A Day in the Life - Teacher

Cutting a sewing pattern for glow in the dark fashion show.

I arrive at school at 8:20, running a bit late even though my commute is only ten feet - my back yard adjoins the playground.  I have a cup of coffee in hand and I load up on breakfast - mini bagels, fried eggs, apples, and leftover bread pudding from yesterday's lunch.

All around me kids are eating breakfast in the upstairs big room and when the are done, the littler ones climb on the indoor jungle gym.  The bigger kids go downstairs and play magic cards, finish homework, or just talk.

At 8:45 I begin breakfast cleanup, which is my job today.  I clear abandoned dishes and wash the tables before folding them up and stacking them on the side of the room.  The room will become a cafeteria again at lunch.  I sweep the floor and am greeted excitedly by an arriving three year old who shouts, "Lauren!" whenever he sees me.

At 8:55 I duck into the office to photocopy a set of problems for junor high class, then I head up to their loft room for class.  Six of nine kids are present - one is sick and two are late, which is an unfortunately common problem with students this age.

We are solving problems related to extending patterns and writing algebraic rules for the nth term.  Here is one: a series of pictures of L-shaped arrangements of squares.  The first pattern uses 1 square, the second figure 3 squares, then 5 and so on.  What is the rule for the nth term?  Everyone sees that it goes up by 2 each time.  Putting it in terms of a variable is tougher.  Do we multiply by 2? That gives even numbers, we want odd numbers.  We don't finish all the problems- we will pick them up again tomorrow.  Some students entrust their paper to me for safe keeping.

On my way downstairs to prepare for my fourth grade class, I pass a crying four-year-old.  He is lying on the floor under a table.  He weeps for the spider man costume he wants to wear, which today is being worn by another boy.  I pull him into my lap.  Kids that age are grappling with the reality that they don't always get what they want.  Nothing upsets them more than scarcity.  I try to encourage him to empathize - won't the other boy be so happy to have a chance to wear the costume? He grudgingly admits this but is still sad.  All I can do is repeat, I know you are sad over and over until he calms down.  Some adults have a saying, "you get what you get and you don't get upset," but here it is more like "you get what you get and it's okay to be upset." I remind him that he will get the costume again on other days, but the concept of other days is hard when you are four.

Fourth grade class begins with multiplication tables, and then we work on extending patterns.  These are much simpler than the ones the junior high students are working with.  The students write the next few terms of a pattern on a whiteboard slate.  Then I let them take turns inventing patterns for other students to extend, which is more mathematically provocative than I had imagined it would be.  Some of their patterns are not fully determined - if they only give the first few terms it is impossible to differentiate between a repeating pattern and one that keeps increasing.  I don't force this vocabulary on them, it emerges naturally in the conversation. Math with groups of students so small tends to be more conversational. There are only five kids in class today out of seven - the other two have gone to the school's land in rural Grafton to have a day in the woods.

I end class by showing them the Fibonacci sequence, which stumps them good. I tell them they can keep pondering it until tomorrow. At the end of class they decide to research it, rushing to the computers to google it. They come to the Wikipedia article and try to make sense of its adult notation. One student finally makes sense of the recursive connection between the terms. They are excited by their discovery and try to stump another teacher.

Ordinarily after fourth grade class on Thursdays I would have a brief class with the kindergarten and first graders, but most of them are at Grafton. I hunt for the two girls who stayed at school and find one of them in the art room.

The room is all a-bustle because students are preparing for the project runway fashion show tomorrow. The theme is "glow in the dark," no I am not kidding. Students pin, hot glue, and sew skirts and wrap-type-things with varying levels of skill and glitter. Glow-in-the-dark paint is being liberally applied. The kindergartner I want to do math with is working with modeling clay.

I ask if she wants to practice counting and she enthusiastically agrees. We are joined a few minutes later by her first grade sister who is already an adept counter. I have noticed that teaching kids to count is surprisingly difficult. There are all kinds of unforeseen difficulties. This particular girl tends to count in the correct order, adhering rigidly to a rhythm with her voice while her finger jumps all over the page so that she arrives at an incorrect number.

Yesterday we practiced by having me dole out marbles while she counted them. I doled them out at a maddeningly irregular pace and reminded her again and again not to count the marble until I put it on the cloth. She seemed to make the connection after a little while but today we are back to square one. Sometimes she counts a single dot twice. Sometimes she skips dots. We are still practicing.

