Teaching in December

Teaching in December is hard. Really, really, really, really hard.  Between Thanksgiving and Christmas teachers are trying to wrap up units while navigating absences due to illness and trips with students who are so excited for the upcoming break they can hardly sit still. And in the Archdiocese of Seattle, it's also the end of the first trimester, so it's report card time. AND for teachers of eighth grade students applying to high schools, it's high school application time. Several hard deadlines and squirrely kids. Here is a sampling of memes that I have scrolled past on my various social media feeds since the start of December:

I am happy to say my report cards were ready on time with a minimum of fuss, and I completed my part in the high school application process today, stuffing envelopes and enlisting the help of the school secretary to scan and send application packets to the school that required digital versions. 

But on top of the typical December crazy, my fall on the ice last week tweaked my knee out in a delayed reaction. I fell on Friday, and a tiny bruise was visible on Saturday. The bruise got bigger, more colorful, and more swollen each day through last week. It didn't hurt at first, but it was strange to watch it increase in size without feeling it. On Tuesday, it exploded in pain. But the doctor's office couldn't schedule me until Thursday.

Diagnosis? Strain with possible small tears in a ligament. Prescription: Two weeks of keeping my weight off of it as much as possible and 800mg of ibuprofen three times of day (with food). I was told to brace it if I could tolerate a brace over the bruise and crutches would be useful if they helped me move around without putting weight on my knee. My friend and co-worker had an extra brace for serious injuries, and it's helping much better than any I could pick up at a drugstore. For one thing, I can tolerate it even with the colorful, swollen bruise. However, my favorite is one that holds three ice packs that I have been wrapping around my knee at the end of each day. It is very soothing.

But even within the chaos that has been the last week, there is a lot of work to complete before the break. My eighth graders are finishing up our unit on Washington state with a boardroom presentation designed to entice a fictitious global corporation to open their next manufacturing and distribution center in our area AND a Time Magazine project where they choose a famous Washingtonian to research, draw, and write an article about. Here is an exchange I had with a student at the start of the Time Magazine project:

Me: Pick a famous Washingtonian to research for your project. Remember that in your essay you will highlight their positive contribution to the local community, our state, the country, and hopefully the world.

Student A: Can I do VInnie Hacker?

Student B: He's not from here!

Me: He *is* from here. I taught him fifth grade in *this* school.

Student reactions run a funny range of shocked expressions, gasping, and "I told you so."

Student A: So, can I research him?

Me: Yes. But be sure you can meet the expectation of highlighting his positive contributions to the local community, our state, the country, and hopefully the world.

Student A: (excitedly) Okay!

Time passes as students work on the assignment.

Student A: (quietly) Um, can I do Dove Cameron instead?

In another class, I used animal cards to randomly pair students for a class period. This exchange ensued:

Me: (noticing best friends working together after the random pairing) Wait, you two got randomly placed together?

Student A: Yes.

Student B: (the partner of student A who claimed to be an atheist until a couple of weeks ago) Truly there is a God!

Meanwhile my oldest child flew to Wisconsin to pick up a car to drive to Massachusetts. It's a long story but suffice it to say that she would not be dissuaded from her perfect plan that sounded bat-crap crazy to everyone I explained it to. Then my husband flew to Las Vegas for a work conference. My house has generally been quiet since we stopped fostering, but it is weird to be home with just my 18-year-old and our myriad of pets.

Tomorrow most of the middle school is headed to sing at a senior living center and cap off their trimester of choir with ice skating. I was slated to attend, but with my knee injury, I've been benched. It will give me time to catch up on grading and write some reflection questions with my administrator for the staff book study to send with people on their winter break. They're going to love that... But our study of Grading for Equity has taken a back burner to other priorities this year. The break is a good time to re-kick start our look at how and what we grade our students on.

Wednesday is the Christmas Pageant. Preschool through grade 5 and the band are performing. I will be the point person in the building during the performance in the gym for the band kids and student government kids who will be runners for the performers. It's entirely possible Thursday is supposed to be a normal day. Or perhaps I've forgotten something. That's also entirely possible. Friday is a half day that begins with a prayer service and ends with a school wide caroling "competition" and indoor snowball fight.

It's really a fun week. But it is made easier knowing a two-week break starts at the end of it.

Snow!

Most of the teachers I know have a love/hate relationship with snow. We are just as excited as the kids to get a day off of school, but then we have to readjust our plans to account for the missed day(s). And don't even get me started on late starts. No one wants a late start - either a full day of school or a full day off, please. Except when it's icy and dangerous on the roads at 7:00am and bare and wet at 9:00am it doesn't exactly make sense to take the full day off. But making that prediction gets messy. At least the final decisions are above my pay grade.

