Preparing for Blast Off

Tonight I actually had no scheduled appointments for TFA (classes, learning groups, tours, etc.) after school. So you'd think I would have taken the afternoon and slept, as I desperately need to do after my third night of fewer than 6 hours. You would be wrong. Instead, I did errands and teaching work all afternoon and evening.

I came back from school really pumped because our instruction is getting more practical and less theoretical and my collaborative group is AWESOME. Let me review. I will be teaching 4th grade summer school with 3 other TFA trainees: one girl and two boys, one Delta, one Houston, and one Rio Grande Valley. We rotate teaching the subjects, but we all teach math/literacy hour in the mornings. This starts on MONDAY. We have to develop the goals, rules, procedures, incentives, lessons, decorations, etc, for our classroom, and the lessons we had today focused on helping us do just that. We wrote parent letters, we learned about rules and expectations and practiced them. There is so much to think about. What will the bathroom policy be? What if one student talks out of turn all the time? What if they refuse to follow directions?

Anyhow, my collaborative has been working really well together, which I won't say is rare for TFA collaboratives (everyone is in one, even teachers who will be teaching a self-contained summer school course), but it certainly isn't the norm, from what I've heard. Mine has been barrelling along building on each other's ideas, and we've decided our consequences pyramid will be steps on a big spaceship. Our theme is "blasting off to 5th grade" and our big goal (not yet totally worked out) is to have all of our students pass the Texas state assessments and be prepared to succeed in 5th grade. Maybe I'll put more of the whole plan up soon, but suffice it to say that it's all around this spaceship theme, and I'm super excited about it. Our CMA (Corps Member Advisor, or teacher, basically) seemed impressed and pleased.

To bring us back to the "free afternoon" thing: a free afternoon at institute is not really free. I have so much to do! I spent about an hour doing some things I needed to get done for me (bills, emails, laundry). Then we tried to get books for literacy next week, but the book we picked out as the right grade level was about a boy who stays back a year in school and doesn't fit in, so we are NOT using that. I had dinner with Lin and Elizabeth (my roommate) and a bunch of other Delta people (everyone in the Delta is great!) and then I typed up our parent letter, had a meeting with my CMA, and then met with my collaborative from about 9 to 11. We hashed out some of our math/lit lesson plans a bit more, reviewed the parent letter and student survey, and figured out our attendance and homework incentives.

I still am behind, though. Friday morning we have a zillion things due: lesson plans for math/lit hour all next week, lesson plans for my science class for Monday (and Tuesday?), the parent letter, the classroom management plan... There's probably even more that I don't remember off the top of my head. Beyond that, I should re-read the chapters of "Instructional Planning and Delivery" and "Classroom Management and Culture" that we will be working from tomorrow in my classes. Oh! And our science diagnostic test, while it is practically perfect in every way, is not completely perfect in every way, so I need to tweak that. Wow. I will be busy busy busy tomorrow, because we do not have a free evening.

To sum up: life is hectic, my collaborative summer class will be awesome and rocketship themed, I am tired but happy. Hopefully in an upcoming post I can be a little more analytical (a higher stage of Bloom's Taxonomy of Learning) and a little less expository. But if you need that now, read Lin's blog (linked on the right). Well, probably not today, because he hasn't had time to write for a few days, either.