Borderland

We’re into the second week of school here this year. I’m still in the early getting-to-know-you period with my class, and we are all more or less on our best behavior, but judging from what I’ve seen so far this is going to be a good year. It’s my 27th in the classroom, and you’d think I’d have it down pat by now, starting off, but I don’t feel that way. I never do things “just like I always do” which would no doubt be boring. Not only that, the kids are always different. I usually map out a general course I’d like to follow and then see how it goes, taking my cues from the group. When I started teaching I imagined that the job would get easier over the years. That was a huge miscalculation. But I don’t mind because it’s also gotten more interesting in many ways.

We’ve got the student website up and running, and the kids started posting things there yesterday. This was the first post to go up:

Yay! We Started!
I’m really happy and excited that we finally started using the website!! Normally I would hate writing ( I guess typing is different) but this is probably gonna be a whole lot more fun!

Short, but sweet. And generally reflective of what else I saw and heard going around the room. A few look like they may not want to have anything to do with writing on the website or anywhere else for that matter (like, they didn’t write anything for 30 minutes) and I’m thinking about what I might be able to do for them. When I taught beginning swimming, there were always kids who didn’t want to get in the water, and I’d praise them for dangling their legs in the pool – taking little steps. It’s the same with teaching.

The kindergarten teacher and I are going to ramp up our buddy-class project and assign the sixth-graders and kinderkiddoes to little “activity groups” that meet once or twice a week. We’ll train the older kids on how to help their little buddies, and then set up a time for them to get together in their groups to work on projects. We want to try and help the kids learn to set goals and make choices with this. It will be a really nice thing to see if it works well.

There were a lot of questions from my students last week about whether we were going to do anything “fun” this year, like go on field trips – especially overnight camping. In my experience, the kids do not enjoy my hardcore ideas about hiking and camping. They imagine sleeping in a small cabin and singing songs around a cozy fire; I imagine teaching them to dig snow caves and practice survival skills. In any case, this kind of thing involves raising money for a bus and food, etc. and I hate fund raising. I told them that I’d give them regular time to have class meetings where they could come up with plans for things they wanted, so they could make their dreams come true. They may learn something about democracy along the way. We’ll see how that goes.

I’ve set up a free and voluntary reading time each day. This was a big hit last year, and the test results for the class confirmed its institutional worth – not that I need tests to tell me it was a good thing to do, but the scores came back mostly real strong. I’ll have more to say about that another time. A new twist on the reading-writing workshop this year is that Dina Strasser and I plan to carry on a discussion on our blogs, comparing notes on our experiences with this method of teaching reading and writing. I’m pretty jazzed about doing a collaborative teacher research project with Dina this way. My next post is going to be the kickoff for that discussion.