Flat Stanley in Syria

July 10, 2009

Wow! I can’t believe we have been in Syria for 10 days already! Time really flies when you are having fun. In the past week Ms. M and I have been learning our way around Damascus. At first it seems really confusing but after a while you learn how to get around. Now we even know the short cuts! We have also been meeting a lot of new people. Syrians are so nice and everyone tries to help us wherever we go. Everyone on the street says “Welcome!” in English when we walk by. We have also met a lot of students who are studying Arabic just like Ms. M and people who are traveling all over the Middle East. Many people come from Turkey and then to Syria. After, they go to Jordan, Lebanon, and sometimes Egypt. I want to visit all those places too! When people talk about them they all sound like so much fun! Ms. M says we will probably get to go to Jordan and Lebanon. I can’t wait!

Love,
FS

Flat Stanley in Syria

July 3, 2009

Wow! The last two days have been so exciting! Yesterday was our first day in Damascus. (In Arabic it looks like this دمشق). When we first left the hostel I wondered where Ms. M had taken me! The streets were narrow and dirty and the buildings were brown and falling apart. Then we turned a corner and saw a long beautiful street called the “Straight Street.” It was filled with people and all kinds of shops. Then we got to the market. The famous. Middle Eastern souk. (In Arabic it looks like this سوق). There was so much to see I didn’t know where to look first. Instead I let my nose guide me. I smelt exotic spices, strong coffee, and sweet candy. There were all kinds of people in the market too: kids, adults, women in head scarves and some without, tourists, and men in traditional Arab dress. The strange thing was that Ms. M didn’t even take any pictures. She said she knew we’d be back and just wanted to take it all in the first time.

Today we took our first day trip. We went on a car ride with our new English friends Sam and James. They were so nice. Sam was really funny because he kept forgetting my name! He called me Flat Eric once! So anyways, on the trip we went to a place called Bosra to see an ancient theater. You really have to see it to understand how cool it was so I’ll let you see the picture of me there. At Bosra we even saw a camel!

Oh, and I forgot to tell you one other cool thing about our day. To leave our hostel we had to climb down a ladder from the balcony. The hostel is built into the old city walls so going down the ladder is the quickest way out. It was really fun and I wasn’t even scared!

Love,
FS

Flat Stanley in Syria

I think I have mentioned before that I have been doing the Flat Stanley project with my students. I am taking Flat Stanley on my trip to Syria this summer so that I can share my experiences with the students when I get back. I made a little book called "Flat Stanley's Syria Journal" so that Stanley can write to the kids. I thought I'd publish his journal on my blog so that I can share my experiences traveling with you all as well.

July 1, 2009

Hi guys! It's me, Flat Stanley. I've been waiting to go on this trip to Syria with Ms. M for so long and I can't believe it's finally here! Right now we are at the airport in Dubai. Do you know where that is? It's in a country called the United Arab Emirates (or U.A.E. for short). Ms. M and I left New York yesterday morning and had a 13 hour flight! It was so long! We ate two meals, watched three movies, and tried to sleep as much as possible. The next flight to Damascus, Syria is only 3 hours. I can't wait to get there.

Oh, one important thing about our trip: we are traveling to countries where they speak Arabic instead of English. Ms. M has already studied some Arabic but I haven't. I learned my first Arabic word today. It is "marhaba" and it means "hello." In Arabic it looks like this: مرحنا. Cool, right? I can't wait to learn more!

Love,
FS

The End of the Year is Finally Upon Us!

I've been saying all of June that it doesn't feel like school is ending soon. I think it's due to the rainy and cool weather that we've been having in NYC. Normally it is sweltering and all I can think is: IT'S SUMMER!! WE SHOULD NOT BE IN SCHOOL! (And yes, in my head it is a scream.) But this year I haven't had that feeling at all. That is until this week. This week I am just done. I spent this week finishing up odds and ends with the students and cleaning up my room. As of yesterday there is nothing left to do: room's clean, all final assignments are finished. I'm ready to turn in my keys and say goodbye to my classroom and students until September.

