The Good, the Bad, and the Ugly

Ugh. It hasn't exactly been the best week around here. But let's start on a happy note...

The Good: 
Last weekend was my sister's baby shower, which was so wonderful! I headed home Friday after a long day of class and work, and while every train out of Philly was delayed due to inclement weather, mine left on time. Woohoo! I got home, helped set up for the party, wrote a paper that was due at midnight (turned in at 11:30 pm!), went to sleep, woke up, threw the party, and was preparing to come back to Philly on Saturday night. Mother Nature had other plans for me. It snowed in earnest pretty much all day, and roads were really bad by the time the party ended. There was no way I was catching a train back to Philly when we could barely drive a car down our street. Thankfully, my sister Steph was in town from Delaware and she got snowed in too! Steph and I live pretty close to each other, but thanks to having opposite schedules and lots of obligations, we don't get to see each other as much as we'd like. It was so much fun to get snowed in together! My parents were happy to have us home as well. The four of us actually carried out a pretty awesome prank together…

For Christmas this year, my Mom got an 8-foot tall inflatable Santa Claus. A few years ago, in the middle of October, my Mom's best friend put a giant inflatable snowman in our front yard, just for fun. Ever since then, my Mom has been trying to prank someone else with a large inflatable. The snow gave us the perfect excuse. My oldest sister, Jen, lives a few blocks away from my parents' house, so around 8 pm, my Mom, Dad, Steph, and I trekked over to her house with flashlights, an extension cord, and the inflatable Santa. Here's what happened:

Hilarious, right?! It was so much fun…I'm only sad that I didn't get to see my sister or her family's reactions when they saw the giant Santa the next day. I'm sure it was priceless. Anyway, I headed back to Philly the next morning, got to do some work, then stayed up waaaay too late watching the Oscars at one of my friend's apartment. 

The Bad:

Then it was Monday morning. I was tired when I got to school, but I stayed up really late on Sunday night (the Oscars only happen once a year!), so I didn't think much of it. Some of my students were sniffling and coughing, but that's pretty much the norm during winter. Then Tuesday happened, and I started to feel pretty terrible. Two of our kids were out sick, which is a big deal. I taught a Math lesson and it was okay, but I felt like I missed a lot of points that i wanted to make. Thankfully my teacher chimed in to fill in the missing pieces, but I felt a little out of it. I headed to my evening class which consisted of a panel of principals. They spoke to us for two hours about their schools, what they're looking for in teachers, and what we can do as candidates to market ourselves and get ahead in the job application process. This is when the nervousness set in. Here's a peek into what I was thinking during that session:

How can I possibly think about what I will say during an interview when I haven't even finished a job application yet? And how can I possibly think about finishing a job application when I haven't even finished my Term IV assignment (which is due next Friday)? And how can I possibly think about finishing my Term IV assignment when I feel like I am coming down with the flu and I have lesson plans to write for tomorrow and I need to update my blog and my apartment is a mess and I've needed to make a dentist appointment for like a month and I have things I need to do for church, and I want to keep in touch with my family and friends and, and, and?!?! 

The Ugly:

Needless to say, when I got home on Tuesday night, I was not a pretty sight. After venting to James and crying quite a bit, I emailed my Classroom Mentor and told her I would have to miss school on Wednesday on account of not feeling well. I slept for 11 and a half hours that night! Staying home and resting did me a lot of good, and while I wasn't feeling great, I thought I was getting better. I went to school on Thursday and was there for about an hour when my CM said I should just go home and rest. Friday morning I went to the Urban Ethnography Forum for two really interesting sessions, then came home and put in about four hours of work on Term IV assignment. Four Modern Family episodes later, the week finally came to a close. 

The Point: 

So now it's Saturday and I feel like I've learned a lot in the past week. I need to stay well-rested and healthy. I need to be patient with myself and take one thing at a time. I'm not doing this whole grad school thing perfectly, but that's okay.

Stay happy and healthy, everyone.

- Rachel 

Happy 100th Day of School!

You heard it right, today was the 100th Day of School, at least for my current school. I'm not sure is the SDP is on a different day, but I am 100% sure about this (get it?). We celebrated with 100 themed math activities such as:

• Coming up with a 100 ways to get to 100 
• Making a design out of 100 pattern blocks
• Building a card house out of 100 cards
• Racing to 100, which is a game you use with a die. Work with a partner and take turns rolling and adding the numbers up. Whoever rolls to 100 first wins!
• Making a tower out of 100 things
• Making a list of 10 things you can do for 100 seconds (and proving it by actually doing it!)

It was a really fun day. Here are two pictures of the aftermath.

