New School Year Angst

[Crankin]

That *is* f'd up. It wouldn't happen where I used to teach.
Not sure what to say!

[azfiddle]

That just isn't acceptable.
No other options for the ELL kids?

[malkin]

Talk to all the people who can make a difference:

Make sure your principal knows.
You might also have a conversation with (or drop a note to) the director of ELL services, the special ed team, and whoever oversees curriculum and instruction for the district.

Have you got a union rep around there?

That really sucks!

[Veronica]

This is coming from our ELL director.

I've had a long talk with my principal. It's a complicated situation. CA requires the 30 minutes per day, regardless of the number of students. We don't have a large population of ELLs at my school - about 15 out of 90 students at each grade level, most have a good speaking command of English. We have had a parent complaint - the teacher has documentation showing she did follow the mandate. But that puts us under more scrutiny. The biggest issue is that this group for the school has not been making adequate growth for the last 4 years. Certain classes have had growth, but as school we're not doing well with this population. Teachers will say that it's the group of kids, but that doesn't fly with 4 years worth of data that says we're not progressing.

Clearly, what we've been doing isn't working and it needs fixing.

Veronica

[Veronica]

I find this very amusing. The resource teacher decided to pull the resource students from my room because it was too difficult do push-in services to five classrooms. I'm down to just 25 students in my class, all of them are pretty close to being at grade level. I have no "crazy" students. I have a few that are VERY impulsive, but they are nice kids. I do wonder what is causing this lack of self control in so many children. It's definitely more prevalent than when I started teaching in the early 90s. I don't mean the moving around in your seat, or tapping pencils incessantly. I mean blurting out in the middle of a lesson something totally unrelated to the topic and the need to sing or make loud weird noises quite often, especially when the room is really quiet. There is a lot of movement within my room during lessons as part of the lesson structure. The students also have lots of opportunities to interact with each other. Thank you Kagan Cooperative structures! But about 4 of my boys seem to need more.

Schedules were reworked so teachers with an ELL population can work with them in their rooms. I don't have a bucket load of extra kids coming to my room. This could turn out to be an awesome class.

Veronica

[Crankin]

So happy that you are down to a reasonable class size. No one crazy is good.
Keep those 4 boys moving... seriously, I know you do a good job of this, anyway, but it sounds like no one has given them any boundaries or listens to them, so they just do whatever they feel like doing. I'd tire them out a bit, and at the same time slowly introduce some rules around the blurt outs.
So, while this doesn't come under the area of teaching, I had one of the 3 clients I took with me from my last job have a "tantrum" in my office last week. He was on the verge of destroying stuff, kicking the wall, screaming. He is 10, an adoptive kid, who made some progress with me when I did a trauma based program with him when I went to his house. It's mostly been teaching his parents how to be consistent, respond to this stuff. These people are altruistic, but they never should have adopted a traumatized kid of a different race, who has been in more placements than anyone i have worked with. I have seen this kid destroy, and i mean destroy his classroom, twice (a special ed class). I got him calmed down a bit and when his mom came into the room, he started up again. I know what triggered this, but it was scary, couldn't get him to stop. He is my youngest client; I don't take anyone under 6th grade now, only adolescents and adults. I want to refer him to a trauma center, where they have people who deal more with younger kids, but his mom will be devastated, and so will the kid. But, I feel like i am not helping him at all.
You might not totally stop all of the impulsivity, but I know you can make headway. And, I am betting at least 2/4 have undiagnosed ADHD.

[azfiddle]

So glad to hear things are looking up! Hope everything continues to go well.

I use some of the Kagan structures too, but not all the time...

Sharon