The best news of the week was that teachers don't have to come back to school until AFTER Labor Day! This is especially good news for me because I am returning from my big trip to Syria on August 30th. I knew it would kinda suck to get back just two days before reporting back to school but I really wanted to maximize my time traveling. Now I have an ENTIRE week off before we go back to school. I leave June 30th!

Really?

New organization sheets came out yesterday and as usual we got them the very last 5 minutes of the school day. It wasn't stressful at all for me because I didn't even try to switch out of ESL this year to get my own class, but there were a lot of stressed teachers Monday, let me tell you. All in all we lost two teachers (they had been told in advance) and most if not all of our school aides.

The big upset came when the principal told us that she was not satisfied with our extended time schedule. (This year we had switched from after school four days a week to before school five days a week.) Her reasoning was that she "caught" (and yes, she actually used air quotes) teachers eating breakfast, coming in late, and "cutting things for student art projects." Even though she spoke to these teachers, they continued to do it, she claimed. So therefore the schedule had to be switched back to afternoons. I can not tell you how furious this made me (and many other teachers too). To claim that we are not working and that is the reason she is changing the schedule is just ridiculous! And how dare she put the whole staff down like that! We have a hard working staff at my school and if there are one or two or however many teachers doing the wrong thing the solution is not to change the extended time schedule which is working beautifully! (Teachers have not complained about it at ALL this year.)

First of all, I'm sure that is not the real reason she wants to switch the schedule. Second, if the problem IS teachers not working, will the work any harder AFTER school? And third (and perhaps most important), she will not even be at the school next year. She's "retiring." So is this all her last ditch effort to torture us as much as possible before leaving the building for good? Sounds like it.o

P.S. Do you think she won anymore people over to attend her retirement party with this showing??

I don't think so

The other day I was talking with a teacher at my school who is helping to organize the retirement party for my principal in September. It's going to be a big to do with drinks, dinner and dancing (like a wedding I was told). And, it's going to cost $110 to attend. I was asking this teacher if she thought a lot of teachers from our school would attend. She said they were passing out the flyers to see how many might attend. I mentioned that I definitely wouldn't. "$110 is a lot of money," I said. (Especially for a party honoring someone you don't like all that much.)

"What??" She replied. "Even if you save up ALL summer??"

"I don't want to save up all summer. I'm going traveling* I have other things to save up for."

She was truly shocked that I wouldn't want to go. Seriously, by September she will be so far from my mind. Why would I want to bring her back? June 26th we say addios for good.


*I'm going to Syria for the summer! I just booked my ticket. I'm going to be studying Arabic and doing some traveling in Jordan and Lebanon. I've been waiting for this trip for a LONG time!

It's Starting to Happen . . .

A little over two months ago, I wrote about a new student from the DR who came to me speaking no English. She had a rough start, but quickly started feeling more comfortable in class. She has been trying so hard to follow along, copy from her neighbors, and come to me to give her more instruction when she doesn't understand.

Just two weeks ago we had parent-teacher conferences and her dad, who speaks perfect English told me that he was concerned her English wasn't progressing as quickly as he'd hoped (or as quickly as her older brother). He said he had to think about it, but her classroom teacher had suggested she may benefit from being held over a year. (Newcomers can't be held over in the first two years without the parent's request). I tried to assure him that her eagerness to learn along with the great support she is getting at home will go a long way towards helping her progress in her English and other subjects. I told him how hard she has been working and even gave anecdotes about "Willy" and his younger brother who had a similar situation and in two years have sprinted forward to the top of their classes. He seemed slightly reassured.

And all the sudden last week, it started happening. The first thing that I noticed was when she raised her hand to participate in class she said more than her usual irrelevant "boy" or "girl." Then I started noticing she was really able to understand me without translation from the other kids and could ask for help in sentences. When we learned new vocabulary related to "transportation" she mastered the words just as quickly, if not quicker, than the other students. Today, she came up to me to tell me something that another kid in the class needed help with (and that kid *speaks* English). Literally two weeks ago she could not have done any of these things. I was just telling her dad that children learning English often go through a "silent period" where they are not saying much, but taking it all in, and before you know it they are speaking up a storm. I literally saw her turn that corner this week. This is why I love teaching ESL, for these kids. They make it all worthwhile.

