Tag Archives: teachers live at school

Dear world; again? So soon?

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Dear clinic that shall not be named —

I’m sure she meant it in the best possible way. I won’t assume anything, but I’ll guess that the RN in charge of messaging didn’t mean to use a commonly known text-message and IM abbreviation. She must have been unaware that there could be another interpretation. So, dear clinic, you still might want to train your personnel to be more careful with their shortcuts, lest they tell an already frustrated patient to do this.

“Please call our office to schedule this f/u appt.”

Okay, Readers, here’s the rest of the story. As I make arrangements for multiple appointments, including another MRI for my neck and the start of a potentially lengthy series of Physical Therapy, I’m doing my absolute best to schedule at the beginning or end of a school day so I can get away with using less sick time. I used up years of accrued sick days in order to take a significant leave of absence in 2011. I started earning sick leave from scratch last year, so there’s not much in my sick bay at the moment. Dealing with cataract surgery and attempts to see a psychiatric nurse practitioner who only worked from 8 to 3 weekdays, I withdrew plenty from that account. And that reminds me —

Dear clinic that shall not be named —

Forcing someone with a severe depression to wait seven months for psychiatric care is a bad idea. Assigning a teacher (a field known for less-than-flexible schedules) to a psychiatric nurse practitioner who doesn’t see patients after 3:00 p.m., well, is yet another poorly considered idea. So think about it, clinic, oh you-who-claim-2B-efficient. A seven month wait? A medical professional with office hours that force the patient to take time off from work every single time? Efficient? Not for the patient.

Readers, I gave up on the psychiatric care. My family physician has done well treating my depression, as well as or better than the one-who-was-not-worth-the wait. I know from past experience that I need to put myself first. In the real world of employment, however, I need to balance my doctor time with my work time. I love my work and my job, too. I’d like to stay employed there. My supervisors would like me to remain employed there, too.

I guess it would be more efficient on my end to remember that laughter is the best medicine. The next time an RN writes “f/u” in a message, I’ll just respond by ROTFLMAO. Right? Right.

 

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Another Reason to be Thankful

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This could have gotten lost in last week’s holiday posts. It could have been mixed in with my friends and their Facebook “Thirty Days of Thanks” memes. It could have been buried by the busy-ness of a holiday week, when few regular readers have a chance to keep up with their favorite blogs. This piece didn’t get lost because I shared it initially with a small number of people. Now that the first in a long stream of holidays has gone its merry way, I’ll share this item with the rest of the world.

Background: I composed the first draft for our national blog last year, but it wasn’t really suitable for what was needed at the time. The marketing folks who run the web sites contacted me on Monday and said, Hey, Daisy, can we run it this week? With a few minor changes, it will make an excellent post for a Thanksgiving theme.

Of course I said yes. The revisions were, as they said, few. My content was still mine and still sounded like my voice on paper. So, folks, don’t be shocked by the picture (I’m not a smiley coffee mug in real life) or the real name. Follow the link below for my most recent contribution to the Connections Academy national blog..

I’m thankful for a wonderful job in a rewarding and evolving field. Read the entire story here.

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Virtual Talent?

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Dear science students;

You may think it shows talent, but it’s a trait. A recessive trait, at that. Rolling your tongue, no matter how cool it seems, is a trait. If you said talent, it got marked wrong.

Dear Social Studies students;

It’s Social. S-o-c-i-a-l. If you can’t spell it, try calling it History. United States History. But please, my dear young ones, Both of these wild and crazy errors came out of my Gifted and Talented group. GT parents, let’s work to teach your children how to pick up a book (a dictionary, maybe) and look it up if they’re unsure.

Oh, you wanted to see the disastrous spellings?

1. Socil Studies (He left out the a in Social. Needs improvement, but there’s hope.)

2. Souchil studis (I don’t know where this one came from. Mars?)

Dear math students; 

Never mind. Today, you were the cream of the crop. All of the tests made me smile. None invoked tears or hysterical laughter. Keep up the good work.

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Vital Signs for Teen Drivers

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Did you know that close to one million high school students drank alcohol and got behind the wheel last year?  When teenagers drink any alcohol at all, not only is it illegal for them to drive, but it puts them at extremely high risk for a dangerous crash. Zero tolerance for underage drinking and driving is the law, but some teens still ignore the danger in favor of behavior they think is “cool”.

