Courage Doesn't Always Roar: A Teacher's Quest to Be Better Each Day

I began the Slice of Life Challenge a month ago with a poem, "Where I'm From."  This has been a transformative month in so many ways and I wanted to end with things I've come to believe.  I've been reading Jacqueline Woodson's Brown Girl Dreaming and I know she has a part near the end where says what she believes.  I remembered the song I sang in elementary school chorus, "I Believe" and listened to it for inspiration before composing my poem.  You can hear the song in the link below.   Thank you so much for this chance to write, share, read, and connect with a community that I've come to love.  I've appreciated the comments and kindness so very much and look forward to slicing with you on Tuesdays.  Without further ado, I Believe...  https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=pj8OOHRTiWc I believe in books. I believe in picture books and chapter books Books of facts and books of quotes. I believe in the power of a book to make us ...

News this morning in New York  Budget deals emerge "Governor Cuomo wreaking vengeance" Diane Ravitch writes.  Elected officials making decisions not qualified to make. Tests to decide the effective teacher and the ineffective one. Heart sinks. What else can I do? I'm a teacher. I was born to teach. It's all I've hoped to be. If I am found ineffective due to independent evaluators who don't know me don't know my heart my experience my work ethic my continual search to be better where will I go? If test scores are the focus and my job is on the line, is it a job I really want  to do anymore? When my family depends on me, will I need to play the game? To get my paycheck? To pay our mortgage? How will I face the young faces in front of me who are more  than any test  will ever say? Sadness today  in New York Our letters our phone calls our pleas  in the end didn't matter. Money wins again. Tomorr...

A funny thing has happened during this month of slicing.  The more I've written, the more memories have floated up, connecting to current issues in my life. Where before ideas would cross my mind and leave as quickly as they came, now they are sticking and percolating in my  mind, and taking new shape and meaning.  I think this is yet another gift that the Slice of Life Challenge has given me.   On a walk to the playground with my children today, I remembered a spring day 25 years ago when I took freedom a step too far and rode my bike further than I was allowed to go.  Venturing to a nearby park with two friends, we rode our bikes up and down the hills, exhilarated.  Until my final ride down the hill when I lost control of my bike and crashed, in the days before anyone wore helmets, laying flat on the ground, stunned.  People nearby saw me laying there, un-moving, and called 911. Several fire trucks and ambulances descended on the park for...me. ...

Tonight's challenge: Synthesize the experiences/learning from my Friday night Barry Manilow concert (yes, I am a proud "Fan-i-low") and my Saturday workshop at CELI (Connected Educators of Long Island).  Here goes:  There is something so joyful about being in a large arena and singing along to a song where everyone knows the words.  The song was created by one person and had specific meaning when created, but then it is released into the world. The song becomes known and each person who sings it calls up different mental images and a slightly new interpretation of the story told in the song.  The song is unique for all of us but shared by all of us as we sing together, strangers who know the same words.  It's nice to sing the song by yourself but there is an energy that comes from singing it together.   Teaching traditionally has been a pretty solitary endeavor.  It is you, alone, in the classroom with the students.  Yet, for some time now,...

Yay for Friday! It's been a rough week and this is the slice I've been struggling to get in to keep my perfect record of slicing each day.  This week involved a class field trip, finishing report cards, my Grandma's 89th birthday and getting things ready for her party, my daughter's doctor's check-up, and... I think I broke my toe playing with son last night. But it's FRIDAY and I am having a night out with my mother and my sister.  We are going to dinner and then....to the BARRY MANILOW concert! We are "Fan-i-lows" and know his songs by heart.  I am looking forward to relaxing, laughing, chatting, singing and maybe dancing on my toes that are unbroken.   Growing up, my dad was only man in the house and he would call it "sorority hour" when he would come up to his room to find my mom, my sister and me watching a movie together or a show.  My mom introduced us to all the classic movies and musicals were our favorite- "The Sound of M...

Tomorrow my third grade class is taking a field trip to a local Mexican restaurant as a culminating activity to our study of Mexico.  This got me thinking back to my own experience with field trips and one in particular that stands out in my memory, twenty five years later.   "Nature's Classroom" was the field trip that made you so excited about becoming a sixth grader at St. William the Abbot.  It was a rite of passage. Every year, the sixth grade classes and their teachers went to Nature's Classroom in Connecticut (we are in Long Island, NY) from Monday to Friday.  It was a sleep-away from home trip where you would spend the week engaged in hands-on learning activities involving the natural environment.  You would sleep in bunk beds in girls only or boys only cabins, depending on who you were.  We were split into different groups and had a counselor who was in charge.  Our meals were all in a mess hall and I still remember "the ort report." ...

"It takes a village to raise a child."  Who has made you who you are?  The current political scene is in favor of tying "accountability" of a child's learning to test scores and then to the classroom teacher, who is supposedly solely responsible for how that child fared on the all important exam. In reality, many have a role in shaping a child's life and that child's ability to learn and no test can tell you the whole story about a child, can't tell you about the child's heart or their passion, their character or their talents.  Yet this one measure can lead a child to feel like a failure, make or break teaching careers, can lead to school closings, can somehow deign a teacher worthy of "merit" pay and big bonuses.  Can any one adult really claim to be responsible for one child's success or struggle? Why isn't the village accountable? What about all the adults, from the very beginning, who have a stake in a child?  Did t...

Desperate times called for desperate measures, so when Alex was two and a half, we called upon the Binky Fairy to make an appearance.  I used to hate seeing pictures of kids with pacifiers plugging up their mouths until my own child became passionately enamored with Binky, or should I say binkies as there were many pastel colored plugs that Alex would suck on for comfort throughout the day.  I recall him pulling it out to say something and then putting it back in, which really let me know Binky's time was coming to an end. My other mommy friends with kids of similar age were horrified that Alex still used a pacifier, but the time never seemed right to do away with them. When Alex was 20 months old, I became pregnant and it seemed like so much in his life was going to change, I didn't have the heart to take away his beloved Binkies.   When I finally got up the courage to take away the pacifier, I decided to try a strategy that my sister and other moms had used- the Bi...

     On Day 17 of the Slice of Life Challenge, I wrote about a Fundations lesson gone awry as I couldn't stop laughing about the dictated sentences.  They were:  Could James have riding instruction on the saddle? and At the explosion, Wendy dropped the beautiful candlesticks.        James and Wendy have become rather legendary in my classroom, and students often weave them into conversations and still laugh about James and his saddle and Wendy and her candlesticks.  I challenged the students to write Wendy's story and they came up with some interesting responses.  Many of them made James part of Wendy's story too.  We just learned acrostic poems, so I decided to try an acrostic story for Wendy. I've never written an acrostic story and don't know if it is even a real thing (ha!) but it was fun to try it out. I included characters from the books I read aloud this year, The Miraculous Journey of Edward Tulane and The...

I am really so grateful to the Two Writing Teachers- Stacy, Anna, Betsy, Beth, Dana, and Tara, for creating this Slice of Life Challenge, which is surely a great deal of work and management, but is life-changing for so many of us.  I wanted to reflect a bit on what I've noticed about writing in the last 22 days and what it might mean for my students.  I first wrote this in narrative form, but then I revised it as a table to better show how my personal connections can lead to classroom implications.  My noticings about the Slice of Life Challenge Classroom Implications for my 3 rd graders The freedom to come up with my own topic makes the writing personally meaningful. It still remains true: students need to self-select their topics the majority of the time for the writing to be meaningful.  Students need help seeing the possibilities for topics in their lives. Comments from other readers makes ...