Snow Day!

I am still in shock that we actually have a snow day. Everyone knows that NYC does not get snow days. Even when I woke up and saw lots of snow on the ground I knew that we would still have school. (We even had a 7:30 am faculty meeting and our principal hadn't emailed to say that it was canceled.) Of course, I couldn't even check the news to make sure because my roommate just moved out and took the TV with her. I quickly thought the fastest way to find out out if there was a snow day or not would be to check Facebook as all my teacher friends' statuses would either be cheering or grumbling. One teacher from my school had written that she couldn't believe the mayor would have thousands of students traveling to school on buses while urging city residents to take mass transportation to school. So that meant there WAS school. I texted her to ask if at least there was a two hour delay and got in the shower. Just as I was getting out, my phone rang and it was her. "We don't have school! Don't you watch the news??" Still not believing her I said "No! I don't have a TV!"

That was a little over two hours ago and I am thoroughly enjoying my snow day so far. I drank my coffee, surfed the internet a bit, watched an episode of Friday Night Lights on Hulu and am now making a cooked breakfast. It's hard to believe school would have just started by now. As for the rest of my day I am planning a nap, more FNL, and some homemade soup for lunch that I made last night! Ahh, I want this happy day to never end! (And it is still snowing!)

Field Trips, Good and Bad

Last week I took my second and third graders on a wonderful trip to the Met to see the Egyptian art (we had just gotten our Flat Stanley back from Egypt a few weeks prior and were all pumped to learn more about mummies, tombs, and hieroglyphics). Julie came along to help chaperone and she was a wonderful help. The kids were super impressed at the beauty and scale of the museum and they loved seeing the mummies, coffins, and especially the reflecting pool around the Temple of Dendur. Many of them have told me they want to go back and are even pressuring their parents to take them back over Mid-Winter Break next week with the free family passes the museum gave us. Highly successful trip, if I do say so myself.

Today all of the third grade classes took a trip to Toys'R'Us and McDonalds (in Times Square). Yes, that is right. They went to look at toys and eat Happy Meals. I talked to my students who attended the trip and they said that the teachers told them nothing about Times Square except to point out the NYE ball. (All of these kids said they had already been to Times Square with their families anyway, so it's not even like the trip was exposing them to a part of the city they wouldn't normally get to see.) I was so outraged at this pointless trip. There are so many wonderful (and FREE) places to take students in this city that are also educational! How trips like this get approved by our administration is beyond me.

Watching the Inauguration at School

We had major technical difficulties with the internet connection/streaming today at school and I almost missed the whole inauguration. It was (almost) very traumatic.

All of the classes were down in the auditorium by 11:30 and the inauguration was already being projected onto the big screen. (I was impressed that they had gotten everything set up with they way our computer teacher had been running around on Friday trying to figure things out.) We watched until about 11:50 and then the screen went blank. The internet connection was lost and they couldn't get it back. Various teachers were offering up suggestions about finding an actual TV or trying a different news channel. Meanwhile, time was ticking away. Then I saw a second grade teacher making a bee line for the door with her class. I heard her say that it was working on the computer in her room. I followed them up to their room and Obama had just started his speech when we got up there (we missed the actual swearing in). We all huddled around the computer and watched silently as the volume wasn't that great. The cutest part was when the kids joined in singing the national anthem. The whole thing will definitely be an experience I remember forever.

Baby Steps

My new student from the Domincan Republic had a pretty good first day. She seemed to be alert and really trying to figure out what was going on in class so she could follow along. She repeated words the other kids were repeating, moved her mouth like she was reading when the class was doing shared reading, and copied off her neighbor to get something on her paper during writing. Then the second day happened and I think it really hit her that she is now in a new school where everyone speaks English and she has no idea what is going on.

