23 June 2008, Monday

I thought Friday was a disaster until I talked to Ms. Jones after class. I was up much later than I wanted to be , planning a game for the students to play to learn solving inequalities that involved Lebron James, Tiger Woods, and 50 Cent. However, only about 2 students did their homework so we didn’t play the game. I REALLY wanted to play that game. The rest of class was so-so. I was trying to work with students in small groups so they could start to understand the material, problem being, while I working with a few students I could tell other students weren’t working. We didn’t get to lunch until 11:45 instead of 11:30. At lunch I found out lunch it truly optional here so today students will know that we might not go to lunch.

The weekend was a great break from TFA. Friday night we hung out in Jake and Zondawayo’s room. Saturday night I went to a club for the first time. And the Cubs swept the Sox. Glorious.

Anyways. This morning I had a really long chat with Ben (the SOM – school operations manager) about my frustrations with the institute thus far. I think my biggest frustration from the conversation is that he was trying to downplay the importance of how much time is spent on the lesson plans. If this were simply an enrichment class, I can understand it not being a big deal if lesson plans weren’t great. However, TFA has put us into a situation where if these kids don’t pass the exam, they don’t get to go to high school. I’m sorry but its really hard for me to slack off on a lesson plan when I know how much is riding on it. I know that other sessions are valuable but you can’t expect me to think that I can decide a lesson plan is “good enough”. We ended by setting goals for what I would get done during the work time.

Well, I had high hopes that I would get that done, but during work time, my CMA called me over to talk with her and one of my collaborative partners. Turns out we we’ve been accidentally screwing our kids over. We are both teaching our objectives in the order we’re require by TFA to teach them in, and as it turns out, I’m teaching them inequalities and word problems associated with inequalities while my collaborative partner is teaching them words and phrases that indicate the different operations (i.e. recognize that “the sum of 15 and a number is 20” needs to be written as “15 + x = 20”) and turning verbal phrases (not even completely doing word problems) into equations. I know I don’t have much experience teaching, but it just seems like you need to know the basics before you learn the hard stuff. As if this weren’t bad enough, we realized we were teaching them conflicting methods. He has the kids circle numbers, underline operational phrases, and double underline “is” (since it represents the sign); I’ve been having them underline quantities and circle the words that represent the sign. If the kids were doing really well and were fully literate they might be ok – even though that wouldn’t be ideal. We’ve got kids who – though my CMA tells me “they don’t have a literacy problem because they all passed the reading test” – have reading comprehension problems and have a very, very hard time interpreting the passages in the first place. I had one student today try to bet me that there was only one inequality in the problem even though it was a SYSTEMS (yes, plural form of “system”) of equations questions.

Class felt like a disaster again. I told the kids at the start of the class that if they were disruptive and/or weren’t doing their work, we wouldn’t take a break to each lunch. Lunch during summer school is not required – they get out at 1:00 p.m. and they are not paying for lunch – so I don’t have to take them. Well, the class was pretty miserable today. Most of the class wasn’t behaving and none of them were doing the work, even when I sat with them in small groups they wouldn’t work nor would they tell me what they didn’t understand. So we didn’t go to lunch. Actually there was one girl who completed her work so she had the opportunity to go but she chose not to. Afterwards I talked to Ms. Jones again and she was ok with what went on. She obviously wasn’t thrilled to death, but she told me it wasn’t that bad and was happy that I didn’t give in and let them go to lunch. Hopefully the kids will recognize that I’m serious about my threats and behave better tomorrow. They’ve been promised the chance to play a game if they do their homework, but even with that promise some of the students crumpled up the paper and tossed it. So we’ll see. On the bright side, Ms. Jones has agreed to take anyone who doesn’t do the homework and do the problem set with them out in the pod area.