Spirit Week

This year student council members came around to ask teachers if we wanted spirit week to be this week, with the pre-planned reopening of the church on the Feast of Saint Luke and St. Luke-a-Thon (our walkathon) or next week, the traditional week before Halloween. The downside of having spirit week this week was that it loads up an already loaded week with more stuff. The downside of next week was that fifth grade will be gone on their annual outdoor environmental education trip to Camp Seymour.

As a former fifth grade teacher who took the October trip to Camp Seymour 10 of the 11 years I taught that grade level, I voted for this week. I figured my colleagues would want to spread out the crazy, and my vote to NOT other the fifth grade - a grade that usually gets othered in a preK-8 school because fifth graders are not primary students, but neither are they middle school students - would not carry the day. But I was mistaken. My colleagues overwhelmingly voted for this week. Whether it was to keep the crazy contained to one week, or because other teachers also do not want the fifth grade on the outside of the fun, I'm not sure. But I am glad the fifth grade got to participate in all the fun.

A rundown of the week's themes:

Monday: Hawaiian/Beach theme

Tuesday: St. Luke-a-Thon - dress in this year's school theme (growing together in faith) or as something that represents St. Luke. My class went with the school theme. They decorated t-shirts with leaves, vines, and flowers, and I was a garden gnome. My partner teacher was a tree, and his class dressed a tree fruit.

Wednesday: First all school mass in the newly renovated church - dress in your best uniform. The new church was beautiful and the middle school choir was amazing. But the smoke from wildfires became pretty thick by Wednesday so we had to shut our windows and keep our students inside. Indoor recess is rare in my school - we send students out almost no matter how hard the rain falls. But unhealthy air made it... well, unhealthy, to send kids outside.

Thursday: Decade Day - dress in clothing representative of your favorite decade of yesteryear. It was so hot and stuffy in the building I couldn't keep my groovy headband on for long. But many students really got into this day, with accurate details like leg warmers, crimped hair, or solid grunge eyeliner. It was very fun to see the creativity and enthusiasm throughout the building.

Friday: Color Games - classes are each assigned a different color and staff are asked to wear St. Luke spirit wear. Eighth graders got "brilliant blue" as their color. Representatives from each class participated in games reminiscent of high school pep rallies. The eighth graders did not win the Color Games but we held our own in several rounds. We had our larger kids get snared up in some of the obstacles in the relay race and the smallest class size, which put us at a disadvantage for the tug of war (though we did win our first round).

The best part of Friday was that the weather finally shifted. With a light drizzle in the morning, the air quality had returned to a level that allowed us to open windows and send kids out to recess! But with two weeks of breathing in air that was at best "unhealthy for sensitive groups" many of us are still feeling the effects of inhaling all that smoke.

Friday also ended with our school hosting a middle school dance for our region. Our dance was the third one of the school year, and this is the first year since schools were shut down in March of 2020 that dances resumed. The gym was PACKED with seventh and eighth graders, who showed up early and left late. We were slammed checking students in from fifteen minutes before the dance technically started until about a half hour after the official start time. Seasoned dance chaperones said in pre-COVID years dances saw half to a third of the crowd we got last night.

After the chaos of checking student IDs and taking money and permission slips from young teenagers slowed to a more manageable trickle, I wandered through the crowds of kids in the gym picking up litter, telling them to stop giving piggyback rides, reminding them our no cell phone use policy during the dance, and having short, yelled over the music, conversations with students I know and my fellow chaperones. At the end of the dance I helped run interference between kids and cars in the parking lot and hung out with the last kid to get picked up from another school while he waited for his dad to arrive. He said he had a great time at the dance and even thanked me for waiting with him when his dad arrived.

It was a crazy long week. Our mass in the newly remodeled church feels like it was weeks ago. This week was fun, but I am looking forward to a calmer week next week (with outdoor recess every day)!

Famous Former Students

This summer I heard that a former fifth grader of mine was going to be on this season of The Voice. I was telling my current coworkers about this as we got our nails done a couple of weeks ago. They told me that another former student of mine (but not theirs - a factor of boomeranging back to my current school) was on Netflix's Hype House. I showed my age by asking, "What's Hype House." Hype House is not for me. I'm clearly not their demographic. It was very disconcerting to see a former student of mine on that show. I couldn't watch more than one episode. My husband thought his name was a stage name. But no, his last name really was Hacker in our school information system when he was 12 years old.

