Posts Tagged “education”

It takes a community

I know there are some who feel that idea was made popular and also coined by the wrong people, however, the truth the words themselves hold is strong for me. In the face of mass school closings, teacher lay-offs, whole staff firings and the current negative aura that surrounds education, I was brightened by our community this week when the PTO and local businesses paid to have an author come to our school and spend the day. School budgets are tight, there is no doubt about that, and our district would not have been able to have Shelley Gill inspire and teach our students about reading and writing without the support of our local community.

But it was not just the financial support that was evident; parents came to see and hear her speak as well. Like us, the teachers and students, they were enchanted by Shelley as she told tales of how her books came into being. It became immediately clear that these stories were not only entertaining, but connected all of us to the world community as well. Her unique experiences in the world at large are amazing to hear, but they also reflected on the smaller world of our rural Midwest town. This author said things in her speech that I say daily to my students. Using “juicy details”, reading to expand your word selection, that a book is like an onion, use your senses when you read and write……Shelley said all of those things as she spoke, just from a different perspective. Hearing this from a “real” person (one who writes really good books even), not just your teacher….well that’s powerful! Just as compelling were her messages about environmental responsibility, respect for other cultures and independent thinking.

This was a super presentation to have on a Friday. Instead of feeling wiped out from the long week, I left feeling at least mentally re-energized. Not because I was completely entertained all day by this engaging author, but because of the connections I made to myself, my curriculum, my students and the world in general. In order to produce wonderful, active learners it does take a community, small, medium and worldwide to share their generosity, their support, and their experiences. If one of those goes missing, the lesson is diminished in some way, and we have shortchanged not only our students, but all of us.

I want to thank Shelley Gill for her energy, enthusiasm, compassion and time. This is a great lady who could easily be spending her time on another adventure, instead of spending it in an elementary school. If you would like more information on Shelley Gill, her books and adventures you can check her out at http://shelleygill.com . You can find out about author visits, her books as well as teacher resources.

Is it really all about the “class” ?

As a teacher, you know there are differences in “classes”….not just in a classroom, but the class as a whole. It’s hard to explain to those outside of education who think all students show up for the first day of Kindergarten knowing their alphabet and how to write their name. It’s hard to understand just how much that is not reality; how you can have a class with a child who has never held a crayon and a child who is already reading.

At my elementary, last year’s 5th grade class was a tough one. There were many students with some pretty serious behavior issues, many with very poor home situations and many who were receiving special education services. We knew this class was going to be challenging when they arrived in kindergarten, so many of the students were at risk. Over the 6 years that they spent with us, we tried to build them up, give them strategies and tools, and set them up for success as they moved on to Middle School.

A few years ago I was talking to the social worker at our school after a student in my daughter’s class committed suicide by hanging himself in his parent’s garage. They were juniors at the time. Mrs. K. said something that has stuck with me. She said, “That class has been edgy and intense from the beginning. They want to push the envelope and change things.” She went on to compare that class to the “over-achievers” in the Senior class that year; the “clowns” in the sophomore class and the “socialites” of the freshman class. Mrs. K. went on to say that by the time a class gets to HS, they have developed a “class” personality and it seems to stick - even after graduation. I have often thought back on that and wished she was not so prophetic.

Today my daughter got a call that a young man from her class had shot himself and died. He is the fourth to commit suicide, from her “edgy, intense” class. (This class graduated 3 years ago.) This is a small town folks….4 kids from a class of 120ish. She and her classmates will now come together again, hold one another, attempt to understand and then go on as best they can. I will hug my daughter, tell her I love her and how important she is to me and those around her. I will try to help her get through another loss - too many for one so young.

As I go through this with my child again today - my mind wanders to last year’s class of fifth graders, who are struggling through their first year of Middle School this year. I think about some of the tender hearts, insecure souls and how hard they worked to get as far as they did. Those students, “my kids” that I really didn’t want to send over to Middle School. The hard ones, seem to touch you more than the easy ones. I pray that they do not find this answer….the adolescent years are so cruel, so hard, ……I pray they will all find the strength they need. I hope against hope that Mrs. K will be wrong, and this weak challenged group of students will turn out to be the class of “survivors”.

**pulled from the New York Times and written by Winnie Hu**

Selling Lessons Online Raises Cash and Questions

Between Craigslist and eBay, the Internet is well established as a marketplace where one person’s trash is transformed into another’s treasure. Now, thousands of teachers are cashing in on a commodity they used to give away, selling lesson plans online for exercises as simple as M&M sorting and as sophisticated as Shakespeare.

