Fourth confession: Part of the reason I didn't immediately fit in as an elementary school teacher was because 4th grade was the last time I was actually in an elementary school classroom, and I don't remember it all that well. I was about ready to teach 5th grade, and I never actually attended 5th grade. But more on that in a moment...
My start in Las Vegas, once I had completed Institute in LA, was by no means smooth. My son and I had an apartment to go to, but the moving company I'd hired to get all of my furniture and boxes from the storage unit in California to Nevada were much later than I'd expected. Thus, my son and I found ourselves sleeping on the floor of an empty apartment once we'd arrived, once and for all, in Las Vegas. Another TFA corps member was kind enough to lend me an air mattress, blankets, and pillows to get us through those first few nights, and I very much appreciated it.
The movers did finally arrive, though, and we began the process of moving in. We unloaded boxes, decorated walls, and set up Internet and cable access. Little by little, it began to feel like some rendition of "home."
There were still a few weeks before school started, but those few weeks were filled with events: First, there was TFA kick-off, the last meeting to feature the entire 2013 Las Vegas Valley corps, which would be a two-day meeting to help us transition from Institute to full-on teachers in our own classrooms. Also, I would be reporting to my school for a week-long introduction. During this time, I'd attend meetings and trainings specific to my school, and start setting up my classroom. Lastly, I would need to attend a three-day-long teacher initiation -- that all new teachers in Clark County had to attend -- at the Venetian. The week following that, we'd begin our journeys as teachers.
TFA kick-off was very similar to both Induction and Institute, filled with team-building games and teacher-building discussions, but there was also one major difference. During kick-off, we worked specifically with our MTLD (again, the leader who would work most closely with us during our first year as teachers and assist in our growth and development). Christy, my MTLD (again, not her real name) was a veteran teacher who had served as a TFA corps member many years prior. She would be working with a couple dozen of us corps members -- some from the 2013 corps, and some from the 2012 corps -- and, together, we would come to be known as "Christy's cohort." Each MTLD had a cohort of their own, but Christy's focused specifically on elementary school teachers from a variety of schools.
She would be our leader, our mentor, the person we went to with questions, the person we reported to ... for all intents and purposes, she was our TFA "boss." We had to answer to our school administration and the district, but we also had to answer to Christy.
Christy, I'll point out here, was very passionate about her work, but she also carried with her an inner weariness that I wouldn't fully understand for some time. I would come to develop very conflicted feelings for Christy -- conflicted because she was a sincerely good person who cared about the people in her cohort (she, for example, took my cats in and watched them when, at a point during Institute I had nowhere else to take them), but she also tended to embody some the aspects of TFA that I would grow to despise, and also tended to play right into the negative experiences that eventually tore me apart and left me wanting to quit.
But I'm getting ahead of myself.
Back to my confession. My mother, despite having meant well, was a very controlling person who was so smothering -- and that's not even a strong enough word; she was so asphyxiating, suffocating, and quenching -- in her parenting that I think it bordered on abuse. I was not allowed to walk across the street to a friend's house -- she had to walk me. I wasn't allowed to ride bikes or go anyplace with friends if she was not there. I was not, even as a teenager, allowed to go someplace with a friend if that friend's parent wanted to drive us anywhere (she'd only let me go if she could drive me to a place and pick me up from that specific place, and that was even as a teenager). I wasn't allowed to go on school field trips unless she was allowed to go (if, heaven forbid, another parent was chosen to go instead of her, she'd keep me home that day). I had arguments with her about my lack of freedom, and her response was that was, as soon as I could demonstrate that I could escape a bear hug from my large father, she'd let me have more freedom. Even at 19 -- 19, for fuck's sake -- she sat outside a cast party I was attending and barged in to get me once she thought I'd been in there too long. She sabotaged a study abroad program I'd been accepted into in college, as well as a Disney college program I'd been accepted into, because she was absolutely sure that I wasn't ready to be on my own so far away from home, and she convinced me of such.
You get the idea.
