1. We moved into a new condo. It is teh awesome. We have put away the books, but there are still approximately 135 million things left to do. Among the fascinating highlights: the washer/dryer repair guy comes on Saturday (4th and hopefully final attempt), a giant Chinese wardrobe gets delivered on Saturday (since we went from 4 to 1.5 closets), and at least 14 miles of cable needs to be strung throughout the condo to hook up Airbear's electronic paraphernalia. But the condo is beautiful and is starting to feel homier. Even the kitties think so.
2. They are going to start doing curriculum/program audits every other week at all the campuses at my work. While this is good news, and ensures a higher level of educational quality (since our hyperbole-adverse but academically hard-assed ed. director will be conducting them), I nonetheless wish it wasn't starting on a week in which I have no time to go through and pre-audit the folders myself :) I did start doing it tonight though and got 8 of 26 done. Yes, that is only 30% (30.8%, actually), but it is still better than none, which is how many I had done this morning.
3. O.G. is coming to sub at my campus on Wednesday! Man, I heart that old guy!
4. I found out that Puritannica is having a bachelorette party on Aug 18 and I have to go, since I missed both the other two parties she got to throw for herself for getting married. Geez, how many parties does one person get to have?! The answer, apparently, is a lot. She better knock it off, though, because there is only so much of my time I am going to allow to be monopolized over this marriage. I can't complain too much, though, because so far I have avoided all the other parties. Ha.
5. I am trying to put together my campus schedule for fall. This is made slightly more difficult by the fact that I have no teachers. Well, one teacher. I hired another who can work for exactly 4 hours per week, and a second teacher who, although limited in subject range, at least allows me to once and for all get rid of the Texter. (And there was much rejoicing. Yaaay!)
6. I cooked my first dinner in the new place tonight. Sure it was only a quesadilla, but I used the oven and everything! Now if I could only find the pizza cutter.
More to come later :)
Monday, August 6, 2007
Thursday, July 19, 2007
Thank the Lord..
...this week is finally over.
Despite having so much to do (or maybe because there is so much to do), these few weeks are taking forever. There's been all kinds of draaaaamaaaaa at the fakeytown fartless office, because they have hired a Really Big Ho' (TM) to run the place in the midst of the sucking vortex created by the absence of its previous manager, your old friend and mine, Puritannica. The chaos resultant from Puritannica's departure has not, as a rational person would surmise, educated the moneybags owners as to her efficiency at making them shit-tons of money. On the contrary, they are rapidly trying to distract everyone from the aforementioned chaos by badmouthing Puritannica as much as possible. How rogue she was! How disappointed and embarrassed they were to discover it!
As another of my colleagues likes to say (to anything), whatever.
I also planned this training opportunity for my coworkers at my school about teaching certification information, professional/national board certification, and the No Child Left Behind Highly-Qualified Teacher (TM) requirements. (Yes, each one of those has its own separate "handbook.") Note that since we are a private school, you do not have to meet state or federal teacher requirements. Instead, you only need to meet whatever standards are set out by your school. As I may have already told you, our school does not actually have any standards. However, there are several people there that do have teaching certificates that they will at some point need to get renewed, and I thought it might be a useful exercise for us to examine our staff base and perhaps see things like what percentage of our staff actually is certified? What percentage would meet highly-qualified teacher requirements? That kind of data might be nice to have in order to either a) demonstrate the quality of your staff or 2) make obvious how you need to improve the quality of your staff. I also thought that since I had to go through all this work to understand this crap for my own procert program I would save other people the work and summarize it for them in a brief, clear, bullshit-free way. I am very good at taking things that are long, complicated, and full of bullshit and elucidating them. It's true. Just ask my uncle Herb.*
Anyway, no one in the company would go. This proves several things that we already knew:
1). Most of the staff at fartless school does not give a fart (!) about professional development.
2). None of the staff at fartless school is paid enough to justify going "above and beyond" the bare minimum teaching requirements.
3). Those select staff members at fartless school that do have/need to renew their teaching certificates are too lazy to do anything about it.
I'm really kind of disappointed (but not exactly surprised). So much for my "contributing as a colleague to the development of my school as a whole" procert goal. I'll have to find another way to meet that goal now. Jerks.
Maybe I'll make something up tomorrow when I am out being productive all day with LaRue. We have some serious productivity planned. And that's not even a dirty joke, it's true.
Just ask my uncle Herb...
