Monday, January 25, 2010
Sunday, January 10, 2010
I'm trying to be a better blogger...
...since I'm terrible at emails, phone calls, and skype. Oh, skype. One day I will learn how to use you.
Today Chloe had her first day of dog training classes. Let's just say she's the friendliest dog I've ever seen. The trainers are already using her to help socialize the other dogs since she wants to be best friends with everyone. So far, no great solution to stop her from whining when I leave, but they did suggest I take her on a walk before I leave for work.
SO, tomorrow, I will hopefully be pulling myself out of bed at 6 to take her on a nice walk and to wear her out before I leave. Let's hope I can do it.
An awesome and scary part of tomorrow? No curriculum to teach! I do need to cut out laminated raindrops for my kids' writing assignment before I get to bed tonight, and I also need to hope very dearly that they practiced with the calendars we made in class since they have a quiz on it soon! Eep! I also need to pick a Star of the Week!
...We will also be practicing what we do in the case of an earthquake tomorrow. Apparently we've had at least two that I should have felt...and I did not, but we had the drill on Friday in the P.M. so my kids would have no clue what to do.
By the way, here's an interesting article from the NY Times about TFA.
Gauging the Dedication of Teacher Corps Grads
By AMANDA M. FAIRBANKS
Published: January 3, 2010
Teach for America, a corps of recent college graduates who sign up to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools, has become a campus phenomenon, drawing huge numbers of applicants willing to commit two years of their lives.
But a new study has found that their dedication to improving society at large does not necessarily extend beyond their Teach for America service.
In areas like voting, charitable giving and civic engagement, graduates of the program lag behind those who were accepted but declined and those who dropped out before completing their two years, according to Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University, who conducted the study with a colleague, Cynthia Brandt.
The reasons for the lower rates of civic involvement, Professor McAdam said, include not only exhaustion and burnout, but also disillusionment with Teach for America’s approach to the issue of educational inequity, among other factors.
The study, “Assessing the Long-Term Effects of Youth Service: The Puzzling Case of Teach for America,” is the first of its kind to explore what happens to participants after they leave the program. It was done at the suggestion of Wendy Kopp, Teach for America’s founder and president, who disagrees with the findings. Ms. Kopp had read an earlier study by Professor McAdam that found that participants in Freedom Summer — the 10 weeks in 1964 when civil rights advocates, many of them college students, went to Mississippi to register black voters — had become more politically active.
“There’s been a very clear and somewhat naïve consensus among educators, policy folks and scholars that youth activism invariably has these kinds of effects,” Professor McAdam said. “But we’ve got to be much more attentive to differences across these experiences, and not simply assume that if you give a kid some youth service experience it will change them.”
Teach for America is nearing its 20th anniversary. Of its 17,000 alumni, 63 percent remain in the field of education and 31 percent remain in the classroom. (This reporter took part in the program from 2003 to 2005.)
Financed by the William T. Grant Foundation, the study surveyed every person who was accepted by Teach for America from 1993 to 1998. It is being published this month in Social Forces, a journal published by the University of North Carolina.
The study compared “graduates,” who completed their two years; “dropouts,” who entered the program but left before the two years were up; and “nonmatriculants,” who were accepted but declined the offer. It included 1,538 graduates, 324 dropouts and 634 nonmatriculants. Nearly 45 percent of those sampled returned the 34-page survey.
While Teach for America graduates remain far more active than their peer group, the findings indicate that the program neither achieves an earlier organizational goal of “making citizens” nor produces people who, in great numbers, take their civic commitments beyond the field of education.
“To find that Teach for America graduates are more involved in education but are not serving in soup kitchens is interesting but not surprising — it’s consistent with their current mission,” said Monica C. Higgins, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard who studies organizational behavior. “They’re not trying to make global citizens. They’re focused on education.”
