Writing With Abandon

Reflections and ramblings about life as an educator, writer, reader, knitter, and over-thinker. Trying to do the writing only I can do.

Tag: teaching

  • Empathy

    Eva’s empathy illustration: “Hold on, I’m coming”

    Today, my empathy got the best of me. I was distracted all day by thoughts of Kim and her father, my heart reaching out to them in Boynton Beach, sending strength and resilience. Wishing I could squeeze her hand and make her smile like she has made me on my lowest days.

    The children were loud and weren’t being good listeners. It’s May, I should expect this by now.

    But last week was a strange, magical blip. Every afternoon as Kim and I walked home, we’d say to each other, “it’s been such a good week,” almost tentatively, scared we’d jinx it. Today was a day I was sure we had jinxed it. Yesterday they were in EP classes all day, so it figured that at the end of the day they’d be a mess. But today, it was a battle from the morning.

    I remember Lina’s teachings about confirmation bias. If we expect them to behave a certain way, they will behave a certain way. Their behavior will confirm the bias that we have.

    So I am asking myself: Tomorrow, how can I be more empathetic to them?

    There are only 14 days left of classes. 3 of those are our celebratory “blast off week” after graduation, and one of those is actual graduation. So really, there are only 10 days left of classes. The students must be buzzing with excitement and sadness and worry. On Thursday, during community time, I’ll ask them to share all their feelings about middle school and this upcoming transition. Tomorrow, I’ll show up believing they can be those same fifth graders we’ve learned to love in spite of their crazy this year.

    I’ll try to emulate Kim, and always see the positive in every situation, no matter how dire it seems on the surface. I’ll laugh it off and focus on the good. I’ll lead with love and kindness.

    Kim always says how much I’ve taught her this year, but she forgets that the teaching goes both ways. I have learned so much from her about life and relationships and perspective. And most importantly, I’ve gained a lifelong friend, one who not only climbs into the pit to sit with you when you’re down, but throws a rope down to help pull you out.

    We can do hard things.

  • All The Things We Do

    Today after eating with Kim and Ana and talking about reader’s workshop and writing conferences, I fell into a deep “I’m a terrible teacher” mindset.

    “I haven’t conferenced. I’ve sucked at reading their work,” I texted Ana. “And now I feel bad that they’re not reading daily, but we can’t change the routine again this year.”

    She grabbed me as we passed in the cafeteria: “I was literally having the same thoughts yesterday in the shower.”

    Then she suggested making a list of everything we are doing, so we can see where there’s wiggle room. What can we knock off our plates so we can do this?

    “But I also like my work-life balance this year,” I told her. “And I don’t want that to change.”

    I walked over to Kim and opened a new document on my computer.

    “I want to make this list, but also so we can see that we’re actually doing a lot.”

    “We do SO much. I love this idea,” Kim agreed enthusiastically. “I used to do this for parenting, too.”

    I appreciate Kim’s enthusiasm for all the things.

    So I started typing as we both shouted things out:

