dismissal. Spend at least 5 minutes trying to get students to sit down and be quiet. Realize that no other students are being quiet and give up, to retreat to my classroom for some peace and quiet.

4:00: After school program begins. An after school class is in my room. Wish that the 15 minutes of peace were much longer.

4:00-6:00: My after school time is used in different ways on different days. Sometimes we have meetings or school events; on those days I won’t get home until 7:30 or 8:00. Others I can leave relatively early and go to the gym. In the evenings I take care of my dog and hang out with Scott. I also tend to have some work-related thing to do. If not, you can bet that I’ll be watching TLC or Food Network.

9:30: Begin to crash and burn. If I’m not in bed by 10, I get cranky.

I know most teachers have days as crazy as this, but I wonder if people in other professions feel as mentally and physically exhausted as I do when they come home. Some days, it’s all I can do to stay awake long enough to eat dinner.

Every teacher at my new school is required to do 40 home visits with our students. This means that I will visit half of my students. If I were super woman, I would do all 80 home visits, but, seriously, you have to draw the line somewhere. If I visited 80 homes, I would never visit my own home.

I had started doing my home visits at the beginning of the year, in what felt like a horrible, never-ending death marathon of working and driving around and visits with parents and children. By the beginning of October, I realized that I was doing home visits at the expense of good lesson plans, which was simply unacceptable to me. The home visits are intended to raise student achievement through building strong relationships with the families. However, my students were not achieving because I wasn’t able to give them what they needed in the classroom.

So, I took a break from home visits for a while. Some other teachers did the same thing, while others put their heads down and busted the visits out. (I still wonder how they were able to do that. I simply didn’t have the energy for it.)

Now, I’m at the point where I’m ready to get the visits finished, so I made a schedule for myself that would ensure I had them completed by December 5. Not bad, considering I still had over half of them to go. I’ve been surprised to find that I enjoy the home visits much more than I thought I would. Some of the unexpected benefits of the home visits include:

1. Driving to parts of San Jose that I would never have visited otherwise. This city makes a lot more sense to me now.

2. Putting some of my students in context. Examples: A student who is frequently over-tired in class lives in a house with like 15 other people. No wonder the kid is tired- he probably can’t get any sleep. Other students are the spitting images of their parents (in both looks and behavior) which explains quite a lot about them.

3. Making connections with parents that simply can’t be made through parent conferences alone. They tell me how much they love our school (particularly, the ones with kids who went to other schools before) and how grateful they are that we are all working so hard together. Every parent has said that if I ever need anything (and I think they mean anything, including a hot meal) that I should call them. Their generosity is touching to me.

Speaking of generosity, it is that time of year once again where Americans get together to eat a lot of food. Some people over indulge, some people watch football, some people go bargain-hunting, and everyone is reminded of what we have to be thankful for. I have a lot this year: a wonderful fiancee, a cute dog, great family and friends, and a job that I actually like. I consider myself extremely lucky.

Well, I completely fell off the blogosphere radar for the month, but, despite that casualty, I managed to survive the absolutely horrid month of October. Mostly only through sheer force of will on my part, and then only just barely.

When I think about what happened to me during the past 31 days, my mind becomes a blur. Long days merge into long weeks to make one ridiculously long month. Pretty much all I did was work.

So, I focus instead on the things that helped me survive. The few non-teaching related gems that have just barely helped my sanity to hang by a thread to the glorious month of November, with its 2 (count them!) separate breaks from school.

Things That Helped Ms. Bennett Survive October Purgatory
1. Scott and I adopted a dog. He’s a dachshund named Ringo and pretty much the cutest thing ever. We rescued him through the All American Dachshund Rescue in Sacramento. We love him. We had a great experience adopting through them and I would totally recommend it to anyone who’s considering rescuing a dog.

2. Wedding Planning with Scott. While a bit overwhelming at times, thinking about a time beyond October was extremely therapeutic. Plus, I get to look at pretty pictures all afternoon.

3. Reading An Echo in the Bone by Diana Gabaldon, who is pretty much my favorite author. The book was awesome. I just finished it this afternoon, yearning for more. You really must check out her work, but if you do, you must start at the beginning with Outlander. If you enjoy Scottish history, historical fiction, or just plain great writing, these books are definitely up your alley.

4. Setting the clocks back an hour and sleeping in for one extra glorious hour. Enough said.

So really, when you look at that woefully short and somewhat sad list of things that encompass my “balanced” life, you can imagine how work is literally all I did for the entire month. Occasionally during the day my mind would try to tuck something away to blog about later, but then when I would sit to write, I’d be completely fried. Nothing coherent would come out. Better, I thought, to stay silent than to start writing crap.

