Spring is Here!

Spring is slowly start to inch its way into New York City. With it comes three types of days:

1. Super rainy, thunder storms
2. Grayish blah days
   
3. The random BEAUTIFUL day that makes everyone want to go outside!

These three different types of days are the only ones that exist in april and may and they make going to work difficult and kids going to school damn near impossible. If it's a rainy day- you just want to stay in bed, but the kids definitely stay in bed- or come in at least an hour late. If it's a blah-gray day then the day sucks any smiles or happiness form the room and the students are like little zombies in their desks. And finally, if it is a beautiful sunny day with 72 amazing degrees of heat, every second indoors is painful and the number of empty seats in classes after lunch grows dramatically. These three types of days are making it very difficult for me to (a) get my ass motivated to be a good teacher and (b) get my kids to learn!

The Algebra Regents (New York's state-wide exams that all high-schoolers must pass to graduate) are 7 weeks away. That is an utterly terrifying thought. In a mere seven weeks I need to finish the algebra curriculum and some how review enough so that my students are able to pass the exam.

The exam is weighted drastically, so much that in order to 'pass' a student only needs to answer half (15) of the multiple choice questions correctly. Yet, there are a hand full of students who struggle severely as they prepare to take the exam for the third or fourth time.

The school I work at treats the exams differently than most schools. Our philosophy is to 'get the exams out of the way asap so that as upperclassmen, students can take more interesting, less straight forward classes' I agree with this mentality, most of the time. The tricky thing is that the students still need to take the tests (some schools are exempt) and really do need to know the material to gain access and be successful in a college or university. Moreover, if a student finishes his or her science regents early, then they can take a class like "Forensics" where they solve a murder mystery using science (each quarter a teacher is killed!) or "Special Effects Science" where they study the chemistry behind special effects stuff used in movies. But, if a student finishes his math regents early he just takes more advanced math as we do not yet have any math electives offered at my school. I would love to teach a math elective on Algebraic Proof, or The History of Math, or maybe Diet Home Economics (heavy on the real life econ, light on the cookies and sewing).

Although I find myself wanting to teach more interesting classes in the math department I feel as if I should most certainly not be complaining. I have such a large amount of freedom at my school in what and how I teach! I listen to horror stories from other MfA fellows and feel bad for them. I am so very lucky to be at my school. The students are great, the administration and support is great and I love what and how I teach. I would never want to leave or do anything else in new york city. (I suppose if they put an elevator into the building- it would be the best school in the world!)

On the topic of teaching, I have started to teach Sex Ed to a small group of 9th grade girls. So far it's going really well, but we only just begun a few weeks ago... more to come.