Standards Sundays: Grade 5 early exploration

Explorers - just another name for tourist.
Bullet points for brevity:

> Exploration is a pretty fun unit to teach, if only because I can turn the classroom into a mini-world, using thumbtacks and yarn to trace where Columbus, Coronado, Amerigo, Polo, and others traveled.

> It's funny that in the Making a New Nation text by McGraw Hill, there is a little snippet that describes a Chinese explorer. It really does make exploring into this glamorous thing. Which it can be. But it doesn't really describe why some nations (i.e. China, Japan) didn't do much exploring around this time. Well, another subject for another grade level, I guess.

> It would also be an excellent tie-in to visit some sort of maritime museum. Then students can actually see things like sextants, and old world compasses.

> Reading maps is huge. In the age where cell phones are locatable by GPS, there is still nothing like using your own head to figure out where you are. I would love to paint a map of the world on the playground blacktop and have students race to see who can go the fastest from nation to nation.

Lesson from online chats

see more Epic Fails

Dear students,

Proper grammar and punctuation are hot. Never let anyone else persuade you otherwise.

Sincerely, Ms. B.

Too old

Some thoughts today:

You know you're too old to jump on the bed when your bed breaks after an awesome jump where I scraped my head on the ceiling.

As usual, the job hunt is on my mind. Constantly. Although I haven't done much about since before winter break. It's too discouraging.

Thinking of choices. Past, present, and future choices. Hm. Turn left, Doctor?

When laziness takes hold, it doesn't let go, does it?

Secretary tension

I've learned to interact with front office staff with a "plate of warm cookies" attitude. Makes life happier for all involved.
Is it just me, or are school front office staffs getting crankier and crankier?

I taught art yesterday at a pretty nice school in my town. Some of my high school classmates went to this school.

After the art class, I waited the customary ten minutes for parents to arrive. Out of the ten students I had, two of them were picked up on time. So I herded them to the office to have them call home. Again, standard procedure.

The front office people saw us coming and panicked, I guess. They rather defensively said:

"What's going on? Why are you all in here?"

And:

"You know you are still responsible for them."

I understand their panic. The front office staff have a lot of daily pressures that build up too. They are not trained to deal with students, and yet they must handle behavior problems sent to the office, bloody noses sent to the office, and me, the after school teacher going to the office.

Still, in general, I find the front office rather unhelpful on my first visit to the school. Once they remember my face, and know that I'm not there to increase their work load, they chill out. Most are even very friendly. But it takes a bit of time to get to that point, and each new school is a new battle of winning over the secretaries.

The odd vacation out

I enjoy baking during breaks from school.
Monday was the traditional first day back at school from winter break. Except at the school where I was supposed to teach art. THEY were off until Tuesday. But no one told me this little piece of information, so I went for nothing.

Although I found a janitor to let me in so I can drop off the new art class fliers, only to be chewed out by the front office secretary. Apparently, staff development days at this particular school also coincide with staff hibernation days where they will come out and growl if disturbed.

On the drive back from not teaching (although I'm getting paid for the half hour wasted anyway, thanks boss!), I thought of numerous schools and their different holidays. It seems like every single school has different timing for their breaks now. When I was in elementary school, it was all the same. It's possible that even within the same district, two schools will have different non-school days.

Which can be a good thing. Not everyone is rushing to go on vacation all at the same time. Plus, more vacation days mean less accumulated stress for all involved.

It can also be a bad thing too - it's hard to keep track of, for one. It's also difficult to get things done when you never know if the school office is open or closed or not. The unpredictability can be annoying. It also doesn't help when the school staff is as unhelpful as that secretary was to me.

My vote: I would like to see a uniform school schedule across the nation - or at least across the state - in a modified/traditional track. I don't like full-tracked schools, and I don't like full-traditional. The modified/traditional allows for a 2-week break in the fall, winter, and spring each, and 6 weeks of summer.

This kind of schedule allows for families to go on longer holidays. A lot of my students go to Mexico, or wherever their families are from, during their breaks. Two weeks make for a more productive trip than one, and since travel is a form of education in itself, I highly recommend it to parents. The fall and spring breaks will be off-season, which helps families find better deals for their travels.

It would also observe all state and national holidays - yes, including Columbus Day, Flag Day, and Cesar Chavez Day. As an addition, and not as a day "included in the breaks," as sometimes Chavez Day can be with spring break. It's a gyp-and-a-half when actual holidays are merged in with school breaks.

You too, can have a teaching credential for only $29.50!

The sad thing is, this isn't the final step. Note that this is a "preliminary" credential, rather than the clear credential. Also, the fee is for the CCTC to send someone out to CSUS to check that all the paperwork is in order. THAT process takes anywhere from 3-6 months.

I lied, there are many sad things about it. Eh. At least I finished what I had to do. I'm in control of everything except for the things outside my control. Waiting for the CCTC to do their thing is outside my control.

TFA, The Onion, and fodder

Teaching is like a white elephant gift exchange. One moment, you are completely satisfied with the box of gourmet hot chocolate mix. The next moment, you are left with a battery powered Santa figurine that lights up to look more like a grotesque, creepy clown and a stunned feeling of hopelessness through no fault of your own other than having a decent gift in the first place.
I'm not particularly a huge fan of The Onion. I perceive it as habitually patting itself on the back. But this article hit quite close to reality in The Onion's signature fashion.

