3rd Week of January

MONDAY
Resolution Report: I survived the second week with NO Starbucks stops before school! Three cheers for me.

Today is the Martin Luther King Jr. holiday. The short-but-blessed sleeping in that I did get to do this morning was cut short by back-to-back counseling appointments with my own therapist and then my parents’ therapist. Fabulous. I LOVE spending holidays talking about my childhood pain and parental neglect.

*sigh of sarcasm*

At any rate, my delight in having a day off was sadly mitigated by the flu bug that spent the weekend attacking me. After finishing my (combined) three hours of counseling, Mr. Chandler and I spent two hours at the local coffee shop drinking lemon tea (me) and mango smoothie (him) and mooching free wireless (because we live in the dark ages and don’t have internet at home). When my flu-addled brain could no longer cope with graduate coursework and work samples scores, I dragged myself home and collapsed on the couch, where I’ve been ever since. As I can barely lift my hand to throw the tennis ball for Big Dog or scratch the insistent and perpetually itchy Little Dog, I expect to be crawling to bed momentarily. If I make it to school tomorrow, it will be a miracle.


TUESDAY
Today’s topic is data teams – sort of. (If you don’t know what a data team is, that’s okay. Here’s the cheater version of today’s blog: I am irritated at the lack of planning, consideration, and professionalism being shown by people at my school. I am going to spend about 3 paragraphs ranting about it. If you don’t feel any need to commiserate with me or hear details about data teams, then I will meet you here tomorrow. Off you go.)

For those of you who actually care about data teams (or like it when I rant and rave), I was in a meeting this afternoon in which my grade level/department team was asked to “fake” a data team meeting at an upcoming inservice. Not only are we being asked to be part of a presentation that is only a week away, but we are also apparently required to start this data team and have a real data team meeting BEFORE the inservice. This is SO IMPORTANT to the administrators that they are going to pay for subs so that we can use a school day to meet as a data team on Monday. Then, in one week, we are supposed to “recreate our data team meeting in front of the rest of the faculty as a model to them of what data teams should be like.” (I kid you not.)

I have several issues with this plan. First, of course, is the timing. If this is so important, why on earth are we only talking about it a now, a mere week before the inservice? If it’s so important, why haven’t we heard about it directly from our administrators, instead of from our over-worked lit coach? If this is supposed to be a REAL data team, shouldn’t we be given adequate time to plan and examine data and all of that before presenting to the staff? If it’s so important, why have our last 3 grade level/department team meetings been cancelled by administrators? We could have used THOSE for this data team stuff, but no…

* Pause for some deep calming breaths *

Those who know me best know that I am a well-planned sort of person. I can plan the crap out of your presentation, lesson, unit, meeting, report, assignment, weekly schedule, menu, special event, retreat, dinner party, vacation, or planning session. (Yes… I once wrote a plan for a planning session.) I am well prepared, well planned, and usually well documented. I DON’T DO LAST MINUTE.
I find this whole situation completely ridiculous. True data teams should be using data to inform instruction and should even be tracking strengths and weaknesses in their classes and then using this to offer their students targeted intervention in key areas. If the writing test is in 3 weeks (and boosting scores on this test is the admitted goal of our administrator), how on earth are we supposed to plan new lessons and offer the targeted instruction based on data… yada yada yada… in 3 weeks? Do these people really believe that I don’t have lesson plans for those weeks yet? I have my lessons planned out through spring break! I already used my kids’ writing scores from work samples they did in September and October to rework my lesson plans for December and January. Call me crazy, but I thought it would be best to NOT wait until the last minute for something like that.

Don’t get me wrong; I plan to participate in the inservice. I’m just irritated at the insufficient timing, the last-minute notice, the poor communication… I have issues with the plan for the inservice as well, but they are based in my own anxieties about being in front of a staff I’m not familiar with. I just can’t imagine that we’ll be able to replay our meeting accurately for the rest of the faculty. The absurdity of the situation will eat away at me, and probably at one of my team members as well, until we burst out laughing at all the wrong moments, frustrating our lit coach (the inservice presenter), disappointing our principal, and baffling our fellow teachers. Then this hyper-professional staff will never take me seriously. I’ll be doomed to slight smiles in the hallway and the empty front tables in staff meetings forever. ARGH!

This concludes my rant. Tune in next week to for an update.


WEDNESDAY
My students were scoring anchor papers today in preparation for the state writing test. At a certain point, I stopped telling them the real answers until AFTER they told me theirs. I was so impressed with the students who were willing to share their answers with the class. Even when they didn’t score a paper the same way I would or the state did, they were able to tell us why they gave the scores they did. I think this is the really important part of the lesson. It’s certainly the part that I want them to remember tomorrow – thinking carefully about each category and then making a judgment about how well the writer did… I also think that compartmentalizing things is a useful life skill (although probably not an obvious one). To be able to stop and look at one part of a situation without letting the other parts cloud their thinking is an incredibly complicated life skill that some adults haven’t even mastered!


THURSDAY
I’ve done my good deed for the day, and it’s not even 7 a.m. Mr. Chandler has an all-district administrators’ meeting this afternoon, and if I hadn’t stopped him, he would have worn a bright red shirt. It’s not a flattering red, either, but one of those reds with a slight orange tint – just enough to give one’s facial skin a weird tint. I convinced him to forgo the red in favor of something less “EVERYONE LOOK AT ME!”

On Thursdays, the Lifeskills class (next door to my room) sells chocolate chip cookies to the rest of the school. They set up a cart in the main hallway during lunch and after school and charge $1.00 for two cookies. The cookies are prepared during my third period class in the room next door, and by 11 a.m. the pod (locker lobby) next to our classrooms is filled with a heavy cookie smell. My students were so distracted by it today that we ended up taking a 30-second break from the lesson. During the break, my students went out into the pod and walked around with their noses in the air, sniffing the cookie aroma. It’s the quietest break I’ve ever seen middle school students take. We called it a field trip for our noses.

Afternoon update: Mr. Chandler wore one of my favorites, a lovely medium gray with a burgundy tie. It’s a good thing, too. It turns out he spent the meeting sitting across from the CFO and the Director of Human Resources.

As I write this, Big Dog has finally finished chewing up his Care Bear candy… it took him over a week, but he finally managed to grind the little plastic heart-shaped nose into bits. Now he’s licking the side of the refrigerator. ??? I hope this doesn’t mean that we have to clean the kitchen…


FRIDAY
Mr. Chandler wore the ugly orange-red shirt today.

Resolution Report: The temptation to stop at Starbucks was strong this morning. The pull of caffeine that someone else prepared for me was so difficult to resist that I actually drove through the parking lot before turning away and heading to school, resolution intact. This makes three weeks in a row with NO Starbucks stops before school.