* It's from Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. You should read it.
Despite having so much to do (or maybe because there is so much to do), these few weeks are taking forever. There's been all kinds of draaaaamaaaaa at the fakeytown fartless office, because they have hired a Really Big Ho' (TM) to run the place in the midst of the sucking vortex created by the absence of its previous manager, your old friend and mine, Puritannica. The chaos resultant from Puritannica's departure has not, as a rational person would surmise, educated the moneybags owners as to her efficiency at making them shit-tons of money. On the contrary, they are rapidly trying to distract everyone from the aforementioned chaos by badmouthing Puritannica as much as possible. How rogue she was! How disappointed and embarrassed they were to discover it!
As another of my colleagues likes to say (to anything), whatever.
I also planned this training opportunity for my coworkers at my school about teaching certification information, professional/national board certification, and the No Child Left Behind Highly-Qualified Teacher (TM) requirements. (Yes, each one of those has its own separate "handbook.") Note that since we are a private school, you do not have to meet state or federal teacher requirements. Instead, you only need to meet whatever standards are set out by your school. As I may have already told you, our school does not actually have any standards. However, there are several people there that do have teaching certificates that they will at some point need to get renewed, and I thought it might be a useful exercise for us to examine our staff base and perhaps see things like what percentage of our staff actually is certified? What percentage would meet highly-qualified teacher requirements? That kind of data might be nice to have in order to either a) demonstrate the quality of your staff or 2) make obvious how you need to improve the quality of your staff. I also thought that since I had to go through all this work to understand this crap for my own procert program I would save other people the work and summarize it for them in a brief, clear, bullshit-free way. I am very good at taking things that are long, complicated, and full of bullshit and elucidating them. It's true. Just ask my uncle Herb.*
Anyway, no one in the company would go. This proves several things that we already knew:
1). Most of the staff at fartless school does not give a fart (!) about professional development.
2). None of the staff at fartless school is paid enough to justify going "above and beyond" the bare minimum teaching requirements.
3). Those select staff members at fartless school that do have/need to renew their teaching certificates are too lazy to do anything about it.
I'm really kind of disappointed (but not exactly surprised). So much for my "contributing as a colleague to the development of my school as a whole" procert goal. I'll have to find another way to meet that goal now. Jerks.
Maybe I'll make something up tomorrow when I am out being productive all day with LaRue. We have some serious productivity planned. And that's not even a dirty joke, it's true.
Just ask my uncle Herb...
* It's from Don't Let the Pigeon Drive the Bus. You should read it.
Tuesday, July 17, 2007
Update
You may have noticed a bit of a culling has occurred around here. I haven't been posting much because things have been nuts at work and getting ready for the big move, and plus I just haven't really been in the mood to blog about my cooking adventures lately. To be quite honest, I haven't been having many such adventures lately. We've been trying to eat up all those meals so we have fewer things to move. (I also went through my books and tried to find some I could get rid of or sell back. Out of 13 bookshelves, I found 3 books I could part with. Ha. Oops.)
Anyway, I'm going to broaden my blogging scope a bit to include more than "pizza." The title of my blog, since it is clearly very catchy, will stay the same--you can just think of "pizza" as a broader metaphorical term, symbolizing all the relevant goings on in the world of nitza. And really, if you're looking for a juicy metaphor to represent Things of Importance, nothing beats pizza.
Except maybe "nachos," and that doesn't rhyme. Oh, and don't worry, I left the posts w/recipes ;)
Anyway, I'm going to broaden my blogging scope a bit to include more than "pizza." The title of my blog, since it is clearly very catchy, will stay the same--you can just think of "pizza" as a broader metaphorical term, symbolizing all the relevant goings on in the world of nitza. And really, if you're looking for a juicy metaphor to represent Things of Importance, nothing beats pizza.
Except maybe "nachos," and that doesn't rhyme. Oh, and don't worry, I left the posts w/recipes ;)
Sunday, June 24, 2007
Trip P.S.
Besides the training part, I forgot to say that there was actually a fun part to last week's trip. Aaron flew down to meet me on Friday night! After a week by myself, I was very excited to have company, and jumped around like it was Christmas. We went out to dinner at a fancy French restaurant (because it happened to be open at like 11), and we slept in and missed the continental breakfast. Ha ha.
