New Blog

I have moved blogs to msmathlasvegas.teachfor.us
I changed so that I could be on the same website as a number of other teach for america members. This way it was more likely that people sharing my experiences would find my blog. It is about life back in Las Vegas.

Waiting for School to Start

The internet company that deals with my apartment complex had all sorts of issues, so I still don't have internet at home. I did however find the closest library and sign up for a library card to use internet. I'm sure that will be useful.

I'm waiting for school to start. I have district orientation starting Wednesday. It shouldn't be too difficult but I need to focus on meeting mentor teachers at my school and finding out what the math department does. It's hard to lesson plan and unit plan without seeing what they already do.
In other news, whenever I tell someone I've moved to Las Vegas to teach they are so appreciative. Then they ask where I'm teaching. When I say Cheyenne High School they say, I'm so sorry for you, that is going to be so hard. Or sometimes they tell me it's dangerous or scary or that I'll quit. It's discouraging to hear so many horrible things about my school. It's to be expected though.

My blog will hopefully get interesting again in few weeks, but for now with no internet and no kids I don't have much to share.

The end of Institute

The last day of institute was both a wonderful day and an embarressing and frusterating day. The first period, Paul(Mr. Idzikowski) was supposed to teach the first two hours. Our high school was the only one with class on Friday so most of the other teachers had gone out Thursday night to the bars and Paul, not wanting to miss out, decided to join them. Now, I'm not sure if the drinking and staying out had anything to do with his mental functioning, but he forgot our students final exams at home. We were responsible for handing them back, and tracking the progress on Friday so he had to drive back to Long Beach to get them(about half an hour away). Luckily he had driven his car instead of taking the big yellow school bus we all ride(Yes the kids know, and yes they make fun of us). Suddenly I'm in charge of two hours of teaching completely not expecting it or ready. Plus it's Friday after the final, the kids have scored 89 percent and all they want to do is hang out. What they really want to do is cut Mr. Idzikowski's and I's hair, but they needed to get 90 percent for that.
As I'm teaching my lesson I notice that plenty of kids are talking. I'm teaching them how to find the circumferance of the earth using sticks, a friend in a different city, shadows and the geometry we learned this summer. I think it's pretty much the coolest thing ever, especially when I get Ryan with his gold football helmut up in front of the class pretending to be the sun for the solar eclipe demonstration(The greeks knew the earth was round before christ because they observed it's shadow on the moon.)
I really don't care that they are talking because I know that my rantings about Greek mathematical and astronimal history are not likely to be on the SAT's.

Vacuums and Girls

During the end of Friday the kids were relatively on task doing a worksheet when my other collaborative member walked in. He brought with him an attractive girl named Bre who was coming to observe. As soon as the two of them walked through the door the quiet work time turned into a giggling group of high schoolers and young teachers.

The students started to yell out...
"Mrs. Byerley, Mr. Idzikowski is cheating on you with that new girl!"
"Mr. Idzikowski, is that your girlfriend, she's hot!"
"Mr. Idzikowski, I want you to be my boyfriend."


Ms. Brown was laughing in the corner, and I was trying to fight it up at the overhead. This was the first time I was just laughing in my class. Feeling like I should get things under control I said, "This is about geometry, geometry has nothign to do with boys and girls and dating. We can all be mature." But I was still kind of laughing and probably blushing because it was ridiculous. I mean it hasn't been so many years since I was in high school and I still get all stupid over my crushes. So anyways, this takes a few mintues to calm down, Bre is mortified that she has disrupted my class so badly and everyone is just kind of laughing. Then out of the corner of my eye(my teacher eyes are developing but still not great) I see freddy in teh back of the classroom plugging the vacuum in and on the verge of starting it up. I want to assert authority and say confidantly, "Freddy, put that vacuum down adn return to your seat. You know taht rule four tells us that we can't vacuum in class." But the room is such a mess and we have ten minutes left to go until the weekend, and everyone is still charged up from the girl boy giggle fest so all I mutter is "Freddy, why do you have a vacuum? What are you doing???" in a very confused, laughing non-authoritative tone of voice.
I realize later that I'm finally laughing and that I want my classroom to be fun. Laughing is somethign I do in all other situations and I hope I can get everyone under control enough to laugh with my kids in the fall.

malas palabras en espanol.