Professor McAdam’s findings that nearly all of Freedom Summer’s participants were still engaged in progressive activism when he tracked them down 20 years later have contributed to the widely held notion that civic advocacy and service among the young make for better citizens.
Ms. Kopp, 42, was curious to know whether something similar was occurring with her corps of teachers. But Professor McAdam, 57, said Freedom Summer was the exception, not the rule.
“Freedom Summer is the odd civic experience, and hardly representative of what happens when young people do service,” he said. “A lot of the impact of any experience is where it’s historically situated.”
Rob Reich, 40, an associate professor of political science at Stanford, shares that view.
“Back in the ’60s, if you signed up for Freedom Summer, it was perceived to be countercultural,” said Professor Reich, who taught sixth grade in Houston as a member of the Teach for America corps. “But unlike doing Freedom Summer, joining Teach for America is part of climbing up the elite ladder — it’s part of joining the system, the meritocracy.”
Last year, 35,000 people applied to Teach for America, 42 percent more than in 2008. Further, at more than 20 colleges and universities, Teach for America was the top recruiter. At Harvard, 13 percent of graduating seniors applied. At Spelman College, in Atlanta, 25 percent did.
“It’s hard to see the incredible outpouring of interest among this generation and think of it as a lack of civic engagement,” Ms. Kopp said.
“Unfortunately,” she added, “it doesn’t seem as if this study looked at Teach for America’s core mission, by evaluating whether we are producing more leaders who believe educational inequity is a solvable problem, who have a deep understanding of the causes and solutions, and who are taking steps to address it in fundamental and lasting ways.”
Cami Anderson, 38, who taught in Los Angeles as a corps member in 1993 and participated in Professor McAdam’s study, is among the graduates who, relative to their peer group, already exhibited high levels of service before stepping into a classroom.
“Not many of us are heads of large public systems, but we’re starting to be,” said Ms. Anderson, who is the superintendent of alternative high schools and programs for the New York City Department of Education. “Just give us a few more years.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/education/04teach.html
Happy Sunday! :)
Today Chloe had her first day of dog training classes. Let's just say she's the friendliest dog I've ever seen. The trainers are already using her to help socialize the other dogs since she wants to be best friends with everyone. So far, no great solution to stop her from whining when I leave, but they did suggest I take her on a walk before I leave for work.
SO, tomorrow, I will hopefully be pulling myself out of bed at 6 to take her on a nice walk and to wear her out before I leave. Let's hope I can do it.
An awesome and scary part of tomorrow? No curriculum to teach! I do need to cut out laminated raindrops for my kids' writing assignment before I get to bed tonight, and I also need to hope very dearly that they practiced with the calendars we made in class since they have a quiz on it soon! Eep! I also need to pick a Star of the Week!
...We will also be practicing what we do in the case of an earthquake tomorrow. Apparently we've had at least two that I should have felt...and I did not, but we had the drill on Friday in the P.M. so my kids would have no clue what to do.
By the way, here's an interesting article from the NY Times about TFA.
Gauging the Dedication of Teacher Corps Grads
By AMANDA M. FAIRBANKS
Published: January 3, 2010
Teach for America, a corps of recent college graduates who sign up to teach in some of the nation’s most troubled schools, has become a campus phenomenon, drawing huge numbers of applicants willing to commit two years of their lives.
But a new study has found that their dedication to improving society at large does not necessarily extend beyond their Teach for America service.
In areas like voting, charitable giving and civic engagement, graduates of the program lag behind those who were accepted but declined and those who dropped out before completing their two years, according to Doug McAdam, a sociologist at Stanford University, who conducted the study with a colleague, Cynthia Brandt.
The reasons for the lower rates of civic involvement, Professor McAdam said, include not only exhaustion and burnout, but also disillusionment with Teach for America’s approach to the issue of educational inequity, among other factors.