Then we drove up through San Francisco and went over the Golden Gate Bridge, which I took several photos of (but they turned out blurry and terrible). It was still pretty cool, and we went into Sausalito--which apparently is not just a kind of cookie! There is a cute little boardwalk that we walked up and down, and we had pizza and ice cream for lunch. Yay :)
Anyway it was a very nice, detoxifying end to the week. Plus I got company on the ride home :)
Then we drove up through San Francisco and went over the Golden Gate Bridge, which I took several photos of (but they turned out blurry and terrible). It was still pretty cool, and we went into Sausalito--which apparently is not just a kind of cookie! There is a cute little boardwalk that we walked up and down, and we had pizza and ice cream for lunch. Yay :)
Anyway it was a very nice, detoxifying end to the week. Plus I got company on the ride home :)
Professional Development
So I did not "post more during my trip," as I had thought I might. But here's a recap:
I attended a week-long educator training seminar called "Schools Attuned," which is based on the work of Mel Levine. The basic idea is to look at students (and your own lesson plans/assignments/teaching) from a "neurodevelopmental perspective" and be more specific and symptom-based rather than label-based when adapting instruction and providing accommodations/interventions. What that means in English is, rather than saying "this kid has ADD" (which may or may not be true, is different for every kid, and isn't that practically helpful), you look at specific aspects of attention, memory, language, temporal-sequential ordering, spatial ordering, social cognition, higher order thinking, and neuromotor function. Say the kid has attention problems. Then they have these specific "components" under attention to help you narrow down the problem: is it sleep/alertness problems? trouble starting projects? trouble maintaining attention/follow-through? trouble planning things? trouble thinking about long-term vs. short-term? trouble self-monitoring? etc. All of these things have specific little education names, and once you learn what they all are it actually does make kids' specific difficulties a lot easier to talk about. You also get this strategy resource binder (which is worth its weight in actual gold) which is symptom-based: If a kid has trouble with sequential ordering of information while reading or processing directions, you can try these 12 things. If a kid has trouble with short-term memory specific to vocab words, try these 85. Brilliant.
It was pretty tiring, though. Even though I got out of the training each day at around 4 pm (approximately 10 hours earlier than I get out of a typical day at my school), I was pretty brain-fried by that point in the day. Since I was in a different city, I would then amuse myself by walking around the quaint little downtown area, reading in the sunshine (beautiful! around 80 degrees), and eating at restaurants and even, once, the ice cream store. I could justify all of this because I was out of town and couldn't cook, but the trip cost approximately six million dollars. My school is paying for half. Hopefully they will pay for half of the food, too.
Anyway, an intriguing and informative week, and I feel smarter and optimistic about what I'll be able to do with my students. For once it wasn't filled with a bunch of teachers wanting to talk about their own situation and going off on tangents that are not relevant or useful, and that was very much appreciated. There were about 13 teachers there total, and we got to talk a lot and go out to lunch. Fun and inspiring - what a treat it is to be around gifted and excited teachers. It did depress me greatly, though, because I know I can't hire people like that to teach at my school and even if I could they would end up quitting because the stupid management would not let them be creative or bring in their intelligent and helpful accommodations. I have been thinking a lot about this, because the management was whining about how inept many of our instructors are at that recent Idiotic Friday Meeting (TM), and because I will have to hire almost an entire new staff for next school year. Which sounds far away but is really, as I realized during the training, only about two months.
Yikes.
I attended a week-long educator training seminar called "Schools Attuned," which is based on the work of Mel Levine. The basic idea is to look at students (and your own lesson plans/assignments/teaching) from a "neurodevelopmental perspective" and be more specific and symptom-based rather than label-based when adapting instruction and providing accommodations/interventions. What that means in English is, rather than saying "this kid has ADD" (which may or may not be true, is different for every kid, and isn't that practically helpful), you look at specific aspects of attention, memory, language, temporal-sequential ordering, spatial ordering, social cognition, higher order thinking, and neuromotor function. Say the kid has attention problems. Then they have these specific "components" under attention to help you narrow down the problem: is it sleep/alertness problems? trouble starting projects? trouble maintaining attention/follow-through? trouble planning things? trouble thinking about long-term vs. short-term? trouble self-monitoring? etc. All of these things have specific little education names, and once you learn what they all are it actually does make kids' specific difficulties a lot easier to talk about. You also get this strategy resource binder (which is worth its weight in actual gold) which is symptom-based: If a kid has trouble with sequential ordering of information while reading or processing directions, you can try these 12 things. If a kid has trouble with short-term memory specific to vocab words, try these 85. Brilliant.