    ///

    ALL THE THINGS WE DO

    • Prep the materials we need for that day (copies, manipulatives, charts, post-its)
    • Plan lessons and units (writing, reading, read aloud, math, investigations, SEL, word study, sentence study, morning meetings, closing circles, integrated projects)
    • Create anchor charts for various lessons and units
    • Check and give feedback to their math work
    • Check and give feedback to HW
    • Email parents
    • Attend meetings during and after school hours (Hiring Committee, Literacy Committee, Tuesday PD, parent meetings)
    • Support students when they need help during independent work
    • Manage social emotional needs — conflict resolution, redirections, etc.
    • Transition them all over the school
    • Do mindful moments and brain breaks
    • Take them to snack and recess and lunch
    • Plan and execute field trips
    • Plan and rehearse for graduation / end of year things (middle school panel, blast off week, graduation rehearsals, etc.)
    • Write, direct, and produce a 5th grade show, which included rehearsals daily for the weeks leading up to it
    • Give kids band-aids (physical and emotional) when they need and clean poop off their shoes after recess sometimes
    • Collaborate with coworkers to do integrated learning
    • Do mentorship ALL THE TIME (sometimes formal meetings, sometimes informal, always happening constantly)
    • Take our own mental breaks (at our lunch and recess)
    • Brainstorm together constantly
    • Put out fires as they come up
    • Meet every other week with Male
    • Make each other laugh so hard we cry
    • Create partnerships and groups for collaborative work
    • Shepherd the children like wayward sheep at the end of the day
    • Manage time all the time (it’s like I have a TimeTimer living inside of me)
    • Manage arrival and dismissal (20 mins in the morning + 20 mins in the afternoon)
    • Take verbal punches from the children daily #FifthGrade
    • Get and give hugs (and a little bit of lice)
    • Document everything! (photos, videos, audio recordings, transcribing, creating wall documentation – printing, cutting, putting it up)
    • Work with small groups
    • Check in with students one-on-one during independent work
    • Create and modify assessments
    • Create rubrics for assessments
    • Grade assessments and projects
    • Grade writing (unit work + on-demands)
    • Hold celebrations for writing that often include other teachers and students
    • Write positive compliment post-its for each kid, almost every week
    • Find games and other early finishers activities
    • Complete progress reports (cumulative grades, comments/narratives, inputting them into Google Slides, saving them as a PDF and schedule sending to parents)
    • Hold parent teacher conferences
    • Do F&Ps three times a year
    • Complete middle school recommendations
    • Administer MAP exams, then download and send the results to parents
    • Reevaluate and reassess how our teaching is going, then adjust and shift based on what we think is best (sometimes involving whole new planning and prep, such as for read aloud, reading stations, etc.)

    WHAT WE’RE NOT DOING

    • Writing conferences and small groups
    • Reading their writing notebooks / using them as much
    • Protecting indie reading time
    • Aligning our investigations to the social studies and science standards explicitly (general topics, but not the nitty gritty)

    ///

    I shared the document with Ana.

    “OMG YESSS. This is your slice today :)” was her reply.

    I may still be ending this day feeling like a worse writing teacher than I was last year. But I do recognize that I’m doing SO much. And I hope that anyone else who ever feels this way realizes that they are, too.

  • Day 21: Elavao

    “Skadoosh.”

    “Seven.”

    “Eight.”

    “Nine?”

    “Nooo, big banana!”

    I pulled my AirPods out of my ears to see what was going on. N, E, L, and Christian were playing a game. We were still an hour out of Miami thanks to Friday traffic, and I was ready to shower, eat, and get to bed early after our overnight trip to the Kennedy Space Center.

    “What are you doing?” I asked.

    “Ms. Amy, you should play!!” E said, delighted.

    “Yes, Ms. Amy should play!” Kim agreed. “Christian, tell her.”

    “It’s called Elavao,” Christian started to explain. “The game is simple. The goal is to count to eleven, or Elavao, and whoever gets Elavao gets to change a number. You can substitute a number for another number, or a word, or a sound effect, until all the numbers are substituted.”

    “So like, 6 is skadoosh, 9 is big banana,” E started listing on her fingers.

    “10 is ‘eee’!” L chimed in again, making a high-pitched noise.

    “And 1 is two,” N said.

    “So it starts, two, two?” I asked.

    She nodded.

    “Play, Ms. Amy!!” E said again.

    “Alright, I’m game!” I put my AirPods in their case and tried to remember all the numbers they’d already substituted.

    Christian began, and we continued in a circle:

    “Two.”

    “Two.”

    “Three.”

    “Four.”

    “Five.”

    “Skadoosh.”

    “Six.”

    “Seven.”

    “Eight.”

    “Big banana.”

    “Eee!”

    “Elavao!”

    We played until we finished the round, laughing at the silly replacements and how some of us, like D, were struggling to do them. With each wave of giggles, more students came from the back of the bus, asking, “What are you playing? Can I join?”