While some of this extra money is going to buy books and classroom supplies in a time of tight budgets, the new teacher-entrepreneurs are also spending it on dinners out, mortgage payments, credit card bills, vacation travel and even home renovation, leading some school officials to raise questions over who owns material developed for public school classrooms.

“To the extent that school district resources are used, then I think it’s fair to ask whether the district should share in the proceeds,” said Robert N. Lowry, deputy director of the New York State Council of School Superintendents.

The marketplace for educational tips and tricks is too new to have generated policies or guidelines in most places. In Fairfax County, Va., officials had been studying the issue when they discovered this fall that a former football coach was selling his playbook and instructional DVDs online for $197; they investigated but let him keep selling.

A high school English teacher in upstate New York said her bosses barred her from selling plans used in her classroom; she spoke on the condition that she not be named.

Beyond the unresolved legal questions, there are philosophical ones. Joseph McDonald, a professor at the Steinhardt School of Culture, Education and Human Development at New York University, said the online selling cheapens what teachers do and undermines efforts to build sites where educators freely exchange ideas and lesson plans.

“Teachers swapping ideas with one another, that’s a great thing,” he said. “But somebody asking 75 cents for a word puzzle reduces the power of the learning community and is ultimately destructive to the profession.”

Teachers like Erica Bohrer, though, see the new demand for lessons as long-awaited recognition of their worth.

“Teaching can be a thankless job,” said Ms. Bohrer, 30, who has used the $650 she earned in the past year to add books to a reading nook in her first-grade classroom at Daniel Street Elementary School on Long Island and to help with mortgage payments. “I put my hard-earned time and effort into creating these things, and I just would like credit.”

The humble lesson plan has gained value as focus on testing and individualized instruction has increased. At the same time, the Internet has diminished the isolation of classroom teachers. Just about every imaginable lesson for preschool through college is now up for sale — on individual teachers’ blogs as well as commercial sites where buyers can review and grade the material.

Teachers Pay Teachers, one of the largest such sites, with more than 200,000 registered users, has recorded $600,000 in sales since it was started in 2006 — $450,000 of that in the past year, said its founder, Paul Edelman, a former New York City teacher. The top seller, a high school English teacher in California, has made $36,000 in sales.

Another site, We Are Teachers, went online last year with a “knowledge marketplace” that includes lesson plans and online tutoring.

Kelly Gionti, a teacher at the High School for Law, Advocacy and Community Justice in Manhattan, has sold $2,544 worth of unit plans for “The Catcher in the Rye” and “The Great Gatsby,” among others, helping finance trips to Rome and Ireland, as well as class supplies.

Margaret Whisnant, a retired teacher in North Carolina, earns an average of $750 a month from lessons based on her three decades of teaching middle school classics like “The Outsiders,” enough to pay for new kitchen counters and appliances.

“I have wanted to redo my kitchen for 20 years, and I just could not get the funds together,” she said. “Well, now I’m going to have to learn to cook.”

Lisa Michalek, 40, who taught for six years in Rochester and now works for Aventa Learning, a for-profit online education company, said she spent about five hours a week tweaking old lesson plans and creating new ones, like an earth science curriculum that sells for $59.95.

“I knew I had good lessons, so I thought, ‘Why not see what other people think of it?’ ” Ms. Michalek said.

After $31,000 in sales, she has her answer. Alice Coburn, 56, a vocational education teacher in Goshen, N.Y., said she saved two to three hours each time she downloaded Ms. Michalek’s PowerPoint presentations instead of starting from scratch. “I hate reinventing the wheel,” Ms. Coburn said.

Others find comfort in having a class-tested lesson by a more experienced teacher. Lauren Perreca, 24, used a $10 lesson on the Vietnam War novel “Fallen Angels” as a reference last year while creating her own lesson for her classes at Weston High School in Connecticut. She also revised her reading questions about “Lord of the Flies” after comparing them with two other lesson plans.

“At first I was self-conscious I had bought something, because what did that say about me?” she said. “But I realized I wasn’t just taking it and using it, I was adapting it to fill in the gaps of my knowledge.”

Now Ms. Perreca has started selling her own lesson plans, like a 54-page “Macbeth” unit with quizzes and homework assignments ($10) that she wrote in graduate school. She said she spent $140 of her $523 in earnings on cookies and books for her students, and used the rest to splurge on dinners out that she could not otherwise afford.