So, anyway, when I was in grammar school my mother got tired of dealing with issues pertaining to the school (what, specifically, those issues were, I don't remember anymore, though I do know it had something to do with a spat between her and my 4th grade teacher), and so she decided to pull my younger sister and I out and home school us. Now, my mother had no college degree and no teacher training at all, but she began to act as my teacher during my 5th grade year. And she was, mind you, entirely negligent in how she went about "educating" us, but that's another story that shall be told another time.
Anyway, during kick-off Christy divided her cohort into grade levels, and then asked each grade level to write things that they remembered about that year in their own lives. What was the teacher like? What did we learn? How did we learn it? During that moment, I felt embarrassed and not quite able to write, "I stayed at home, my mom was my teacher, and she gave me teacher books to study from and then had me grade my own tests." So, instead, I made up a concoction of things that happened during my 3rd grade year and my 4th grade year and presented it as what my 5th grade year was like. It was mostly a lie, or not actually relevant to what Christy was trying to do, but it's what I had in the moment.
I'm not sure how things might have been different if I'd been honest at that point. I remember approaching Christy during a break on that day and relaying to her just how scared I was about entering my own classroom. "I'm not really sure what I'm doing," I remember telling her, thinking about the state standards that I had yet to learn, as well as the teaching methods and curricula and materials that I had yet to grasp.
She'd smiled at me. "Kate, plenty of people have taught 5th grade before." She said it in such a way as though to suggest that it wasn't really that hard, and that I'd be fine. How I was feeling, though, was that she may as well have told me, "Kate, plenty of people have changed the oil in a car before," and then left me to find the tools and instructions to do so.
As I said, kick-off lasted for a couple of days, and then I headed to my school for initiation and training.
Principal Lilian Lawrence (so not her real name) presided over new teacher meetings and school-wide expectation meetings. She introduced Amy (fellow new TFA teacher) and I to Ruby and Jordan, also TFA teachers. It's important to note here that Ruby and Jordan were known as star TFA teachers. Ruby had actually come from another state, a state in which she had gone through traditional teacher training and had been recognized with teaching awards in that state. She joined TFA simply because she believed in its mission to end educational inequity. She was an awesome teacher, and brought that to our school. The previous year, she'd been assigned to teach 2nd grade, but this year she had been "promoted" to 4th grade (and my son, an incoming 4th grader, would be in her class). Jordan, too, was being "promoted," going from a 3rd grade teacher the previous year to not only a 5th grade teacher, but the 5th grade lead teacher (and unlike Ruby, as a 2012 corps member Jordan really was only in his second year of teaching).
I thought this idea of "promotion," from a lower grade to a higher grade, was strange. We were all elementary school teachers, after all, and we were all paid based on our experience and education level -- not on what grade level we taught. Why was moving from a lower grade up to 3rd, 4th, or 5th grade deemed a "promotion?" And further, why was moving down, from 3rd, 4th or 5th grade to Kinder, 1st, or 2nd, deemed a demotion?
And it was, too. I met a 3rd grade teacher named Ken Witty (that is his real name, because I know he won't mind if I use it), who had actually been a 5th grade teacher the year before (in my classroom, no less). He didn't get along with Principal Lawrence at all, though, and she'd moved him down to 3rd grade as a result of that. I found out that if you were not well liked, or else did not perform up to expectations, you were moved down grade levels. At our school, it was common knowledge that moving up grade levels was a "promotion," and moving down grade levels was a "demotion," and it didn't take long to figure that out, either. As a 5th grade teacher, I was at the top of the proverbial food chain at that school, and it seemed so strange to me that that was the case.
I told Amy as much. During a conversation one day, I told her how I thought that it was really weird how upper grades were really treated as more important at this school, especially since fundamentals are taught in the lower grades -- fundamentals that are crucial to success in the higher grades. I asked her why she thought this was the case.
"Testing grades," she told me, without thinking about it too much. "The upper grades are the testing grades, so that's why some people think they matter more."