    Later, Christian let us know that it’s actually a drinking game, and whoever messes up is supposed to chug. We joked that one day, when the fifth graders are in college, they’ll come across a party where someone is playing this game, and they’ll say, “Hey, wait a second, my PE teacher taught us that when I was 11…”

    Either way, it’s a fun game we’ve added to our Closing Circle list.

  • Day 20: Reading Stations

    This week, Kim and I started reading stations.

    We’d tried TC’s 5th grade reading units with a workshop model and had little success with them. As a new school, we haven’t had a curriculum that students have followed since kindergarten, meaning there are large gaps and inconsistencies in what students are capable of doing. We were finding it hard to engage all students in the mini-lessons, whether reading happened earlier in the day or at the end of the day. We also saw a need for more consistent language study (vocabulary, spelling, grammar, conventions), but couldn’t figure out how to fit it in our day. Squeezing it in at the end of writer’s workshop was too rushed, and when we missed it, it just… wasn’t happening.

    In the fall, we both took the Shifting the Balance upper elementary course and realized that there were many other practical activities we could be doing, but that didn’t fit into our reading block as it was. When our investigation stations that we began in January were so successful, we decided to try a similar model for reading.

    There are six stations: indie reading, read with friends, write about reading, fluency practice, word study (using Structured Word Inquiry), and sentence study (using Judith Hochman’s Writing Revolution). The two language study stations are teacher-led, and the others are independent. Students go through two stations in a day (20 minutes in each), and cycle through all six after 3 days. Then it repeats.

    With February break and our theater show and the overnight, we couldn’t start the stations until this week. Today, after the second class, the students shared during Closing Circle some of the things they were enjoying about reading stations so far. Here’s what a few of our boys had to say (boys who are semi-reluctant readers!):

    “Something that I like about reading stations is that we get to do many things, we get to move from one to another. It really makes me feel like I get so many options to do super cool stuff to read. Like, I never knew that. When I hear reading, it’s just like, reading, indie reading. Now I know that there are many things to do when it comes to reading. Super cool.”

    “Something I like about reading stations is the word study and kind of like, it changed like, I saw that reading isn’t only looking at a paper and seeing the words.”

    “Something that I liked about reading is the word study and the sentence study and indie reading because I like to read by myself.”

    “Something I’m enjoying in reading stations is learning new words and the history of words.”

    We headed to dismissal feeling buoyed by their positivity. I’m so grateful to work with Kim, who’s just as enthusiastic about trying new things as I am, and I’m excited to see how reading stations go for the rest of the year!

  • Day 19: Lunches with I.

    I’m sitting at the big wooden table, planning out our morning meetings for the week after spring break, while I. picks at his food and doodles a dinosaur on a post-it.

    He first requested to have lunch in the classroom with me a month ago. He wasn’t hungry but he had a few bites. We talked a bit. He worked on his cover for the informational writing piece we were publishing.

    Since then, he’s asked to come every day.

    “Why does I. eat in the classroom?” All the other kids ask.

    His reason, if you ask him, is that all the boys talk about is Fortnite, and since I. doesn’t play Fortnite, he can’t participate in the conversation.

    “What would you prefer to talk about?” I asked him that first day.

    “Literally ANYTHING else,” he said, his eyes widening. “But whenever I try to change the topic, they end up going back to Fortnite!”

    I think it’s not just about Fortnite. I think he also prefers the quiet. A pause in the overwhelming social activity and noise of the day. The cafeteria can get pretty loud, especially with this group of 5th graders. They all talk over one another.

    “Ms. Amy, name an animal?” I. interrupts my slice writing.

    “Um…” I think. “A panda.”

    He looks off to think, then gets back to doodling.

    These are my lunch periods now. Me and I., sitting in silence or listening to soft music while we both work at something.

    I’ll get back to it.

  • The Final Slice (For Now)

    I tell people all the time one of the most beautiful paradoxes to me is writing. And the reason why is because in order to do it one has to live in an extraordinary place of humility, in the process of making something that perhaps might be shared with the world. On the flip side, the mere notion that someone wants to make something that might be shared with the world is rooted in ego.