Not that this counts as beautiful writing. I’m just saying that at least now I’m back in my happy place (which is a place that I call Not October) and I can fit myself back into my online presence quite nicely.

I’ve missed you, blog. Care to have another go?

We’ve just finished week four of school, which is usually a signal that everybody is getting pretty sick and tired of each other.

Sick is definitely a part of the daily vocabulary at school; several teachers have had to take multiple days off to recover from whatever child-induced illness they may have contracted, and the attendance of students has been noticeably lower due to infection.

Did I mention I’m going to get a flu shot today?

Tired is another word I hear on a regular basis. The kids have been whining a lot more, and if there’s one thing I can’t stand, it’s whining. I’ve also had lots of tears for seemingly no reason. (As in, “Ms. Bennett, he took my pencil!” “No I didn’t, it’s MY pencil!” “BWWAAA!” “BWAAAA!”) Woah there. It gets worse as the day goes on, so that my last class of the day is significantly more emotional than the first. I find one of the biggest challenges to the new school structure is that I don’t know all of the interpersonal things that have gone on with my students throughout the day, so problems explode in my classroom that wouldn’t otherwise because I don’t know to be on the watch for them.

Here’s an example: at my school, classes compete to see who can read the most books during a week. My class right after lunch won this challenge, so they received the school cape, which followed them through the day on Friday. Each teacher who gets the class chooses a student to wear the cape; most of us will choose a name from a hat. I did this, and Q got to wear the cape. This didn’t sit well with E, who got so upset about not being able to wear the cape that he crammed himself into the corner and refused to come out. I went on with the beginning of the class, figuring he just needed a minute of alone time, and while I was checking the students’ homework, I realized he was still sitting there. I went to speak to him.
Me: It’s time to come out and work on your Do Now.
E: I want to wear the cape.
Me: I pulled Q’s name out of the hat, and it’s only fair that she gets to wear it.
E: I want to wear the cape.
Me: It wouldn’t be fair to Q. So please go get to work on your Do Now.
E: I want to wear the cape.

By this time, we were somewhat of a spectacle, so I gave E a choice.
Me: Ok, you can either come outside and talk with me, or you can work on your Do Now.
E: I want to wear the cape.
Me: Those are your choices, what will it be?
E: I’m going to go outside.
Me: Ok, great. Let’s go.
E: I want to ride on the elevator.
Me: If you’re going to come outside, it’s to have a conversation with me. Let’s go.

This same conversation repeated itself for about another 3-4 minutes outside of the classroom until I was finally able to get E to come back inside and take his Do Now book out of his desk. Instead of doing it, however, he clutched it with a death grip and started wandering around the classroom, singing Michael Jackson songs.

Me: Ok, now it’s time for you to go next door and have some reflection time.
E: I want to wear the cape.
Me: We’re going next door now.
E: No.
Me: Yes. You need some refocus time so you can be a good learner. Right now you’re not ready to learn.

He protested verbally all the way, but I was able to gently guide him to the classroom next door, where he spent quite a bit of time filling out a behavior reflection form. When he finally came back to my classroom, his fixation on the cape had ended and he was able to focus on math.

I later talked with his literacy teacher and she said he had been on his own little planet during her class as well. Apparently the cape situation just set him off.

Whew. We still have 4 more weeks before we have a day off. Hopefully the students can stand to be around each other for that much longer.

These days, whenever the phone rings past 8 p.m. I pretty much assume it’s one of my students or their parents. This is because a) they’re pretty much the only people who have my home phone number and b) who else would call me on a weeknight?

If you’ve ever talked with young kids on the phone, you know it can be pretty awkward. I love it.

The phone rings. I answer it.
Child’s voice: Hello, who is this?
Me: This is Ms. Bennett.
Child’s voice: Oh. (Very disappointed.) Is Ms. C there with you?
Me: No, Ms. C doesn’t live here.
Child’s voice: Oh. (Again, disappointed.) Ok, bye! (Click.)

I don’t even know who it was. Scott said the kid must have thought that Ms. C. and I were living at the teacher house. You know, the one where all the teachers go when we’re not at school. Why would teachers ever want to talk to anyone else?

I had a good long laugh about that conversation. They crack me up even when I’m not with them.

Today, I was sitting with my last class of the day, trying to get them to talk to each other about their Goals. They are 7. It has been in the upper 80s in San Jose since school started last week. When those two things combine, the last class of the day tends to be a little squirrely. Today was no exception.

