embarrassed

i spent saturday through wednesday of this week having an amazing time. saturday night i made an impromptu trip to seguin to hang out with clay at his river house. sitting in the trees, taking in all the sights and smells of the country and talking until 3AM is exactly what i needed. then sunday i drove into san antonio for my literacy conference. THANK GOD I WENT. it was the single most useful thing i have ever done for my teaching career. i got to know some of my fellow teachers and had a chance to hear the reality of my school. we've been academically unacceptable for several years and this is our last year to pull up the scores on the TAKS test. otherwise, TEA could be closing my school next year just like they've done for some other schools in austin. where do the kids from closed schools go? well none other than the other academically unacceptable schools, pushing them further down on the achievement gap and making the teachers even more overwhelmed. that's no child left behind at work my friends. be proud that g.w. decided to try it out in texas first. anyway, the children at our school do not come from the most solid academic background. couple that with their uncanny affinity for violence and it turns into a challenging situation, to say the least.

i talked to some of the teachers about the lockdowns, stabbings and gang problems from last year and honestly was not really surprised by anything. i knew what i was getting myself into in the area of discipline when i took the job. i took self defense twice in college. i can hang, yo. :)

what did surprise me was that i learned i was a horrible teacher last year. i entered last year's classroom with the belief that all of my students could read. i knew that it wasn't as easy for some of them, but i assumed that if they just read HARD ENOUGH, they could get it. what an idiot. the reality was, and i sadly did not realize until almost two years later, that i had a LOT of students that could not read. sure, they could probably sound something out or slowly stumble over words, but that is not reading. reading means understanding what you have read, even in the most literal and fundamental sense. my kids could not do that and i could not see that they could not do that, not because of a lack of effort, but because they did not know how.

thankfully, i went into the conference assuming that i would have kids on a third grade reading level in my seventh grade class next year. (i guarantee i had kids at that level in my 10th grade class.) i walked away from those four days with practical and affective strategies to use on a daily basis to help these kids learn how to find the meaning of a text by themselves. that, my friends, is true power. these children will be lost in the real world without literacy. they're already lost in their teenage world without it. they get up every school day and go to a place where almost everything they do revolves around a skill that they do not possess. on top of that, they have to do everything in front of their worst critics- their peers. the main presenter of our conference pointed that fact out to us. how many adults can say they do that? i sure as hell do not. no wonder they say they hate school or it's stupid or they just can't do things. i'd probably give up after that many years of failure and no end in sight. so, i could not be more excited right now about what i'm going to do in the fall. i'm going to have a classroom in which students build skills and cognitive confidence that they can carry with them beyond the school year. i am happy. and embarrassed.