Today was Friday and luckily the kids were a little more calm. I gave second period a lecture about how the only difference between them and first period was how on task they were. I congratulated them on their 75 percent test average but told them I knew they could do better.

One student Mario has been giving me all sorts of trouble. We've gotten in arguments about whether or not "hell" is appropriate classroom language, or if it's okay to say "fuck" if it's quiet. He's always turned around facing backwards in class, and I'm always trying to fix it. Today I had some success asking him a bunch of easier questions, but the day ended in disaster, more for him than for me.

We have a progression of consequences on the wall, starting with a non-verbal warning, going to a verbal warning, then a reflective slip, then a parent phone call. I'd been trying everything with Mario, warning him, making him write reflections and I told him if he did anything else in the last ten minutes of class I would call his parents because I had warned him so many times.
One of the more humorous things he had done to deserve a warning was call me a concha. Now I wasn't sure exactely what this Spanish word meant but I could tell it was bad as the latinos all laughed at it.
I said, in Spanish(thank goodness for Peru)
I studied Spanish in the University so I don't know all the bad words, but I'm not stupid and I can tell that it's not appropriate. The Latino boys in the corner went wild when they realized I could speak Spanish. The black studetns went wild yelling "tell us what is going on, we can't understand." The class was generally a little out of control at this one.
I went to Mario's desk and asked him privately what the word meant, explaining that I wanted to learn. He told me first that it wasn't a bad word and then that it didn't mean anything. On the bus ride home I found out that it was a degrogatory word for a women's genitals, starting with the same letter. This made me feel a little better about what happened less.
Other things he did were even more blatenly disrespectful. For example, he was taggin the whiteboard with a marker, I told him "you need to erase that." Seemingly he went to go get an eraser but instead got a different marker and as I told him "you can't write on the board" he continued to write only a foot in front of my face.

He was turning around again distracting students and I walked over and told him I was going to call his paretns and that he should go wait with Mrs. Brown for the rest of the class. The class heard, made a big deal out of it, and he walked out the door. He had already gotten one referral for walking out and he was warned that he would be kicked out of summer school at the second one. Ms. Brown was upset because he's a good kid and she'd formed a personal relationship with him. I feel bad and felt like it was unfortunate that the class heard me talking to him, but he uses up so much of my time that other students need more. I felt like I needed to be a better teacher to really know how to deal with him.
I'm not sure if he'll be coming back or not. I'm not sure if I want him to come back or not. Usually it is my lack of confidance in my own skills that makes me want to give up, not so much in the students. I believe someone could help Mario, I just don't know if I can when I'm worried about 20 other things at once.

TFA Day

For a few days there had been whispered rumors. Other TFA institutes had recieved a special half day off. We thought that yesterday might be it. It was Wednesday of the third week, exactely half way through the year. We were dissapointed when we had to stay until 4:30 at the school in sessions theoretically learning how to not suck.
This morning we still had high hopes. On the bus someone casually asked the bus driver what time he was picking us up that afternoon. He must have been confused when his reply of 1;30 was met with such enthusiam. He had no idea that three extra hours could mean so much to a group of teachers.
When we left the school we were met with even more surprises. Not only did we get the afternoon off but a whole bunch of activities had been planned. YOu could tell that the planners had been through Institute because they picked some really appropriate treats. As we got off the bus we were greeted by a line of massage tables. Free professional massages, tips highly encouraged. I was pretty excited, since I havn't found someone to trade backrubs with here. They had snow cones and cotton candy. To satisfy our desparate need to play they arranged soccer games, hip hop dancing volleyball and Tai Bo. Exercising and back rubs felt so good. Some kids just went and curled up in a ball in their room and slept but I was awake enough to enjoy it.
Sometimes it takes a lot of hard work to really appreciate life. If I had free time all the time I don't think I coudl get this much joy out of it.
Friday we are having our Vegas social. The people from our region are visiting and we are going on a Krunk Kruise, which involves getting on a boat and getting drunk. I think I'm making some major friends by being DD- everyone is pretty ready to get wasted.Plus the Vegas motto, on our TFA t-shirts is, "we work as hard as we play."

Cheating, uninvested apathetic students.

Today we took the second test. Try as I might I could not get the class to be quiet. I took off points, diciplined them and nobody would listen. There was a constant hum.
This afternoon I graded their tests and I could tell some of them were cheating. Two wrong identical answers from kids sitting right next to each other. People with correct answers but no work and wrong answers on prerequisite material. People with answers that were almost right but completely missed the point. For example, 50x instead of x=50 with no explanation of how they got there.