    Jason Reynolds, from an episode of Unlocking Us with Brené Brown

    I can’t believe March is over. What a month to have documented daily. An exhausting month. A scary month. An emotional month. A month that finally, thankfully, is coming to an end, turning itself over to April and new beginnings.

    I was wary about this challenge, as it’s probably the most disciplined I’ve been writing in years. Maybe even a decade.

    I have always been a writer.

    As a kid, I would write stories and create fake newspapers on AppleWorks on my iMac. In middle school, I started blogging on Xanga and LiveJournal with camp friends. For years in high school and college, I wrote every day, whether journaling or free writing, or writing stories and memoirs. I surrounded myself with other writers and edited Caliper, Stuyvesant’s literary magazine, my senior year. I even went to college for Creative Writing. I started running an open mic with my friend, as well as a one-page flyer-style lit mag, and consistently participated in both. But in my final semester, I dropped the major because of a logistical conflict (and conflict between professors) with my other major.

    After that, I let writing fall by the wayside. I didn’t feel that I could do it, that anyone would want to read what I wrote. I journaled off and on, but could never quite get back into a groove.

    During COVID, I started journaling again more consistently, but I wasn’t producing writing for any audience aside from myself.

    It wasn’t until I started teaching writer’s workshop that I rediscovered the love of writing within me, through teaching kids how to go through the writing process themselves. Their excitement and nervousness inspired me to write mentor texts, and then their feedback to those mentor texts fueled me further. In our memoir unit this year, one student said, “I don’t understand why you’re a teacher. Why aren’t you a writer?”

    Well, I am both. I am a teacher. I am a writer. I write for me, I write for audiences (blog followers, my students, my friends when I write love letters to them). I am a copywriter, using words to advertise and persuade.

    This writing challenge wasn’t easy. It was quite difficult in fact. And not every post was a real “piece,” if you will. But it was something. And I put myself out there. And for that I’m proud. I hope to keep the momentum going — Tuesday slices? SOLC 2024?

    I wrote every day for the 2023 Slice of Life Story Challenge run by Two Writing Teachers.

  • Writing Conference with Myself

    If a writing teacher were to come up to me right now, 8:17pm on a Tuesday night, 28th slice of 31, ask me the magic words: “How’s it going?”

    If it were I in the writer’s seat, pen in hand, notebook open before me, I would reply: “Not well.”

    “Not well?”

    “I can’t think of anything to write today. I’m plumb out of ideas.”

    “What tools do you have for generating ideas?”

    “I know, I know. Think of places and people and memories close to your heart. Make a list, choose one, write everything down. Use Ralph Fletcher’s ‘breathing in and breathing out,’ or a photograph, or an observation out my window. But I’m telling you, I’m stuck.”

    “Let’s try. What’s one small moment from today, just an image, that gave you joy?”

    Ugh, I’d think. Fine, I’ll try.

    And close my eyes. And breathe. And think about what moment today was not hectic, not loud, not tiring.

    “I’ve got it!”

    “Great. Now write it down.”

    Tuesday, March 28th

    At recess, my student brought her notebook down to the playground, led me to a bench, and read me her poem about #middleschoolfeelings. Legs crossed on the bench, notebook open in her lap. Voice soft, yet powerful. We workshopped a few possible endings. She borrowed my pen to ink the chosen one. Then went off to share it with a friend.

    Day 28(!!!) of 31

  • His First Sudoku

    Today M picked up sudoku as an early finishers after math, settling in next to me as he worked through it. It was his second time attempting the puzzle, as the first time he didn’t quite understand how it worked. Today, he was ready to try again, determined.

    I could see the gears grinding in his brain as he successfully placed one, two, three digits.

    “I got a whole row!” he cheered.

    “Great work!” I told him as I checked another student’s math journal.

    “I’m gonna write the little numbers in the corners for these next ones,” he said. Then suddenly, he pouted. “No wait, I think I messed it up.”