It was pretty tiring, though. Even though I got out of the training each day at around 4 pm (approximately 10 hours earlier than I get out of a typical day at my school), I was pretty brain-fried by that point in the day. Since I was in a different city, I would then amuse myself by walking around the quaint little downtown area, reading in the sunshine (beautiful! around 80 degrees), and eating at restaurants and even, once, the ice cream store. I could justify all of this because I was out of town and couldn't cook, but the trip cost approximately six million dollars. My school is paying for half. Hopefully they will pay for half of the food, too.
Anyway, an intriguing and informative week, and I feel smarter and optimistic about what I'll be able to do with my students. For once it wasn't filled with a bunch of teachers wanting to talk about their own situation and going off on tangents that are not relevant or useful, and that was very much appreciated. There were about 13 teachers there total, and we got to talk a lot and go out to lunch. Fun and inspiring - what a treat it is to be around gifted and excited teachers. It did depress me greatly, though, because I know I can't hire people like that to teach at my school and even if I could they would end up quitting because the stupid management would not let them be creative or bring in their intelligent and helpful accommodations. I have been thinking a lot about this, because the management was whining about how inept many of our instructors are at that recent Idiotic Friday Meeting (TM), and because I will have to hire almost an entire new staff for next school year. Which sounds far away but is really, as I realized during the training, only about two months.
Yikes.
Friday, June 15, 2007
Dilemmas in Teaching and LISTENING TO BULLSHIT
So, as you may or may not know, I work for this school that offers all one-on-one instruction* for credit (and sometimes tutoring). We had a meeting this morning to discuss the English curriculum, which has always been retarded. The idea is to make it more academically vigorous, more well-defined, and more consistent so that our teachers (who invariably have worked there less than six months, since we pay so shitty) can adequately teach it. So that some of the kids, you know, learn something.
Now there is an interesting dilemma. We teach to the individual student, which means that we assess them when they come in and we teach them where they're at--even if they're in the 12th grade but they really only read at a 4th grade level. Maybe they have some learning disabilities, maybe they've had terrible life experiences, maybe their little self-esteems are all broken from previous school failure. (Maybe, once in awhile, they're just f**king lazy. It's true.) Anyway, it's a tailored curriculum, and it's adapted directly to meet that student's individual needs. I love that, and it's why I work there. I did not, for once in my life, just get this job because I needed a job to pay the bills. I found a company that did what I wanted to do, I walked in and told them to hire me, and they did. So this is something that matters to me.
However, when you have to grade a student in a particular class, say English 10, you have to give him a grade based upon some reasonable standard of what "English 10" should be. You don't give them A's just because they tried really hard, or because their terrible paper is still a huge improvement from their godawful paper before that. I feel strongly about this side of things too. You can't just come to my school and buy an A for your kid. A kid can work really hard but do C work in Geometry. Not everyone that takes Geometry can get an A in it. I did, but then I worked my ass off all the time. I am pretty smart, but I studied really damn hard in school. I should get A's. (And I did get A's.) You can have a grade for effort, and we do--it's 10% of the grade, quality and attitude or something. But a kid that reads at a 4th grade level and writes a 2-paragraph paper because that's what level his/her writing skills are at--that's appropriate instruction. But that is not an A in English 12! If we send them out with a transcript that says "English 12 - A" that is misleading to colleges, to other high schools they might be attending and, in all honesty, to that student. I am not alone in thinking this. Our director of education is very vehement about this point.
However the important thing to know is that our school does not actually have any standards. If you ask them for some (so that you can adequately grade a student, or understand where they should be at in the first place), the insane owneress will get all pissed off at you and attack you for not "believing in the mission of individualized education." She just generally misinterprets everything anyone says anyway. But this was just stupid. Her husband also went off about how he always found literature classes boring anyway, and that we should allow the kids to read things that interest them. This is a great idea, to a point. Except that all that interests them is Paris Hilton and wasting their parents' money.
After my ridiculous meeting, I went to volunteer at the autism clinic. This was a hell of a perspective shift, as the workers there were celebrating little victories like how this toddler had gone up to some other kids and said, without prompting, "I name Jack!" (I-->My). This represents very big progress for an autistic toddler. The teacher (and doubtlessly the kid's mom) were just about beside themselves. Then I started thinking how much I wanted to hug all the moms of autistic kids, and how brave and patient they are, loving kids that don't recognize your emotions or respond to them--that don't hug you or connect with you or, sometimes, even talk to you at all. That's a tough job.