Me: Talk to your partners about a Goal you have had in the past.
Them: (sharing)
Me: Who can share what their partner said?
B: Chewy was telling me…
Me: Who was telling you?
B: Chewy.
Me: Did you just call him Chewy?
Whole Class: That’s his name!
Me: I thought his name was J.
Whole Class: In first grade we called him Chewy!
Me: J, would you like to be called J or Chewy?
J: Chewy.
S (from the back of the room): CHEWY DEWEY!
Whole Class: erupts into laugher
Me: Oh, my lord. You guys are ridiculous!

At least I’m never bored.

We start with kids on Monday. My classroom is ready, relatively speaking. All the crucial things are up on the walls and I’ve got my plans and copies all set. It’s going to be an awesome first day.

One thing that I have been aware of this week in making poster after poster is that I am very clumsy with my markers. I ALWAYS have marker all over my hands. Does anyone else have this problem? I mean, I know they’re “non-toxic,” but seriously. This can’t be good.

Also, I apparently have forgotten how to cut paper straight. Almost every piece of butcher paper I cut out was extremely crooked and needed a patch. And I also have difficulty in getting staples to actually go all the way into the wall. Most of them stick out about a centimeter.

But, it’s done. And I think it looks nice. Bring on the kiddos!

Today was a 10-hour work day, and yet I am home feeling much more energized than I have felt during those 8-hour days we’ve had thus far.

The reason for this is that today was my first official day in my new classroom with the opportunity to unpack the massive amount of stuff I brought from my old classroom. The first day into your room at the beginning of the year is always an exciting one.

Today was also the day that we received a huge furniture shipment at my school. The school didn’t have a 5th grade last year, and only 2 classes of 4th graders, so a bunch of new rooms are being opened up for this year. The desks from the second grade were much too big for our students, so they were moved to the upper grades and the smaller desks and chairs were delivered for us.

It was quite the operation. A veritable army of parents and children showed up to help us move all of this stuff around. I couldn’t believe it! Every single person there was just so happy to be able to help the school that they didn’t complain one bit. Even when minor breakdowns in communication occurred (like when we already had enough desks in the room and the parents had to carry them back downstairs) nobody got upset. Furniture was moved, unpacked, put together, and organized in every classroom that needed it, and the parking lot and playground were painted all in the space of 2 hours. Our secretary pointed out to me that we would be totally unable to function without the support of the parents, and it’s true. I really can’t imagine all of the teachers doing all of that work on their own. We would probably still be working on it now.

Nothing like this ever happened at my old school, and I have spent the day trying to figure out why. I know that it is not that the parents there didn’t care, because I saw them care in my own classroom. There was just never the kind of school-wide mobilization that occurred today. And really, I think it is because nobody at my old school ever bothered to ask the parents for help. You know how the parents found out about today? The secretary called them. That’s it. Maybe a letter was sent home, maybe it wasn’t. I’m not sure. But clearly, the power of the phone call was huge for these families. I wonder what would happen at other schools if principals, secretaries, and teachers all made an effort to contact every single family before school started. Would you see an increase in parent involvement? It’s an interesting experiment to try. Has research been done on this? What efforts have you made at your school to increase parent involvement? Have they worked?

Switching to my new school is like being a first year teacher all over again. We’ve only been in professional development for a week, and I’m already overwhelmed with all of the assessments to write, plans to make, and just plain thinking that I have to do to be ready for my students at the end of the month. Don’t get me wrong- I am very excited to do all of this work- I’m just saying it’s a lot.

Honestly, I don’t know why I thought this would be easy. Maybe I disillusioned myself into thinking that since I have a whopping 2 years of teaching experience that somehow the third year would get better.

Instead, what I’ve learned is that teaching is just a really hard job, regardless of how much experience you have. All of the teachers at my school are working just as hard as I am, with just as much to do as I have, regardless of experience. The beginning of the school year is always going to be insane. Plans to write, classrooms to set up, millions of things to buy, and a to-do list that cannot possibly be completed in one measly little weekend.

Maybe it’s just that the first week back to work after a nice, long summer break is when we all have that little voice inside us that says, “Why am I doing this again?” But when our babies come to us and we have to teach them, that’s when we remember.

We do this because we love it. Because if we don’t, who will? Because our students deserve the best from us, all the time. If we’re not willing to give that to them, then we really should consider another profession. That’s what I’ve learned so far in my professional development.