During that first week at school, I learned a whole lot about tests, and just how important they were. I heard about the data we'd be collecting throughout the year (Aimsweb data, Discovery Education data, Accelerated Reader data, math facts data, and Core Phonics data), and how we'd use them to prepare our students for the be-all-end-all, most-important-test-of-all-tests, the CRT (Criterion Reference Test). The CRT, taken at the end of the year, would apparently produce scores that would affect our school's star rating and, therefore, my principal's reputation. To Principal Lawrence, the CRT was everything, and tracking preparatory data until the day of that test was almost as important.
During some of the meetings that week, we discussed data collection, but I still had no idea what Aimsweb, DE, AR, math facts, Core Phonics, or any of it looked like. The strategists leading the meetings seemed to think that we all knew what they were talking about, though, and questions regarding what these were or how they were administered were met with wide eyes and gaping expressions, as though they couldn't quite believe that any qualified teacher wouldn't know what these things were already. Such expressions were immediately followed, usually, by a brief (and unhelpful, at least for me) run-through of these data-collecting systems before quickly moving on to something new. I learned to keep my mouth shut about not understanding a thing, but this also caused my anxiety levels to reach peak highs.
The data tracking was to be done damn near everywhere in the school. The bulletin board that first greeted teachers as they entered the building (near our principal's office) was reserved for teacher data, and it displayed the phrase "Data Drives Instruction" across the top. The bulletin boards that lined the halls wouldn't be reserved for student work -- they were to display data (the boards that corresponded to our classrooms were supposed to show AR data, and the other boards would show test data by grade level). And within my classroom, one of the boards needed to be devoted to data tracking as well. I had no idea how to do this, as I had no idea exactly what I was tracking or how I was going to track it.
I did my best, though. I had decided to use a Harry Potter theme in my classroom (I even bought Hogwarts House banners to hang in the classroom, and set up my desks in long rows beneath them so that I could "sort" the students on the first day of school). So, for my data tracker, I set up a a board that was vertically lined with numbers (0 - 50, in increments of 10, which was arbitrary at the time since I didn't know what I was actually tracking or how to track it), and created little silhouette witches on broomsticks to represent the students.
When Principal Lawrence came in to see how my room was coming along, she stared at the data board for a while. I don't think she was quite sure what to make of it. She really did believe in me as a new TFA teacher, though, so she didn't question it. She just looked at it. Then she turned and began to leave almost as abruptly as she'd come in, stopping to briefly comment on a stack of leveled books that sat atop my classroom bookshelf: "Oh, I'm glad you have these. You can go through them and use them for your reading groups and RTI."
I nodded enthusiastically, even though I wasn't quite sure what she meant. Luckily, she turned and brisked out of the room.
At that moment, I felt a small surge of panic. Reading groups? RTI? I knew, though experience with my son's education, that such things involved the use of centers -- which I thought were pretty standard in elementary school classrooms. But I'd asked Michaela (my CMA from Institute, remember?) about centers and how to implement them back when I was at Institute. I'd hoped for either information about a training in centers, or else that Michaela would help me out one-on-one with them. They seemed to me to involve a lot of planning and management skill, and the idea seemed overwhelming, so I wanted help with them.
But Michaela had told me, "Oh, don't worry about that. Centers are a pretty advanced classroom strategy. I wouldn't worry about using them during your first year."
Yeah. No centers during my first year, according to Michaela (who actually taught in Clark County, no less). And yet, here I was, about ready to embark as a teacher, facing the requirement that I would need to use centers so that I could implement small reading groups.
And then, along with that, was the RTI requirement. RTI stands for Response To Intervention, and the idea behind it (which I wouldn't actually learn until I took my special education class over the summer), is to provide intense reading intervention for extremely low students before referring them to the special education team for testing. It's like, if a child might qualify for special education, you've got to try to intervene first (and collect loads of data and documentation on that intervention). Classroom teachers, in Clark County, anyway, are supposed to perform this intervention for 30 minutes on a daily basis. And at my school, the process of choosing students for this intervention had nothing to do with whether they might qualify for special education; rather, we would use one specific piece of reading data, choose our six lowest kids, and form a special, 30-minute reading group that served as our "intervention" of the day.