In the morning during our extended time period (where I have a group of only newcomers) she started crying. I tried to get the other kids to ask her in Spanish what was wrong. Finally in between huge sobs she told them she was crying because she didn't speak English. The boy sitting right across from her was new in September and now speaks just a little English but understands quite a bit. I told him to tell her how he didn't know any English in September and now he knows a lot of English. He translated in Spanish and another boy (who arrived just a few months ago) shouted in English frantically, "Me too! Me too!" "Tell her in Spanish," I told him. Then I told Willy to tell her that two years ago he didn't speak any English either. He told her even though he felt a little embarrassed about doing so. She listened to them all and even though she still looked distraught I felt like it was important for her to hear.

The next day (her third in the school) she was still upset at breakfast before coming up to class. Her parents sat with her for a while and then finally brought her up to the class. I decided she needed a little fun and got out the "Go Fish" cards, which the other kids were thrilled about too since they love it when we get to play games in class. At first I played her hand having her repeat everything after me: "Willy, do you have a tropical fish?" Halfway though the game she knew all the kids names and how to say "Do you have?" KC, another first grader with tons of personality was having so much fun making jokes and silly faces at the "go fish" pile when she didn't get the right card. The new girl totally picked up on that and by the end of the game all the kids, including new girl, were laughing hysterically and having the best time. Ever since that day she has been totally fine in class, no more crying.

New Newcomers

I got another new student today. She's a first grader who just arrived from the Dominican Republic and doesn't speak any English (yet). That brings my newcomer group up to eight students! I don't know what it is about this year but four new newcomers in one year is more than I have ever had. The other four students range from two to two and a half years here, so even though they are all "newcomers" there is still quite a range in the abilities of the students in the group. (Especially when you account for some of the being very strong in their native Spanish while others are very behind.) The newcomers are my favorite group to teach so I'm thrilled to be getting a new student. I can't wait to see the students who were brand new at the beginning of the year sort of graduate up to become the students who are translating and helping the new girl.

And speaking of moving up, I've been meaning to write about one student, "Willy," for a little while now. He came to me in the first grade from Ecuador two and a half years ago. At the time he didn't speak a word of English and was incredibly shy to top it off. In the last two and a half years he has learned so much English and grown about a level and a half each year in reading that he's on his way to being almost unrecognizable as an ELL at first glance. He's not there yet, to be sure, but I can really see his progress towards that. It's interesting to see how he fits (or doesn't fit) in the two groups that I see him in. Twice a day he is in my newcomer group working on basic English vocabulary and sentence structures, etc. He can often be heard saying "This is easy!" or predicting what we are about to do and jumping ahead of us on exercises. But still, he needs work building this foundation and each day he does learn new vocabulary and sentence structures that strengthen his academic English. Then, later in the day, I will see him in his grade-level group (with mostly long-term ELLs who are also in third grade) and after the mini-lesson he will immediately say, "This is too hard. I can't do it." With a little extra support and confidence building though, he can. Willy is a very bright student and it's interesting to see him straddle these two groups, one in which he is very confident and another in which he is very unsure of himself and his skills. I love that I have the flexibility to be able teach him in both of these groups because I feel that by working to both strengthen his basic English foundation while challenging him with his academic English, the gap between the two will close rather quickly.

I'm pretty sure that having this big group of newcomers to teach is part of what has made me much more content in my position as the ESL teacher (rather than a classroom teacher) this year.

Snow in the City!

I had a meeting in Lower Manhattan today and the snow started falling just before our lunch break so I was able to get out and catch some of the newly-fallen snow.

There's always some sort of emergency around here

We have an "emergency" faculty meeting tomorrow morning at 7:30 a.m. Rumor has it that it's to discuss the budget. Do other schools have "emergency" faculty meetings? And if you call them "emergency" is it then okay for them to break our union contract by having them, a) more than the regular once per month, and b) before our contractual working hours which begin at 8 a.m.? (Oh, wait, we ALWAYS have our faculty meetings at 7:30 a.m.) I think this is already our second or third emergency meeting of the year.

