Monday: STEP data analysis and teacher work-time. Tuesday: Hurricane effects in NE Ohio! Email sent out at 9:30 the night before saying school is canceled. For me, all-day at-home workday. Wednesday: Teacher workday. Email sent out about parking indicates there is too much broken glass to hold school, and emails sent out by some teachers…

One of my students spent fall break in a psych ward. She was being tested for schizophrenia and ended up with a diagnosis of PTSD. Without delving into the family history, there’s a history of abuse and a restraining order. She’s considered a danger to herself and others, and my school is trying to figure…

There are so many updates to give and so little time in which to think about them. The first day of fall break, I went to school in the morning to get some things organized and under control because my pregnant co-teacher said she had about a 25% chance of returning to school after break…

I administered the KRAL yesterday – the Kindergarten Readiness Assessment for Literacy, which is scripted by the Ohio Department of Education. Most of our kids had been done but we had a couple new enrollees who didn’t have data, and I’m so glad I got to test the one kid I did. At the end…

and the bags under my eyes are UNREAL. I ran out of contacts so I’ve been wearing glasses every day, and that’s great because the shadows from the frames hide the bags and make it look like I might, you know, be a trustworthy person who’s competent enough to teach some kids. I just got…

I just met with my MTLD and she was wonderfully, refreshingly upfront about the fact that my school is full of crazies. (My words, not hers.) She asked me how things were going and I continued with my recent  trend of starting to tear up in embarrassingly public places, and we talked about the fact…

I was not aware that the most stressful part of getting ready for the school year was going to be putting my bulletin boards up. I’m at one of those crazy college-oriented charters and my classroom is Georgetown University. Georgetown’s colors are blue and grey, so in my classroom we’ve been going through and systematically…

After weeks of reflecting on what it means to be a Charter Corps, it dawned on me at orientation on Saturday that we weren’t actually talking about the fact that we’re all teaching at charter schools. We were talking about the fact that Northeast Ohio is a new corps and we’re the ones setting the…

Well, dear, hypothetical readers, it’s been a while. About a week before the end of the Phoenix institute, I got a package from my school with two books and a packet called Summer 2012 Pre-Institute Work. I panicked. In the middle of institute, the very LAST thing you want to hear from anyone is that…

I’ve always hated watching myself on video because I find a million tics I never knew I had and I can’t believe my voice sounds like that in real life and I look awful in that dress, but I’m in the middle of watching  a video of myself from my science lesson last Thursday and…

I was walking on the ASU campus the other day when I overheard a brief snippet of conversation that articulated brilliantly everything that I’ve been thinking for the past week and three days: “There aren’t many people who have been through this kind of thing. There is literally no free time, ever.” We started teaching…

Induction sounds like it would be cultish and freaky and definitely not something I wanted to sit through. I’m awful at large-group getting-to-know-you activities, I hate icebreakers, and I didn’t want to stay at a hotel when my apartment is so close to Cleveland that I could have just commuted in every day. It turns…

My blogging history is sketchy, at best. I kept a (massively embarrassing) livejournal in high school, I kept a travel blog when I was in Barcelona for a month and a half in 2010, and I was required to keep a blog for a Spanish class I took last semester on picaresque literature from the…