Her students are incredulous. “They’re like, ‘Who would want to buy those? They’re so boring,’ ” Ms. Perreca said. “I’m like, ‘Hey, I’m making money.’ ”

In Ms. Bohrer’s class the other day in Lindenhurst, N.Y., five children were counting M&Ms while she made sure they digested the lesson before the candy. The exercise, which comes with directions, sorting mats and work sheets, has sold 31 times for $3 a pop. A variation with Lucky Charms is popular around St. Patrick’s Day, she said.

“M&M sorting is not a new concept,” said Ms. Bohrer, who has been teaching since 2001. “I made it easier for teachers to do. They just have to click and print.”

Daniel Street’s principal, Frank Picozzi, said he supported Ms. Bohrer’s online business because his students reaped the benefits of her initiative and creativity.

Ms. Bohrer recalled that when she used to share her lesson plans at no charge, a poster of her reading strategies was passed around so many times that it ended up with a teacher in another school who had no idea where it came from.

“I’ll share with friends,” Ms. Bohrer said, “and if anyone else likes it, I’ll tell them where to buy it.”

Not sure how much I am in agreement on this theory, but I thought it was an interesting news article on Yahoo Healthday news, by Serena Gordon.

Spanking May Lower Kids’ IQs

The bad news is that youngsters who are spanked might lose IQ points.

The good news is that it appears that children’s IQs are on the rise — and at least one expert believes that part of the reason why is that corporal punishment is falling out of favor in the United States and elsewhere.

That’s the view of discipline and domestic violence expert Murray Straus, a professor of sociology and co-director of the Family Research Laboratory at the University of New Hampshire. Straus was scheduled to present the findings from recent research on spanking on Friday at the International Conference on Violence, Abuse and Trauma in San Diego.

The results of a survey of more than 17,000 university students from 32 countries “show that the higher the percent of parents who used corporal punishment, the lower the national average IQ,” Straus wrote in his presentation.

In looking at spanking just in the United States, Straus and a fellow researcher reviewed data on IQ scores from 806 children between 2 and 4 years old and another 704 kids aged 5 to 9.

When their IQs were tested again four years later, children in the younger group who were not spanked scored five points higher, on average, than did children who had been spanked. In the group of older children, spanking resulted in an average loss of 2.8 points.

“How often parents spanked made a difference,” Straus said in a news release from the university. “The more spanking, the slower the development of the child’s mental ability. But even small amounts of spanking made a difference.”

Dr. Rahil Briggs, a child psychologist with the Children’s Hospital at Montefiore in New York City, said she believes that “discipline should be an opportunity to teach your child something.”

“If you spank, you teach your child that hitting is the way to deal with a situation,” she said. “But if you use other methods of discipline, you can begin teaching your child higher-level cognitive skills, self-control, cause-and-effect and logical thinking.”

Briggs said that previous research has clearly shown that when children are in negative stressful situations, it can actually change the architecture of their brains and impair certain neural processes.

Dr. Stephen Ajl, a child abuse pediatrician, director of pediatric ambulatory care at the Brooklyn Hospital Center and medical director of the Jane Barker Brooklyn Children’s Advocacy Center in New York City, said that “spanking and other forms of corporal punishment mean that someone has lost control, and if that goes on on a chronic basis, it may affect some part of children’s psychological well-being.”

And though some people believe that they can use spanking as a form of punishment without losing control, Briggs said that’s very difficult to do all the time.

“When you’re physical with your child, you open that floodgate, and the likelihood that it could veer into where you don’t have as much control increases,” Briggs said. “Plus, if you’re just spanking, you haven’t taught your child anything.”

Straus’s presentation at the violence conference was also to include findings from the study of university students, done by researchers in 32 countries. It found that in nations with decreasing use of corporal punishment, the countries’ average IQ scores rose.

Those findings are plausible and make some sense, Briggs said, but she added that it’s difficult to tease out all the other factors that could play a role in IQ scores — including poverty and parental education.

Ajl recommended that parents think about how they want to discipline they’re children before they’re faced with a situation. And, he said, a pediatrician can help parents come up with more effective ways to discipline their children.

Mentors
In my district, as in most now, we have a mentoring program.  It was just in the beginnings when I was hired, so in the 3 years of mentoring that I and all new hires are required to complete, each year was unique.  Although I didn’t always find the information or assignments helpful, my actual mentors were, well, quite honestly, priceless.
  