At 12:10, after about twenty minutes of counting, we hear the lunch bell sound. Everyone rushes to put away what they are doing and runs up the stairs to lunch. We eat curry potatoes and chickpeas, corn bread, carrots, apples, and cabbage salad. Plus leftover enchiladas from yesterday. An eclectic, satisfying lunch.

I eat at a table with whatever adults aren't busy helping kids with their food. Today the conversation centers on some junior high students who didn't seem to be taking much ownership for their learning or their behavior toward others. Bhawain, their teacher, is frustrated and despite many talks with these students and in some cases their parents, things don't seem to be changing. Junior high years are challenging everywhere.

 As I finish my lunch a four year old comes over to me as he does every day and asks if we can go on the computer when I am done eating. The kids love to play games with letters and numbers on the Starfall website. The hard part of using the computer is taking turns and the same boy who was crying earlier over the Spiderman costume cries again because he doesn't get to go first. I hold him in my lap again and we play with miniature animals while he waits for his turn on the computer. We make a herd of nine zebras and he acts out battles between a dolphin and a bear.

I often stay with the preschool kids for the whole afternoon but today I go back up to the junior high loft to have some students complete a make-up quiz.  The quiz is about solving equations.  The girls alternate between working earnestly and mock-whispering in a joking attempt to distract each other.  We round out the last few minutes of the day with parodic dancing to melodramatic music - they dance, I am a spectator.  Hair is flinging everywhere and by the end everyone is laughing hard.  Another girl comes up to get her things from her locker and the dancing girls bump and jostle her playfully.  I have a feeling that reminds me a lot of how I felt in school growing up, that the purpose of all of us coming together in the school building was partly to learn but also partly to keep each other company.

After school I have a few minutes of relaxation before we began our staff meeting, late as always.  Our meetings are always very long, this one especially so.  There is a lot to talk about because the school does not have any administrators - all administrative tasks are done by teachers, although everyone does not necessarily do the same amount of work.

We talk about snacks and finding a Santa for the holiday party. We talk about Deirdre's kitchen project to make gingerbread houses next week and whether it would be possible to make egg-free icing for a student with an allergy.  We talk about the ongoing struggle to get parents to pay tuition on time.  We talk about how to best communicate with a three-year-old boy who is deaf in one ear, and what to do about an incident of racist teasing that targeted an Asian-American student.  All of these conversations are long and detailed - since many staff members have after-school jobs this is the one time each week when we are all available to talk to each other.

Then we do our weekly check-ins about how the kids are doing.  Each teacher shares about their homeroom students and there are usually several issues to discuss.  This week we spend a long time revisiting the junior high kids we had talked about during lunch.  Bhawain, their teacher, still feels frustrated but is ready to move from the venting phase of the conversation into problem-solving.  We talk about Monday's council meeting.  Many staff members were unhappy with the motion students passed and feel that the issue was symptomatic of a larger problem with a lack of respect and caring from certain students.  This problematic group of junior high students has been involved in lying, unsafe roughhousing, ignoring younger kids who ask them to quiet down, disturbing classes, having inappropriate conversation with younger kids around, etc.  It is suggested to have another council meeting about these issues, where we would also invite students to speak up about the things these older students are doing that are bothering them.  Many teachers feel this might need to a long meeting because the students in question are not eager to talk or to acknowledge the ways their behavior is harming others. We talk about what we as adults might want to say in the meeting but also about how it is detrimental to have adults control too much in council meetings.

And then it is 7:00 pm and the staff meeting still isn't over.  While I certainly feel that our meetings could probably be more efficient, I am glad that everyone is willing to take the time to have the conversations about the emotional well-being of individuals and our school community.  It is difficult to know how to reach young adolescents sometimes but no one is giving up.

I finally get home at 7:45.  Thursdays are the longest days by far, on other days I come home at 3:45.  I eat crackers and salami for dinner and drink bourbon out of a coffee mug since I don't own a proper whiskey glass. I am tired and a little bit wired from the long meeting.  I do not dread tomorrow.  I remember to put my glow-in-the-dark nail polish in my bag.  I have promised it to some fashion designers.