Whew! Glad I didn’t go overboard with stressing about these tests – they were far easier than I expected.

I took two practice tests in the Kaplan and CliffsPrep review books for the Multi-Subject CST and the LAST. The practice tests were easier than the actual test. The CliffsPrep book was tremendously helpful with its review of literacy terminology. Other than that, just reviewing how to add, multiply and divide fractions, refreshing my use of basic mathematical logic and familiarizing myself with the way the questions were written seemed to be enough.

I tested at the 125 West 18th Street building. We were supposed to show up at 7:45 a.m. The line was a full city block long – it went from the front of the building to the corner of 6th and 18th, down to the corner of 6th and 19th, down to the corner of 19th and 7th Ave. and back to the entrance of the building! I was surprised at how many people were taking the tests – of course not everyone was there for the Multi-Subject CST and LAST. I met a woman taking the Dance CST – who knew?!

Good luck to everyone who took NYSTCE exams today! Hope we all aced them with flying colors.

I’ve met quite a few of you so far and you are all so amazingly talented, positive and focused. It’s very impressive. We’re in for an exciting year full of joys and stresses, but I’m convinced we’ve got the strength individually and collectively to get ‘er done.

I can’t wait to see how these friendships blossom as we turn into skilled teachers. Please everybody keep your heads up. Let’s figure out ways to turn this hiring freeze into frozen non-alcoholic drinks (or something…looking for a metaphor…not finding one.)

Don't worry, it's virgin.

A couple of teaching fellows I spoke to afterward recounted conversations with school representatives in which they were told the schools were not actually considering new teachers, even though they were in a position to hire them. The mood was definitely not an optimistic one. Fellows literally sweated as the lines inched forward. Our conversations were about nothing but the hiring freeze, the curt responses (or lack thereof) we’ve received from sending out or dropping off our resumes and the group interviews they’ve attended that were conducted in an unprofessional manner (f-bombs were spoken during a recruitment session at which there were at least 6 new fellows, including me, in one interview group).

It’s all beginning to feel like a maze leading nowhere. “Why are we being interviewed by schools that later say they want only experienced teachers?” one fellow asked. “Why were we accepted into the program only to be pushed aside by even the most high-need schools because of the freeze?” My question is, why were we accepted to become teachers when there were already hundreds of teachers not working in classrooms who ostensibly want to be working?

On that last note (and this is going to make some readers angry, I’m sorry but I’m trying to get at the truth), a number of principals with whom I’ve interviewed have voluntarily told me that they “can’t find enough ‘qualified’ ATR teachers” to fill their 60% slots. They are frustrated that the DOE has tied their hands.

By telling me this information, they pulled me in to the conversation. I asked these principals if there was a way for them to access just the ATR teachers’ information and target their recruiting specifically at them. All of the principals told me the same thing (and I have no reason to believe they know each other – they are all in different boroughs and far out in each of those boroughs, I might add) – “At least 50% of the ATR teachers do not have contact information (resumes, email addresses) listed on the Open Market and I can’t contact them.” The ones they have contacted, they say, have not responded to their phone calls or emails or come to their recruiting events.

Trying to be an informed person, I’m aware of the UFT’s assertion that the ATR teachers are great teachers who want to teach and who have been actively searching for jobs but are being discriminated against. So, is it just another poisonous rumor that 50% have no resumes or emails listed? Is it possible that the principals with whom I’ve interviewed were telling me this stuff  because they have agendas? Why would they share this information with a teaching fellow – with someone that they haven’t hired? Does that mean it’s true? And if so, why isn’t the union fixing this to get those ATR teachers some email addresses so they can network and get placed asap? If it’s not true, are the principals just trying to make me anti-union?

In the words of the principal with whom I interviewed today, “I’m not sure what effect this hiring freeze is going to have on the profession, both in terms of inspiring more people to become teachers and the morale of the incoming cohorts of future teachers.”

Thoughts?

Oh, and to answer the anonymous commenter who wants me to “focus on what really matters – teaching children well,” I would like to say that I’m doing that to the maximum extent possible (reading UbD, Differentiating Instruction, Harry Wong, Dr. Fred Jones in addition to the NYCTF book and pre-training activities, visiting nearly 20 schools and soliciting advice from teachers I know), but if I don’t find a job this fall, I still won’t be “teaching kids well” no matter how much reading and observing and demo lesson-ing I’ve done.