My first mentor was Mrs. B.  She had been teaching for well over 30 years.  She had been a special education teacher, classroom teacher and reading teacher.  She was the only Title I teacher in the building where I began my teaching career as a “guided reading teacher”.   (It was a part time, 9/10ths, position – you know where they get you full time really but don’t have to give you full time benefits)  Mrs. B. was a soft spoken, low key, small, gray haired grandma type lady.  She was kind and extremely patient with the students, and with me!  I have since lived on some pearls of wisdom she gave me my first year.  “You can’t save them you know, you can give them strategies, tools, and encouragement, but you can’t save them.  They have to do that themselves.”   I have recited that quote to myself numerous times, as I struggle to “save” one.  “Some are just hardwired different, dear.  You have to figure that out, that’s your job.”  Man, if that isn’t the truth.  Funny thing about that though, the ones that are hardwired differently are the ones that I end up enjoying the most!!  Imagine then, that after you are so impressed by this dignified, upstanding, master teacher who never raises her voice, you are walking by her room one day and hear, “Well, shit, shit, SHIT!”  My head spun ‘round, and I peeked in and said, “Mrs. B.  are you OK????!!!”  Her answer, “Sure, why do you ask?”  I sputtered to explain why I’d asked and she laughed…..laughed long and loud.  She said, “Yeah, I’m a teacher, but that’s just my day job, the rest of the time…..I’m human!”  Probably the most important pearl of wisdom she ever gave me.  As I continued that year, I learned she was very human, smoked like a chimney, drank like a fish and told the dirtiest, funniest jokes you ever heard.
 
My second mentor was also a Mrs. B.  She was different from the first but just as good.  She told me, “Administrators come and go, and you get to jump through new hoops each time.  But, kid, the students stay the same, so just shut your door and teach.”  She gave me OLD stuff.  Old basals, old games, old lesson plans…..and you know what I figured out, for my strugglers, they often WORKED!  That slow building repetition, it was just what they needed.  She LOVED the students and they knew it.  They worked so hard for her.  She most often got those with the biggest behavior issues.  It didn’t matter how quirky they were, they were just another student in the class, expected to follow the rules.  You know, it took some of them the first semester to figure that out, but once they did, she rarely had behavior problems.  She had over 30 years in the district, taught in 4 different buildings, taught reading, classroom, and special education, and survived half a dozen superintendents, and more principals.   Her best piece of advice, “You gotta start where they are and find something about them that you truly like.  They don’t care until you do.”  That was true for academics and behavior, and I remind myself of that almost every day.
 
Both of my mentors have since retired and I miss them both, immensely, if for no other reason than they reminded me to “keep it about the students”.  There is so much other, well, crap that you deal with as you sit on committees and go to professional development and get new administrators that it can be easy to forget why you are really there.  So on those days, I find myself asking not “What would Jesus do?” but rather “What would Mrs. B. do?!” (Either one of them).   After I ponder that for a minute, and pull up one of their pearls of wisdom, I just shut my door and teach.

Homeroom® Teacher’s Blog is pleased to introduce you to Franki, our new contributing blogger.
In her own words:

“My name is Francesca Hutchins-Huff, Franki to my friends. I didn’t grow up with the desire to be a teacher. In a way, it happened by default. In my previous professional life I was a consultant for Texaco Refinery, teaching interpersonal skills to a diverse, international group of people. During a period of down-sizing, I went from there to working with the senior population, assisting them in understanding their medical benefits under the latest Medicare system, advising on living trusts, and most importantly, how to take their medical care into their own hands. Although this job was rewarding, there was no room for advancement. At the time I decided I would take some classes until something better came along. It did. I just didn’t know it at the time. I decided that I wanted to work with children. I took a leap of faith and I didn’t look back. 

For the past 4 years I have been teaching 1st and 3rd grades as well as middle school in Long Beach, California, and Las Vegas, Nevada.  Since I began teaching, I got married, relocated to Ohio, and became a step-mom. Learning how to be a mother has been its own rewarding challenge. When I moved I also became a private tutor. Although classroom teaching and tutoring may seem very different, I could not say one has been more rewarding than the other, they are just different. Each day that I work in education I learn as much, if not more, from my students as they learn from me. The experience and the knowledge I gain from life, teaching and my interactions with others inside the classroom or out are an invaluable gift to me. As my grandfather used to say “If you don’t learn something new every day of your life, you might as well cash in your chips and go home because you just wasted a day.” That is my motto exactly.

I look forward to sharing my thoughts, insights and experiences in teaching and I look forward to hearing from you”

Great Gifts for Teachers