A Nice Weekend

It has been a nice family weekend. Even with the 3 hours I spent at school this morning, it has been a nice weekend. I supervised my sophomores at Saturday school today because it desperately needed to be assigned to students who were way behind on their outside reading. It was okay though. I brought Tiana with me, since I wasn't officially working. They clearly miss me, which feels good and makes me look forward to going back. I had fun with them. I made them read pretty much the whole time, but I gave them two "breaks" to come gather around my desk and listen to me do a dramatic reading of a short story. During the first break, I read Langston Hughes "Thank You, M'am." I thought I would never want to read that story again after an LAUSD prescribed unit I had to teach when I was student teaching that made me way over analyze that story with students who so were not interested. But I guess I got over it, because I enjoyed reading it today. In the second break, I read "The Hand" by Guy de Maupassant. Now THAT is a good story. One that makes you get chills and giggles, all at the same time. Many of the kids made great progress in the books that they were reading, and they can all test on the 2 stories I read them, which at least will be something. I love seeing kids get into reading, especially reluctant readers. I'm still crossing my fingers that I can actually get my super awesome book ownership project funded. Only $1312 left to go! It sounds like a lot, but to many people, it's not, so I'm hoping one of those people comes across it and likes it.

Meanwhile, Vinny and Daddy had a nice father son weekend. They went to Lowe's for Vinny's 3rd build and grow workshop. They made a really cute snowman picture frame. Much props to our good friend Katrina for telling us about these workshops. Vinny LOVES them. He wants to wear his Lowe's builder apron all the time. Which reminds me, I need to sew his patches on it before he loses them.

I met up with the boys and my in-laws for lunch, and then went out with my oldest (meaning longest, not age) friend, Janelle. We've been friends since I was 9. That's a long time. I love her to pieces. Our relationship is different than my relationship with other friends for some reason. Like, both of us do go out at night and stuff, but for some reason, not usually with each other. Lately, we do a lot of lunches and coffee dates. She still has a young fun spontaneous life, and I so rarely get to be spontaneous, so that's okay. She's still one of my best friends, because when we sit down to chat, the hours just fly by.

For dinner, we had a quiet family night at home with take-out and redbox. There is this new Italian place in town called "The Boot." Second time we have tried it and we were not disappointed. It is EXCELLENT. The food is fantastic, high quality, and unique. You can tell the pizzas are homemade because the crusts are not perfectly symmetrical. And the prices are by far the best in town. Everything is under $6! Totally not kidding. If you live here and haven't tried it yet, you really, really, really should, even if you live on the other end of town. It is that worth it.

Tiana is going through a growth spurt. She ate constantly today and for long, long stretches. She was eating for like 15 minutes at a time, but today it has been like 30 minutes at a time, and she just doesn't seem full for very long. I read on the LLL website that this is normal, and as empty as my breasts feel, I just gotta keep letting her go at it so that my body realizes she needs more and makes more at each feeding, so it gets better.

Looking forward to next week, even though I have so much to do. Making cupcakes for Thanksgiving and I found some new recipes I am going to experiment with. Possibly a marshmallow creme frosting like a hostess cupcake.

Every day I hear about someone new who reads my blog that I didn't expect. People I know, but never hear from. Because only a handful of people comment, I sort of forget that so many people read it. Sorry it is so hard to comment right on here. I have it set to accept no anonymous posts to avoid spam. I'd like to make my blog just more viewer friendly in general, utilizing the tags and whatnot, but I'm not very good at that stuff. If any savvy bloggers, want to come over some day and teach me, I'd love to learn.

What would Erin Gruwell do?

Even working in a relatively supportive charter school, I am finding the problem with budget cuts to be absolutely detrimental to my teaching.... Let me give you a fantastic example of the problems facing education today, that those who are outside of the system probably don't really see.

In order to get money, we need to use funds from the government Race to the Top program. In order to get that, we need to promote and prove student improvement and achievement. In order to do that, our school is using, among other things, a group of fantastic programs from a company called Renaissance Learning. One of those is a reading program in which they take a diagnostic reading test to determine their reading level, and then they are expected to read books at their own level (genius idea) for which they take tests through a program called Accelerated Reader. It is a fantastic program that actually is well-tested and has very few kinks or issues. Overall, it really did help my students make progress last year, and it helped track that progress very well. Now, we will be using this data to implement a literacy program and get some Race to the Top funds for showing student achievement.

The problem... in order for my students to test, they need laptops. We don't have a lot of computers at our school. We have 4 laptop carts, but there are about 25 teachers, so that is not really the greatest ratio and leads to battles for the carts. We really, really, really need several more carts or something... but alas, with the budget cuts, it is a miracle that I still have a job and that I haven't taken a pay cut at all, so there is certainly not money for more carts. I planned way ahead and scheduled one of our school's 4 laptop carts to use for the 2 block period days this week. I booked it back in May. However, because of budget cuts, our IT department is understaffed and overworked (aren't we all), and the laptop cart I scheduled is not ready for use due to some severe student abuses and just wear and tear on cheap computers that now needed a lot of maintenance over the summer. (What can I say... they are high school kids. We try to be careful, but it happens). I think I will be able to share the cart that my neighboring teacher is using, as she said she is willing to split it half the period tomorrow. The other problem... it only has 25 laptops, and of those only about 17 are really working. Now, if my class size was still 25 people or less, like it was my first year, then this would be something that I could probably make do with... but due to budget cuts, our school is slightly overcrowded this year and my class sizes this year are somewhere around 28-33. This means that for half the period, I will have the computers, and only half of my class will be able to use them at a time, so I need to somehow get them to finish the 90 minutes worth of computer stuff I have to do in about 25, so that they can trade off. I also need to come up with a lesson plan for the rest of the time, and something engaging and quiet that the rest of the students can be doing while the ones using computers take the tests.

Ironically... one of the things I need them to do is take the Accelerated Reader quiz on their summer reading, which was The Freedom Writers Diary. If you are familiar with the book, the teacher, Erin Gruwell, isn't even given books for her students and has to use her own money to go buy them the books she wants them to read.

In teaching this book, I bought the book The Freedom Writers Diary Teachers Guide, which has all of Erin Gruwell's great lesson plans and a bunch of reproducible pages for engaging lessons and vocabulary practice to go along with the book, so I found some activities in it and was going to copy them... but our copy machine is broken. I am sure that they will get someone out to fix it. In the mean time, I could use the back-up, the duplo machine, but last year, due to budget cuts... we couldn't renew the maintenance contract on it. Our director dipped into his discretionary budget and bought the ink, but we all knew that we are basically screwed if it breaks. Well, it basically isn't working. Yesterday it ate half my paper. It would copy a page, eat a page, copy a page, eat a page. Paper is a valuable limited resource in my world, so I cannot afford to waste it like that by trying it again, and I asked around and other teachers said it was doing it today too.

So what would Erin Gruwell do?  Would she pull a rusty, unrelated lesson out of a file cabinet, just because she has nothing else? Or would she head to Office Depot where they offer a 10% discount on photocopies for teachers, and use her credit card to pay for the copies, because her account is overdrawn....

I think she'd go to Office Depot, so off I go, for the second night in a row... because last night, I was there buying pens for the students who couldn't afford to get them this year. Not even kidding....