Tuesday, June 17, 2008

First the bad news: Last night was absolutely miserable. I was up until about 12:45 finishing all of my work that I had to do. The amount of work they’ve put on us is insane. I’m up at 5:45 to catch the bus to go to school, we don’t get back until 5 or 5:15. I run and then get dinner which usually gets done in an hour and a half – total – and that’s all the free time I have because the rest of the night I’m working my butt off trying to get everything done. This isn’t sitting on the internet reading for fun or playing games with a word document open. This is serious work time I’m talking about. And there just aren’t enough hours in the day to do everything TFA wants and still get enough sleep – much less have a social life. I had every intention of being social here and now all I can really do is work in the computer lab so at least I’m around other people during parts of the day. This institute could be so much more effective if it were just a little bit more spaced out because then people could sleep and still do the learning

The start of this morning wasn’t much better. Our faculty advisor probably thinks we’re nuts. There’s a MAJOR communication gap between TFA and the Atlanta teachers. Our FA today told us that our pre-test was worthless – why I already suspected – for a number of reasons. Our CMA (core member advisor) tried to defend it saying that it was based on the previous however many years of previous test data and the objectives. The FA reminded the CMA that the CRCT (Georgia’s NEW exam this year) is brand new and hasn’t even had an official copy released yet. The TFA pre-test was based on the old test which was much easier. AND the proportions are wrong. Just because addition and subtraction are mentioned as part of the exam doesn’t mean they carry the same weight as graphing inequalities.

Then came math lit hour. When our FA gave us the problems of the day that the students were supposed to do as a warmup. However, she told us straight up the students didn’t know how to do it so we would have to teach it to them. So we figured we’d give our order of operations/positive and negative numbers assessment at the start and then teach the problems and still have time to do our procedures. The students of course didn’t arrive – well the ones who has buses that were on time (relatively) – until 8:30. What followed I will remember as my first “teacher” moment. The third problem gave the numbers “7, 10, 13, 16, 19…” and asked them to find the linear equation. Out of the blue I got the inspiration to create a lesson on finding those patterns on the fly because I realized it would be worthless to tell them the answer without teaching it to the in a manner that they would remember. So I had them take notes on a step-by-step procedure for understanding the process and then walked created a few other similar problems for them to retain it.
As I was walking around the class when they were trying to do one on their own, I noticed it was 8:55 and I still had to wrap up and get to my next session by 9:00. I decided the students’ learning was more important and wrapped up quickly but effectively and was five minutes late. When I wrote my reason for being late, I ended it by noting that it was well worth it. If TFA wants to put me on a core member improvement plan for being tardy to a session, so be it.

Class was equally wonderful. I knocked out transforming sentences into inequalities at the start and the class seemed to understand much better than the day before – we’ll see when I get to graded my assessments. Then they really seemed to be interacting with the material much more effectively today than yesterday. Brandon moved them from pods to a big circle and they seemed to like it so I let them stay in the big circle for my class and it seemed to work really well. Before I knew it I checked the time and it was 11:25 (lunch is at 11:30) and I hadn’t even gotten to my independent assessment. So I handed out the assessment and they worked until 11:35 without a complaint. Granted their lunch is silent so they don’t have that much to look forward to, but they were still really well behaved during the assessment.

Lunch at Harper-Archer is silent during the summer session because kids come from a number of schools so they don’t want any trouble to start and then get out of hand on the buses after school. I guess in the past they’ve had some incidents – of what nature I don’t know – so it’s understandable, but its hard to watch all the students being told to be quiet the entire lunch period because that’s their only real break from learning all day. I feel bad for the last teach who gets them after lunch, right before they leave, because they’re ready to leave.

However, the rest of today has been pretty miserable. Our CMA is – understandably – really stressed and its spilling over more and more each day. Like I said, I understand she’s got plenty of work to do as well but every day she seems to be getting more harsh with us. When everyone was sitting in the room today – there’s 12 of us and its not a giant room – and she yelled (!) at us to come together to meet. She’s got to be under a lot of stress but it’s really getting crazy. It’s really starting to rub off on me. I know part of it is I’m not getting enough sleep, which is a problem in and of itself, but when she gets so harsh with us I can see it rubbing off on me and other CMs.

TFA also loves to preach that we should love being flexible, but, in the words of our CMA, “TFA has scheduled the institute down to the minute so they can’t be flexible with us when it comes to transitioning from various tasks. For example, some of the CMs are assigned to bus duty – which in theory ends at 1:10 but the busses are often not ready to go at that time so it runs over – and the CMA expects them to be back. In theory, the FAs are still there so the CMs don’t have to be present so they should know to leave at 1:10. If they don’t need to be there, why do they even need to go in the first place?

The ride back turned into a glorious gripe session. The girl I was sitting next to asked me for some help on her objectives because her CMA was saying they weren’t clear enough step-by-step directions. I know I’m not a key points master, but she seemed like she was pretty close. The a girl across the aisle told me how she loved how I talked in sessions. If it weren’t for my morning miracle session, that would have been the high-point of the day. We then proceeded to talk about how so many of us were frustrated with how things were going. I think about 15 people already dropped out in the first week. I’m taking a guess here but I’d think there’s probably around 600 corps members here (150 from charlotte, a few more than 150 from Atlanta, and then much smaller corps like Jacksonville that only has 50), so that’s over 2% that are already gone. It doesn’t sound like that much but that’s only one week in to institute (not even on the job yet) and its people who are specifically selected because they have persevered through difficulty in the past (yes, we were told this was part of the selection criteria that was very important).

We got back just after 5:00 p.m. and we had a mandatory meeting from 5:30 – 7:00. So I grabbed a quick dinner and went off to the meeting. I’m going to try to squeeze in a run now and then finish all the lesson planning and data entry I have to do. Did I mention TFA gave us a data entry tool for 50 objectives when we’ve got like 130 total. So we’ve got bits and pieces on three volumes. Now TFA got their act together and we have to transfer ALL OF THE DATA (20 kids, 127 objectives per kid, 127 objectives, etc.).

If the tenses of this entry seems a little screwy, a) I’m exhausted and b) I’ve written it throughout the day so I started it at lunch and now I’m finishing it after dinner just because I’m writing when I can.