I'm annoyed. My kids aren't invested in their educations. If they are just going to cheat why should I take the time to grades tests? Why should I teach them anything? I might as well just give them the answers. I'm not invested in those kids anymore. I loved them, really wanted to work for them and now I'm annoyed.

I shoudl clarify a bit, this is second period that I'm talking about. First period did awesome and averaged 85 percent on their tests. They are the ones working hard and learning a lot.
I should have ripped up some tests today when kids wouldn't stop talking, me telling them I was going to take points off was not drastic enough.
Part of the problem is that kids finish early have to sit around and wait and get bored and start talking. Plus someone always has their hands raised so I can never have a second to monitor. GRRRR>>>>>>I'm bitter.
I want to tell those kids I'm not getting paid, I don't have to help them, I'm here because I care and if they are going to cheat I don't see the point any more.

Failure

Our classroom is a disaster. We have no time before class after class or in between class to clean up and it started the year quite messy. The day of my first extended observation I had my notes all ready to go on the overhead until right before class started and I realized they were gone. I asked the other members of my collaborative for help in desperation but they had to leave and I was left with a pile of disorganzied loose leaf rough draft stuff to lead the class for two hours.

It went okay at first, but about the time that the program director Tim walked in to join my Corp Member Advisor Joey we go to the aprt where we were suppoesd to do a tracing activity. My collaborative member had left the tracing paper at home and had forgotten to cut up the sheets of paper. I froze, not knowing what to do, and moved on to the next part. Unfortunetely this involved problems from the book which I no longer knew, so as the two observers watched I looked through a pile of paper while the kids got out of control in the classroom waiting for me.
I felt like such a failure on so many levels that day. My disicpline was crappy, I can't assert authority, my lesson was a mess, my timing was off, everything went wrong.
Later in my debriefing when Joey went over what I'd done that day I cried for ten minutes about how bad I was. I've really never failed this much in my life before. I feel set up for failure in a way. I learned today that this Corps is the first to teach in teh first week of training. I had three days of training before walking into a crazy high school classroom with summer school kids who'd already failed the class at all different levels and no sense of personal dicipline. Seriously, and I've probably said this before, this is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.
It's the first thing that I've just been terrible at making mistakes all of the time. Thinking about dicipline, attendance, all of the kids who skip school, come in late, overhead projectors, white board markers that don't work, everything is just crazy. One day one of my student's boyfriends came to tell me that his baby with his girlfriend was in the hospital having heart problems and that she would miss class because of it. As he told me about his baby being on the verge of death I missed taking role on everyone walking by and got off to a bad start. How can I pay attention to 30 students some of them brand new when someone is telling me about their baby being sick. I don't even know what it is like to have kids and my student's have kids. I can't believe it. I'm responsible enough to take care of them but definitely don't feel like I could take care of a baby. It's crazy.

The first test

My kids had their first test today. I felt like our objectives were trivial. We can spend hours trying to explain how to add negative numbers or repeat that supplementary angles add up to 180 so many times and have them still miss questions. Our test could not have been any more obvious, we practically laid it out for them the day before. Of course when so many kids have missed 3 or 4 days out of 5 all of that laying it out was really lost on them.
I was pleased to see that a lot of my students did well. I actually probably would have given up in despair if they hadn't been able to after all we'd practiced. I'm absolutely shocked at the state of the school. How do kids get to senior year without being able to add -1 +2. I'm not kidding. They think that it is three or negative three, and when they see the discouraged look on your face sometimes they guess 1.
We have on student, John, who is one of the most hardworking and polite students I have ever met. He wants to pass so badly but when you ask him, what is 12 minus 4 he thinks about it for a few seconds with a look of intense concentration on his face and guesses 7 or 6 or if you've been doing negatives maybe that. When you ask them what is negative 4 minus 7 they think that two negatives make a positive and that they answer should be 11.
I feel like I can't go anywhere with my lessons because they are so far behind but that they are so boring becuase I don't go anywhere. We do have the smart students in the class who get everything done right way with all of the answers right. I try to find extra problems for them but its so hard to help them do more and help remediate the others in a class of 35 that I only have tenuous control over. It's very discouraging to know that you are boring half the class. There were kids who I barely even know who got A's on their test and I realized that they were just sitting around being bored.