The study, “Assessing the Long-Term Effects of Youth Service: The Puzzling Case of Teach for America,” is the first of its kind to explore what happens to participants after they leave the program. It was done at the suggestion of Wendy Kopp, Teach for America’s founder and president, who disagrees with the findings. Ms. Kopp had read an earlier study by Professor McAdam that found that participants in Freedom Summer — the 10 weeks in 1964 when civil rights advocates, many of them college students, went to Mississippi to register black voters — had become more politically active.
“There’s been a very clear and somewhat naïve consensus among educators, policy folks and scholars that youth activism invariably has these kinds of effects,” Professor McAdam said. “But we’ve got to be much more attentive to differences across these experiences, and not simply assume that if you give a kid some youth service experience it will change them.”
Teach for America is nearing its 20th anniversary. Of its 17,000 alumni, 63 percent remain in the field of education and 31 percent remain in the classroom. (This reporter took part in the program from 2003 to 2005.)
Financed by the William T. Grant Foundation, the study surveyed every person who was accepted by Teach for America from 1993 to 1998. It is being published this month in Social Forces, a journal published by the University of North Carolina.
The study compared “graduates,” who completed their two years; “dropouts,” who entered the program but left before the two years were up; and “nonmatriculants,” who were accepted but declined the offer. It included 1,538 graduates, 324 dropouts and 634 nonmatriculants. Nearly 45 percent of those sampled returned the 34-page survey.
While Teach for America graduates remain far more active than their peer group, the findings indicate that the program neither achieves an earlier organizational goal of “making citizens” nor produces people who, in great numbers, take their civic commitments beyond the field of education.
“To find that Teach for America graduates are more involved in education but are not serving in soup kitchens is interesting but not surprising — it’s consistent with their current mission,” said Monica C. Higgins, an associate professor at the Graduate School of Education at Harvard who studies organizational behavior. “They’re not trying to make global citizens. They’re focused on education.”
Professor McAdam’s findings that nearly all of Freedom Summer’s participants were still engaged in progressive activism when he tracked them down 20 years later have contributed to the widely held notion that civic advocacy and service among the young make for better citizens.
Ms. Kopp, 42, was curious to know whether something similar was occurring with her corps of teachers. But Professor McAdam, 57, said Freedom Summer was the exception, not the rule.
“Freedom Summer is the odd civic experience, and hardly representative of what happens when young people do service,” he said. “A lot of the impact of any experience is where it’s historically situated.”
Rob Reich, 40, an associate professor of political science at Stanford, shares that view.
“Back in the ’60s, if you signed up for Freedom Summer, it was perceived to be countercultural,” said Professor Reich, who taught sixth grade in Houston as a member of the Teach for America corps. “But unlike doing Freedom Summer, joining Teach for America is part of climbing up the elite ladder — it’s part of joining the system, the meritocracy.”
Last year, 35,000 people applied to Teach for America, 42 percent more than in 2008. Further, at more than 20 colleges and universities, Teach for America was the top recruiter. At Harvard, 13 percent of graduating seniors applied. At Spelman College, in Atlanta, 25 percent did.
“It’s hard to see the incredible outpouring of interest among this generation and think of it as a lack of civic engagement,” Ms. Kopp said.
“Unfortunately,” she added, “it doesn’t seem as if this study looked at Teach for America’s core mission, by evaluating whether we are producing more leaders who believe educational inequity is a solvable problem, who have a deep understanding of the causes and solutions, and who are taking steps to address it in fundamental and lasting ways.”
Cami Anderson, 38, who taught in Los Angeles as a corps member in 1993 and participated in Professor McAdam’s study, is among the graduates who, relative to their peer group, already exhibited high levels of service before stepping into a classroom.
“Not many of us are heads of large public systems, but we’re starting to be,” said Ms. Anderson, who is the superintendent of alternative high schools and programs for the New York City Department of Education. “Just give us a few more years.”
http://www.nytimes.com/2010/01/04/education/04teach.html
Happy Sunday! :)
Saturday, January 9, 2010
A good first week back...
