Elbow, knees, dreams

Teaching on the Titanic

What a discouraging week. The lead master teacher at my school has decided to work elsewhere. She wants to work at a school with strong leadership and a staff dedicated to improving results for children. That witch!!! Seriously though, can you blame her? Read More...

ahh, summer

Things are looking up. Finally. After my not-so-great last day of school, I had a not-so-great last day for teachers. My children came to work with me, and I thought they might be helpful, but instead they were bored and underfoot. I tried to keep them Read More...

A bad ending

I’m glad we had Monday at the park, because the last day of school wasn’t so great. Our plan was to walk to the library for storytime, which would have been really fun (and would have taken up most of the morning). Alas, it rained heavily, Read More...

Diary of a preschool teacher, pt. 2

It’s Friday night, I’ve got three days of teaching left, and I’m one glass of chardonnay down so far. In my role as mentor teacher, I did an observation cycle (pre-observation conference, observation, post-observation conference) with Read More...

a sad thing to see

A few years ago, I was in the teacher’s lounge, feeling exhausted. A middle school teacher (my school is preschool through 8th grade) asked how things were going, and I told her all about how difficult my kids were being. I then asked her how she Read More...

On not being safe

How’s this for a headline? “Teacher tries to help preschoolers stay alive.” I nearly spit out my coffee this morning when I saw that one. Preschool teacher Marisol Sierra, who teaches in the Chicago neighborhood where schoolkids are Read More...

I don’t care how great you think you are

Yesterday a kindergarten teacher in my mentoring group turned to me at our weekly meeting and hissed, “you should just come and observe me and get it over with, I don’t care when. Actually, just skip it and give me all twos, because I don’t Read More...