New School Year Angst

[Veronica]

Random craziness deleted

Teaching - the job of producing a quality product from a mixture of unknown materials.

[Crankin]

I missed your rant. Now I want to know.

[malkin]

Random craziness deleted

Teaching - the job of producing a quality product from a mixture of unknown materials.

lol!
love this quote!

I'm really looking forward to this year. Last year was my first year back in the school district after 10 years at a private school. This year, I plan to be less confused.

[azfiddle]

Good luck Veronica. I am already through with 2 weeks in the classroom in our modified calendar district.
I love your quote.

PS on an unrelated note, my Ruby is named Veronica Speedwell- after the dark blue wildflower (common name Speedwell, latin name, genus Veronica). I think my new Surly is going to be called Betty...

[Veronica]

I'm stressing because I've been assigned a 4/5 combo this year. We're adopting new math and ELA curriculum, neither of which do I have all of yet. Oh, and that's FOUR new curriculums for me. I just got my student list and I have 3 resource students, 2 ELL, one known crazy who was suppose to move, and two new kids from private school. One new kid is a year younger than everyone else in his grade. The other new kid is from a charter school that lost its charter because they weren't up to snuff. Every kid who has come back to our school from this charter has had major issues, academic and behavior. "Everyone" says that combos are suppose to have independent workers so that you can in theory cover both curriculums. Yeah, right. That's 20% of my class that I don't think will be independent. And I'm tired of the pithy response of "You're a great teacher, you can handle it." Frankly, I just want to reply, "F@ck you." to that. "What can you do that will really help me?"

I've already decided that I'm going to use a lot of my own stuff for ELA. I just don't want to be floundering with new curriculum. The new Common Core standards are pretty close for 4th and 5th grade in ELA and I've put a lot of time in to prepping for novels that I've used in the past, aligning them to the new standards since we've known they were coming. Math is going to require two lessons a day. The differences are huge for the two grade levels. You can pretty kiss Science and Social Studies good bye.

So, my original post was an even more b!tchy rant about what I'm looking forward to. I've now moved on to, "How do I make the best of this?" and screw any state testing. The students will be as prepared as I can get them with the time and materials I have. I feel like the district has set up these kids to not perform well by refusing to give us another teacher.

I looked up my name in the dictionary in like 3rd grade. I've always liked that I'm a pretty blue flower.

Veronica

[Catrin]

I did see the original post, and I think you are handling it all very well! You are now in the "making lemonade" stage, and to my way of thinking, that is when we are the most creative. Good luck!

[azfiddle]

Veronica,
You do have a pretty full plate. Good luck with the challenges this year- they are not trivial at all.

[Veronica]

There is a 32 month age difference between my oldest student and my youngest. That's huge at this age. And I've learned that one of those new kids is actually an SDC placement. Now, back when I agreed to take the combo, I was told I would not get any of those. I suspect that our classes are filling up and they are just putting kids anywhere at this point.

I do the prep schedule for my school. The district didn't assign us enough prep slots and they won't adjust until after the start of the year. The contract does give them 20 days to move students and teachers around to accommodate actual enrollment. That's 4 weeks of potential upheaval and we wonder why our students aren't performing as we would like.

It's a good thing I really like that I have no commute. I also really like my principal.

Veronica

[salsabike]

Veronica, what does "SDC" stand for?

[Veronica]

Special Day Class and there are various types of those. We have SDC classes for severely mentally handicapped, autism, emotionally handicapped... and I think that's it at our school. There's a move to put the less severely handicapped students onto the General Ed teacher's roster. Then they get pulled out into a Learning Center to meet the needs specified in their Individual Education Plan (IEP). Putting those students into a combo class can make for a scheduling nightmare since the combo teacher is already trying to manage two grade level's worth of curriculum.

The resource students also get pulled, but it's generally only about 40 minutes each day, unlike SDC when it can be a couple of hours. I also have a student who will be pulled for Speech, but that's only once a week for 40 minutes. Then for the two English Language Learners I'm suppose to devote 35 minutes a day to a dedicated ELL curriculum. Don't ask what the 28 other kids are doing then.

Each one of these groups is managed by a different district person and they only care that you do what's needed for their subset of your class. It's like they are completely unaware that there are are these other subset in your classroom and no one really advocates for the General Ed population. So the resource teacher who insisted that three of her kids would "greatly benefit from my structure" doesn't care what impact those three kids will have on the rest of the classroom. While I'm wondering are those three kids going to be a disruption when I HAVE to be teaching the other grade level's math curriculum and can't be available to them?

Veronica

[malkin]

... So the resource teacher who insisted that three of her kids would "greatly benefit from my structure" doesn't care what impact those three kids will have on the rest of the classroom. While I'm wondering are those three kids going to be a disruption when I HAVE to be teaching the other grade level's math curriculum and can't be available to them?

Be sure to address this concern with that very same resource teacher! Our district has a stash of funding for situations where more special ed. support is needed. You'll probably need a lot of evidence to support your position... I'm sure you know the drill.

Your whole classroom sounds like a complicated situation. Lucky that you like your principal.

I swore that this would be the year that I started off all focused, calm, and organized. That plan pretty much got blown out of the water this weekend as I found out that my 84-year-old dad is very ill. My brothers and I will be traveling to see him during the first week of school. Four days of travel for 3 days of visit.

[Veronica]

I'm sorry to hear about your dad.

Veronica

[rebeccaC]

I swore that this would be the year that I started off all focused, calm, and organized. That plan pretty much got blown out of the water this weekend as I found out that my 84-year-old dad is very ill. My brothers and I will be traveling to see him during the first week of school. Four days of travel for 3 days of visit.

sorry to hear you have to go through this....hoping being around siblings/family can help in dealing with the processing of your dads illness.....it helped me when my grandmother suddenly passed on recently.

[salsabike]

Malkin, I'm sorry about your dad. It's such hard stuff.

Veronica, I've always thought that teaching a split without a BIG class size reduction is so nuts. I would go on and on but I know that wouldn't help you one bit. I wish you well and I wish you good support from the people at your school who can give that.

[Veronica]

Thanks, being proactive helps.

I read Chris Hadfield's book this summer and felt like I should have been astronaut, although Gravity made me think not.

Anyway...

Astronauts over plan, sweat the small stuff, look for the flaws in a plan and plan for the next thing thing that could kill them. That's what I do. Okay, maybe I'm not so much planning for what can kill me... but what can go wrong and how do I avoid it? Whining isn't going to change the situation. I've already presented to my principal my concerns about math, with data to back it up, to take the district office. That wasn't enough to persuade them that a combo is a bad idea. All of our classes have reached the district average of 30 enrolled. We can have a max of 33 students. I don't know how big we have to get for them to reconsider. So, now, I'm looking at how do I keep this from killing me - emotionally not physically.

Veronica