The Day Before The First Day

Yeah, I know, it sounds like a terrible movie about a religious detective unearthing clues to the creation of the Universe or something. I'm sure Spielberg's already on it.

Today my mentor teacher and I finished cleaning up the room and getting everything organized. He's the department chair, so we also organized the books in the 'forbidden teacher hallway of locked departmental cages.'

We also had our first departmental meeting, a combined venture between the English and Social Studies teachers who teach "Humanities." The process of buying books and paying for books and distributing books reminded me that there's another side to teaching: navigating bureaucracy. Over the course of the day, I was reminded of this several times. Classes being dropped and combined with other classes, obscene numbers of students in some classes, very few in others, and various other bureaucratic annoyances. I suppose at some point one just has to look at the state of things as it is, rededicate yourself to doing the best possible job you can with what you've got, and then expect even more from yourself. Easy for the wet behind the ears student-teacher to say, right?

My mentor teacher and I have some good ideas as to the flow and scope of the Pacific Rim Humanities course we're teaching, and the Contemporary World Problems course will make itself as we go. After all, if we planned too far ahead, the problems wouldn't be very contemporary, would they? That course will be largely guided inquiry based.

My mentor is still occasionally asking me the surprise planning question, asking me to think on my feet. I love it. Today's issue was whether to immediately adopt the Latin and Greek word root vocabulary curriculum (that we were presented with for the first time today, without any teacher editions) or to reuse the same stuff he's been using forever. My idea: in the first week, we'll have some craft time. We'll take the first twenty word roots (in five units) addressed in the vocab text, jigsaw their meanings, and have experts present them to combined groups. So, in a class of 35, groups of seven are assigned to learning each unit, then students are regrouped into groups of five where each person is presenting one unit's worth of words to the others. They will then create foldable bookmarks, outside is decorated by them, and inside are twenty lines of:

[Word Root]: [Meaning] -- (example from text we're reading) (page number)

My hope is that this will lead to some closer reading of the texts in our Humanities classes, along with providing very contextual vocabulary practice. The bookmarks will be checked regularly, Think-Pair-Shared with classmates, and presented to the class so that each person will have examples of each word root. Still needs some refining, but my mentor liked the idea and we'll be incorporating it into the first week.

On my way out, I borrowed last year's yearbook from the library, made some copies, and will spend tonight making myself flashcards of the students faces and names. My goal is to have all my student's names hallway ready by the end of the first week.

Looking through the yearbook and my class list, my students are extremely ethnically diverse. I've been told that the district is 65% free and reduced lunch, and that the affluent kids in the area generally attend private schools in the Tacoma area. Demographic information below, with the obvious disclaimers that 'Asian' once again groups everyone from any country on the Asian continent, including India, Cambodia, China, Vietnam, etc, that Dropout rate numbers are notoriously skewed to seem lower than they are by not counting anyone who doesn't file drop out paperwork, and that very few are going to report themselves as migrant, and so forth and so on.


Student Enrollment - 1,363

Male - 52.2%
Female - 47.8%

American Indian - 1.5%
Asian - 13.6%
Black - 24.0%
Hispanic - 16.7%
White - 42.5%

Free or Reduced Lunch - 52.6%
Special Education - 11.9%
Bilingual - 8.8%
Migrant - 0.0%

Dropout Rate - 3.8%
Cohort Graduation Rate - 77.7%