Learning Along the Way

I am in the 7th month of “back into the classroom” and it is going well. I really like my 8th grade students and I am having a great time with them. I enjoy working with my other 2 colleagues on the science curriculum and with my team of teachers who teach the same students I do. Devin got a book that caught my eye and I decided to nab it. It is called Never work Harder than your Students by Robyn R. Jackson. I really thought the would be helpful to finish out what has become a very busy year. However, it is about principals of great teaching. It has brought some life into my current position and reminded me why I do what I do. I plan to write about this book in upcoming post. The book is organized into 7 different principals:

1. Start where your students are.
2. Know where your students are going.
3. Expect to get your students to their goal.
4. Support your students along the way.
5. Use feedback to help you and your students get better.
6. Focus on quality rather than quantity.
7. Never work harder than your students.

I am looking forward to posting about these ideas.

What a day! The Singapore American School MS PE department organized a day of fun events and activities for 925 students. The students were divided into 4 teams – Red, Green, Yellow and Blue and wore their colors proudly. It was a refreshing change from the white polo shirts. I was so impressed that the students knew what to do and where to go (they helped me to find out where the high jump was happening) and anxiously got prepared to do their event. I have done lots of field days in my years of teaching and this was the best I have been involved in. The students had lots of choices of events to be a part of and they all seemed to have picked events that they felt good about doing. It showed in student attitude and behavior. The skill level at the high jump ( I was only a  helper ) was impressive. The students there seemed to know they were good at this event. It was a great day and I am glad that the PE department does this for students. After being outside all day (especially in Singapore) I am thankful for those PE people. They ROCK!

What a concept! This is what we associate the holidays with in the Northern Hemisphere but not in a tropical environment. As our world has become more transient and international we have brought along our cultures in the most senseless ways. Snow in 85 degree (F) weather? I guess soap bubbles look alot like snow. Hey – We are studying Chemistry in my science class and I bet many of my students have seen the Singapore snow – Fake Snow – maybe we can make it snow in the classroom?

Happy Holidays!

Man it gets hot here. The trick is to get out before 7 am and then after a 2 hour bike ride drink lots and lots of water. We have been on a couple of rides here and it is not Colorado and it is not India but it has been a pleasant surprise every time we have gone. Today, we went on a ride through the East Coast Park. Even though we didn’t get started until 8:20 am the park is shaded with huge trees and it was cool. We went over 50 KM on a great bike path that took us all the way to Changi Beach Park in one direction and to Starbucks in the other direction. We learned that Singapore is promoting biking all over the island by putting in bike paths. 

Car Racing is something I know little about and have never taken the time to understand.  So when opportunities arise…learning happens along the way. Singapore hosted the first ever night time Formula One Grand Prix and we had free tickets. We started out watching a practice run and did not know exactly what was going on. A good friend had come in from Hong Kong because he is a fan of the F1 and we met up with him to get educated. The qualifying race would be next and we had a better understanding. Even though I probably will not become a F1 fan I do appreciate some of the things I learned:

• The car sounds are awesome (you can feel it in your heart) but can really damage your ears. Wear earplugs!
• Being there (hands on experience) really makes watching on it on ESPN enjoyable. It is better to be able to see the whole field of cars racing.
• You must have a good camera to get pictures, as you can tell I did not!

Moving can be overwhelming. Moving and changing jobs can be even more overwhelming. However, moving into a new school job is just a matter of learning how the systems work. Schools are schools and kids are kids, so things of the important nature that apply in one good school apply in another good school. I am lucky to be in this line of business.

Singapore American School transitioning for new teachers is fantastic – one of the best that I have personally experienced. They bring new faculty in and put them in a hotel while they work on finding the perfect place that will be their new home and learn about the new place they will live. They really meet your first needs of Maslow’s Heirarchy. Then after 10 days of addressing our basic needs we spent a week at school – learning about the systems, technology training, meeting important people, getting into our classrooms, ect.  Next week we meet all the returning teachers and work on the learning processes our students will be involved in. And school starts a week after that. Wow – we will be ready for our students and able to meet their basic needs! Thanks, SAS!