I was a Teach for America hopeful at one point in time, and I am glad to say that I didn't go that route or else I would be an accountant by now. Not that accounting isn't a good job - I just prefer teaching. Yep, despite all the who-ha and do-dads of the system. And the fact that windows can come crashing down over children's heads at any given moment.

Something that did take me back about this article is that it was written in 2005. And things have not changed at all for the better. In fact, it has probably gotten worse.

There are a million and one real news articles about the state of American education. I'm not sure we need a fake-news article about how bad it is, or how hopeless it can get. Why on earth do we need to try so hard to persuade people to become teachers? And more to the point, why on earth are we doing nothing to keep the good teachers in schools now? The good teachers, like Cuellen in the article, who have so much potential and can grow to be someone principals fight over to get on staff with only a little bit of investment on the part of the system. The good teachers who end up burning out like a moth in a space rocket exhaust pipe.

Well, I don't get these moments very often, so I'm going to revel in it for a little while. I'm glad I wasn't 21 years old, straight out of undergrad when I started teaching. Because knowing me, I would have quit long before now.

Standards Sundays: Grade 5 major Pre-Colombian North American settlements

Older than Europeans.
Fifth graders in California are supposed to study the geography and climate influences, customs and folklore, and economies and government of the following:

- cliff dwellers and pueblo people of the Southwest
- Pacific Northwest Native Americans
- nomadic nations of the Great Plains
- woodland peoples of the Mississippi River

That's a lot of different tribes. The way the MacMillian textbook describes these nations isn't very easy to comprehend. It's not presented with any sort of connection from one group to the others. Which sort of defeats the purpose, no? Students have already gotten a lot of Native American history through the 4th grade mission unit. So why do more when there is no connection?

They have to be related in some way. I don't actually know how they are related though - that means more research on my part.

The one main point that I did get from the MacMillian text is how it acknowledges that Europeans weren't the first ones to land in the Americas. Although, later on, the text still makes it seem like the Europeans were the most influential in the making of these modern nations, which is debatable really. A whole lot of history happened before they arrived - it's probably mostly lost though. Sad.

Another year of teaching under the belt

How I spent my New Year's Eve:

7:25 PM - Started with a load of dishes.


7:40 PM - Then some baking. Plain yellow cake mix. I tossed in a handful of confetti sprinkles and topped them off with broken pieces of Ghiradelli chocolates. Yum.


8:12 PM - Quality time with Netflix and Doctor Who. The Tenth Doctor is quite attractive, and I'm not only referring to the trench-coat-brown-pinstripes-converse-sneaker combination. Which is rather stylish as well.


8:28 PM - Dessert is ready!


11:57 PM - Animal Crossing celebrations are oddly much more entertaining than anything the major networks dished out this year.


11:58 PM - Getting my toast ready. OJ in a fancy glass.


12:02 AM - w00t! 2010!


12:03 AM - Mo says, "What's all the fuss about?" And yes, I did clink my glass against his water bottle. My level of craziness has already been established even before adopting a rabbit.


Technically, I'm in my third year of teaching experience - but I'm going to call the remainder of this school year, and all of the next, my first year anyway. I'm no longer a student teacher! Can't explain how good that feels. Any teaching related adventures starting now will be tagged "first year."

New Year's around the world

December 31/January 1 is my favorite holiday, probably because I associate a lot of good memories with this night.

No one goes to school on this day, but it would be fun to start off the first day back at school with some new year's cultural activities such as:

Bonfires made of old Christmas trees happen all over the Netherlands on New Year's Eve. Now that's an education law suit waiting to happen. Scratch this idea?

In Japan, some people observe "kakizome" on the second day of January (which may or may not be the first day back at school, now that I think of it). It's basically a calligraphy exercise: people write a phrase or poem using brushes & ink. It's very similar to the Chinese New Year tradition of writing lucky words on red paper - except that the Japanese tend to use white, or cream, colored paper.

The Russians eat meat and potato dishes. Care for kartoshnik, students?

The Danes like to save old dishes, probably chipped ones, throughout the year, then throw them at their friend's homes on the 31st. So you know you have a lot of friends when you find a huge pile of broken dishes on your front step in the morning. I can make it work with some modifications - perhaps taking broken dishes and cementing the pieces into a mosaic?

Carnivals ring in the South African new year. This can be a school-wide, or even community wide, event. Lots of coordination, lots of work, but probably really, really fun.

For a more scientific approach, like the Germans, I could melt metal and drop it in buckets of water to tell fortunes for the coming year. According to this, if the metal comes out in a shape of a pig, then your year will be full of plenty.

Photo from here.

Most of the ideas I got from this site deal with non-January 1 New Year's events. Actually, I suppose most of the world's traditional new year begins with the coming of spring and the end of winter.

Hm, perhaps an even more academically acceptable activity would be to study the different types of calendars. It'll be interesting for students to figure out where their birthdays fall on say, the Julian calendar, or the lunar calendar.