So, my kids rocked their first assessment back--that's not to say they are all where they need to be--we have a lot of work to do before they will be ready for 1st grade, but right now, of the 18 students tested nearly 89% (16 students) of my class is proficient on the Reading and Writing benchmark, and again 16 of them are also proficient for their fluency. For fluency they are given a sheet with letters in random order, and they have one minute to make the correct sound for as many letters as possible. A student's fluency is the greatest predictor of later reading success so I'm happy at the moment.
The math benchmark is next week, which I am a little more concerned about since the way we teach is "standards-based." Essentially, I teach one standard, and then I never teach it again. So, if my students didn't understand patterns when I taught it over the course of a week in October, they technically are not introduced to it ever again, though they are tested on it now in January. ...I don't necessarily strictly abide to the pacing guide (I tend to deviate from the curriculum somewhat), so I am hoping they still will grow on this benchmark.
Right now, the biggest challenge I see is teaching them writing. It's such a daunting task, and it's scary! So, from now on they will be doing full-fledged writing 2x a week in class and for homework at least once a week. Almost all my students returned completed journals after Christmas break, so I am hoping to send them home with another journal soon. They were great to read, and I think the more work they do at home in addition to what we do in school the better. Since I only get them for half-day kinder, and in other districts full-day kinder is the norm, I expect that the other half of the day parents work with their students...which is why I send home more than one page of homework each day.
So what we really need to tackle for the next couple months are reading and writing. I think they are finally ready for reading and writing--they are comfortable enough to make mistakes and to practice and to work hard to be able to read, to write, to be ready for first grade.
...oh, and don't get me started on this, but we still have a LONG way to go with rhyming. I think for the rest of my life I will hate rhyming, because with the amount of time I've spent teaching it...and the variety of ways we practiced...there are still a lot of my students who do not get it. I think I need to find a song about rhyming for them.
In other news...
1. I attended a Make-A-Wish volunteer orientation session on Wednesday, and I'm filling out the application in hopes of becoming a Wish Granter!
2. I am taking Chloe to dog training classes tomorrow--wish us luck.... It's been great having her out here, and I think it will be good for Chloe to learn to listen to someone other than me...and someone who doesn't have a treat in his/her hand.
3. I got to see Julie before she left for Korea! So great--I still wish everyone lived in the same town again, but it was nice to see her and to feel like we were back in Malibu again! If only there were a John's Garden here.
4. I still am not sure what I want to do come 2011...granted I have plenty of time to think. Perhaps a book is in the works somewhere down to the road. I mean, cancer, Alzheimer's, TFA and the education gap--the book writes itself, hey? Plus, in a couple years, maybe I can write about how Chris was the youngest singer to ever premiere at the Met? I certainly hope so.
Here's hoping Week 2 back at school is just as great as Week 1 (and that I follow my resolution to leave ON TIME every day again).
The math benchmark is next week, which I am a little more concerned about since the way we teach is "standards-based." Essentially, I teach one standard, and then I never teach it again. So, if my students didn't understand patterns when I taught it over the course of a week in October, they technically are not introduced to it ever again, though they are tested on it now in January. ...I don't necessarily strictly abide to the pacing guide (I tend to deviate from the curriculum somewhat), so I am hoping they still will grow on this benchmark.
Right now, the biggest challenge I see is teaching them writing. It's such a daunting task, and it's scary! So, from now on they will be doing full-fledged writing 2x a week in class and for homework at least once a week. Almost all my students returned completed journals after Christmas break, so I am hoping to send them home with another journal soon. They were great to read, and I think the more work they do at home in addition to what we do in school the better. Since I only get them for half-day kinder, and in other districts full-day kinder is the norm, I expect that the other half of the day parents work with their students...which is why I send home more than one page of homework each day.