The past two weeks have been a whirlwind of activity. I’ve had three group interviews, two demo lessons (following the interviews) and was told by the third principal that due to the hiring freeze, she couldn’t continue interviewing me (even though she wanted to). She forwarded my resume along to other principals and I am so grateful!

The first demo was a mini-lesson (15 minutes) with 9th graders. I could have spent 2 days with those kids! They were really, really awesome and so thoughtful and critical of what I had them reading.

The school had proposed the lesson’s subject matter and I developed these original source material photocopies for the students to read about the subject matter and write questions they had in a graphic organizer. (I feel strongly about giving students original source material that’s not pre-processed explanations of societal events and structures, so that they have to process it themselves. I used informational and analytical news articles, travel guides, interviews with people discussing the societal structure in their own words and other material that was not from a student-focused type of text). The students asked me great questions and just were so interested in the subject matter that I felt like there was no way 15 minutes was enough time to interact with them like they seemed to want me to.

Afterward, the principal said the lesson was “great” and asked me how I thought it went. I said that I thought I could have differentiated better and even provided much more challenging texts for the students to read. I explained that I felt the classroom management was good, the kids were really on task and when I saw that they seemed to be done with one reading and getting bored, I came over to their desk to see what they had already accomplished, to answer questions and to give them more challenging texts to read, in order to prevent the boredom from turning into disruptions. (Is this called scaffolding? I need to understand what that word really means).

Hopefully, I’ll be back for an all-staff interview at this school. So far I feel like I would love to work here. The school is very focused on creating a college-bound mindset, and it shows. The students are doing Socratic Seminar and when they do, their questions and thoughts are astoundingly astute. It’s a very, very new school just finishing its first year, and the whole staff are traditionally-certified and trained teachers, so I feel like being a Fellow among them would push me to improve very quickly as a teacher.

The second demo lesson was just today. I did a lesson on metaphors for middle school students. I’ve had a preference for teaching middle school for some time, and meeting these students made me feel more solid in that preference.

In terms of my pre-demo mood, I was a lot more relaxed than I was for the last lesson. Not having gone through training and needing to do demo lessons is extremely, extremely stressful and in my first lesson, I felt like the stress made me less organized. I felt better this time around and generally trusted my instincts about how to interact with students more. Plus, I feel like I created a much more organized lesson plan with a clearer flow. I also had 45 minutes instead of 15, and that helps!

The lesson started with an individual activity that the students actually told me they liked a lot. Two or three of them raised their hands and when I came over to their desks, they whispered “This is good! I like this!”

The class remained quiet during the individual activity and I was able to write the aims on the dry-erase board. After that, I tried to get the students to say what they knew about metaphors. They all seemed really reluctant to talk/shy. It’s possible they just didn’t know what metaphors were, or that I didn’t ask a clear enough question, and I’m going to work on that for next time. One student did say “A metaphor is a comparison” which was the answer I was looking for. I explained more of the nuances of metaphors, explained what we would be doing for the rest of the class and started the 2nd part of the lesson.

As a class, we analyzed a poem and a song that both use metaphors heavily. After reading the poem a couple of times, I tried to get the students to say the metaphors they heard/read. They were very quiet and I wasn’t sure how long to let them stare at me like “what? I don’t understand” and when to give the answer. What I didn’t think about and was pointed out to me after the lesson was that I didn’t ask clear enough questions. I’ll definitely have to work on that. The observers told me later that I could have spent 15 minutes just on one line of the poem and that I didn’t seem to gauge the kids’ understanding well enough, which I really, really want to do better! So much of this is learning from mistakes that we’ll make as first-year teachers, so I relish the constructive criticism they gave me!

There was one student with a lot of energy who frequently went off-task. I noticed that this student was always finished with the work before the disruptions happened, so I had this student hand out the next reading to work off some of that energy.

Overall, I felt like I did a really good job for this being my 2nd lesson ever! I do hope that the staff sees some strengths in what I did and hires me. This school seems like it has so much going for it – thoughtful, opinionated students; very VERY talented teachers and administrators; a great philosophy and a commitment to real-world, hands-on learning; a sense of democracy wherein the students have a say in a lot of the activities they do.

I was very nervous after the interview following the demo lesson. I did get a sense that the standard was very high for teachers at this school and that there was no way I could have met that standard today, even though I exceeded my own expectations for this one day. So, here’s hoping!

I’m making relationships with principals that are yielding results in the form of recommendations to other principals. Yes!