On July 26, 2005 Mumbai was hit by a rain that flooded the city and took many lives. We had only been in India 3 days. Our apartment, on the 7th floor, was flooded due to how the drains were constructed – as Rose puts it – upside down. So we should have learned something from that but the rains go away and they really go and I guess you forget.  The monsoon has come early this year and last night it really came down. This morning we awoke to 2 inches of water throughout our entire apartment. The worst part if that the packers had spent the entire day boxing our living room and half of the boxes were damaged. So now, we have an additional day of packing. It is fore casted for the rains to slow down on Monday and Tuesday when they carry the boxes out. Keeping our fingers crossed.

What is academic rigor? Why are the 2 words put together? Academic as defined by Encarta has to do with the scholarly and intellectual. Rigor is severity or harshness: unrelenting strictness or toughness in dealing with people or things and an unwillingness to make allowances. So what does it mean when you put the 2 together? Why would we want to put severity on being scholarly? Who would be motivated to learn something where there was inflexibility in how it is done. And who would decide how this is done – to me? To our students? I had lots of questions after our recent MS Faculty meeting on areas we would like to improve at our school.

I am torn by the dialog around academic rigor when it comes to the Middle School Philosophy. I really would like to see students who are rigorously engaged in their own life learning. What I think is a better definition would be academic vigor. But how would we do this? We must take into account the adolescent learner.  I found lots of summarization about this topic from http://ceep.crc.uiuc.edu/poptopics/middle.html.

Developmental needs of young adolescents

Reed and Rossi (2000) conducted survey research with 321 rural (n = 101), urban (n = 119), and suburban (n = 101) sixth-, seventh-, and eighth-graders in an attempt to identify their developmental needs and wishes. These researchers reported their results and organized them into three categories. The first category was the “search for personal identity,” which included wishes such as wealth, fame, material goods, popularity, concern about conflicts in social relationships, wishing people would be nicer to each other, and better family relationships. The second category was “life in school,” with high academic achievement being the most common wish. Students wished that they earned all A’s. Students also expressed a desire to be a part of sports teams, and urban children generally wished for better resources during after-school time. The final category was related to “life and health” (not dying, staying healthy) and real-life societal and global issues such as world peace.

Reed and Rossi (2000) suggest that service learning is one way to integrate some of these early adolescent wishes into the curriculum. They also suggest that teachers create themes and integrated curriculum that emphasize conflict resolution, justice, identity, and violence prevention. They suggest that because many middle school students express concern about homelessness and violence, for example, conflict resolution training could be incorporated into service learning activities designed around service to homeless children and their families. Also advisor-advisee sessions (small groups of students meeting with one teacher throughout the year and discussing issues of personal concern, engaging in team-building activities, etc.) can provide a setting for implementing activities related to these concerns.

This web site presented more information on academic rigor and the middle school student:

According to the National Middle School Association (1995), effective middle schools curriculum should be exploratory, integrative, and challenging. Belair and Freeman (2000) state that “early adolescents succeed more and learn best when they are required to be practitioners of knowledge rather than just receivers of knowledge” (p. 5). The challenge to those who believe in the middle school movement is to prove that academic rigor and responsiveness to the developmental needs of middle school students are not mutually exclusive.

In another position paper, Anfara and Waks (2001) discuss middle school curriculum philosophy and the contrast between academic rigor and developmentally appropriate practice for young adolescents. They state that middle school students need experiences that allow them to apply knowledge. They also suggest that information should be presented in a way that stresses the relationships between subjects. They believe middle school students need to see the applicability of knowledge to their own lives. Presenting knowledge for its own sake as a short-term goal does not work with middle school students because (1) this approach offers little context to students, (2) the material has little motivational power, and (3) difficult curricular content must be watered down to be comprehensible, robbing it further of its usefulness.