So what we really need to tackle for the next couple months are reading and writing. I think they are finally ready for reading and writing--they are comfortable enough to make mistakes and to practice and to work hard to be able to read, to write, to be ready for first grade.
...oh, and don't get me started on this, but we still have a LONG way to go with rhyming. I think for the rest of my life I will hate rhyming, because with the amount of time I've spent teaching it...and the variety of ways we practiced...there are still a lot of my students who do not get it. I think I need to find a song about rhyming for them.
In other news...
1. I attended a Make-A-Wish volunteer orientation session on Wednesday, and I'm filling out the application in hopes of becoming a Wish Granter!
2. I am taking Chloe to dog training classes tomorrow--wish us luck.... It's been great having her out here, and I think it will be good for Chloe to learn to listen to someone other than me...and someone who doesn't have a treat in his/her hand.
3. I got to see Julie before she left for Korea! So great--I still wish everyone lived in the same town again, but it was nice to see her and to feel like we were back in Malibu again! If only there were a John's Garden here.
4. I still am not sure what I want to do come 2011...granted I have plenty of time to think. Perhaps a book is in the works somewhere down to the road. I mean, cancer, Alzheimer's, TFA and the education gap--the book writes itself, hey? Plus, in a couple years, maybe I can write about how Chris was the youngest singer to ever premiere at the Met? I certainly hope so.
Here's hoping Week 2 back at school is just as great as Week 1 (and that I follow my resolution to leave ON TIME every day again).
Friday, January 1, 2010
Is it really 2010?
Does school really start again on Monday?
...Okay, I'm not going to lie, I'm struggling at the moment, as everyone tells you you will when you go home for break after your first couple months teaching. I actually looked at jobs in Florida on Craigslist today...
HOWEVER, then I emailed back someone from Pepperdine who had asked about my TFA experience (I emailed him back very delayed...), and well, it made me feel better. There certainly is no way I could go back to Florida and feel good since I would be abandoning my kids, and I just couldn't do that to them.
I've heard people say that TFA is the toughest thing they've ever done in their lives. We all know I'd be stupid to say that. Cancer trumps TFA.
That said, I'm over 3000 miles away from my parents--my closest family is over 2000 miles away, and I do feel tired and stressed a lot. I'm also 23, and I'm terrible at planning for long periods of time, but I would like to know if this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I love teaching, and I love my students, but there are also many things that come with teaching of which I am not so fond...
So here is my list at the moment of careers I'm considering:
1. Pre-k or kinder teacher
2. Special ed teacher or consultant
3. Professor (yes, college)
4. Writer
5. Dog walker (could be fun...and I wouldn't have to leave Chloe...though is it technically a career?)
...Anyone have any more suggestions?
Happy New Year!
...Okay, I'm not going to lie, I'm struggling at the moment, as everyone tells you you will when you go home for break after your first couple months teaching. I actually looked at jobs in Florida on Craigslist today...
HOWEVER, then I emailed back someone from Pepperdine who had asked about my TFA experience (I emailed him back very delayed...), and well, it made me feel better. There certainly is no way I could go back to Florida and feel good since I would be abandoning my kids, and I just couldn't do that to them.
I've heard people say that TFA is the toughest thing they've ever done in their lives. We all know I'd be stupid to say that. Cancer trumps TFA.
That said, I'm over 3000 miles away from my parents--my closest family is over 2000 miles away, and I do feel tired and stressed a lot. I'm also 23, and I'm terrible at planning for long periods of time, but I would like to know if this is what I want to do for the rest of my life. I love teaching, and I love my students, but there are also many things that come with teaching of which I am not so fond...
So here is my list at the moment of careers I'm considering:
1. Pre-k or kinder teacher
2. Special ed teacher or consultant
3. Professor (yes, college)
4. Writer
5. Dog walker (could be fun...and I wouldn't have to leave Chloe...though is it technically a career?)
...Anyone have any more suggestions?
Happy New Year!