Email me at my new email address: nyteacherblog@gmail.com

Just say no to Joel Klein as Secretary of Education

Sign the petition. Pass it on.

Election Reaction

My whole school was buzzing about the election yesterday. From Kindergarten up through fifth grade all the kids were aware of what had happened and very excited. In the halls kids were heard shouting "Obama rocks!" and one particular first grader walked up to everyone he saw to tell them "Obama is the new president of the United States!" In my morning "extended day" period I had just two students (a first and a fourth grader) who don't speak much English yet. I tried asking them if they saw the election last night. The fourth grade boy looked at me with a puzzled face that said "I have no idea what you are talking about." Then I said "McCain, Obama." The boy's face lit up with recognition and the little girl perked up and said "Obama!!" with a huge smile. So cute.

Throughout the rest of the day I gave each group of students a chance to say what they saw on T.V., what they thought, or to ask any questions. Almost all of the students had a lot to say. More than half of them said their parents or someone they knew had voted and some even got to go with their parents to see what it was all about. In talking with my students all of them knew that Obama would be the first African-American president. Some other tidbits from the day:

-A second grade girl said "His dad is from Africa, and I'm from Africa too."
-A fifth grade boy wanted to know why McCain was motioning with his hands during his speech. (I explained how he didn't want people to boo when he was congratulating Obama.)
-Many students wanted to know if McCain was mad that he didn't win.
-One of my newcomer ELLs asked "What happened to the girl who was always with Obama before?" (Hilary Clinton)
-I was impressed when one third grader knew that the donkey was for the Democrats and the elephant was for the Republicans. Many more students knew the colors, probably from watching the map the night before.

After spending most of each class talking about the election, I made a web of things we had talked about and had the students do a "quick write" for five minutes about the election. (Our first QW of the year.) They all wrote for a solid five minutes and had good things to say based on what we had talked about.

I was very excited for the whole day and I had a great time talking about the election with all of my kids.

I voted!

The "Spelling Chip"

Today I tried a new strategy with my first and second grade classes that I adapted from a video I saw in PD this week. In the video the teacher explained how when she did centers/guided reading with her students she was getting a lot of questions from students that they really could answer themselves. It was getting to the point where she couldn't do her small group instruction because of the interruptions so she came up with a system where each group of students got a "question chip" in which they could use once during the 90 minute centers time to ask a question. This made me think of my lower grade classes and how all of the students are constantly asking me how to spell words that are on the word wall or that in any case they could be attempting on their own. I sometimes tell them to try on their own and other times end up helping three kids spell words simultaneously. It was getting out of hand.

Today I introduced the "Spelling Chip." Each student got a chip (really a math counter) that they could use to ask me how to spell a word. I explained how they could only use it once so they should try to save it for a really tricky word. We reviewed the different ways they could try to spell a word if they didn't know how (word wall, stretch it out, look around the room, ask a friend) and I stressed that even if they didn't spell the word correctly I would be very happy to see that they tried.

It worked like a charm. Only two (TWO!!) students asked me to help them spell a word because they were so interested in "saving" their chip. I still went around the room helping the students with their writing and in some of those cases helped them with spelling and sounding out words, but for the first time I didn't have a huge mob of seven year-olds around me asking me how to spell every single word.

I'm hoping that it wasn't just the novelty that was exciting for them and that we can keep this system going. (It's nice because the tangible aspect of it keeps me on track too.)

I Love My Little Ones

One of my favorite students, a first grader, asked me this week why I take another boy in her class three times a day but her only once a day. She loves me and coming to ESL class so she was very serious in trying to figure out this huge injustice in her six year old life. I tried to explain to her that her classmate only spoke a little English so he needed extra help so he could learn. She was very understanding, "Yeah, he only speaks a little bit English. Not that much." The she added in a whisper, "He said that you play games with him," hoping to dispel his rumor. "That's true. You can learn by playing games too," I told her. Then she said very sternly, "To learn you have to do a lot of *homework*! Not play games!!"

I don't know what's funnier: that a first grader reprimanded me for playing games in class or imagining two six year olds discussing coming to my class and what they do there.