Institute and Job Update!

Four weeks down, only one week to go. All of us have seriously been counting down the days until we get to go back to our own regions and get settled.

Last time I wrote in here, I had told all of you about the mix up with our curriculum and what we are supposed to be teaching. Well, that confusion and curriculum change now happens on a daily basis. Each day, my collaborative is told that we need to teach this, teach that, test on this, test on that, turn this in, turn that in. It gets really frustrating when things change last minute and our students get really frustrated too. The school district took away our Math Power Hour- an hour where the students are placed in ability differentiated groups- and our kids were extremely disappointed.

In addition to everything that is going on at our school, our evenings are filled with training sessions, lesson planning, creating assessments and action plans. This is really hard work. Much harder than I had ever anticipated it to be. I feel like once this is over I will have the sense of empowerment that I stuck through it and I am capable of everything that the next two years are going to throw at me.

We rotate subjects in our third grade classroom every week. The first week I taught reading, the second and third weeks I taught math, the fourth week I will be teaching writing. I think my favorite subject that I have taught so far is math. It is so exciting to have a student finally understanding something, especially after lesson planning that activity for 4 hours! Third graders are so incredibly wonderful.

I never fully understood the expression "kids say the darndest things" until I spent four weeks teaching third graders:). Here are just a few quotes they have said over the past few weeks:

- "I think freedom means that black and white people can be friends."

- "I want to be like Chris Brown when I grow up. But I won't beat nobody."

- "I am going to go to college."

- "Is Oregon in Russia?"

Oh! And the most exciting news... I HAVE A JOB! :) I got a phone call from my placement coordinator on July 8th and she arranged a phone interview. I had my phone interview that same evening and found out that I got the job that same evening as well! It is such a relief to be hired and employed! The school is Confluence Old North. It is a charter school in St. Louis and it is run by EdisonLearning. EdisonLearning has schools all over the world. The principal who interviewed me was looking for someone who was endorsed in science and social studies, which I am. The school is about 7 minutes from my house in St. Louis.

I was talking to another TFA corps member about what to expect and he told me to expect the best and the worse. The best case is that some of the kids who are there are there to get a great education and they want to be there. The worst case is that some of the kids who are there were kicked out of St. Louis Public Schools for a number of reasons and they were placed at Confluence Old North. Regardless, the principal told me that at long as I go in there were strict classroom rules, the majority of my problems will be small. I start inservice days on August 2nd. The first week I am there is for new hires only, then the returning teachers come back on the second week. The first day for students is August 16th.

I feel like now that I have a classroom, I can really start planning my room, year, behavior and investment plans. It is so exciting that all of this is finally happening! I am so ready for the challenge and I know that I am going to come out of this a strong and amazing teacher, but the process is going to take some time. I feel so optimistic about the years to come:).

I'm off to bed! I will try and update this blog more often, but until then... Thanks for reading:).

Always,

Allie

Week Two of Chicago Institute

This week was rough, challenging and so rewarding all at the same time. On Monday, we started teaching in our classrooms for half of the day and sitting in educational sessions for the other half. I work with a collaborative group of three other people to teach four different subjects for 45 minutes each day. We met our faculty advisor (a veteran teacher who supervises us in the classroom) and she said that we have a few students in our class that will give us constant trouble because of his behavioral problems. My group and I decided that we would walk into the classroom with a new set of eyes and treat each student as if it were the first day of the rest of their lives.

Each week, our objectives are written for us by an Institute Curriculum Specialist. We are given the objectives and we need to design a lesson plan that will allow students to master that objective. Well, Monday did not go so well. I felt as though they were not fully understanding the concept of inferences, which was my objective for the day. Tuesday did not go as planned and my reading lesson got pushed back to the last thirty minutes of the day. On Wednesday, I went in fully prepared and motivated with all of the materials to help my students master the concept of inferences and character traits. Well, my four hours of lesson planning paid off! My students were on fire! They were understanding the content, engaging in the material, and they all did amazingly well on their end-of-lesson assessments! It was so rewarding to finally succeed in teaching someone something!

Thursday was a completely different story... Ten minutes before my lesson was scheduled to begin, my faculty advisor pulled me out into the hall to meet with the schools curriculum specialist. I was told that I needed to change my lesson for that day in order to teach to a script so my students could pass the assessment to be given at the end of that same day. I was so caught off guard, all I did was smile and nod. Thankfully, my entire collaborative group was willing to change our schedule so I ended up having an hour to prepare. As I quickly learned, an hour is not nearly enough to understand phonetic sounds and plan how to teach phonetic sounds. To top everything off, we also found out that the school was being audited that day and auditors would be sitting in on our lesson to make sure that we are following the National Geographic text that the school is supposed to use. There must have been some major miscommunication between Chicago Public Schools and Teach For America, and unfortunately, I was caught in the middle of it.

This weeks success story:

This boy, I will call him Tyrone, is seriously the highlight of my day. He went from being semi-disruptive in class to being the first to raise his hand, turning in his homework on time, and asking for more challenging work in class. I honestly think he has made this transition in just four days because we made sure to start off with a clean slate. Now, don't get me wrong, he has moved down a few stair steps on our behavior chart, but he is more than willing to do whatever he needs to do to get back up to an A+ with the rest of the class. Working with kids like Tyrone make it so much easier to get out of bed in the morning, because I am waking up with a purpose. I might not be changing the world, but for that day, I am changing a life.

I have a lot of work to do this weekend, but I am heading to my roommates parents house for a Fourth of July barbeque. It will be nice to get out of the residence halls for a few days and relax. Our students don't have school on Monday, but we still have sessions planned all day... but the good news is...

We are 2/5 of the way done with Institute!

Bottom Line: I am still surviving, learning how to live without sleep, working the hardest I've ever worked in my entire life, learning valuable lessons and loving almost every minute of it!

Good night:)