Hello all! I have decided to begin a new blog about my classroom. Not for the families of the cherubs in my room, but for other teachers.With all of the new mandates and requirements for teachers these days it is very easy to get burnt out. About five weeks ago, my teaching colleague and I {we each have separate kindergarten classrooms with 23 students each} were talking about how much we hate teaching.
We don't actually get to do any teaching.
All we do is manage behavior until Title I teachers come and get our Tier I and Tier II intervention students so they can teach. Or even worse, we manage the class while an aid pushes into the classroom to work with a struggling cherub.
We thought, "We went to college and got master's degrees just to manage a large group of children so someone with limited educational background can provide support to our most needy students?" This makes no sense!
So we overhauled our classrooms. We put the aid in charge of classroom management (using the systems we set up) and began working with our struggling students once more. Duh.
This was nice for a while.
But then it was time for report cards.
We have moved to a growth-based report card where we have an assessment and a score from 0-4 for each child's proficiency on each individual standard. This means we have to assess every standard with every child at the beginning of the year and again at each of the quarters.
We just finished assessing our cherubs for the third quarter, got our report cards compiled and sent home, and we were hit in the face with IREAD-K.
Ugh.
Over 2060 questions to ask one-on-one.
It took us three-four weeks of solid assessing. Minus the one week after the previous quarter ended compiling all the grades...minus the last week of school which is filled with field day, talent shows, etc. we were left with only 3 weeks of actual teaching time in our final quarter of the school year. And we still had to assess students for the final report card. So I guess take away another week. Two weeks left for teaching.
Oh, and we cought wind that our district is only going to allow us one recess next year. For full day kindergarten. AND we added an extra hour to our school day.
Wow. We hate our job. Or so we thought.
We realized we don't hate teaching. We hate what teaching has become. But why does it have to be this way?
It doesn't.
We are bringing the fun back. Screw all the assessments. They can be done quickly during other times of the day. (I pull kids and ask questions during recess, rest time, computer lab, and even specials if I have to!) We need to bring the fun activities, themes, and CRAFTS back!!!
So follow along as I cronicle how I am bringing the KINDER (kid) back into KINDERGARTEN!