I’m pretty bummed that a principal who said they really want to hire me cannot because their school has just passed the 3-year mark. I really liked their school and the teachers there were amazing – so full of joy about teaching students, the students at the school and the school environment. Although I can’t be hired, this week I’m spending a day at this school to meet the students and see the teachers in action. That’s positive. Like NYCTF said, we should be putting ourselves “at the top of the pile” for when the restrictions are lifted. If the restrictions are lifted.

I also spent a day with four teachers and about 100 students on a class trip to the New York Botanical Gardens. It was awesome! I got to teach the teenagers a little about what I knew about plants (bergamot orange trees, agave plants and vanilla orchids) and they seemed enthralled. I also got to help with a little discipline, finding students who didn’t stay with the group and motivating them to rush and meet up with the rest of the class (a few girls who were busy taking glamour shots of themselves in the “rainforest” for their MySpace pages. Um – not appropriate on school time, ladies!) It was a really great experience. I left that day remembering how much I enjoy the interactions with students and seeing them get interested in information.

Vanilla Planifolia (Madagascar) - this orchid's pods contain vanilla beans. Whoever said "vanilla" meant "boring?"

Agave Plant = Agave Nectar, a sweetener for tea, coffee, juice, even baking that's safer for diabetics because it doesn't raise your blood glucose levels as high as plain white sugar does.

Bergamot Oranges - grown in Southeast Asia. The peel is turned into an essential oil that's used in 50% of all women's perfume (and is great for relieving stress as an aromatherapeutic incense).

I wish I could do some official student teaching (for more than 2-3 weeks this summer). It really would be invaluable and lots of fun. I’d feel much more confident with more classroom experience.

That’s all for now. I’m trying to enjoy this holiday weekend even though I’ve got the demo lesson this week and I’m really nervous about it. Wish me luck!

I quote

“All of the interviews I had set up have now been canceled with no alternative dates established…Prior to the decision by my buddy Joel, I interviewed at 4 of the most difficult schools in New York. 2 schools offered a position on the spot. All offers were rescinded after the announcement by the chancellor.”

While I disagree with my fellow Fellow’s opinion of the teachers in the ATR, because I can’t possibly know if they are “good” or “piss poor” [for that matter, who can know such a thing for certain? Isn't a lot of it subjective (I don't trust standardized tests more than their average scores), depending on the observer's philosophy, the most recent methods coming out of Teachers College and their own preferred teaching style? I digress.] I am feeling some of the same feelings he’s feeling!

I actually felt like I got something out of the classroom observations, even though they clearly were not at high-need schools. It’s instructive to see spellbinding teaching, challenging curricula and positive classroom cultures, even if the students are predisposed to behaving well and doing work.

I can’t say the same thing about the “debrief” sessions afterwards – I’m tired of hearing the same things I’ve read more than twice already in two separate “webinars.” NYCTF can be awfully impersonal and inflexible. My debrief leader kept saying “I can’t get into all the wonderful stuff I want to tell you about” over and over and over until I finally was like, “Look, I’ll shut the door. Let’s talk about this for real.” Impersonal. Inflexible. I guess that’s the DOE.

BUT – Double Hooks is right on the money with this one: Having us new Fellows spend a day in an underperforming school would have been a great seive for those of us who aren’t really up to the task of working in a very high-need school. I can’t say I know what it’s really like (I haven’t seen a school fight where cops were called, yet) but I feel like I know what it’s sort of like (a 7-year-old kid in my mom’s class, who “can’t count” brought marijuana to school, was shown to the Principal’s office, and protested by saying, “What? It’s less than an eighth of an ounce!”) And I feel like I really, really want to work with that child!

Anyways, this post was just supposed to be an update on the job outlook for Cohort 18. I hope we all can get through this, get teaching positions and enjoy a crazyhecticmadjoyful ’09-’10 school year. Hope is all I have right now, but that’s better’n nothin’.

Because I heard a teacher say this, and it hurt me.

Call me skeptical, even cynical, but this sentence in today’s New York Times? I don’t know how they parsed out this meaning from the announcement last Wednesday. To me it seems like they are actively pitting the new traditionally certified teachers against the new NYCTF and TFA recruits.

“The city still plans to hire about half the usual number of educators from Teach for America and the Teaching Fellows program, but it has not made similar guarantees for other teachers.”

Sigh. Divide and conquer. That’s what it’s called, right? Textbook case. As far as I see it, this information is false and was included in the article specifically to fan flames of jealousy between two sets of new teachers, who would naturally be allies (and that scares the powers that be).

The truth? Teaching Fellows have gotten no word that the DOE “plans” to hire them. In fact, they’ve been told exactly what new graduates of the city’s top MS Ed. programs have been told – wait your turn. Be flexible. Network. We make no guarantees.