I started getting all overwhelmed and thinking about my purpose in life. I had to go home and eat a leftover burrito.
*that is, when the money-grubbing owners aren't forcing teachers to double, triple, or quadruple up their students in order to make n x $80 an hour.
Now there is an interesting dilemma. We teach to the individual student, which means that we assess them when they come in and we teach them where they're at--even if they're in the 12th grade but they really only read at a 4th grade level. Maybe they have some learning disabilities, maybe they've had terrible life experiences, maybe their little self-esteems are all broken from previous school failure. (Maybe, once in awhile, they're just f**king lazy. It's true.) Anyway, it's a tailored curriculum, and it's adapted directly to meet that student's individual needs. I love that, and it's why I work there. I did not, for once in my life, just get this job because I needed a job to pay the bills. I found a company that did what I wanted to do, I walked in and told them to hire me, and they did. So this is something that matters to me.
However, when you have to grade a student in a particular class, say English 10, you have to give him a grade based upon some reasonable standard of what "English 10" should be. You don't give them A's just because they tried really hard, or because their terrible paper is still a huge improvement from their godawful paper before that. I feel strongly about this side of things too. You can't just come to my school and buy an A for your kid. A kid can work really hard but do C work in Geometry. Not everyone that takes Geometry can get an A in it. I did, but then I worked my ass off all the time. I am pretty smart, but I studied really damn hard in school. I should get A's. (And I did get A's.) You can have a grade for effort, and we do--it's 10% of the grade, quality and attitude or something. But a kid that reads at a 4th grade level and writes a 2-paragraph paper because that's what level his/her writing skills are at--that's appropriate instruction. But that is not an A in English 12! If we send them out with a transcript that says "English 12 - A" that is misleading to colleges, to other high schools they might be attending and, in all honesty, to that student. I am not alone in thinking this. Our director of education is very vehement about this point.
However the important thing to know is that our school does not actually have any standards. If you ask them for some (so that you can adequately grade a student, or understand where they should be at in the first place), the insane owneress will get all pissed off at you and attack you for not "believing in the mission of individualized education." She just generally misinterprets everything anyone says anyway. But this was just stupid. Her husband also went off about how he always found literature classes boring anyway, and that we should allow the kids to read things that interest them. This is a great idea, to a point. Except that all that interests them is Paris Hilton and wasting their parents' money.
After my ridiculous meeting, I went to volunteer at the autism clinic. This was a hell of a perspective shift, as the workers there were celebrating little victories like how this toddler had gone up to some other kids and said, without prompting, "I name Jack!" (I-->My). This represents very big progress for an autistic toddler. The teacher (and doubtlessly the kid's mom) were just about beside themselves. Then I started thinking how much I wanted to hug all the moms of autistic kids, and how brave and patient they are, loving kids that don't recognize your emotions or respond to them--that don't hug you or connect with you or, sometimes, even talk to you at all. That's a tough job.
I started getting all overwhelmed and thinking about my purpose in life. I had to go home and eat a leftover burrito.
*that is, when the money-grubbing owners aren't forcing teachers to double, triple, or quadruple up their students in order to make n x $80 an hour.
Thursday, June 14, 2007
*drool*
So I went out to dinner with The Guys last night and then we went to the pub for one drink. I always figured I was pretty good at math, but last night I realized I apparently do not know that 1 does not equal 4. So I had 4 drinks and stayed up until 2:30. Then I got up at 6:30 to go to work and teach trigonometric identities. Even though I do not, as you may recall, know math.
Another interesting discovery: Pepsi One for breakfast + teaching trig identities = awake and feeling fine. Airbear's discovery: sleeping in until 12 because of hangover = headache all day. Ha.
Anyway I worked 8:30 A.M. to 9:00 P.M. today and I am tiard. More updates next week while I am down in California and bored at night without any hooligans to hang out with.
Good night!
Another interesting discovery: Pepsi One for breakfast + teaching trig identities = awake and feeling fine. Airbear's discovery: sleeping in until 12 because of hangover = headache all day. Ha.
Anyway I worked 8:30 A.M. to 9:00 P.M. today and I am tiard. More updates next week while I am down in California and bored at night without any hooligans to hang out with.
Good night!
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