The “cool factor” isn’t what teens might think. My local school district conducted surveys and then asked students to create posters sharing the results, and the results might surprise some.

 78.6% of 9th Graders have not had an alcoholic drink in the last 30 days. You don’t need a drink to have a party.

88.2% of 9th graders have NOT smoked cigarettes, 86.6% have NOT smoked marijuana.

When asked, students often overestimate the percentage of their peers who use alcohol and other drugs. When they overestimate, they justify use by their peers and are more likely to use themselves. Our goal is to challenge and to correct students’ incorrect perceptions of peer alcohol, tobacco, and other drug use and to consistently provide a ‘no use’ message to students. Seeing statistics like this helps debunk the “Everybody does it!” mythology.

The Centers for Disease Control and Prevention (CDC) asked bloggers to pass on these sites for parents and teen drivers alike.

Vital Signs; Teen Drinking and Driving

Vital Signs Social Media

Parents are the Key; a website devoted to safe teen driving in general

 

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Work email among creative sorts

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Or — sometimes “Reply to All” gives you more than you ever really wanted to know.

From the Media Specialist’s assistant:
“We are missing a skeleton. His name is Mr. Thrifty. If you have seen him, let us know.”
The responses:
“Is he in a closet?”
“Maybe he’s boning up for a test.”

From the guidance counselor:
“Where’s my cardboard banana? It’s about 4 feet tall, heavy cardboard, and was on the ‘Eat a Healthy Breakfast’ bulletin board by the office.”
The responses:
“The skeleton ate it.”
“I know where it is, but I’m sworn to secrecy.”

From the art teacher:

“My desk chair disappeared on election day. It’s gray, on rollers, a little paint on it.”
The responses:
“Is it a Democratic party chair or Republican party chair?”
“Was that a committee chair?”
“Chairman or Chairwoman?”
“The skeleton has it – he’s sitting on your chair, in his closet, eating the banana.”

The final follow-up:
The skeleton turned up in a classroom for a human body unit in science.
The desk chair had been returned to the wrong classroom after the poll workers used it on election day.
The banana? It was hanging on the music room door, clad in a pink feather boa.

That was at a previous workplace. I still keep in touch with those people. In virtual schools, however, we find our own random ways to share knowledge and keep spirits up. 

Did the inventors of email imagine it would be used for entertainment such as this? Never mind.

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Testing: 1, 2, 3 – Encore, almost

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It’s that time of year again! State testing. The Wonderful Knowledge and Concepts Exam. Criterion Referenced Items (a.k.a. WKCE-CRI). Rubrics. Fill in the bubble next to the correct answer choice. Make sure you erase completely and make your new mark heavy and dark. Use only a number 2 pencil. Any questions? You have 40 minutes. Begin.

I teach in a public virtual charter school, an online school, and my students live all over the state of Wisconsin. Since we can’t expect all of them to come to us, we go to them for the required tests. After the Packers beat the Rams on Sunday, I put on my test season sweatshirt (above), packed my bags, and got ready to go.

My destination: a hotel in a major metropolitan area with conference room or rooms that will hold all of our area students. Four of my colleagues and I set up camp in our hotel rooms, including connection to the hotel wi-fi and an in-depth investigation of the in-room coffee makers. We had supper in the bar (the hotel restaurant was out of our price range), checked out the conference rooms for size and set-up, and then settled into our hotel rooms again to relax.

I set out my clothes for the next day — casual, yet teacher-dressy — including my school name badge (so parents will know who I am) and my district ID (in case the state agency decides to audit us). I’m ready.

In the morning, students armed with number 2 pencils will arrive, ready to attack their test booklets.


I hope they all remember that multiple choice items have only one answer, and they should make their marks heavy and dark.

And I sure hope I can forget this repetitive test proctor speech so it stops running through my head and invading my dreams at night!
Note: this is an encore post with a few revisions to bring it up to date. I’m settled into the same sorta-ritzy hotel as last year, with four coworkers instead of two because our enrollment skyrocketed this year. The number of students to be tested in this location doubled, as did the number of younger students that need a benchmark reading assessment. Later – later this week, perhaps, I’ll share some of the trials and tribulations of maintaining test security on the road. 

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Through the inbox at work –

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Believe it or not, even in a heavily regulated work environment, interesting items sneak through the filters and land in my inbox. I shared the voter registration set-up yesterday. Today it came in the form of the abstract to an article in a professional journal. Not the entire article, but just the summary abstract that described it.

