A teacher's job is never done.

Even though I am a year into retirement I am still teaching and learning.

The teaching part is obvious, as I have taken a volunteer position with the SPCA to do the Humane Education in schools and for community groups. In order to do this, I had to read the thick Humane Ed manual given to me by my predecessor and decide which lessons and materials I would use for the different age groups. I scoured the internet for images to help little ones understand our mission and how to care for their pets. I helped some cub scouts and brownies get their badges connected to pet care. I even visited someone's home to learn about caring for and transporting bunnies when I had to take one to visit a class.  I am also learning how to interact with various people in the shelter who do vastly different jobs. And of course, I learned how to take the dogs out for walks during the day. That way I get to play with them too!

In my capacity of teacher-volunteer with the Steamboat Floating Classroom, SPLASH, I had to learn how to capture and identify macro-invertebrates, and what they told about the amount of pollution in the water. This was also something I used with my classes at school after I attended a weekend workshop at the Cobbs Creek Environmental Education Center. We have three stations on board the steamboat, so I had to learn all stations, including watershed ecology and water chemistry. I thought, being a teacher, I already knew about watersheds and environs. Nothing like realizing you know nothing! LOL.

When I was teaching in the public schools, I often used to scour the internet for help with subjects, strategies and behavioral issues. Even as a retired person, I still like to keep my fingers on the pulse. Some of the best places to go for information and assistance are Educators blogs, the Notebook, and The Educator's Room. Links will be given at the end of the blog.

The Educator's Room impressed me for the excellent articles on topics of interest in the classroom - inclusion, parent conferences, learning disabilities,  addressing the Common Core, standardized testing, etc. I have even written a couple articles for them myself. It's a great place for ideas and a place to learn new things. There is an Educator's Room conference in Atlanta this June 25th to the 27th, with workshops and speakers. I am giving a workshop on using vocal music in the classroom and I'd love to see you there! Check out the conference page and see if you can join us! I guarantee you will learn a lot from fellow educators.

The Notebook is specifically about the policies, problems and successes in the Philadelphia Public School System. They have a myriad of reporters writing for them and education blog links, and a newsletter which is issued daily, keeping you up-to-date on everything happening in the city and state regarding education.

Diane Ravitch's blog is one of the places to go if you want to know about national topics connected to the reform movement for public schools. Although she is 75 years old, she hasn't let that slow her down much. If you want to know what to do to get involved in the anti-reform movement, see Diane Ravitch's blog.

Want to learn more? Visit these links. You won't be sorry.

The Philadelphia Public Schools Notebook - http://thenotebook.org/

Educator's Room -  http://www.theeducatorsroom.com

The Educator's Room Conference - http://conference.theeducatorsroom.com/

Diane Ravitch's Blog - http://dianeravitch.net/

Let Me Count the Ways!

The things I have observed that worked at my school to make it easier for everyone to learn. We are not necessarily still using them.

 

1. Reading and talking about good literature.
That includes teacher read alouds, and author studies, and literature groups. Even the Kindergarten classes did author studies with children’s writers like Ezra Jack Keats, Richard Scarry, etc. I used Roald Dahl books to get the kids hooked on author studies, His writing is so deliciously decadent and the kids love his fifth-grade-type humor. Another author we studied was Gary Paulsen who wrote one of the best books we used that year, Woodsong. We read The Monument also. And then there is Beverly Cleary (Beezus, Henry, et al), James Howe (Bunnicula and friends) and my low readers got to read a series of books about kids with various disabilities written by The Fonz, Henry Winkler himself! It was amazing when the kids could speak about themes and similar characters, as well as compare and contrast the way the protagonists solved problems. That is what reading is supposed to do – make you think.

 

2. Writing about things that matter to the students.
Many of the teachers at our school had the privilege of attending at least one summer Writing Institute at Columbia University’s Teachers College in NYC. I know for Eileen Burton and I, it was a life-changing experience. Eileen states that she hated writing until she went to the Summer Writing Institute My husband says I was a different person after the, someone with more passion about teaching and writing. I saw much better writing from my students after I applied the lessons I learned to their writing. It was lovely to see their transition from anguish to pride when they wrote a memoir. The main thing was they wrote about the things that interested them, not about the prompt I presented. Usually, after that week at Teachers College, more than half of my students scored at the proficient level in the State Writing test. We examined good writing, tried to emulate what we liked, and made it ours.

 

3. The Children’s Literacy Project.
Our Kindergarten teachers began teaching all the primary grade teachers the strategies for reading that the Children’s Literacy organization presented.  It really got the little kids thinking about words and writing. And the teachers’ passions about reading and writing were ignited.

 

4. A Buddy system.
Every teacher at our school had a buddy that would help out in the times when you were super frustrated with a child and needed a break. We didn’t use our buddies ever day, or even every week, but having one sure helped when we were about to lose it.

 

5. Faculty trust and collaboration.
Our 7^th and 8^th grade teachers were truly collaborators. They met weekly about what was going on with the students, thought of special programs for the kids, created and revised behavior programs that were for the most part self-contained in those grades. They supported each other, were flexible and truly cared about the students. They’d come early, stay late, work through lunch to make it work. In fact that was true of all the teachers at our school. We were there because we loved doing what we did and wanted to show the kids that they could succeed.

