I haven't blogged about my class in a little while because, well, it's been a very strange time. The weeks following Mia's death were painful at best, and it didn't help that that time period feel right in between the snow day-palooza that took over the Midwest. That said, this month started off taking quite a toll. But just like every other day-to-day and week-by-week in this experience, the ups and downs are consistently high and extremely low and as unpredictable as ever.
This last week was a special week for me personally because my boyfriend flew in for a St. Louis visit. It had been eight weeks since we had last seen each other over Winter Break, and it couldn't have been a better visit. I could go on and on but I'm going to skip to where he tied in to the TFA life this week; my special visitor accompanied me to both Saturday school and a full communication arts period Wednesday before he left.
That's right, my boyfriend ventured into my school and my crazy life not once, but twice. It meant so much to have him want to know for himself where I am and what I'm doing and now he will know, just like my friend now does after her visit, what I'm actually talking about when I trap him on the phone with cries of despair and joy.
Saturday School was a good start because only a few students were there and we just gave pre-tests for each subject. Those are our target students who are invited to Saturday School, those students in the range of passing the MAP (Missouri standardized test). The real test was the real visit to MY class on Wednesday, one that isn't easy for my loved ones to make. But Mr. Bikowski did a great job, and thank goodness the kids weren't a total handful that morning. They were definitely curious about our visitor, but they liked the attention. A.J. watched the kids, corrected them, read with them, helped them - it was great.
One of the harder parts of this crazy experience is the immense separation anxiety - separation from the real world and, at times, a feeling of separation from the thread that connects me to all the people I love. I know that my best friends and my family are there for me and we love one another and we care so much for one another's lives, but sometimes it's hard to cross that barrier that separates the me I was in the world I was in and the new me in what seems to be some place on the corner of the Bermuda Triange and the Twilight Zone.
I'm so lucky to have had three of my favorite people come to my classroom and see for themselves the faces and voices that dominate my life. Talking to those people about what they observed and how reality measured up to their expectations really makes me think about the changes that we've made and my perspective - how it's changed and maybe where I need to adjust what I see.
Every now and then, well that really is just about every afternoon, I need to take a step back and look at what happens in my classroom. I'll see things that need to change, I'll see things that have changed, and I'll see things I never saw before. And I'll also see the things that I need to accept that I cannot change. It doesn't sound very TFA, but I do know that sometimes I have to choose my battles. So far, I've been choosing all of them, and I don't think I do my students service my doing that. The ongoing lessons .... will I ever learn?

We had a good class today. We had a good class in that every single student got one-on-one time with me, and several more (almost all) in small group time with me working on their reading, blending, and comprehension. It was good in that I made an excellent point to get real CFUs from every student in attendance, we learned our centers game as a class before venturing onto real centers, and there was top differentiated reading, review, and teaching throughout the day without really any whole-group lessons aside from the explanation of the games and extensive spelling games.
But, too much was missing for it to be a truly successful 206 day. Because too many of my students weren't there. Students out for suspensions (who I looked for all day), students out due to transferring to other schools, students out because of the insane snow days of recent, and then because of our lost student. While it was a progressive day for the present members of 206, it is never really satisfying to know that you were a great teacher to SOME of yours kids.
If we could do that with my original 27 students, it would be a good day. What does that mean? The fix in the real problem behind the gap. I can teach kids, even as a first-year teacher with no experience, how to go from letter sounds to small sentences and short blends to paragraphs. I can teach a student to add and subtract, skip count and identify figures.
But the real challenge lies in those numbers, those missing students today. Attendance, behavior, attitude, homelessness, sickness. The internal and external underlying factors give our students in low-income communitities a cracked foundation on which to build their academic landscapes. How do we expect them to measure up? The parents can do it, the teachers can do it, the students can do it - but we have to do it all, together.
Just a last-minute thought on a Friday night, looking at my 14-student roster today.