100%

The weeks are moving quickly for us now. Tomorrow is parent-teacher conferences and in two weeks we will bask in the glory of a week of no school. None. Zero. No students. No lesson plans. We will be leaving Gallup (destination unknown) for a few days to get the crazies out of our heads. It will be grand.

I am not here to brag. That is not my intention. So before going any further, know that this is not the Scott Show. I do not want people ooh-ing and ahh-ing us. All I want to do is tell stories from our lives.

That being said, I have gotten a lot of 100%s on tests and quizzes in my life. Erin too. Truth be told, Erin has probably has gotten more than I have since she was a spectacular Summa Cum Laude in college while I squeaked by with merely a Magma Cum Laude. But alas, this is also not the Erin Extravaganza. After all the years of schooling and all the tests and quizzes and all the assignments, we've gotten quite a few 100%s. When asked how many exactly, Erin said, "probably a gigajillion" (the majority of these 100% were not in math for Ms. Farver). I would say more in the range of a googlepahihodillion, but we're really just splitting hairs. Suffice to say, we've gotten a lot.

With that being said, allow me to introduce you to one of my students. Her name is Beatrice (which isn't her real name. I don't even think there were any 'Beatrice's' born after 1922..). Beatrice is a struggling student in my class and is having a number of difficulties with fourth grade subject matter right now. Her reading level is about that of a first grader. Her writing, about the same. But Beatrice is a smiler. Regardless of how poor she does on an assignment, she is always smiling.

I set up a meeting with her mom and the Student Support Team (SST) the other day, and we tried as a group to come up with ways to help Beatrice be successful in the classroom. We came up with some ideas, and in doing so, found out she had received inclusion Special Education services at her previous school (one would think such information would be somewhat beneficial to receive before the start of school 7 weeks ago... ) so we started getting our paperwork around in order to develop a new Plan for Beatrice involving Special Education Services. Good news for sure. Bad news, however, is Beatrice cannot benefit from Special Education Services until we hold a special meeting with tons more paperwork, lawyers, parents, principals, teachers, psychologists, and probably partridges in pear trees. That will take place this week. She will get the services, albeit a bit later than what would have been best. But, I digress.

Beatrice participates, as do all my students, in the Accelerated Reader (AR) program at our school. In AR, students choose books at their individual reading levels, read them and then take a quiz about the content to see how well they understood the book. Our goal in my class is for everyone to get at least an 85% on each quiz. Most are at that level, with a handful higher and a few a little lower. However, Beatrice has taken 5 quizzes over the books she read so far this year and has gotten a grand total of 4 questions right. Since there were 5 questions on each quiz, 5 quizzes makes it a 4/25 or 16%, somewhat under our goal of 85%. However, Beatrice keeps smiling, apparently oblivious to her inability to understand what she has read. Until last week. Her smile got bigger, her eyes got brighter and though she was too shy to give me a celebratory 'Farver High-Five,' I could tell she was proud.

While Erin and I look for our gigajillion- or googlepahihodillion-th 100% sometime in the near future, Beatrice will be quietly looking for her 3rd. You see, last week, totally out of the blue, Beatrice's big smiling, bright eyed, no high-fiving self got back to back 100%s on her reading quizzes. 2 in a row. I was so proud of her. It did not matter that I had helped her read the quiz questions, because Beatrice answered the questions totally on her own. It also did not matter the books she had read were at a first grade level. Looking at all the hoops we have to get through in our first year as teachers is daunting. Seeing the performance of our students on state tests can be distressing. Watching the paper pile up higher each week can be down right depressing. But seeing Beatrice's face after those 100%s, well, for a moment I forgot about all the rest. I was happy. Even if she wouldn't get me a high five. It didn't necessarily erase all the doubt and anxiety I've felt these first few weeks, but it reminded me of why I wanted to do this, to be a teacher.
Congratulations Beatrice!

Teaching

For one of our graduate classes, we're reading a book with a story about Josh, a middle school student who cuts himself, and the question is posed, “how can a student concentrate on English or algebra when he feels unloved at home and unsupported by his parents.“ I was thinking about this comment while I was washing dishes tonight, after having listened to some political heads on some news channel discussing potential policies of the presidential candidates as it relates to education. I began to wonder how much good that money is doing for kids like Josh and many kids in my class who feel unloved and unsupported at home. I wondered how different the results of these efforts would be if the government stopped giving money to traditional education programs. What if they took that money, those hundreds of googledillions of dollars (I am pretty sure a googledillion does not exist, but since millions and billions do not make sense to me because they are such ungraspable numbers, people may as well start saying “googledillions”—at least that sounds fun) and put them towards programs that worked at the root of our problem in education. Hunger, abuse, sickness, neglect. To me, it is not that kids are dumb or cannot learn, but that they have bigger things to worry about than studying for their spelling test on Friday. Be it broken families, broken hearts or broken bones, these struggling students are struggling because school is not their life; life is. What if those googledillions of dollars went to programs designed to help people get jobs or pay for health care or do any number of things to help take the pressure off of these struggling families and help these kids not worry so much about living and helped them live a little? I think they would be more able to learn.
I met with our new counselor the other day. She had just arrived at our school; she had been hired this summer, but a condition of her employment was she was not going to be able to start work until this past week. She seems nice and she has been counseling for a number of years. I had heard from another teacher about a program the previous counselor helped to run. This counselor would pack up backpacks of food for certain students to bring home for the weekend, since many of these children receive most of their food from the free breakfasts and lunch the school provides, and do not have much to eat over the weekend. The new counselor told me she was aware of this program, and then gave me a list of all the counselor-y things she has to do. Give whole class counseling presentations. Meet with SST students. Worry about attendance issues. It was an impressive list, I am sure, and she added a caveat at the end of her to do list that if she could find some time later in the month, most likely October, she may be able to contact the food pantry. Even so, it would be a lot of work for her to get the food and pack the bags. I offered my own services to do the bidding, along with my class, the fourth grade as a whole and our whole wing of the school. I feel this type of program goes to the root of all the problems we see at school. I became a teacher because I want to help kids. These kids are hungry, they live with people who have other worries besides signing notes and selling cupcakes on Thursday nights and they need to eat. I feel like my babbling on about rounding numbers to the nearest hundred thousand is pointless to a lot of my students. I may as well be teaching them to round to a googledillion. The next line in the book reiterates why I want to teach. It goes to the heart of why I want to be in the classroom. The author says that maybe the best thing for a teacher to do is to listen to her student, as she may be the only one he opens up to. I want to be there for my students. I want them to learn but really, I want them to feel loved and to be nine and ten years old. If that means we, as a school, work together to make sure they do not have to have adult worries, like what they are going to eat on the weekend, so be it.