Tomorrow my life begins

Well, this is it. I'm finally going to start teaching. My room is ready, (at least I think it is), I have my first 3 weeks roughly planned out, I've looked over the curriculum for the first 6 weeks, and I have possibly the best investment plan known to man - I'm raffling off an iPod nano at the end of the year.
My colleagues have cued me in to the fact that students down here go crazy for raffles. At one point last year, a student was raffling off two $7 movie tickets (or it might have just been one) and about 100 people paid the $1 entry fee. I guess you'd think that the students would not pay $1 for a chance at a $7-14 prize that they have very little chance of winning, but they love their raffles!

As for the iPod, the thing was just sitting around wasting space, and I had even tried to sell it in order to buy a camcorder the kids could use. Luckily, my school most likely has grant money that I can use, so there's no reason to spend my own money on a camera. Instead, the iPod will be used to get my students in class, on task, and interested. I've decided that all 139 of my students will compete for the iPod, which will be raffled off in December. They can get entered into the raffle for having perfect attendance for an entire month (no tardies either), having all assignments turned in on-time, or for getting an A on a major project or test. Since my students might not all be there this first week, as I guess it's just the culture to not show up until a week or two into school... I'm going to give each student one raffle ticket for each day they are present this week, but ONLY if all of the students show up by Friday. We'll see how it works out.

Reflections on the week

Every day closer to the start of school we got, I felt like training got better and better. The problem is... for the most part it didn't. True, the school training was better than the region training, which was better than the TFA Orientation, but none of it compares to TFA Institute. I felt that all of these August training sessions were merely reiterating things I had already learned, or repeated things that happened in a training session 2 days prior. And the trainings just went ON and ON and ON. It was like the Energizer Bunny was training me: while that might sound cool, the little guy can't talk and does nothing other than beat his drum incessantly. Any who... the trainings did occasionally offer a nugget of wisdom, which I will no doubt use in my class. I just wish that I had more than Friday to set up my classroom. Friday was our only day of in-service, but luckily the administration let us come in on Saturday and Sunday as well. It's a good thing too, because I would not have been done on Friday, since I had a HUGE cabinet of supplies to go through, computers to (fix) and set up, and rules and posters to hang. Luckily, Alexia was kind enough to help on all three days, so it was much more enjoyable and relaxing to sit and watch her do all the work. (I kid, I kid, but she really did help out a ton).

On a side note, I had a very interesting Thursday/Friday combination. On Thursday, I was approached by my English department chair to work with the UIL Journalism club. I agreed, of course, and will be one of the three faculty mentors for the club starting this September. While I was talking to one of the other faculty mentors for the group, I mentioned that I wanted to create an after school Multimedia and Film Club. He was genuinely excited about my idea, and told me to talk to our assistant principal, and was gracious enough to walk me through the maze that is the administration area to her office. She ushered me into her room as soon as my faculty guide told her that I was interested in starting a club, (vanishing immediately after making that statement), and simultaneously closed the door and offered me a seat. I only got about half a sentence of, "I'm interested in starting an after-school Multimedia and Film..." when she asked if I was interested in heading up FCA, or the Fellowship of Christian Athletes. Seeing as I came into the office with the intent of doing a Multimedia and Film Club, which is pretty much the exact opposite of athletics, I showed her my best befuddled look. She explained further, saying that I would be able to work with the FCA kids and teach them multimedia, work with them during the day, and advise/support them at events. Not wanting to be rude and not wanting to turn down an offer that I still did not understand, I took the safe route and told her that I would get back to her the following day. I left the office feeling like a deer that just barely missed getting hit by a Mack truck in the middle of the night- confused, in shock, and unaware of what just happened. I talked to a few other teachers, and looked through the pamphlet that she had given me about the organization, and slept on it. It's not that I didn't think I could run the club or help out the kids; I didn't go into that office with the intention of being the FCA mentor, and Texas religion is a whole different ballgame then I'm used to. I'm the kind of person that gets a little anxious around people who shout "Praise Jesus" for 5 minutes straight. Yeah, I'll praise Jesus, but wouldn't it be better to spend those five minutes oh, I dunno, serving food at a soup kitchen rather than yelling at the top of your lungs the same few words over and over again? It's possible that my students wouldn't be like that, but I wasn't sure I wanted to take the chance and feel awkward for a year. Plus, one of the other TFA kids already expressed interest in the club and spent part of his summer on a mission trip building houses in a colonia in Mexico.

I went into my AP's office the next morning, explained that I wasn't comfortable heading up the FCA, and told her that it didn't really fit with my goals of teaching ANY interested student Multimedia and Film. As part of the FCA, I'd only be helping members of the organization; I can't imagine that an entire class of 1,000+ 9th graders are interested in sports and are devout Christians, so I'd likely be missing a good portion of the population. And there was always the potential that the students in FCA could care less about Multimedia, and then I'd be stuck. Luckily, she was very receptive of my refusal to head up FCA. Perhaps it was my winning personality, or the fact that I told her that another teacher was interested in the position. Or maybe, it's because my administration is awesome and this job is going to be great. Whatever it was, I think I win.

