Today's project

I decided to write a brand- new cover letter today for a long term sub gig for which I wanted to apply. It took me seven hours to write one page. The following paragraph started out as three single spaced pages. For me, this is the hardest part of the application process; In a limited space, getting across how much I want to get back into the classroom and how I'm qualified for it even though I don't have the standard 3 full years of classroom experience.

Here's the end product:

"I have had many diverse experiences in the education field. While it has been a few years since I was a salaried teacher, I know that every experience I have had has better prepared me for full time classroom teaching. Being a student teacher and a literacy coach in Worcester, Massachusetts gave me a general introduction to teaching, but also showed me how to address the needs of a student body that was as diverse in skill levels as it was in ethnic backgrounds. My time as the assistant director of a private tutoring company taught me how to communicate effectively with parents and the value of one-on-one time with students. As an outdoor educator, I had limited time with each school group that came to our facility. I taught myself out how to learn names and gauge the needs of a group almost instantly, how to balance teaching both content and team building skills, and the value of hands-on learning. Substitute teaching helped me hone my classroom management skills and exposed me to a variety of teaching styles. Even being underemployed recently has helped me redefine my teaching philosophy. In my new found free time I have become somewhat of a news junkie. This has made me realize that helping students understand the world around them should be my main goal as any educator. I believe that teaching students how to access information and evaluate sources is just as important as the content that is covered."

Chalk: One of My Favorite Movies

I have a long, Love/ Hate relationship with "teacher movies". When I was younger I found them an amazing source of inspiration. Movies like Mr. Holland's Opus, Lean on Me, and of course, The Dead Poet's Society, all made me want to be a teacher. Yes, all the heroes in these movies face obsticals, and they don't always win, but they make teaching look like magic. Like if you work hard and your intentions are good, amazing things happen. Which, may still very well be true, but...

Once I started teaching, I hated them.

For whatever reason, when it came to teacher films, I apparently had previously tended to ignore the fact that these were all movies- meaning they embellished reality. Even in pointing out they faults in an educational system or society on the whole, certain aspects of them are either over-simplified or over idealized, even the ones that are based on real life. When I actually got into the classroom at 23 and saw what the reality was like, I couldn't handle it. I was too startled by how " hard work" was indeed, just that; actually the hardest work I had ever encountered in my life, to the point where it reshaped my definition of it. It was demoralizing, and I hadn't expected that. I left my first full time teacher job before I'd even really grappled with trying to make sense of what the reality of teaching was.

The following year, I found the movie Chalk, and I loved it, and I still love it. It is one of the only movies that I feel really told the story of my experience teaching- which is far more common, I would suspect, than the stories of the super-star teachers other movies might be based on. It was funny, quirky, frustrating, touching and most of all, true to life- even though it is a mockumentary.

Chalk Trailer

Atom.com: Funny Videos | Other | Funny Animations

My IDEA File OR "My Job has become my hobby, my hobby has become my job"

In my spare time I write lesson plans and read academic texts about educational theory and practice. You know, for fun.

There are two reasons why this is somewhat ironic:

1) When I was in grad school and teaching full time, I dreaded both lesson planning AND academic reading.

2) -Even more amusing- I used to spent much of my free time crafting and chit chatting with friend and family about their craft projects. Now I work at a Michaels craft supply and have very little time after work for my old pursuits. Instead of staying up late working on quilts or beading, I outline courses and read about educational theory.

My job has become my hobby and my hobby has become my job.

I have a word file on my laptop entitled IDEAS. When I worked at an office job, I started to jot down little things that I didn't want to forget. I knew I'd get back into teaching and it was way for me to remember thoughts that had occurred to me or things I wanted to try in the classroom. I started out just writing one and two sentence lines. When I substitute taught the next year, I would jot down things I saw other people do that I particularly liked ("Tennis balls on chair legs to reduce noise", "DOL- Daily Oral Language grammar exercises"), or specific things I wanted to avoid ("No electric pencil sharpeners ever!").

Occasionally, when I had time, I would outline a couple ideas, personal philosophies and values. They'd have bold underlined titles such as: "Main theme for any English class- learn to communicate well!", "As an activity in character recognition/ analyzation...", or just "Classroom management". Eventually, specific classes, personal projects and research topics started to filter their way in, such as "ESSAY TOPIC: School; Paradise or Prison? Questions about the history, philosophies, and controversies in the American Public School System ", “Literacy Across the Curriculum/ ‘Active’ Free Choice Reading” (Find a sexier title) for 7^th, 8^th or 9th grade^" , and “How did we get here? Why are the current issues of the day issues to begin with? (History-11th or 12th Grade Elective?)".

The other night, for example, a took a heading and idea I'd jotted down in passing a couple months ago: "FUN GAME FOR LESSON PLANNING aka- I'm kind of a dork/ tool" for which I had quickly described a system where I would choose three state standards at random and see if I could write a lesson plan that encompassed them all. Tuesday night, I spent 2 hours outlining a full social networking/ community website based off this idea and expanding it into a 'Lesson Plan Slam'- i.e- competitive lesson plan writing.

I started a quilt in October. Maybe I should get back to it.....