One such smart kids, Ryan, struts in late every day in a wife beater tank top showing off his arms. He thinks he's above the law and trys to test me every day.
When I call him out on it he asks why I'm only picking on him.
When I was trying to get them to see the connection between the word alternate and the angles alternate interior I put the definition of Alternate on the board which used the words "goes back and forth." Ryan, being the champ he is yells out "that sounds like sex Ms. Byerley" from the back middle.(why do I have him there right in the middle of everything, if only I had time for a seating chart.)
I tell him it's not appropriate but blush and lose track of what I'm saying. How did he get sex out of geometry. I can only imagine what he'd be like in a literature class.
Thursday some students screwed up some negative signs again and got the answer 69 degrees for an angle measure. Of course I'm not stupid enough to actually make that an answer, but kids can get things wrong in creative ways. Ryan yells out a comment about "ohhhh 69." I tell him once again that is not appropraite and he says "what are you thinking about Ms. Byerley, I'm just talking about math." Now I feel really dumb because the whole class knows that I made his connection instantly and at least for a moment was thinking of oral sex instead of trying to teach them geometry and contemplating what I should do to address the issue. He is so good at making me look dumb. One time he told me Robert's name was Jose so when I called Robert Jose he made fun of me in front of everyone for getting his name wrong.
We had a little talk this morning which kind of went okay but he accused me of changing my lesson plan and denied doing anything wrong. Eventually we got on the same page and he was my scorekeeper in Jeopordy. I liked having him at the front of the room.I've learned that if you don't enlist students to help you pass papers, keep scores, collect things, you never have time to catch them writing gang symbols on the floor, text messaging, cheating, talking, taking pictures of you with their cell phones(Ryan again, while two people were observing me.)

All in all I love my kids and want them to do well so badly. I feel like I have nothing left to give them though.

TGIF

I've never looked forward to Friday's quite the same way as I do at institute. Plus the use of an acronym was pretty appropriate considering that we speak in acnronyms constantly at TFA(Teach for America.) We work with our Co Labs(Collaboratives) in the day to teach lessons then later we go to CS(curriculum specialist) sessions or maybe a LS(literacy specialist session.) Or on Friday we go to DCA(Diversity, Culture and Achievement) to talk about race, poverty and other issues in our classrooms. And every day we get to spend time with our lovely CMA(core member advisor) Joey and learn all about math stuff. If we don't do a good job of being on time and learning all the acronyms for teaching MOCCA, FEVR, and more then we get put on a CMIP(Core member improvement plan). If we have time to think of anything other than teaching we might develop an IC(Institute Crush). Okay I have to admit, I have developed an Institute Crush but it's a secret. Then at night after we ride the school bus back we have LPC(lesson planning clinics) and hopefully we finish up our drafts before midnight so that we have time to sleep a little before starting all over. We have no time for anything here. Even going to the bathroom is a rush becuase there is a huge line in the tiny breaks we get to run from our classes we teach to the classes we take to learn how to teach. We are always learning what to do one or two days before we need it if we are lucky, afterwards if we are not.
I think in this grand rush we don't even have enough time to say the words all the way, we speak in TFA code all the time. Even if it's not acroyms we are so indoctrinated with the language of "working relentlessly" towards "big goals" and schafolding instruction to meet the kids where they are at that everything we talk about is in this language.
A simple beach volleyball game email turns into a five step lesson plan format.
We are living, breathing speaking teaching, oozing our our pours. I would say that we are sleeping teaching but most people aren't really sleeping except ocassionally on the bus or in a class that gets boring. I've managed to do better than almost anyone but it's because this is the first time in my life that I have turned in less than my best work or just decided not to do something and make up excuses about it. Sleeping is a fundamental human need and I will sacrafice my summer for these kids(man I already love them) but I can't give up my sleep. It's mine and I at least should be entitled to that basic human need. I feel like a slacker though because I only work from 6:00 to 10:30 straight every day no breaks, not even on the bus, or at dinner and on Saturday and Sunday too.
I did go to the beach today to body surf, my first personal time since last Sunday. I love the waves, you can't really think about anything in them, only the waves breathing, staying afloat, the power and calmness of the ocean. It's the only thing that could really calm me down.