 

The group on the left (blue poster) was the only group to truly come up with 100 ways to get to 100! It was a pretty challenging task for these kids. The groups that persevered were the ones who realized that they could make a pattern of 1+99, 2+98, 3+97, etc, etc...

I can't tell if there are 100 pattern blocks on that table, or if the students just didn't want to clean up…hmmm.

In other news, my reign as Person of the Week is over. It was actually a relief to bring my things home. It was really strange having some of my belongings, as well as pictures of myself, on display in the room. My worlds collided! Here's what my display looked like:

The picture in middle on the bottom is actually a picture of me from when I was in 2nd grade. My kids really got a kick out of that. 

I'm pretty exhausted today despite the fact that this was a 2-day long school week for me. Presidents Day on Monday in addition to our second Snow Day on Tuesday meant that I only got to student teach yesterday and today. I start student teaching five days a week in March. I can't wait, though I know the first week will feel very long! I haven't student taught full time since college and I remember how tired I used to feel. But now that I think of it, that's sort of what grad school has felt like the whole time, so maybe I'll be okay! 

Happy Almost-Friday and Happy 100th Day of School!

Person of the Week

Every Tuesday, a different student is highlighted in a 30-minute block of time called "Person of the Week." The child can bring in 15-20 family photos, something handmade, their favorite stuffed animal, any awards they've won, things they collect, etc. This week, I got to be Person of the Week! It was fun to pick out some of my favorite things to bring in to my classroom, but when it came time for me to present, I was actually a little nervous! Here's what I brought in:

• 15 pictures of me with my family
• the first needlepoint project I finished on my own
• 3 of my favorite CDs (Beirut, Beirut, and Beirut - mostly because I don't own a lot of CDs!)
• an Ohio State logo (because I like their football team)
• 4  keychains (I collect them)
• a mug with an R on it (to symbolize my love of tea and hot chocolate)
• my awesome Sonic Screwdriver (Doctor Who reference!)
• a little journal that looks like a TARDIS (DOCTOR WHO!)
• an award my boss gave me last year while I was working for City Year

I described each object that I brought in, then handed it to one of two helpers, who displayed my items on the carpet we were all sitting around. After I talked about everything, everyone got to ask one question, unless they wanted to pass. If you choose to pass, you get the option to come up with a question after everyone else has gone, or you can phone a friend, and call on someone else to ask a question for you. I got questions about how old I was in certain pictures, where I was from, how old my cat was when she died…I was surprised by the specificity of some of the questions! One of my brothers is in a wheelchair, and a student asked what happened to him, which I thought was really thoughtful. 

I forgot to take a picture of my Person of the Week display, but I will take one on Tuesday and post it. As for tomorrow, it's Presidents Day! Woohoo! I will hopefully spend the day being extremely productive. 

On a completely unrelated note, I've been really into the Japanese version of "Let it Go" from Frozen. My brother-in-law introduced me to this multi-lingual version of the song and asked me which singer I liked best. I was taken with Takako Matsu's voice. Her tone is so clear and beautiful! You should listen for yourself here. 

The multi-lingual video is great and everything, but there weren't any African or Indian languages in it! I wasn't the only one to notice: 

http://www.pri.org/stories/2014-01-24/no-room-african-or-indian-languages-disney-s-multilingual-version-let-it-go

I was really disappointed when I went on youtube and searched "let it go african language" and found a video called "Let it Go (Africanized Tribal Cover)." The main singer is a young White girl, and she spends most of the music video surround by a little choir of seemingly White children with tribal paint on their face. It didn't rub me the right way at all, even though the little girl's voice is beautiful. *sigh*

On that note, I'll sign off. Stay warm! 

Little Kids vs. Big Kids

Thursday at my school is ice cream day. After the kids have eaten their main meal, every kid gets an ice cream cone/cup or a popsicle of some sort. Last Thursday, the dessert was a vanilla ice cream cone, but the ice cream had blue food coloring in it. One minute, each kid was unwrapping their dessert, and the next I was looking out at a sea of blue chins, blue mustaches, and even blue hair. It was so adorable!

Yesterday, my class celebrated Valentines Day by having Pajama Day. Three kids in the grade came to school in onesies, while the rest wore more typical, matching-set pajamas. Again, it was so adorable! When our kids arrived yesterday morning, my Classroom Mentor said, "I could never say 'no' to my kids when they were like this," meaning, "These kids are gonna walk all over us today because they look so stinking cute." They didn't, of course, but it was a really fun and hectic day.