Through the American Recovery and Reinvestment Act of 2009, the Obama administration pumped $100 billion into public K-12 and higher education, saved over 300,000 education-related jobs, doubled spending on special education services, and added $10 billion to Title I programs to serve disadvantaged students. A year later, Obama championed another $10 billion to save more teacher jobs.

So far, so good. This sounds like basic Daisy, stereotypical teacher talk, right? Teacher = Obama Backer.

Wrong. We teachers are intelligent beings and independent thinkers. We do not vote as a block; we vote as individuals. We pay attention to our associations’ endorsements, but we don’t follow those recommendations automatically. Here’s the rest of the abstract:

 Both major national unions — the NEA and AFT — have endorsed Obama’s reelection bid. But they have not done so on account of the money. Unions haven’t fully embraced several significant Obama education policies, including his support for including student performance on tests as a measure of teacher performance, more charter schools, and measures that would make it easier to fire ineffective teachers. What’s developed is a complicated, evolving relationship between the administration and the teacher unions.

Contrast that with Wisconsin’s Governor Scott Walker who has absolutely no relationship, evolving or otherwise, and – oh, let’s not go there.

And on an entirely different note, check out this real life math problem I posed to the math teachers with whom I teach.

If I want to order 60 copies of a book from a commonly-utilized bookseller, the book costs $2.99 or 75 bonus points and bonus points are awarded 1 pt. per dollar spent. How many books do I need to buy with cash to get the rest with bonus points!

Extra credit: I’ve already accrued 312 bonus points from other past purchases.

 Have fun!!

No one answered my email yet. Maybe they’re waiting for me, a reading and writing verbal linguistic type, to prove my worth. Readers, it’s up to you. Can you help?

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Voter registration: it’s all in a day’s work

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I returned to my cubicle after a sick day, and oh, my, the work had piled up. My gradebook was packed with portfolios, tests, and quizzes all waiting for my expert grading skills. My inbox was bulging, and many were seriously must-have-attention-now messages. My physical mailbox was full, too – full of the big white envelopes that families mail to me filled with portfolios and collections of math work.

Meanwhile, I got on the phone and made up as many of the previous day’s scheduled phone calls as humanly possible.

The saddest relic of the sick day? Communication broke down, and many of the students who normally attend my Monday virtual class didn’t get the word that it was cancelled. I received phone messages and emails that bordered on rude. How dare I become ill for a day and throw a wrench into the well-oiled machines of their schedules! Deep sigh, deep breath, cough, cough, cough, and I headed back to the list of make-up work. I couldn’t control the cancellation of my class, and I did what was within my power to communicate the cancellation.

But as I addressed the most pressing concerns, wrote up a placement change for a student, gathered information on state test accommodations for another, and then step by step did a quality job of grading, I felt a little better. Not relaxed, but calmer.

And then the following memo turned up in my work inbox:

From 11:00-1:00 today the League of Women voters will be at (the charter high school in our building). If you need to register to vote, change your address or request an absentee ballot (and you are a city resident), feel free to come down to the main hallway and talk with our volunteers.

A sign that life is good, and our society still has hope for positive change: Voter registration was going on downstairs. I wonder if flu shots are available there, too?

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Fire drills and testing season

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When is a fire drill not a typical fire drill?

  1. When the building leader is shouting “The fire department is here! Get everybody out!”
  2. When the FedEx truck comes and finds the secretary in the group standing on the sidewalk and manages to deliver the package, despite the building being evacuated.
  3. When the biggest dilemma is whether or not to lock the office containing the state test booklets.
Test security is huge. HUGE I tell you. In a brick and mortar school, the test booklets remain in the office vault when they’re not actually on a student’s desk bonding with a number two pencil. Teachers can’t leave them in an unlocked, unsecured, unsupervised room. So as the two teachers in the middle (locking) office heard the alarm and evacuated their little corner of the building, they had all kinds of questions running through their minds.
  • Do we keep the tests secure by locking up?
  • What if the fire department needs to get in the room?
  • What if they smash in the office window and ruin the test booklets by covering them in shards of glass?
  • If it’s a real fire and the test booklets burn or get smoke damaged, how will we get them replaced in time?

Heaven forbid there ever be a real disaster in a testing situation. Oh, the places we go and the lengths we’ll travel just to make sure that no child is left untested.

Cases of Official Test Booklets and the pallets that carried them in.

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