As a former journalist, I hate bad fact-checking and I hate purposefully false “news” even more.

Click below to see the full text of the letter that Teaching Fellows received last Wednesday evening, telling us about the Chancellor’s announcement.

Dear ________,
We hope you have taken the opportunity over the last few days to review the recently published terms of the June 2009 Fellowship. If you have not done so already, we encourage you to complete enrollment in the Fellowship by electronically signing the Fellow Commitment Form on the ‘Home’ tab of your My NYCTF page. I am writing today with important information about becoming a Department of Education employee this coming school year.

As you may have heard, Chancellor Joel Klein announced today that due to likely budget reductions principals must follow new guidelines when hiring teachers for the 2009-2010 school year. Under these guidelines, at this time principals can only fill vacancies with teachers who are currently employed by the Department of Education. (There are some immediate exceptions to these hiring restrictions:  Principals may consider new candidates for vacancies in bilingual special education and for up to half of the vacancies in schools that are opening this year or have opened in the last two years.) As budgets are finalized over the summer, these hiring restrictions will be lifted for those subject areas and geographic districts where the need to fill vacancies is not being met by the existing workforce. The primary implication of this policy is that new teachers cannot be formally hired into any school-level vacancy unless and until the restrictions are lifted.

We want to reassure you that these hiring guidelines do not affect your status in the Fellowship, nor do they change the hiring process and timeline previously communicated to you.  More specifically:

Your acceptance into the Fellowship remains valid and there is no change to your status in the June training cohort, your subject assignment, or borough assignment.

In anticipation of budget reductions and a consequent reduced hiring need, we have significantly limited the size and subject areas of the June 2009 cohort as compared to prior years.

Accepted Fellows have been assigned only to those subject areas and geographic locations with the highest projected vacancies. These are the areas where we anticipate there will still be a need for new teachers and where hiring restrictions are likely to be lifted.

These guidelines limit the early hiring of new teachers; however, in general, a later hiring timeline for new teachers is consistent with past trends. While we believe most Fellows will secure a position at the start of the school year, we have created an opportunity for individuals without positions in September to remain in the Fellowship through the fall term.

As the Office of Teacher Recruitment and Quality is helping manage the implementation and targeted lifting of the hiring guidelines, you will have access to real-time information regarding when and where principals can consider new hires.

These restrictions do not impede your ability to continue to network with school hiring representatives and pursue vacancies that may become available at a later date. The Placement Support team will continue to facilitate school-based interviews and you may be invited to networking events.  We also encourage you to begin networking with Fellows and connecting with schools. Toward that end, we have recently posted several resources under the ‘Job Search’ tab on My NYCTF, including the Job Search Action Plan, which will keep you on track as you begin to research positions and schools. For more information about the job search process and hiring landscape please refer to the Guide to Becoming a Department of Education Employee.

If you have any questions about the job search or hiring restrictions, please do not hesitate to contact our placement support team at fellowsplacement@schools.nyc.gov or 718.935.4147.

I thank you again for your continued commitment and interest in the Fellowship and look forward to welcoming you in person on June 15th.

So I tried really hard not to do work this weekend. By “work” I mean writing cover letters, sending resumes, finishing the 600-page book, writing my demo lesson plan and practicing it, and studying for the LAST and CST. These activities were keeping me up until at least 1 a.m. every day, and I was so exhausted by Saturday that I got a migraine.

I had plans this weekend to have brunch with my gf and her best friend. We did that. And then, after brunch, we all talked about my lesson plan. “You need to make it easier on yourself,” they said. “Why are you trying to have the kids tackle world problems that adults haven’t yet tackled?” True enough. So I’ve got my little literary device lesson plan – a much easier lesson to teach, while still being creative.

And I was supposed to be not working!

Anyway, I also picked up a new plant to add to my collection of babies on the windowsill. May I introduce Copper?

She’s the new pet plant whose job is to keep me relaxed while I’m at the computer doing work. I love my plants like babies because I can’t get the cat that I so deeply long to love.

Did I say I took a break from work? Well, that was kind of a lie. I have been reading this TFA book for clues about how their program might differ from Teaching Fellows and for a preview of what my life might be like in the next couple of years. So far, based on the book, I can expect to not have a social life, to be emotionally drained at the end of every day, and to feel really, really, really responsible to my students. And to have some small successes with them that will make me break down in tears of joy. The latter will serve as the reward. I’m ready for it all, I think.