I think 2nd graders are mysterious. I have seen evidence of very deep thinking from some of my students. Some are definitely more articulate than others, but even the ones who struggle to capture their ideas with words, are showing evidence of deep thought. Sometimes they act like "big kids" who are too cool for school, mostly when older students are around, but then they get their hands on some blue ice cream or they come to school in pajamas and they are instantly back to being "little kids." So how do you define a "big kid" or a "little kid?" I ask because I'm trying to place 2nd graders on the spectrum that is elementary school. In some ways, I think that 2nd graders are the fine line between the "little kids" and the "big kids." They're the little-big kids.

When I think back on being in 2nd grade, two experiences come to mind. The first is that I accidentally called my teacher "Mommy." Only one other person heard me, but he was a good sport about it, and instead of blabbing to everyone about it, he and I simply had a good laugh. The second thing I remember is that we had a class wide spelling bee. I was standing next to a new girl who is now one of my best friends, and she had to spell the word "different." She spelled it correctly and promptly leaned back against the board and started fanning herself as if she were going to pass out. Hilarious.

Do you have any funny 2nd grade stories? How do you define "little kids" and "big kids?"
And most importantly: do you own a onesie?  

"You do all sorts of strange things when you're a teacher."

This week I got to introduce my students to multiplication. It was so fun, but I was really nervous! Building the bridge between addition and multiplication is a big step for kids. In my mind, if you do the wrong thing, you could end up with a kid who can spout off facts and solve multiplication problems with an algorithm, yet has no conceptual understanding of what multiplication is.

So how do you introduce multiplication to 2nd graders? My teacher uses curriculum from Everyday Math, so I followed the book, but made my own adjustments as I saw fit. I started with this problem:

Jane bought 3 packs of gum. Each pack has 5 pieces of gum in it. How many pieces of gum did Jane buy? 

Each child had a clipboard with a blank piece of paper on it. I told them to find the answer any way they wanted to. Some of them made 3 sets of 5 tally marks, some of them counted by 5s, some of them wrote 3 x 5 = 15, and some of them wrote 3 + 5 = 8. I facilitated an open strategy sharing in which kids got to describe how they solved the problem. I represented their ideas on the board and then introduced them to the fact that they could solve this problem through multiplication.

What I love about multiplication is that it moves kids from dealing with single objects to dealing with groups of objects. It's kind of like a magic trick. If you need to buy 100 packs of gum, you could either add 5 + 5 + 5 until the cows come home, or you could multiply 5 x 100.

To give them a visual way of representing multiplication, I taught a different lesson on arrays. Arrays are rectangular arrangement of objects in rows and columns. I went back to the problem about Jane's packs of gum, and we made a 3 by 5 array to find the answer another way. After the students did some number stories in their workbooks (number stories = less threatening way of saying word problem), I put a bunch of different objects on the carpet that were arrays. I brought in a cupcake holder, an egg carton, a box of paint, and a chess board. Using these objects, and their imagination, they filled in some blank arrays and came up with their own multiplication problems.

After the lesson, I was talking with my Classroom Mentor about how it went. I told her that I really wanted to bring in an egg carton, but I still had a few eggs in it. I moved the eggs to a padded tupperware container and voila! I had an egg carton. She laughed and said, "You do all sorts of strange things when you're a teacher."

After writing this, I realize that the first strange thing I did was empty my egg container for the sake of a math lesson. The second strange thing I did was gleefully write a blog post about how much fun it is to teach multiplication. Ah well!

The February Blues

I find February to be the right hook of wintertime. It's short, but it packs a punch. All I want to do is sleep, watch Modern Family (who doesn't?), eat, drink some tea…and then sleep some more.  

Since I'm student teaching 4 days a week this semester, I'm not able to work in the Financial Aid office at GSE. I kind of miss working there! I got to spend a few hours a week away from homework, speak to students on the phone, do some filing, and get to know how GSE runs behind the scenes. To make up for the hours of work I'm not able to do this semester, I need to work some weekend events this Spring. I'm working for 4 hours on Friday and 9 hours on Saturday. I'm a person who values their weekend time, so I'm more than a little bummed out about this arrangement. However, I accepted this graduate assistantship knowing that there would be some sacrifices involved, and I know that the benefits outweigh the drawbacks in this situation. I don't have to do those hours every week. Just a few! I will survive.

Complaints like these make me feel like I've gone soft since I stopped working for City Year. When I was working for City Year, I was getting around 5-6 hours of sleep a night, commuting on SEPTA for 2 hours a day, and working 50 hours a week. Of course the biggest difference between City Year life and grad school life is the homework. I had virtually nothing to do at home when I was in City Year. Regardless, I think that I felt more stressed while I was doing City Year than I do now. I'm trying to remember what I did during the last two winters to get through the February Blues, but I'm drawing a blank. Here are two funny things, so that I can at least end this post on a high note:

Courtesy of the Internet: