ressurection

Now that I have some time on my hands, I'd like to start up this blog again. Blogging is a funny thing. Narcissistic, no doubt. I could write in my journal, which is awfully tempting because nothing beats that paper and pencil satisfaction (especially at this moment as I write fom my phone while in the train). But there's something about "publishing" that is strangely appealing and irresistible. Plus it's more green, right? So here goes. July 31, 2010. New thoughts, new dreams, and possibly a new era of
Vi.

a tribute to amelie

(tandom bikes = too much fun)

whip share: one thing you find interesting

A whip share is an opportunity for each kid go share what's on their mind, either prompted by a topic or left open-ended.

This morning's topic: One thing you find interesting. (Very open-ended)

My favorite response: "I think it's interesting that my cat looks younger than me even though I'm older. And we have the same birthday."

you can vote however you like

Lyrics:

Obama on the left
McCain on the right
We can talk politics all night
And you can vote however you like
You can vote however you like, yeah

Democratic left
Republican right
November 4th we decide
And you can vote however you like
You can vote however you like, yeah

(McCain supporters)
McCain's the best candidate
With Palin as his running mate
They'll fight for gun rights, pro life,
The conservative right
Our future is bright
Better economy in site
And all the world will feel our military might

(Obama supporters)
But McCain and Bush are real close right
They vote alike and keep it tight
Obama's new, he's younger too
The Middle Class he will help you
He'll bring a change, he's got the brains
McCain and Bush are just the same
You are to blame, Iraq's a shame
Four more years would be insane

Lower your Taxes - you know Obama Won't
PROTECT THE LOWER CLASS - You know McCain won't!
Have enough experience - you know that they don't
STOP GLOBAL WARMING - you know that you won't

I want Obama
FORGET OBAMA
Stick with McCain and you're going to have some drama
We need it
HE'LL BRING IT
He'll be it
YOU'LL SEE IT
We'll do it
GET TO IT
Let's move it
DO IT!

Obama on the left
McCain on the right
We can talk politics all night
And you can vote however you like
You can vote however you like, yeah

Democratic left
Republican right
November 4th we decide
And you can vote however you like, I said
You can vote however you like, yeah

I'm talking big pipe lines, and low gas prices
Below $2.00 that would be nice

But to do it right we gotta start today
Finding renewable ways that are here to stay

I want Obama
FORGET OBAMA,
Stick wit McCain you gone have some drama
MORE WAR IN IRAQ
Iran he will attack
CAN'T BRING OUR TROOPS BACK
We gotta vote Barack!

Obama on the left
McCain on the right
We can talk politics all night
And you can vote however you like, I said
You can vote however you like, yeah

Democratic left
Republican right
November 4th we decide
And you can vote however you like, I said
You can vote however you like, yeah

from mayflower to blue angel

VROOOOOOM

This week my classroom was disrupted by an ear-splitting rumble. The Blue Angels are in town. I've never been, but every year the Blue Angels come to San Francisco to put on an air show. A few things bother me about this.

Cost. This is all hearsay, but word on the street is that to put on a Blue Angels show costs a pretty penny, especially during an oil crisis. I tried to research how the event actually cost, but couldn't find anything. No surprise there, really.

Association. When the jets flew overhead, my students ran to the windows with their eyes shining and with big smiles on their faces. When a fighter jet passes by there is no ignoring it - you hear it, see it, and feel it in your bones. To all the people who gathered to watch the air show today, it's entertainment. But around the world that deep to-the-core sensation is what comes right before bombs are dropped, humans suffer, and lives are lost.

I suppose one might argue that this is to honor our troops. Maybe that's why I barely see any protesting about this. But I can think of a number of ways we can honor the troops without that Big-Brother-is-watching sensation that is very misleading.

Maybe it's coincidental, but how fitting that the Blue Angels should come to town the weekend of Columbus Day. Berkeley and the Bay Area celebrate Indigenous People's Day to recognize the affect of Columbus's "savage injustice".

But around the U.S. people will be celebrating this nation's "great" founder (it's hard to express sarcasm using just quotation marks) Christopher Columbus. And what better way to kick off this ignorant celebration than with a big, costly hurray for war and pain.

say no to prop 8

One student brought in a button to share during our morning meeting:

My brother and I went to our first political meeting. I got this button. It says "VOTE NO on proposition 8."

Proposition 8 is currently on the ballot in California. If it passes, it will "eliminate the right for same-sex couples to marry." This share led to a discussion about how there are people who don't believe in gay marriage (we have three families with gay parents in our class) and what a proposition is.

This student has her button proudly pinned to her pink leopard print backpack, along with its button friend: Barack Obama 2008, World Peace, another Human Rights Campaign, Junior Rangers, and MusicMaker.org.

I love it! Can't get enough of it! It was such a special share...that young people are exposed to and thinking about issues like this is truly inspiring!

i heart playgrounds

One hard part of being a teacher is having to watch your kids playing and not get to join. Between having to be a responsible adult ensuring safety on the yard and being a young educator that doesn't want to come across too young, I've only ventured onto the swings (slowly and tamely rocking back and forth...snoozer!) while in the presence of my class. Most of the time though, I stand there green-eyed and envious.

And to make things worse, look what I've just recently discovered at a hidden park right in the Mission:



Watching this makes me so happy. I love my kids. Even though they get to go on the twirly, teacup-of-the-future ride and I don't.

laugher

As I sit in this cafe writing up lesson plans for summer school, I like to distract myself by reminiscing about the year.

One of my students apparently told her dad one day:
"Miss Vi is the longest laugher in the class"

Side note: To this day I'm not sure what it means. When I asked my student, she didn't give me a straight answer because she seemed embarrassed that her dad told me the story. I may never find out!

making history

student: "My dad said I'm a part of history."
me: "Yeah? How's that?"
student: "Because I have two dads and I'm their kid before gay marriage...So I'm part of making history."

One of my students (whose family identifies as LGBT) after the CA Supreme Court lifted the ban on gay marriage just last week.

cinco de mayo

A couple days late, but today en la clase de espanol, we discussed Cinco de Mayo.

Estudiante: "How long did the war last?"
Profesora: "Un dia! One day."
Otro estudiante: "Yeah, Cinco de Mayo lasted one day. The war today lasts a lot longer than that. A war that lasted one day would be quite amazing...quite amazing."

They speak the truth.

1st grade: obsessed with star wars

A joke I heard at lunch today:


What kind of car does Luke Skywalker drive?






A Toy-Yoda.

relearning math

Tonight was the first how-to-teach Math course of my credential program. I left the class floating on cloud 9 (or, in prime factors, cloud 3x3).

The professor was, honestly, a little scary at first...she made it very clear what her expectations were without ever spelling it out to us (never acknowledging someone speaking out, always asking for a quiet hand to answer a question, staring people down) but she quickly won the class over with her amazing flair...and all around math!

Math was always a subject I thought I really rocked in school (until Calculus II in college). But I'd come to realize that what I was really good at was memorizing tricks (carry the one, punch numbers in a T1 graphing calculator).

Conceptualization. That's what I've been missing. My professor started the class with the difficult concept of understanding magnitude. What does a million feel like, a billion, a trillion, 10 trillion (like our national deficit....it turns out, if we were to pay $1 ever second, it'd take us over 30,000 years to get out of debt).

I am completely psyched to relearn all this math. Nerd alert! But seriously....I am psyched.

Brainbuster: One activity we did (and stop reading if you're not that interested in math) that I still have trouble with had to do with fractions. The professor wrote (1/2) / (3/4). What does that look conceptually? (no clue). Here is my version of what she drew on the board:
So essentially, how many three-fourths can you get out of one-half? If you cut the whole piece into four, you can only get 2 pieces out of the 3 you'd want to make 3/4 (shown in blue), so the answer is 2/3. I have no idea if this will make sense to someone just reading it, but this whole thing blew my mind because I'd never seen this type of problem drawn out for me. I tried other harder fraction problems and my head hurt (plus I didn't activate my brain buttons beforehand).

I could go on and on, but it's now time for my post-dinner walk. If you're digging this math stuff as much as I am...


...call me!

pushing my buttons...my brain buttons!

Whoops! Haven't blogged much lately. I'm back in school and some good changes are at hand.

One change that we will be making to the classroom is to tweak the format. One thing I love about the class is that it is not a sit-silently-while-you-do-work kind of environment. Students are talking and socializing, which is a huge part of their education. But, especially with 27 students in one room, it's not surprising that it can get noisy. So we are changing the layout of the room so there will be more areas for quiet, focused work but still maintain a designated area for partner work/discussions.

This change coincidentally comes at the same time the school's learning specialist gave a presentation on accomodating varying degrees of mental alertness. And with that was the concept of Educational Kinesiology (Edu-K), which is basically physical movements that enhances whole-brain learning.

One that I thought was pretty fun was what Brain Gym calls Brain Buttons. The name alone lends itself to winning people over.

SO! Follow along as you read this:
* Place thumb and fingers under clavicle to the left and right of the sternum where there is meaty flesh. These are your Brain Buttons.
*Activate Brain Buttons by massaging them.
*Simultaneously, massage belly button with opposite hand.
*Stimulate these points for 20-30 seconds, or until tenderness is released.
*Switch hands and repeat.
(here's a sketch I did after the meeting while on BART)


Doing this supposedly (I'm still looking into it) increases oxygen, works on right and left brain communication, corrects number and letter reversals, and could help with Dyslexia.

If nothing else, it's soothing.

languages

Quote from my Second Language Acquisition class:

"There are a lot of language we don't teach in schools, like, basically all of them."

This was during a discussion of Ebonics and school, responding to another person's comment about the need to teach Ebonics if society is going to acknowledge and value its existence. But it would be nearly impossible to be able to teach every language that walked through school doors.

they be nice

An "I'm Thankful For" letter that a student gave me this Thanksgiving

addendum: kevin henkes

I was going to take out Julius: The Baby of the World from the library today. But, I was already taking out too many books and walking home, so I decided to sketch my own rendition of the scene I mentioned.

I know I don't do Henkes justice, but you get the gist:


(Lilly, the one behind the tree, isn't supposed to be quite so big. Hey, I said I wanted to be a teacher, not an artist!)

squeaky wheel

I am quite privileged to be living with a person who is not only extremely thoughtful but is also an educator. So you can imagine what a lot of our conversations revolve around (aside from whether or not we should go eat pho. The answer is always yes.).

One great thing that I get from talking about my day or about teaching in general has been the mirror that M will hold up in front of me to help me gain clarity on a particular issue.

Most recently, I've been noticing how negative I'd become. I'd been stressing out over the kids in my class who are disruptive and require a lot of my energy. How do I engage them? What am I doing wrong? How do I convince them that what we're doing is something they'll gain satisfaction from and ultimately enjoy doing?

Not easy questions. And while I'm not saying that these aren't important questions to ask, I found them to be all-consuming. I came home frustrated and disappointed in myself. Nothing kills your mood than having spent the whole day shushing kids and putting on a stern, serious face. Not very satisfying.

So this past week I'd decided to harness my energy elsewhere. Why let the squeaky wheelers get my attention? For each kid who is acting up, there are five who are engaged, are being respectful, and do have fun.

My switch in humor became abundantly clear one day when I was waiting for students to line up to go to lunch. A number of kids were horsing around, talking, and not paying attention to what I was saying. I decided to use a line one of my lead teachers often uses: I am feeling disrespected. Upon saying this, one student exclaimed, You're respected, Miss Vi!

Oh man! The moment this student said that, I realized my big mistake: By concentrating so much on the bad, I was missing the good.

Also, I felt icky after making that statement that centered around me. I don't want them to do things to please me. I want them to understand how their behavior affects the class and that yes, it is disrespectful to disregard what I am saying, but not as a teacher but as an individual.

In my hand little notebook that I try to carry around with me, I've been writing the positive things that go on around me...and there are plenty of them.

Some examples:
- Seeing new and unexpected friendships begin to bud.
- Student M and N are playing on the playground. M does a split and touches her head to the ground. M asks N if she can touch the ground with her head. N says yes, picks up woodchips in her hand and dumps them on her head.
- D, who began the year hating the concept of school, walking away from one activity saying, "I love reading."
- K skipping around the blacktop chanting, "I'm a beautiful pony"
- Banana tag! I love this game. Everyone is it and you chase anyone down. If both people tag each other at the same time, you roshambo (rock paper scissors). The loser sits down and can't get up until the person who got them gets tagged. Kids love it too.
- Doing yoga in a reading group. One book described how animals influence yoga poses. Nothing's cuter than five 1st graders lying on the ground doing the fish pose.

