Checkpoint, midway through the year
Wow! Hard to believe that we're halfway through the school year! Grades closed on Friday. And what with feb break, spring break, prom and the zillion other distractions of the end of the school year, it's all downhill from here to June.
Academically...
Big change this year, going to five blocks instead of four. All classes shrank from 1:20 to about an hour. But, not surprisingly, I'm ahead of where I was this time last year with algebra, and test scores are matching last year's scores. That extra 0:20 was clearly wasted time anyway ... beyond the attention span of high school students ... and just led to student behavior problems. So everybody's teaching four classes instead of three, and extra paperwork and grading comes with that. But I've been doing this long enough that it's not really a problem.
I've done okay with the two robotics classes. It's been a challenge, because I only had enough VEX kits for one class, so I had to stagger projects and rearrange material for the two classes so that they took turns with the kits. But now that I'm switching into software for the second half of the year, I can start running the same lesson for both classes ... provided I get their laptops all set up with MinGW and the programming software for the Creates. Which I should be doing right about now.
Culture of the school ...
We have discipline problems. The students randomly mill around in the hallways, don't go to class, and don't go to detention. There's no school-wide policy enforced about behavior, and no followthrough for student mis-behavior, unless the teachers do it themselves. Evidently ... and this is complete rumor at this point ... subs coming to the building most dislike doing their time in our quadrant, because the students have the most behavior problems. Other schools have, for example, a staffed detention block after school, with a list of who's supposed to be there, and calls home if they don't show up. Do we? No.
My eventual goal is to get myself into one of the exam schools. The O'Bryant math-and-science school would be the most likely, I expect. It's "low man" on the three-school totem pole, but the students would be a world ahead of the ones here. I consider my time in West Roxbury to be plugging in my hours and sharpening my skills until I'm ready for an exam school. I'm not likely to switch to the suburbs; I can retire after ten years in the BPS, and I'm already a third of the way there. Damn!
Academically...
Big change this year, going to five blocks instead of four. All classes shrank from 1:20 to about an hour. But, not surprisingly, I'm ahead of where I was this time last year with algebra, and test scores are matching last year's scores. That extra 0:20 was clearly wasted time anyway ... beyond the attention span of high school students ... and just led to student behavior problems. So everybody's teaching four classes instead of three, and extra paperwork and grading comes with that. But I've been doing this long enough that it's not really a problem.
I've done okay with the two robotics classes. It's been a challenge, because I only had enough VEX kits for one class, so I had to stagger projects and rearrange material for the two classes so that they took turns with the kits. But now that I'm switching into software for the second half of the year, I can start running the same lesson for both classes ... provided I get their laptops all set up with MinGW and the programming software for the Creates. Which I should be doing right about now.
Culture of the school ...
We have discipline problems. The students randomly mill around in the hallways, don't go to class, and don't go to detention. There's no school-wide policy enforced about behavior, and no followthrough for student mis-behavior, unless the teachers do it themselves. Evidently ... and this is complete rumor at this point ... subs coming to the building most dislike doing their time in our quadrant, because the students have the most behavior problems. Other schools have, for example, a staffed detention block after school, with a list of who's supposed to be there, and calls home if they don't show up. Do we? No.
My eventual goal is to get myself into one of the exam schools. The O'Bryant math-and-science school would be the most likely, I expect. It's "low man" on the three-school totem pole, but the students would be a world ahead of the ones here. I consider my time in West Roxbury to be plugging in my hours and sharpening my skills until I'm ready for an exam school. I'm not likely to switch to the suburbs; I can retire after ten years in the BPS, and I'm already a third of the way there. Damn!