It started to snow on Tuesday morning just as school was starting. It wasn't sticking to anything and did not for the duration of the school day, but I still had an eighth grader picked up during first period due to the snow. It snowed one me on my way home, but wasn't sticking to the roads or sidewalk, just the foliage. But as the temperature dropped, we got a few inches of snow. It sort of melted and compacted again before daybreak in my yard so I couldn't get an accurate measurement.

Wednesday was a snow day. 

Thursday, we had a late start. Even so, one of my coworkers fell on the ice in the parking lot on her way into the building.

On Friday, the district where my school resides called a late start, but my school did not. It snowed on me for most of my drive in. When I hit the county line, it stopped but by the time I got to my school's parking lot it had started to snow again. At least two more staff members (including me) fell in the parking lot trying to get into the building. It started to snow about 7:45am and literally looked like a snow globe when I looked out the classroom windows for a time between 8:00-8:15. As kids were arriving at my school, the surrounding district called a snow day. Most of the day was clear, but we did have indoor recesses for the second day in a row.

Friday night it began to snow again, fairly late. Before midnight it started sticking. This is when my husband and I were on our way home from a holiday party. My husband tried three routes into our neighborhood, sliding back down the first two hills. I kept telling him to park in the Safeway parking lot and we'd walk the two or three miles home from there. But he tried the third route, that took us past the aforementioned Safeway. This route was his last choice because it has the steepest hill, but it also has a downhill before the uphill to gain momentum. We know from previous experience it works well, as long as you don't stop at the stop sign at the bottom of the hill. We made it home and woke up to a winter wonderland on Saturday morning.

I just learned how to drive a stick shift in the past few months, and after our 20-year old's car died, our fun sporty stick shift car has become my primary mode of transportation. So far, I've been able to get to and from where I've needed and wanted to be. On Sunday a few of my coworkers and I had reservations for high tea at a shop owned by one of our school families. I scoped out a parking space in the lot as I was in the turn lane to enter. It looked like there were many spaces at the top of the hill, so I put the car in gear and gave myself the momentum on the flat part of the road to get myself up the hill. It would have worked too, but a car pulled out in front of me and I had to stop on my way up the hill. I could not move forward, so I put it in reverse and backed down the hill into another section of the parking lot. There were spaces over there too, but none that I could get into easily given I was driving backwards. I was on flat ground again and the car that had made me stop had exited the lot, so I decided to try for up the hill again. With no reason to stop on my way up, I made it! And I did not stall the car. I felt like an accomplished stick shift in the snow driver!

On a totally separate note, I had a fun/funny "teachable moment" interaction with a student this week. We were working on a worksheet from our social emotional curriculum created by Committee for Children. He was asking questions bordering on the argumentative about the questions the worksheet was asking. I looked at him and said, "It sounds like you'd rather argue about the questions than reflect a little more deeply to answer them." He was silent for a beat. "Yeah, that's probably true," he said before turning his focus back to the worksheet.

Conference Week

 My current school does conferences Monday through Wednesday of Thanksgiving week. This gives students a full week without classes and allows families to travel to their Thanksgiving destinations earlier in the week if they schedule their conference(s) early. Teachers are given flexibility with the conference schedule they send out. For example, one teacher went to a literature teacher's conference, flying home on Monday. She adjusted her schedule so that her Monday conferences began at noon rather than 8:00am. 

I like conferences. For the entirety of my career they have been uplifting and affirming. I get to celebrate the successes of my students and help set goals for the remainder of the school year. It helps that in the two decades I have been teaching I have only had one student I have truly struggled to find a success to celebrate. Maybe two. But one I remember quite specifically.

That's not to say I've never had difficult or awkward conferences. But they are few and far between. This year there were none. I did make an in the moment decision to basically chicken out and not tell one family that their child continues to chew gum and eat candy throughout the day. But the problems of wrappers littered on the classroom floor and gum being left stuck underneath (brand new this fall) chairs have stopped since I made my displeasure very clear earlier in the year. It didn't seem to be the most important point to focus on as we discussed missing work and peer relationships. Besides, I'm fairly certain some of my colleagues encourage gum chewing during math class, especially on test days.  Thus, I chose to avoid what might have become an awkward conversation.

I have one student this year who uses an impressive vocabulary to speak quite eloquently. As my dad would say, this student uses ten-dollar words. All. The. Time. For example, after a misunderstanding early in the year, I was eventually told, "I did not presume any malicious intent on your part." It is to the point that when this student participates in class discussions, which happens often, other students tend to tune out, knowing they might not understand the question or comment. I have found I have to cut short the input from this student, even though deep insight and thoughtful reflection are always present, so I can "translate" it into language that most of the class will better understand. I had anticipated push back from the student when I mentioned that class discussions would benefit from less elegant language, and that a change might even improve this student's peer relationships. But rather than the defensiveness I expected, this eighth grader turned toward Mom and said, "To be quite candid, I see the logic of this reasoning more profoundly coming from Mrs. Conrow." Followed by, "I shall endeavor to decrease the elaborateness of my articulations."

