In honor of teacher appreciation week, here’s a reminder to all of my readers about why you are a great teacher!!

This year I have been having a lot more classroom management issues than I had last year. I suspect that this is because of our new implementation of Carnegie, which asks students to work on tasks in groups which may or may not be group-worthy every day. It could also have to do with the actual combination of students in the classes. I guess I’ll have to wait until next year to see. In the mean time, my vice principal shared this article with me, and I have shared it with a colleague who has echoed my difficulties in managing his classroom which shares many of my problem students.

We all have those students who struggle with attendance issues. One of mine in particular comes to mind. Since he is in my period 7 class, he often misses big chunks of my class on backwards days.  I know for a fact that this student’s mother has a hard time acting as his parent and thus he is responsible for getting himself to school everyday. Unfortunately, he lives too close to school to take the bus, so he either has to walk or ride his bike. The other day, he was struggling to make the choice between riding and walking in single digit temperatures. he reasoned that biking would be faster but walking would be less wind; he ended up riding his bike and arriving to school about 25 minutes late.

This is not a choice my students should have to make. When he walked into my class, his cheeks and hands were like ice. At the very least I wanted to make sure he has a hat. Another teacher and I are trying to brainstorm upperclassmen with cars who might be able to help him out. How is it that we can deny transportation to kids who live so far away!!? How can I help arrange transportation for kids without getting into liability issues?

I am going to concentrate on the virtual community of practice that has been created by the makers of our textbook. It includes resources from the company and from other teachers of the curriculum.

Today, I noticed there is a whole section on pacing the curriculum, which is something I have been having trouble with. Everything seems to take us twice as long as the pacing guide suggests it will take. As far as I can tell, their main tip is to pick and choose what questions of the lesson are most important for your students and then really focus on those instead of doing every single investigation in the lesson. I have been doing this more in Algebra 2 lately and it definitely helps the pace.

My friend Maureen runs the Safe School Safe Streets grant for Greenfield High School.  As part of this coalition, I learn a lot about the board of health and the goings on of drug and substance abuse prevention in Greenfield. For example, Greenfield recently raised the legal tobacco age to 21 instead of 18. This reduces the contact of all high school students with people who can legally buy cigarettes.  Boston recently followed suit and raised their tobacco age also.

Maureen is a super loving person who loves to spread positivity so at the beginning of this school year, she started giving out an award at each meeting called the “Be the Change Award” based on the quote “Be the change you wish to see in the word” by Gandhi.  Meaning she gives an award to the person who is working to make a change in the community. I was astounded that this January she gave this award to me!!! At first I was embarrassed because I felt like I didn’t deserve this award: I don’t do anything other than attend the meetings!! But Maureen pointed out that I had gone to every single meeting since she started the grant, and I realized that Maureen just gives this award out because she wants to show her love for people and then I appreciated that she just wanted to tell everyone publicly that she loves me and is rooting for me as a teacher and as a person.

In the spirit of the new year I thought I would share my New Year’s Resolutions for school. (These have been collected from many articles on the topic, but these are my favorite.)

1. Greet all students at the door every day by name.
2. Give individual time and attention to students.
3. Get organized- I still have boxes from last summer. Really unpack them.
4. Empower students to be more involved in their learning process.
5. Be more consistent with classroom management.
6. Use my textbook more efficiently.
7. Help my students enjoy learning!

A couple of my teacher friends posted an article that I found thought provoking and intriguing.  It stresses the importance of teaching students how to be patience and how to understand the payoff that putting in extended time of work can give.

An extreme example of this is a research paper on a work of art where students are required to first spend three hours observing the work!!! That definitely sounds like an exercise in patience. But the idea is that by spending time with something you can actually begin to understand its nuances instead of just memorizing a bunch of facts for a test.

Over the summer, I attending a training in Holyoke for the computer science class that I teach.  There is a cohort of Western Massachusetts teachers who are starting teaching ECS and getting trained on it. There was an article written in the newspaper about our training!!  See the link:  Newspaper Article 2015

Principals matter, too. Read this op-ed piece about the importance of recruiting and keeping good principals.

The Recorder ran a story about the possibility of bringing farm-to-table to Greenfield. We’ve applied for a grant to create a K-12 curriculum about farming, ecology and the environment. I am really into eating locally and minimizing my impact on the earth, and I think it’s important for students to learn about healthy eating and how to grow their own food. Read the article!

My students tend to think that they are either good or bad at math. I want to make them feel that they can improve at math so that they are more confident and likely to grow over the school year. Maybe I will share this article with them. It says that being bad at math is no longer an excuse. Students can improve their math ability with hard work and dedication.

I just ran across this article about a study of Rate my Professors reviews. The study searched specific key words in students’ reviews of professors to see whether they were different by gender. It tells an interesting story about stereotypes of women, but also how women in academia are viewed.