A Teacher’s Job

Monday, April 24, 1995

Today, coming back from a hot weekend-—is summer on the way? (Lisa’s counting down the days... shouldn’t I be?)--was your basic run of the mill days.

The English Nine classes are running their usual Monday agendas: Daily Oral Language, SSR (silent sustained reading), review of last week/preview of this week, handing out of the Cultural Literacy assignment (following up on last Thursday’s note-taking exercise), board work (students writing their vocabulary sentences on the board for teacher-edits), and Writer’s Workshop. All of this in our 90-minute period (and we were dinged for not varying the activities during a period...).

English 4/4H begins with a little SSR. Then we move into the remainder of Act Two of Pygmalion, with discussion. Between Act Two and Act Three, I introduce the idea of the Electronic Portfolio, a computerized assignment they will begin working on later this week. I’m only planting the seed now, trying to spur some thinking on what the individual students would like for their topics. I’ll follow up with more directions, as well as a HyperStudio tutorial later in the week, but for now all I want to do is to get them thinking. And it works. They are filled with questions, ideas. Good. And we launch into Act Three of the play. They’re loving it, laughing out loud (always a good sign).

My lunch is filled with preparing the classroom for tomorrow’s classes, putting up the next Daily Oral Language assignment, the Vocabulary Quiz for the English Nines, the next assignments on the E9 Assignment/Grade Sheets, and going over the absence referrals for the classes, pulling the names and numbers of those students who have already reached four absences for the new term (these do not count the students who have yet to show up/check in to class, of which there are SEVEN first period).

During fourth period prep, I go to the Professional Room. I begin to create an introductory packet for the Electronic Portfolio. I self-edit my second draft of my Writer’s Workshop piece for English Nine—-I’m doing the Content Writing assignment (the subject is "Love") concurrently with the class, to model the process—-a follow-up to last week’s very successful conferences. I’ll input the changes tonight at home. I then make parent calls for the absence referrals. Of the six calls, two are wrong numbers, two are no longer in service, one doesn’t answer and the one parent I do reach doesn’t speak English (but, luckily, a small daughter is home who can translate, and she does—-mom is supposed to meet with her daughter’s counselor tomorrow on campus). I then head down to the office to go over my Professional Growth stuff with GumpDumb, who tells me that all looks good; I need to put it into final-er form and give it to him for his signature. It sounds good to me.

When school is over, I do a final prep of my room and head home—-with a detour to the post office to send Sara in England a letter. Home, I do some yardwork and wait for Lisa to come home. Then, we both pick up Kyle from grandma’s, since she takes care of him on Mondays and Fridays.

After dinner and a truncated bath—-he’s over-tired and fussy (anyone would be after the lousy night of sleep he/we had last night)--it’s early bed. While Lisa puts him down, I do the dishes. We talk in passing, after he is down for the night, before she goes off to do some work and I sit down in the office for my "chores": the inputting of my self-edit changes to the "Love" piece; work on my Professional Growth stuff; work on this journal; work on the Electronic Portfolio planning; and the retrieval of my copy of HyperStudio from my files (so that I can load it on to a computer at school so the 4/4H’s can do the Electronic Portfolio).

And now I’ll go to bed.

This is a teacher’s day.