The middle school team decided to ask about student anxiety/stress this year. The responses were eye opening. One student claimed a baseline anxiety of 1-6, but with a 10 when asked to attend lunch time study hall to complete missing work. The response in the above photo is from a student who genuinely puts forth huge effort but does not always see a return on that effort. With the parents present we were able to talk through sources of stress and brainstorm ways to support students when their stress levels rise. I was able to create easy to implement strategies for four of my students during the 20-minute conference time frame. (In my homeroom of 15, that's more than a quarter of the entire class.) For example, on student will begin taking math tests in the learning resource center, away from the possibility of perceiving classmates are doing better and judging the progress of others. Another will simply ask for a break when anxiety rises and take time to walk down the hall practicing deep breathing, with the anticipated return to class being within a few minutes. We made a contingency plan in case it takes longer than a few minutes, but my sense is just knowing this plan exists will decrease the anxiety felt by the student.

Since my homeroom class is pretty small this year, I had lots of time in between conferences. I used the time to grade papers, create worksheets for next week, and construct an Advent bulletin board. It was one of the easiest boards I have ever created - using short lengths of butcher paper, a fancy font printed in 400pt, clip art candle flames, and leftovers from projects earlier in the year developed around the school's theme of "Growing Together in Faith."

As I stated above, conferences have always been a source of affirmation for my career path. I usually feel showered by compliments from students and their families. This year was no exception. I only had two conferences today, so I was able to put up the Advent bulletin board in anticipation of the first week of the new church year when we return from Thanksgiving break. The first one began with the student bringing me my favorite frothy coffee. The second and last one ended with the dad, who had been fairly quiet for the duration of the conference, saying, "So I have just one more question. Red or white?"  I wonder what he would have done if I had said, "Both." Happy Thanksgiving!

Service Day

Today was the fall service day for the middle school students in my building. I have never had to organize a service day before because all my other teaching positions included doing service inside the school building and/or students logging their off-site service and turning in paperwork attesting to their service. But grades 6-8 at my current school have an entire day dedicated to service at the end of each trimester. Although the sixth and seventh graders usually do on-site service, it is truly a service day for them: the sixth graders organize a food drive every trimester, and then spend the service day sorting, counting, and transporting the donated food to the St. Vincent DePaul food pantry across the street from the school. The seventh graders organize a warm clothing drive in the fall and spend the service day sorting, counting, and bagging up the donated clothing to be transported to different organizations in the north Seattle area.

But traditionally the eighth graders spend every service day off campus performing service in the community, preferably with direct contact helping those in need. The eighth-grade advisory group led by the principal always goes to the local Ronald McDonald House, where he spent time as the parent of a hospitalized toddler decades ago. The experience, even though it ended in the death of his firstborn son, had such an impact on him that he gives back to that organization as much and as often as possible.

My predecessor and the other 8th grade teacher scaled back during the COVID years to taking their groups to a local park to pick up litter. Without direct contact with a specific group or organization, being entirely outside, and close enough to not require parent drivers to transport students, it made sense for the most recent years. However, as the service day drew near, and it suddenly dawned on me that it was in fact my job to organize a service day for my students, I thought I would jump on the litter patrol bandwagon to make my first service day easy on myself. But my principal encouraged me to find something that allowed for direct contact with a community in need.

So, I spent a prep period sending out emails to the many assisted living facilities near our school but did not hear back quickly from any of them. Finally, while I was home sick one day I decided to start calling the facilities I had emailed. The main line of the first place I called transferred me to the volunteer coordinator. I left a voicemail and started hunting for the next phone number I needed. But before I could punch the number into my phone, the volunteer coordinator from the first location called me back. She had apparently been out sick, and had started composing an email to me the same morning I called, but had not yet finished it. She was beyond thrilled that I had 20 eighth grade students who would be willing to work in the gardens at her site in the middle of November.

Thankfully, it was not raining today. In fact, it's been a very dry November for us. But the soil was thoroughly damp, which made it easier to pull weeds and save bulbs for replanting. My advisory got down in the dirt and worked hard today.

They earned their pizza lunch! Even though I had a student talk me into adding more pizzas to my order because they were all SO HUNGRY, it was money well spent. I was able to put two pizzas in the fridge at work for next week, which is conference week, and bring two pizzas home for my family to enjoy.

Also, residents, staff, and students all want us to return for our winter service day in March. My wrist hurts (which happens after overuse after I fell in one of my classrooms over a decade ago) and my spirit wear clothing and jeans are caked with mud. But it was a lovely day.

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!"