Student Work Gems

I know that I don't actually have students yet, but I did find some old student work, including a binder full of floppy disks.
This picture doesn't do the binder justice. I'll have to get a pic of the real thing for you all sometime this week. Even though it's cool, (not as cool as this binder though), I will never, ever go through all of the floppys. I instead stuck to rifling through some of the hard copy student work, feeling confident in a student's project on "Animals". It was a fairly thick packet, with a lot of graphic organizers, a fairly hefty 7-page report, and some comparison charts. On closer inspection, there was very little transition between paragraphs, but it didn't matter once I hit the top of page two. Throughout the entire project, each paragraph was dedicated to a specific animal, such as a blue whale, a bottlenose dolphin, a border collie, or a jackrabbit. Paragraph one on page two, however, was all about "the ass mammal, better known as the donkey". I have never in my life heard anyone refer to a donkey as an "ass mammal", but I guess the description is correct. Since everyone down here seems to refer to donkeys as burros, it's probably an innocent mistake on the part of the student, but it had me laughing so hard I almost fell out of my chair. I know it's horrible to laugh at a student's work, but I'm not laughing at the student; the project was genuinely well done.

Just For Fun

Check out this website for other cool crafts like the crazy floppy disk binder. One of the guys on here has a floppy disk messenger bag and a USB monster. It's interesting stuff.

Mexico, thanks for getting my back
Well, it looks like we're not going to get hit by the full force of the hurricane, but there is still a good chance that the RGV could get some severe flooding. Apparently Dean is the third largest hurricane in all of the Atlantic, and Mexico is looking at 20 inches of rain where the 'Dean hits. That SUCKS... As you can tell from the picture, it looks like we're still going to get a good deal of the northern arm of the hurricane, so we'll likely see a good amount of rain. I'm already taking precautions and parking my car on the street where the water drains considerably quicker than in the area behind my apartment. True, I'm not under a covered area, but at least my car won't have to drive through 8 inches of rain in order to get out of my subdivision.

We went over the New Jersey method today in training (which amounts to lots of visuals and hands on work). I couldn't help thinking though, that my plan to incorporate a good deal of multimedia in the classroom is essentially the New Jersey method on crack. The main idea of the NJM is that students will learn more if they are actively engaged. Unfortunately, some students are turned off by the potentially lower-age-level creative projects. With video, stop-motion animation, storyboarding, and the like, I'm fairly certain that my students will find themselves challenged enough to be interested, involved, and therefore learning. We'll see.

Rock You Like A Hurricane

*Disclaimer* - The following two paragraphs are very similar to a user's manual. Since I said this, I'm sure half of you will skip ahead to the third paragraph. Go ahead... the first two paragraphs aren't interesting at all.

Well everyone, I promised myself and several others that I would blog about my life as a teacher for the next two years, so now's about a good a time to start as any. I plan to update at least every Sunday, but if I happen to get any interesting stories or information, you can expect more than one entry a week. The original plan was to create my own website with more than the "just a regular blog" feel, but I was unable to get my copy of DreamWeaver until recently. The other big holdup is that I won't be getting a paycheck until late September, and I don't see any reason to purchase a domain name and web space with money I don't have that could be used for food and water that keeps me alive.

As for a few more rules of this blog. I can't actually post any pictures of my students, or even their names for legal reasons, so I'll be referring to them much like Agent Friday did on Dragnet back in the day. Also, I'm not certain if I'm even allowed to say which school I'm working at on a public blog, but seeing that everyone that COULD potentially read this is someone that has my cell phone number, I'm not too worried about the school name (W.A. Todd). Should my website get more than a handful of readers or I become some internet phemon, I'll have to go back through and delete any potentially dangerous information. On this same token, should my students wander upon this website, I'd appreciate it if the comments were kept in good taste (I'm looking at you, friend) so it makes my life easier.



So I live in Mexico. Not literally, but for all intents and purposes it is. I live almost as far south in the U.S. as you can get without living in Brownsville. The border patrol is 60 miles north of me, and free trade zones abound. It's $.25 to go across the border into Mexico and $.50 to get back, and you don't even need a passport.

(The little yellow line here is the border. Sorry about the size of the photo, but that's about as good as I can do until I have my own website fixed up. The dots above the border are the towns I live in, work in, or drive through often.)

Palm trees abound, but there's also a fair amount of cacti littering the more remote areas. It's like South Texas can't decide if it wants to be tropical or an arid desert. At least while I've been here it's been much more tropical - the RGV (Rio Grande Valley) has seen record rainfall, which I had the pleasure of letting my car swim through.

