Begin: Year 2

School starts on Monday. It's hard to believe just over a year has passed since I first welcomed students into my classroom. There's a lot of changes in store for this year.

I like my school, and the fourth-grade team is great this year. We have a new teacher who is really good, and we seem very dedicated to the collaboration/PLC ("Professional Learning Community") model that is being promoted in HISD and at our school. I was elected team leader (somewhat by default due to a lot of circumstances) but I did get us to begin revamping our calendar which we didn't really follow last year. It seems as though we will actually use common assessments this year as well, which should be exciting. I do have 25 students, more than I'd like, but hopefully that will get adjusted.

I have a lot of different plans for this year. I'm going to try doing a real Reading Workshop, with good mini-lessons. I'm going to stress vocabulary, and do a decoding program. I'm teaching grammar differently, and I have math planned out for most of the year as well as a new design for the math block which gives students more time for independent practice and working in teams. I think I'm going to start staying after school with the kids for study hall and to study English and narrative elements in movies.

On the down side, we wasted a bunch of time with horrible professional development. The worst example was the HISD bilingual session. For some reason, they decided to get all the bilingual teachers together at one site. Given the sheer size of our district, that's way too many teachers to have anywhere. The "keynote speaker" was a horrible motivational speaker, whose book had so many typos I had to stop reading despite my boredom. I think she got hired because she's friends with one of the organizers. Parking took 40 minutes and I ended up on the grass by the track (which is made of dirt, by the way). Some people had to park in a shuttle lot and catch a bus. One of the teachers from my school had her car towed because she parked by the dollar store across the street. Of course, it was an HISD session, so I wasn't learning anything either. Plenty of people left as soon as the opportunity arose, and I may have been one of them. Perhaps the "best" moment was when it was announced that HISD's bilingual programs are "working" because there are less 5th grade bilingual teachers than kindergarten teachers! Yay! We push our kids out of bilingual programs! It's working well!!

I've been spending a lot of time with data. It's been fun as I've applied my passion for data to a different field (education). I did discover one particularly motivating fact: the average SAT score at the high school that my students feed into, for 2004-05, was 847. I guess this isn't unusual, but for some reason, that number says a lot more to me than a lot of other facts could.

Well... here goes year 2!