student teaching week seven

This week I started at Gresham Middle School with Carole Romeiser, and I like it well. I was concerned about how much I would like the "unbridled puberty" of middle school, but so far it's a hoot. That said, I'm probably seeing them at their best in the library, with more adults in the room than probably any other single place in the building. The library is one kinda mid-sized square-ish space, with fiction hardbacks around one side, non-fiction around the other, biography on a small set of freestanding shelves in the center, and fiction paperbacks divided by genre on bookstore-style racks in a couple of places. There's a computer lab on the side with the fiction, as well as some table space between the computers and the office/circ desk area, where the kids sit while Carole gives announcements and instruction. There's also table space on the other side, but less of it, since there are more shelves in that space to hold all the nonfiction. Carole's office is in the back, behind the circ desk and directly opposite the entrance. There's another office space next to that which holds their school store, and then there are two office spaces on either side of the entrance, one of which has a workroom with the laminators, and the other of which is a small ESL classroom. Carole has a part-time secretary and a steady schedule of parent volunteers, so at any given time when kids are there, there might be Carole, me, the secretary, the kids' classroom teacher, the ESL teacher, a volunteer, the technology guy who's been working on the lab, and any other teacher working in there. This is why I think maybe the kids are seeing more adults than usual when they're in the library. :)

So far I've been doing mostly a lot of shadowing Carole, seeing everything I can see. I managed to front-load all of my required activities into my high school segment (but no worries, Marion, I'm not going to stop doing things!), which frees me up to have a lot of flexibility on what I do from here out.

Monday's inservice was pretty interesting to go through. We spent the morning in meetings with the principal and two leadership teams of the teachers, so I got an earful and eyeful of faculty politics at work. A lot of people were at a lot of other people's throats, and the principal worked REALLY hard at making things look positive and effective anyway (to her credit), and the people who've later been identified to me as the "good guys" think a lot of the complaints were wholly unfounded. Basically, they are trying to implement vertical (between grade levels) and horizontal (between teachers on the same grade level) planning so that they can hopefully guarantee that all the kids are mastering the same essential skills without wasteful redundancy, but many of the teachers are really resisting anything that makes them work together--including letting the librarian and technology teacher work with them, even when that means Carole teaches the class for them and they don't actually have to do anything. Carole worked at another school for some years and did some truly incredible-sounding interdisciplinary research projects there, and she's really frustrated that she's been at Gresham for four years now and has been able to eke out only very minimal buy-in from teachers to do the same thing here, even with the principal's support.

Then on tuesday we had the system-wide inservice with all the high school and middle school librarians, which I thought was a very pleasant crowd to hang out with all day. I spent the day in two long sessions, smartboard training in the morning and activboard training in the afternoon. I was hoping not just to learn about how to use them, but to get a feel for what the differences were (a LOT) and for which I'd rather have if I was in position to need to purchase one, which I'm still confused on. The activboard (designed originally for schools) would do a lot more stuff and seemed more durable, but the smartboard (designed originally for businesses) seemed a lot more user-friendly. Apparently the schools in Knox Co. are about half and half as to who owns which kind.

The rest of the week was spent settling into the new routine. Carole had pretty thick schedules of seventh graders coming in as classes for checkout on wednesday and thursday, so I kept pretty busy running circ and shelving, and friday there were no classes so we just had open access and took care of a lot of little tasks here and there (entered some internet use permission forms, bought some things for the AR store, etc.)