(Reynosa, which you can see here, is a pretty nice tourist spot in Mexico, and is about 15 minutes away. RGV relies on it a lot to provide cheap labor for the economy.)

Seriously, this place can get rain for 10 minutes and the streets are flooded. This brings me to my next order of business - Hurricane Dean. I'm sure that most of you have heard in the news that Hurricane Dean is bearing down on South Texas and Mexico with all of nature's wrath. Should the hurricane hit, the entire RGV will most likely be wiped out as it's a floodplane that takes 2 and a half hours to drive from one end to the other. Because of all the construction and several decades of drought conditions, you never would have known that this area used to occassionally be an extension of the Rio Grande River or the Gulf of Mexico. I'm constantly bombarded with signs that tell me to "Keep Your Gas Tanks Full" since it's "Hurricane Season". I think this is pretty good advice, but then again, the Texas Department of Transportation has managed to close an entire highway on me with no detour signs directing me to an alternative route (and on a day where I was taking my teacher registration test, no less!). Oh, TDOT has also come up with the gem, "YOU DRINK DRIVE, YOU LOSE" that can be seen on the way back from South Padre Island. Everyone else has decided to take TDOT's advice though, and gas rose 20 cents a gallon today. It's still at reasonable levels, but should Dean hit Galveston as a few TX media outlets have predicted (on no real statistics), "gas could rise to $7 a gallon and collapse the entire U.S. Economy!" Right... right. Well, I'm not particularly worried, as the current path of the hurricane has it hitting the Yucatan and just barely grazing my newfound home.



The Weather Channel seems to have a good handle on things, and the locals all say that RGV has about 3 hurricane warnings a year, but they haven't been hit in something like 100 years. "It's bound to happen!" - fearmonger. I'm not too terribly worried. My car works, I have renter's insurance, and I have until Thursday when this sucker hits ground. I find it strange to think about the items that I would definitely need to take with me, but there really aren't that many items: it's mostly paintings, important papers, and photos. I'll keep you all updated on the Hurricane though, and if I'm forced to evacuate.

Too Cool For School
School starts a week from tomorrow. Some of my students *might* be there. From what all the other teachers have told me, I can expect class sizes from 7-12 students the first few days. By the end of the third week, I'll probably have over 20 in each class. A lot of my students will most likely be from migrant families and other towns, as Donna (my school district) has a population of 14,000 and my 9th grade academy will have over 1,000 students. I highly doubt that 7% of the city population is attending 9th grade. I'm really looking forward to teaching though. Houston was a blast, and I feel like I can really make a difference in my students' lives. I'll be teaching English, but I'm hoping to incorporate multimedia and have my students turn their readings and writings into animations, movie shorts, or slideshows. I got the idea from the iLife Challenge and a professor I saw at a conference who teaches a class called Writing with Video. Apparently I have a good chance of getting grant money, because while the building is old and there aren't many funds for books, there's a bit of money for technology and not a lot of people are taking advantage of it. At least that's the word on the street. I still have to actually apply for the things, but I'm just happy that my chances of receiving funding are greater than zero.

If there's one thing I've learned from this summer, it's that "professional training" can eat up your entire life. I've been in training 10 of the last 12 days, and by the time school starts, I will have had an average of 8 hours of training for 16 of 19 days. That's right - I only get Sundays off. I do it for the kids though... and Sunday has never felt more relaxing. We've had training for lesson planning, assessment, accountability, special needs, lesson planning and unit planning, expectations, legal jargon, sexual harrassment training, and everything else under the sun. There has been so many acronyms thrown at me that I'm starting to think the military uses less. There's TFA, IEP, LPT, RSAT, IRL, ESL, ELL, DISD, LSSP, TSTA, NEA, AEIS, PAID, PEIMS, TAKs, TEKs, TAAS, TEAMs, NCEC, CIP, and enough others to make my head explode just thinking about it. At one point I asked a question about the acronym ADB because, well, every other capitalized word was an acronym, and I got a confused look from my instructor who told me it wasn't an acronym at all - it was a code. Lovely. Now I get to learn how to tell the difference between acronyms and codes. Training really wasn't that bad though. Our meals were more or less paid for by various teacher associations wanting us to join, and I got some cool schwag: not one, but two mousepads, several bajillion pens, two bags (one is really freaking cool and has my school district logo on it), cookies, markers, hi-lighters, and a couple of coupons to different restaurants. I was slightly depressed that I didn't win any raffles, because they were giving out tons of gift cards to Target, Jason's Deli, and Wing Stop. Every day I'd look longingly at my meager stub of a ticket, hearing those first two numbers called out to the delight of my body and soul, only to have the last number, usually a "3" or "9" called out as all hope was lost. Oh well. There's always next week.