Gov. Patrick visits UPCS

Here is a news article from Worcester's Telegram and Gazette about Gov. Patrick's recent visit to University Park Campus School, where I did my student teaching. There isn't much specific information on the school itself- perhaps because there are a plethora of articles just like this one that have been published over the past decade. There are constantly groups coming in from all over to observe how this school works. As the latter half the article reads:

"Today's visiting group, which also included state Sen. Harriette L. Chandler, D-Worcester, Mayor Joseph C. O'Brien, Superintendent of Schools Melinda J. Boone, School Committee member Jack L. Foley and Clark President John E. Bassett, staff and media, moved through the 226-student school like a watermelon through a boa constrictor, but University Park is used to guests... The day before, they hosted a group from Texas."

As to the purpose of the visit, the Massachusetts legislature is apparently working on a new bill that "takes special aim at underperforming schools and the achievement gap between students of different socioeconomic statuses. It also offers districts the opportunity to create Innovation Schools with more autonomy over curriculum, budget, school schedules, policy and teachers' contract provisions." I like this quite a bit.

I'll be the first to admit that I have rather limited experience in teaching and education. That being said, in looking at all the companies and institutions with which I have worked, University Park included, the most successful are those where fulfilling the needs of their students takes priority rather than fulfilling state or standardized test requirement. The irony of which often being that the schools that don't set test scores as the end-all-be-all benchmark for progress, do much better on them than those that might. At least, again, from what I have seen in my various travels. No two students learn exactly the same way, so it would stand to reason that an individual school may just be the authority on how to educate the students that attend. This is especially true at a school like University Park, which also happens to be chocked full of teachers and staff with advanced degrees and maintains a close partnership with Clark University. I have always described UPCS as a great example of what an urban public school could be. The feasibility of replicating it's success at other schools, however, would rely heavily on the types of resources available. But that is a topic for another night.

Ken Robinson says schools kill creativity | Video on TED.com OR "How I fell in love with TED: Part 2"

The fist link listed with Rives' poem was to this talk, the title of which obviously caught my attention. I'd become rather jaded about my job and our educational system in general. I had reread the chapters in Daniel Quinn's My Ishmael on education, specifically how we don't need it; at least not in the model we currently have. I had also stumbled upon a copy of Grace Llewllyn's The Teenage Liberation Handbook: How to Quit School and Get a Real Life and Education. Needless to say, this video was right up my alley for the mindset I was in.

For some, these ideas may persuade one to throw out the whole system. For me, however, they got me thinking about what kind of changes could be made.

Rives remixes TED2006 | Video on TED.com OR "How I fell in love with TED: Part I"

I may have mentioned this, but I had a rather rough first year of teaching. It lead me to leave the classroom voluntarily, which lead to this downward spiral at the current point in which I find myself wielding a price gun at a part-time, minimum wage job with plenty of time on my hands to contemplate my career goals. Ironically, I have decided that my ideal teaching job would essentially be the one I had; the one that I thought had turned me off to teaching forever. That is a brief description of where I am. Here is a small part of the story of how I got here.

After quitting my teaching job in Worcester I was moved to Westchester, New York. When I got there, like now, I was underemployed and therefore had a fair amount of time to mess around on the Internet. While YouTubing various poets I came across Rives' 'Mockingbird'. I was already starting to fall in love with spoken word poetry and this piece made me swoon. I watched it over and over and over again. I'm always in awe of his rhythm and pacing.

New direction for Educational Leadership

I just finish reading last week's article in the New York Times entitled "Educational Leadership: Skills to Fix Failing Schools". It's part of their Ten Master's of the Universe series that highlights new post-grad programs that are popping up to both meet the needs of some of our most pressing current issues and bring in a little extra cash for the institutions that offer them. The idea is that fixing our countries school systems is "work (that) demands educators who are more M.B.A./policy-wonk than Mr. Chips". It then goes on to talk about a variety of programs, one at at Macalester College in St. Paul, Minnesota, that pairs graduate students with one mentor with a background in Educational leadership and one in business leadership. Interesting stuff.

To be honest, I've only just started to become interested in the policies, theories, and debates on Education on the national scale. When I was first in the classroom, I was trying my hardest just to keep my head above water. I was too busy trying to teach to examine the big picture. Since I haven't been able to get back in on a regular basis, I've had a chance to broaden my scope of vision. (I'm not sure if that's a blessing or a curse). I talked briefly about there being a multitude of complex problems in our public schools, but I'm only just now starting to realize that I'm not even really sure what half of them are. I just always took for granite that they were there.

I know there are some very bright people out there who have been very vocal about the fact that business people have little to no place running schools- that the two function entirely differently. I'm curious about what they would think about these new programs. I'm excited to read up on it and find out. I am currently underemployed (I have a part time retail gig that's holding me over while I look for a teaching job). It's offered me more time to really look for answers for some of the questions I've always had about education on my own terms- no required reading or professional development presentations. While I believe these things are valuable, I don't think I knew enough about what I was looking at at 23 to make much sense of them.

Do I think there's merit to these new Masters programs? Maybe. Maybe not. I do think their designers are on the right track. They are starting to re-think Education for the new century, and that, at the very least, is an idea that intrigues me.

200 applications!

I sent a facebook message to a former college classmate of mine, asking about requirements for multiple NYS teaching certifications. He has a background in History but has recently been trying to get a license to teach science. His mother is a veteran public school teacher, and said in her school for every open ELA or Social Studies position there are over 200 applications.

I've started seriously considering relocating for next year.