I have never watched The Voice before, but I had at least heard of it. I have been watching this season, after I heard Jaeden was going to be on the show. His blind audition was on the last night of auditions, and he was the second to last person to be chosen for a team. If his audition had been earlier in the selection process, he clearly would have had all four chairs turn, but two of the coaches had filled their teams before he auditioned. It was crazy and fun to see Jaeden, his sister, and their mom on TV.

I became aware of Jaeden the year his older sister was in my fifth-grade class. Jaeden is at least two, if not three, years younger than her, and I didn't know who he was until the end of the school year. The two of them opened up the annual school talent show, on the second to last day of the school year, by praying the rosary. Jaeden could *not* stand still as he prayed. His little hips were swinging back and forth, and he was working hard to keep his feet still. It was adorably distracting during the prayer. Later, as he took to the piano during the talent show, I was instantly aware of his talent with music. I'm not sure if he also sang during that first talent show in my memory, but he definitely did in later years. I vividly recall him singing and playing the guitar, showcasing a song he wrote for his mother, the year he was in my fifth-grade class.

Jaeden has shown talent and passion for music from a young age. I vaguely remember hearing he auditioned for America's Got Talent at one point but I never got to see that audition. Last night it was amazing to see how far he's come since he was that cutie little boy praying the rosary with his big sister. I can't wait to see how he does on The Voice and beyond.

Click here to see Jaeden's blind audition.

One Month In

A back-to-school card from my mother-in-law.

 

One month into the school year and my students have seen me barely more than my sub. I missed six school days due to COVID and two more for meetings at the Archdiocese. Here's to hoping I make it into the building for every school day in the month of October.

One of my favorite middle school social studies beginning of the school year activities fell a little flat this year due to my bout with COVID. I bring in artifacts from my life - things like T-shirts from my days in college theatre, photo albums, cards and letters - and have students walk around the room and take notes on each item. All of my new social studies classes were able to complete this part of the activity. But the second part of the assignment has them writing a biography of me from the lens of a historian using artifacts to reconstruct the life of an otherwise unknown person. The final step in the process is to debrief the reality of the artifacts from their biographies of me. (For example, I attended Space Camp and participated in an archeological dinosaur dig as part of teacher professional development, but the photos show me in a flight suit and actively excavating a hadrosaur scapula). This is a jumping off point to discuss how historians know what they know and the reasons they might make mistakes, especially when studying the ancient past. Unfortunately the middle piece of this project was not done this year. By the time I recovered enough to return to school it felt too late to resurrect that lesson and complete it according to the original plan.

It certainly has been a different sort of start to the school year. Needing a sub for eight school days during September has never happened to me before. Nor have I ever before missed a curriculum night in my 22-year career. Thankfully, my students and their families have seemed to handle it very well. I am having a blast with this new role. When people ask me how my school year is going, I can genuinely reply, "It's so much fun!"

I wanted to share some of the highlights of the school year so far, because it really has been a ton of fun.

• On the first day of school one eighth grader told me halfway through her first class with me, "I already have mad respect for you, but I don't know why."
• When receiving new spirit wear with the school's logo, a Nike logo, and each student's last name across the back, one boy said in a deadpan, "Saint Luke, growing together in faith. Brought to you by Nike." (Growing together in faith is our theme this year.)
• Another student quote, "You seem like the kind of person who was popular in high school." (I absolutely was not popular in high school.)
• I assigned an open-ended project where I told students they could show what they had learned in any format they wanted. As they asked questions and the truly open-ended nature of the project hit them full force, I heard, "This is great!", "I'm kind of excited," and "This class is so chill."
• I am teaching siblings of several students whose older siblings (mostly brothers) were in a fifth-grade class of mine before I left the school and came back. Many of them and their parents have reported to me that I was one of the older siblings' favorite teachers.
• Former fourth graders (now in fifth and sixth grade) continually smile broadly and wave at me, and many have said some variation of, "I'm looking forward to having you as my teacher again!"