Uphill, both ways.

As I listen to President Obama talk about the auto industry and the types of jobs American companies are creating, I am thinking about the students who I will soon be sending out into the workforce.

We're working on bringing technology into the classroom. But only on shallow levels- they're learning to hit the right buttons on vocabulary websites but not how to create the programs or troubleshoot difficulties.

We have smartboards in every classroom but use them as whiteboards and rarely let students touch them.

We spend huge chunks of the budget on technology that no one uses or that malfunctions and we have to outsource tech repairs (see: entering 212 grades 4 times because of website issues).

I'm studying education politics because I believe in public schools and public school teachers. I complain about the focus on 21st century skills because I don't think it should take over the school. I want my students to be innovators of technology rather than using it at a menial job and I want school to prepare them for that.

There's no software solution to this?

Well it has been a minute since I've been here and like any job, my teaching responsibilities have changed quite a bit in the 3.5 years I've been working. Oh, no? In other jobs they don't change your responsibilities and tell you about it the day before you come back from a vacation? One more bonus to being a teacher.

Basically, I teach foreign language and like some of my colleagues around the city and other states I am now required to teach foreign language with Rosetta Stone. Never mind that I can't troubleshoot a not-very-good pc. Disregard that Rosetta Stone isn't aligned to state standards or ACTFL standards. Forget that I spoke with several of my supervisors multiple times to express the reasons I, licensed foreign language teacher and student of multiple languages, did not believe it was the best choice for our students. Ignore that the decision was made over the summer and I was informed, by the computer tech (who has been remarkably patient throughout this situation) on the Friday before the school year started. Yes, don't think about those things and the changes might seem manageable and even exciting.

Unfortunately, I do think about those things. Especially because this is my tenure year, round 2. I will be evaluated on my ability to be "highly effective" while spending the year creating a curriculum for multi-level classes in one class period that I was in no way trained for and am only minimally assisted with.

What brings me back is that I have reached out to teachers I know, teachers I don't know and classmates and professors at my previous graduate school and current graduate school and not been able to find many other people dealing with similar situations. This seems like an ideal topic to collaborate on and I can't find collaborators.

Initiative?

I had an interesting conversation with a friend yesterday. I went on ARIS to look at what I'm teaching and which students are in which classes. It was mostly what I expected- classes of 34 (and one of 35?) organized only by level. Not by grade, not by past experiences in the school, not by which students have failed the same classes 3 years in a row because they cut the last 2 periods every day.

Even though this is what I expected, I wasn't exactly thrilled. What do you do when you see 2 students in a class together who fought repeatedly last year? Seating charts, overplan so they never have time to fight, take their "temperature" every day when they walk in, know how to chose your battles, etc?

But I mentioned this situation to my friend and she asked why not just ask for one of those students to be switched to a different class? She views this as showing initiative to prevent a problem. I agree, but in my school such switches are almost never made. A teacher asking for a schedule change is looked at as someone who can't handle their classroom and has given up without even trying.

Maybe it's a different situation in other schools. I hope at my own the voice of the teachers reaches more ears during the school year than it has this summer.

Summer vacation= sunday morning tv

I will watch any show Christiane Amanpour is involved with. Even the episode of Gilmore Girls in which she makes a cameo. Since she took over This Week on ABC I've been watching it religiously.

Today the guests were Arne Duncan, Randi Weingarten and Michelle Rhee. I was glued to the screen. Here's the video:

Michelle Rhee visited my grad school last year and was a topic of debate in every class I took in the last 2 years. I haven't agreed with all of her choices, but I support a lot of them, and I am willing to consider all of her suggestions because she talks about teachers as if we are professionals.

In the summer I start to romanticize my job. I spend time with people who treat teaching with respect instead of my students and administration who view us as someone around to serve and or annoy. I imagine that my opinions and initiative might be influential in my work environment and that I might be rewarded if I am successful. I forget that my evaluation will come down to checks in columns labeled "satisfactory" and "unsatisfactory," instead thinking that my hours and hours of work might warrant at the very least a few carefully chosen adjectives.

But then I get a welcome back email from my principal and remember that I work for the NYC DOE.

What the panelists on This Week seemed to agree about, and the reason that I tolerate the downsides of working in the DOE is that the goal is to give every child a quality education. But it is nice to imagine being treated as if that's what I were trying to do.

Neon expo markers? Yes, please!

Getting ready for school seems so much harder than anything I do during the school year because finding a place to start can be really challenging. This is how I end up sitting in my room surrounded by stacks of lesson plans on one side, resources I've acquired behind me, school supplies on the other side, and a stack of to-do lists in front of me.

I've found a few helpful things so far.

I found out that you can buy school supplies on amazon.com. I'm sure everyone else already knew this, but finding a way to avoid the back to school rush at Staples seemed like quite a victory to me. Plus, they have these.

And I'm already excited about creating lessons on wordplay.com. It's a great new tool for Spanish teachers. Free, customizable vocabulary lessons, with sound. The best part? You can monitor how your students are doing at learning and retaining words, there are class and individual statistics. The developers of this website have been nothing but helpful to me, I highly recommend it.

Already?

Now that I'm done celebrating Spain's victory in the World Cup (which I did mostly in Quebec City, where a surprising number of people joined me in running through the city with Spanish flags), I can't stop myself from starting to think about what I'll be doing next year.

Here is an excellent article about one way to use some summer time to get ready for the coming school year.

Of course, it would help to officially know what I'll be teaching next year. I like to start summer planning by rewriting curriculum maps for my classes and reflecting on how the order of the curriculum worked last year. And of course, watching movies from Spanish-speaking countries that I might be able to incorporate into my classes next year. But on a micro-level, I have a hard time planning individual lessons without knowing which students will be in which classes and if they'll remember anything by September.

With colleagues like these...

Until the school year ends, I'll be a bad World Cup spectator. I recommend bolas y bandeiras for updates and great images.

With all of my students' Regents graded, I'm starting to feel the end of the year sigh of relief. But this seems to be the part of the year when politics take over and staff start acting like the students more than adults.

At least 4 of my coworkers won't be back next year and a lot of others are worried about being excessed. But they aren't alone in leaving the building- the cuts at other schools in our campus have been drastic and we are feeling the effects. One school has even asked for help with their test administration, which creates a lot of extra work for us. It's interesting, and disheartening, to find out how many teachers in my campus community will let politics and clashes with administrators take priority over what's best for the students.