    I leaned over. “Hmm, let’s see.” I spotted the mistake. “There! You put a 6, but the row already had one.”

    “Do I have to start over?” he asked.

    “Nope! Just erase that one and see what other digit could go there.”

    “Okay,” he said, erasing and taking another determined breath in.

    A few minutes later, he cried out, “I got a whole square, look!”

    “Amazing! See?” I said. “Want me to check the book to see if it’s correct?”

    “You can do that? Yeah!”

    I checked. He was right.

    “Now you can use that square to help you with the rest of the puzzle.” I looked at the clock. “But we have to transition to PE now.”

    I started to gather the other students to transition. M stayed glued to the puzzle.

    “How about you take it on a clipboard to PE? That way, in case you need a break, you have it.”

    “Yes!!” he cheered, and quickly put the rest of his materials away, grabbing a clipboard and lining up.

    The rest of the day, M had the clipboard with him. He used it for a couple moments during PE (“while the girls were arguing,” he said), as we lined up to go to Spanish, at lunch after finishing a Spanish word search, during quiet time, and then finally for music. When everyone returned upstairs to clean up, pack up, and get ready for closing circle, he bounded in excitedly.

    “Ms. Amy, I finished the whole puzzle!” he said, showing it off to me.

    “You did it!” I cheered. “Want to save puzzle #2 for tomorrow?”

    “Nah, I think I’ll bring it home,” he smiled proudly.

    Day 27 of 31

  • A New Community

    I had different plans for this slice (or did I? It’s 5:40pm on a Sunday and I am tired and ready to get out of the house for a walk or a run before I settle in for the evening), but then I read Elisabeth’s wonderful slice about commenting!

    As a first time slicer, the comments were a totally unexpected and welcome surprise. Yes, yes, I knew that commenting on 3 other slicers’ posts each day was part of the challenge, but I didn’t realize that meant other slicers would comment on MY posts.

    And so each day I was pleasantly surprised as a couple of comments would come trickling in, or likes, or even follows! It filled my cup, especially during a month that has been such a mental, physical, and emotional challenge for me.

    So, I dedicate this slice to the new community, and offer a little introduction about myself, inviting you to comment with the same so that I can get to know my fellow slicers/bloggers/writers better!

    My name is Amy. I’m originally from New York City (Upper West Side!), lived in Madrid for two years, and now currently reside in Miami. I love reading, knitting & crafting, singing loudly to music, cooking, and moving my body (yoga, running, pilates, rollerblading). I taught for 5 years in NYC public schools as a Spanish dual language teacher, and currently am in my second year at a private school as a monolingual teacher (though with many students who are bilingual, porque claro — estamos en Miami). I studied creative writing in college but then let go of it for a little while, only to rediscover my love of it as a teacher of writer’s workshop last year. My friend and mentor, Ana, encouraged me to start this blog. My cousin and literacy consultant, Nawal, inspired me to join the slice of life challenge. And here I am!

    Now, tell me a little about you!

    Day 26 of 31

  • Dream Jobs

    I love teaching, I really do, but it is certainly a draining career. The pandemic really shook things up for me in terms of realizing how the boundary between work and home was nonexistent. The past two years have been much better, but as someone with multiple interests, hobbies, and talents, I still find myself daydreaming sometimes about alternate careers…

    Like copywriting. A side gig I started last spring, which I’m really quite good at and can be very lucrative. A job I could do remotely, allowing me to travel the world or live in a different time zone.

    Or becoming a full-time fiber arts maker. I’ve been a knitter since middle school, and recently took up punch needle, which I love. My family friend, a fellow crafter, texted me yesterday, “We should start an Etsy shop!” And I let myself think about that possibility, too.

    Or maybe I could open a bookshop/café/yarn shop with my best friend down here. Miami certainly needs one, and I loved working as a barista as a 22-year-old.

    Or I could be a writer, if I finally got my act together and wrote every day.

    Maybe I could go back to school and study psychiatry, become a therapist for children or young people.

    What alternate careers do you daydream about?

    Day 20 of 31