In the Lou

I received an email tonight from one of the members of my 12-person learning group. She wanted to call this upcoming week of Institute “Friday Week.” Her theory was that, in the same way getting to Friday — the fifth day — has some magical, uplifting, energizing quality, so too should getting to the fifth week of our five week experience here. So, now that you (hopefully) get the idea: Happy Friday week. (more…)

In my attempt to keep in touch, here comes week 3’s installment.

First, Wednesday of this past week marked the official 50% mark of my Institute experience. On Thursday, though the schedule showed an afternoon of workshops, we actually got out of school at 1 pm for TFA Day — that’s Totally Free Afternoon day. :) It was most excellent.

Low point of the week: Having planned an excellent lesson and awesome demonstration to teach converting verbal phrases into algebraic expressions (i.e. five more than x), I realized once I was about to open my mouth to start things that I had left my materials bag in my prep room. This was very awkward, (more…)

Alright, this week, it will be amazingly short compared to my chapter book published last week.

This week we got our classrooms. I teach on a team of four people. I’m teaching algebra and such. The only problem is that I’m not getting much teaching done because my kids are having a really hard time behaving right after lunch. Yes, I know, lucky me with the post-lunch crowd.

Things have been going frustratingly slow because I spend much of the little class time we have (they have been getting back from lunch late because they won’t be silent to be dismissed from the cafeteria) doing discipline. By Friday, I was already a full lesson behind on our schedule, none of them had learned anything, and basically, I had decided the end of the nonsense had to come.

When my students came into the class, they were supposed to start working on the “Do Now.” Although we have gone over my expectations, I have a sign on the door that they can’t help but see that reminds them “Do Now = Do it Now Silently.” After asking them twice to work silently with no success, I warned that we would go back out into the hall and start class again once everyone was silent. Well, we had to go out to the hall. Twice. In total, I spent 28 minutes of our 45 minute block with my students in the hall — waiting for them to realize I was serious about them coming into class and getting to work.

The final 17 minutes of class went beautifully. We went over the do now (the “trouble maker” even volunteered to write the answer on the board — with the correct answer I might add), the previous day’s quiz, and a new lesson! Of course, their mastery of the new objective was not what I would have wanted, but I can weave in some remediation over the next several days in a related objective.

Here’s to hoping they remember my expectations tomorrow and come in silently.

What is this? I’m reposting my emails (exactly to the day) sent to family and friends during my summer 2006 Institute experience in Atlanta. TeachFor.Us didn’t exist at the time — hence the title. For some of you, this will be a trip down memory lane. For my hundreds of current readers, I hope you find these emails interesting. I feel they are an important part of the Teach for America experience that would otherwise be absent from my blog. Without further ado…

First, let me apologize for the method of delivery. I know that receiving a “mass email” is somewhat impersonal, but I’ll only send out one of these. My reasoning is that I have, for the most part, been remiss in getting in touch with most of you personally to let you know what I’ve been doing, what I’m doing, where I’m going, etc.

The Sparks Notes edition:
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