ka-chinggggaaaa!

This week my schedule has been a little off kilter. I'm flabbergasted to realize that tomorrow really is Friday! Because of the training I had Tuesday and Wednesday, I'm super confused!

The REACH training was interesting. I learned that REACH stands for "Respecting Ethnic and Cultural Heritage," and basically learned about teaching students from all cultures and the kinds of things they need. I got loads of information and tons of handouts; many of handouts I will be able to use with my students. I became quite intrigued with the whole idea because this year I actually taught a multi-cultural literature unit and many of the things I learned at this training will be perfect to incorporate next year.

I went to the school on Tuesday after the training to prep things for yesterday and found a nice note from the sub (who, according to my female students, was hot!). He said the kids were great and complimented me on my work. I can't even begin to express what a sweet feeling that is, knowing that I can leave my classroom and have a good report. This morning I saw the note left from the sub yesterday and felt mostly the same way--except she was quite irritated with 1st period because her own individual pencil from home was stolen, along with 6 of mine. She had worst handwriting than most of my students, so it was difficult to decipher exactly what she said. Even you can rarely trust a junior high student's version of the story, I asked all my classes to tell me what happened, and I think between the two, I came up with a pretty good idea of how yesterday went.

My day back was a big of a reality check. I have just 3 more days for CRT review/cramming. I gave them a easy quiz today on the commonly confused words that we've been learning and, to my utter amazement, I bet the majority of my students got 100%. I set the quiz up as I've heard it will be on the CRT and so I think that part will be good. Tomorrow and Monday I will do some review with External Text Features, which I originally covered at the beginning of the year. Then, on Tuesday I am going to go over some test taking skills, hopefully to reiterate the importance of reading the question and doing their best.

We had a CRT teacher meeting after school today. After hearing these horror stories of teachers changing student's answers and cheating in other forms, I understand why they have to keep going over the same information: You may only stand so close to the student so as not to see his/her answer; you may not prompt/summarize/paraphrase a question for a student; you may not look at the answer sheets except to put them in the envelope at the end of the day; lock up the answer sheets daily......There is also a huge deal this year with the Language Arts portion of the test dealing with our ELL (English Language Learner) and SPED (special ed) students and their accommodations. Normally, if the student has the accommodation of having the test read out loud to them, the teacher can read each question to the students. This year they've changed the layout of the test so NONE of the test may be read to the students. So, we basically have these students who have been in country less than one year (who barely speak English, let alone write it), students with LD where reading the test out loud would dramatically help them that will most likely fail these tests. It's all crappy. And then, of course, there's the factor of those kids who will not read the questions, make pretty designs on their bubble sheet. And all this affects our AYP (Adequate Yearly Progress). And then there's the whole issue that my student's scores always come back to me: how good of a teacher am I? We shall see....(tremendously sorry about the CRT ranting; I promise by the 9th of May, I will not utter that 3-letter swear word until next year!)

I received an e-mail from my dad's friend, Detta Bird, who is an English teacher at our feeder high school, Granger. She wanted to know if I was interested in a teaching job at the high school, teaching junior and sophomore English. I was this close to saying "yes" until I saw that I'd also be the cheerleader adviser. I know I probably said this about being the yearbook/newspaper adviser, but I really don't know anything about cheer leading; I'd be a miserable mess at that one. Even though my dream has always been to teach English in high school, I'm confident that I've found a good match with WL and now that I have one year under my belt, I know next year will be a bit easier.

Today I received another Character Rocks card from a student. (Character Rocks is a program at the school much like a "Pay it Forward," where someone nominates you and sends a little card, then when you get one, you send two more out) It was from a journalism student who basically makes the newspaper each month look super(she's the editor). She thanked me for being a 'sweet' teacher and said that 'your smile makes the day of all students who see you.' Yeah, I know, sniff, sniff. How truly wonderful it is to get these little rewards and tokens, especially at this stressful and busy time of the year.

I made a countdown chain to the last day of school; as of right now, there are 24 more days left of the school year. I hung this chain up in my room and plan on cutting one chain off each day. There were several students who didn't understand the concept: "What's a count down for?" So, in 4th period I spent about 5 minutes explaining the concept and when I saw a few light bulbs go off, I figured we could move on.

I suppose my creative juices aren't so much flowing right now because I just read what I just wrote and it's kind of boring, so I'm going to take my own cue and sign off for now. Maybe tomorrow the juiced will have returned.