But, again, this was something I kind of learned along the way. I had no idea what RTI was, or how to teach it (hell, I didn't even know the first thing about teaching a small reading group) at first.
I learned more about Clark County's reading framework (something I would hear about again and again and again down the road) once I attended teacher orientation at the Venetian. There were hundreds of new teachers there, all recruited to help pull Clark County out of the educational quagmire it was in, and all of us were separated for individual sessions by grade level. Over the course of the 3-day event, what I remember most was being introduced to that framework. In the framework, we were required as classroom teachers to make sure that our reading block was a certain length: About 30 minutes of whole group reading instruction, about an hour of small group instruction (complete with literacy centers), and 30 minutes of RTI. There was a specific time frame for language arts and writing, too. There were also 80 required minutes of math, and a teacher was supposed to fit science and social studies in where they could. We were taught to "integrate" those subjects -- that is, to focus specifically on reading and math, and to "teach" social studies and science within those subjects by, like, making sure our assigned readings were science-y or social studies-ish.
Aside from reading groups and RTI, I also learned what my specific school requirements would be regarding lesson plans. Each lesson had to be linked to a standard, and needed to contain all of the following: 1) the standard being addressed, 2) the daily objective, 3) the materials that would be used, 4) the "essential big question," 5) the vocabulary being taught, 6) the procedure that would be used, 7) how I would close the lesson, and 8) how I would assess the lesson. I needed all of this for each subject -- for my reading lesson, my math lesson, my language arts lesson, and my writing lesson. Further, I needed this for each of the reading group lessons I would be teaching (about 3 a day), for the RTI lesson I would be teaching, and I also needed to be explicit about my centers, and which literacy standard(s) each center was aligned to. Also, I needed to make sure that my lessons outlined which other standards (science, social studies, speaking and listening) were being addressed in these lessons.
I keep using the word "overwhelmed." It's really an understatement in terms of how I was feeling. I used Jordan's lesson plans as a template, but it helped only slightly. I didn't know yet about the resources (such as Teachers Pay Teachers) that would eventually make my life much easier.
The weeks in Vegas leading up to the first day of school culminated on our last Friday before the start of the year. In CCSD, this Friday is designated, district-wide, as a kind of "back to school" day, in which parents and families come to school to meet their teachers and see their rooms. I had spent a lot of time making my room very Harry Potter-esque, and I put on a witch's hat and played Harry Potter music in the background, but despite all of the dazzle I put into making this day a good one, I was very anxious to meet my students and their families.
In essence, I was terrified that they were going to take one step into my classroom and realize that I was not a real teacher. Part of the reason I felt this way was because I didn't feel like a real teacher, and I was not overly prepared. I greeted everyone warmly throughout the afternoon, though, and did my best to answer questions and show the students around the room. Some parents wanted to know where their child's seat was, and I patiently explained, each time, that they would be "sorted" into Houses on the first day. They looked at me skeptically, but didn't ask further about it.
One set of parents had a very high-achieving daughter, a GATE student whom they were very concerned about regarding her education (they were the parents who wanted to make sure that their child was receiving a high-quality education at all times). Though my stomach sank at this, I referred confidently to my data board and made a very bold statement: "Most of my students exceed expectations by the end of the year, so you have nothing to worry about." They left happy, of course, but this left me feeling guilty and anxiety-torn.
Other parents approached me out of concern for different reasons. Some parents confided to me that their child was very "low" academically, and wanted to know whether I could help them. I assured them that I could -- that I would approach each student individually and give her or him whatever it was they needed. Others expressed concern that their child's behavior in class -- whether they were known to be talkative or any number of things -- might keep them from excelling. I communicated confidence that I could reach each student, again, as individuals and make sure their learning environment was what it needed to be to ensure success.
Lie after lie after lie. It's not that I didn't believe in what I said, or that I didn't hope to do everything I could for my students. I just wasn't at all confident that I actually could do the things I said I would do. But it was hard enough not believing in myself -- I didn't need to start the year with parents not believing in me, either.
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