List goes on and on...which is why I wanted to become a teacher! I just needed the reminder.

kevin henke

This author is brilliant. Kevin Henke has a series of books that have the same mouse characters (I'm not exactly sure why mice are so endearing, but hey...it works). Some of his stories feature the heroine, Lilly, who is badass. She is a really strong girl mouse that is unique, creative, fun, a bit cocky, and stubborn.

His stories have a lot to do with kid angst. It also have a very Simpsons feel to it - it's a children's book that appeals to adults too. The adults in the stories are edgy and sarcastic. Very witty.

The one that was the most laugh-out-loud for me was Julius: The Baby of the World. In one scene of the book, Lilly expresses her dislike for her new baby brother by hiding behind trees and warning pregnant strangers against the "lumps" in their bellies. You just need to check it out. Brilliant.

"Julius is the baby of the world," chimed Lilly's parents.
"Digusting," said Lilly.

p.s. Turns out he also wrote Kitten's First Full Moon. Even more brilliant!

literature for emergent readers. eek!

We have started to meet with students in reading groups. B stays inside the classroom and keeps an eye on the activities in the room. R and I split the class and take reading groups in groups of 4 or 5. It's been awesome getting this responsibility, but there has been little time available to get direction on what to do.

Unfortunately, the books we have available are these pretty boring readers (I like fish. I like fox. I like dog. How about you?). It's partly a result of not having more interesting resources available. So since I've been given almost-free reign, I'm been racking my brain for interesting texts that are interesting and appropriately leveled.

It's not easy!

I went to the library yesterday and felt like my butt was on fire and I was looking for a bucket of water hidden on the shelves to put it out. But nowhere on the crammed shelves of my local library could I find something to squelch the flames.

Tomorrow I think I'm going to bring I'm the Biggest Thing in the Ocean (courtesy of Bottom Shelf Books and Hand Full of Heart Stones), but no doubt the kids will know it already. I bet I can still stretch it maybe 2 days....but then what?!

It's not that there's a shortage of good books, but it's a tricky balance between getting books that have interesting plots and aren't totally frustrating for kids who are barely sounding out words.

Help! I need my Fairy Godmother to bibbady bobbidy boo me some good literature! Dr. Seuss where are you?!

ways you can read, the musical

Every Friday the whole school meets on the yard for assembly. There are weekly traditions (a welcome song, birthday wishes, announcements) including a performance put on by a different class each week. Today was the first grade class's turn to perform.

Assembly somewhat fell into my lap...it was clear that me taking over the planning was something welcomed by my head teachers. So I ran with it.

Theme: Different ways a person can read.

In our class, we stress the idea that you don't have to be reading Harry Potter to be considered a reader. So why not really drive that message home.

The gist: I split the class into groups that represented different types of reading: Words, Pictures, Faces, Music, Stars, Braille (the list went on an on...it was hard limiting them). And each had a different visual representation. The one that went over the best, I think, was when the four students got on stage with four pieces of construction paper and, when put together, formed a picture of a fish. Ta da!

I had trouble sleeping the last two days because, why lie, I was nervous. Though I knew it wasn't a big deal in the long run, the fact that this was the first thing I would really call my own made the event seem more monumental than it needed to be.

AMAZING! The class rocked that assembly and really wowed the audience. Hearing the audience "ah ha!" during the fish puzzle really made it clear to me that we had the audience eating out of their little 6-year old palms.

Afterwards, parents came up gushing about their superstar baby actors (as they should have) and congratulating us on a job well done. But what really meant a lot to me was hearing the response from the teachers.

While I don't know him very well, there is a teacher in the middle school who left me speechless. He is a no-nonsense type of guy whose opinion I've come to value. He doesn't just hand out compliments like Halloween candy. So it was my time to gush when he came up to me and said (paraphrasing), "That was possibly the best assembly I've seen. Not only was the content meaningful, the presentation was just as thoughtful. This type of presentation is something I might have expected from the 4th or 5th graders."

These students are sharp and wonderful and have proven they can live up to high expectations.

Yippee!

HAVE A GREAT WEEKEND