Anfara and Waks (2001) conclude that a subject-oriented middle school is not appropriate. In their view, emphasizing academic rigor makes middle schools into watered down junior high schools, which were not successful models in their view. As mentioned in the research section below, these researchers believe that middle school research that does not lead to convincing results with regard to academic achievement is flawed, perhaps because the actual middle school model is rarely implemented correctly. They argue that developmentally appropriate academics can be rigorous and measured without relying on achievement tests grounded in isolated academic disciplines. They want educators to stop the pendulum from swinging back to subject-focused middle schools and junior high schools from the current middle school interdisciplinary curricular approach.

Finally, in a paper that describes one school district’s effort at middle school curriculum reform, Thompson (2000) concludes that the public and some educators misunderstand the standards movement. She feels that critics of the middle school philosophy conclude that because project-based integrative learning does not look like traditional (didactic) teaching, it must not be rigorous. In Thompson’s view, critics of middle schools appear to want to see more lecture-based learning (e.g., would prefer to see students learning about buoyancy from a textbook and lecture-and-discussion format rather than through a demonstration done in a swimming pool or other body of water). An important current challenge for middle schools is to align curriculum in ways that are integrative, exploratory, and engaging, while simultaneously helping students score well on standardized tests (Thompson, 2000).

I believe it is also important to be passionate about learning ourselves as teachers and model this. Students should see our love of learning all the time, that we should be a over zealous about it. I think we also need to remember our mission statement – a place where kids are pursuing their dreams and enhancing the lives of others. Look at our mission awards and think about how easy it was to place kids in the Academic area of our awards. What should we really be trying to improve as a Middle School?

I was honored last night by many of my colleagues at a goodbye dinner. It was hosted by the IT Director of the American School of Bombay and many of the people that I have worked with closely were there. It is times like this that I feel fortunate for the life that my husband and I have chosen to live and to be able to work with such great people. Quality people. People that I want to be friends with for the rest of my life. Many of my friends and colleagues that have chosen the path of teaching overseas are people who thirst for knowledge. You will find many of them learning languages, trying local cuisine, traveling to new places, exploring a new exercise program like yoga and creating music and art pieces. These teachers are lifelong learners. They want to improve themselves and this carries over into the classroom where they help students improve on a daily basis. I love the people I work with. I am finding that it may be easier to say goodbye this time around. It could be because this is the 5^th time we have done this but I really think that it is because I believe I will see many of these amazing and talented people again. Or at least I hope so. I also know that I have a new situation coming up at Singapore American School to make new connections with more amazing international teachers. WooHoo!

We are moving again.  To Singapore. The process of going through our “stuff” has begun in preparation for the move. My husband and I have done this 8 times – 5 of them to new countries. We should have this down. However, once again I ask myself, where did we get all this stuff? How do we deal with it all and not have to deal with it all over again? So the first thing I wanted to deal with was all our paper work. I went to a couple of sources to find out – Ehow.com, Goodhousekeeping, MoneyCentral. That last link was focused on what papers to save in a natural disaster situation. It stated that most all documents are reproducible but you need to think about which documents would be a pain to replace and try to put systems in place to not have to go through this.  It states that the more of your financial life you have online the easier it will be to recover documents. I do so much online so I am getting rid of lots of our old paper work.  Here are some things that I got after right away:

• I sent an electronic documentation of all our accounts and passwords  to my hotmail account and to my husbands. It will be there forever. I just have to remember to keep it up to date.
• Scanned all those vital documents – passports, birth certificates, marriage papers and sent those to my hotmail account too. However, I will keep a copy with us a send another with our things in the states.
• Every year I scan all the documents that are needed for our taxes – so now I just keep the last 3 years worth. I should probably send these to my hotmail.
• Family photos – most are online, but I have scanned many but not all. Many years ago – I sent all our negatives to our storage area. Mmm – I wonder how those fair?
• Family videos – This one is difficult and my plan is to get all in a file format and saved to a hard drive. (need to purchase this)

Being an expat in a country like India also adds some different levels to dealing with my stuff. Have you seen http://www.storyofstuff.com?  I highly recommend you watch this if you ever wondered about your stuff.

So another Learning along the way for me – now I have to go through more of our “stuff”.