6. We had a principal who allowed us to fail. If something wasn’t going well and we had a suggestion of another thing we could try, she allowed us to try it. If it failed, she had us examine the reasons why and begin again. She had enough confidence in us to give us some breathing room. As long as you were teaching the curriculum and the kids were progressing, you were okay. I taught many things through songs, but could always demonstrate how the use of the song fulfilled the Language Arts, Social Studies or Science curriculum.

 

7. We were not afraid to buck the system. Of course, that worked well only when we had a principal who was willing to back us up. Lucky for us, we had one of those for more than a dozen years, We didn’t know how much she shielded us from until she left. I left shortly after she did, and most of the teachers were gone in the next three years. It’s a shame because we had a little paradise in the middle of West Philly for a while.

 

I hope they continue to buck the system and fight for their students forever.

Still learning!

Subjects or Moments?

"Everyone who remembers his own education remembers teachers, not methods and techniques." -- Sidney Hook

When I think about my twelve years in Catholic school, there are some years that completely escape my memories and others that I can still relive in my head. With few exceptions, my memories are about people, not what I learned.

First and second grades were a complete blur probably because there were 96 in grade 1 and 84 in grade 2. Obviously my teachers could not have gotten to know us, and my mother taught me how to read and do math. I probably would have learned more if I had been schooled at home. But that wasn’t popular then.

I remember crying my eyes out when I discovered I was going to have Sister Carmencita for grade 3. She was known throughout the school, from 1^st to 8^th grade, as the meanest teacher ever. When we entered her classroom, we all sat quietly with hands folded because we were scared to death. But this little old nun, who made tall 8^th graders cry when they came down for discipline, was one of the kindest teachers I ever had. We sold candy at recess time to raise funds for parties and supplies not given by the school district. She taught us about profit and loss and good salesmanship. She was fun, fair, and made us promise we’d never tell anyone else in the school that she could be nice. We kept that secret well.  Unfortunately, she died in January and we ended up with the meanest nun ever. I’d rather not discuss third grade from then on, because I spent the rest of the year in tears and frustration.

 

My grade 4 teacher, Miss Brophy, was the person who awakened my love of reading. She introduced us to good literature and will always be remembered for that. Grade 5, on the other hand, was a total waste of a year. The nun we had would fall asleep every day after lunch and we could spend an hour or more playing cards, drawing or whatever. We never woke her up, knowing a good thing when it presented itself. I think that was the year when I realized that some teachers didn’t need to be in that profession. That year would haunt me all through school because I never really learned to master fractions until high school. I should have been taught them in grade 5, but Sister was sleeping at Math time.

 

Grades 6 and 7 were the golden years as far as teachers were concerned. Both years I had nuns, but these two were the funniest, fairest, most creative teachers of them all. Sister Christine Marie, and Sister Frances Bernardone always treated us as though we mattered, as though we had sense, as though we could be trusted. They instilled in us the desire to learn art and music and how it could be combined with math, reading, and geography to make us more well-rounded people. They were my best two years in school, period. I learned everything about how to be a teacher who showed respect, who could admit mistakes, and who went through life with humor. They are the reasons I am the teacher I am.

Eighth grade was spent in a class where our main goal was to frustrate the teacher. We pulled every trick in the book and even got away with some. Our Social Studies nun was partly deaf and wore a hearing aid. We’d whisper our answers and questions, wait for her to turn up her hearing aid, and then yell our questions and answers. We threw a superball around the room all year and never got caught. We made tiny paper airplanes, which we sailed onto the nuns’ veil, which had an indentation at the top.

High School and much of college were years I spent going to school only because I HAD to. The things that interested me in teenage years were not academic, although I did graduate 10th in my class of 600. I realized (I was told) I could sing well and joined the glee club, and participated in our school musicals, got started working with kids as a tutor in the Community Service Corps, where I met my husband of almost 42 years. I participated in the protests of the 60’s against the Vietnam War and in solidarity with the United Farm Workers. These high school activities still interest me today, but I can’t really get excited about any of my high school teachers, because they ruled by intimidation and bullying. If anything, they did teach me how NOT to teach.

Three professors stand out in college for their unique ways of instructing their subjects. Dr. Reginald Brill ignited a fire in me about History that had been extinguished way back in grade 3. I took 3 course with him and eagerly attended them all. Dr. Bette Landman, who would later become the President of the College, taught anthropology and made me delve deeper into a subject I just took to get it over with. Dr. Haslett, my Anatomy and Physiology professor taught me how everything is connected and how to explain the circulatory system in 50 words or less. She taught me to mean what I say and say what I mean. I carried that over to my teaching years and it worked well for me.

So did you notice the theme here? For the most part, I remember teachers and not content or specific ways of teaching. And that will be the same, hopefully for today’s students if we can get off the “teach to the test” kick. Remember HOW a person acted, hopefully with respect, fairness and humor.

And if you’d like to read more about how I used those qualities to make a difference, please read my book, It Wasn’t in the Lesson Plan. You can listen to an audio chapter, read my bio and order an Ebook or the paperback version at http://www.outskirtspress.com/itwasntinthelessonplan

Still learning!