dmmetler

My only problem with bringing in the CC students is that library science isn't a degree offered at 2 year schools. Essentially, they'll be getting an untrained volunteer, when the pilot was with someone who obviously knew she was doing. It'll be great experience for the college students, but it's not going to be the same as having a trained librarian. I did like that the district person went to the CC first. A LOT of students start at the CC for financial reasons, and especially if your plan is to teach, it's a good idea to get through college without or with minimal debt-and he's ended up in the same position Janine has with her Penn education.

In one of the schools I worked at, we had a social studies lab (artifacts, costumes, videos,photo sets etc) and a science lab. Both had, at one point, had a full time teacher who managed them. Both were locked and teachers sometimes would sneak in and borrow stuff, but otherwise, they weren't used due to budget cuts. I can easily see the same happening with libraries in urban schools.

Cursive first is a thing-i want to say that traditional Montessori is cursive first. Motor skills wise, it's easier in many ways than print, and is less prone to reversals. The reason for doing print first is to make learning to read easier so you don't have as many forms of each letter at once. (There are already multiple ones just in printed text that kids will encounter while learning to read).

I love the CGI on Cerberus. And yeah, he's just a good boy who wants to play and be loved.

They're well set up for a UNIT spin-off like Torchwood, with Kate, Shirley, Mel, Donna, and very light doctor content. Which I would watch the heck out of.

Recprders can be made of plastic. Those were recorders (Probably YRS-20). Tonettes are rounder, and flutophones have a more flared bell. I've spent a LOT of time teaching recorder.... https://www.westmusic.com/recorders/ Specialist teachers (music, art, etc)are more common in school systems which have unions. It's not because of changes in teacher training-I've taught the required music Ed class for eled majors. It's because the contract calls for X minutes of paid planning time, and the kids need to be somewhere-so, let's let someone else handle those pesky standards. . As a music specialist, I've been told by students that "this is my break"-bwcauae their classroom teachers have told them "30 minutes until break" or whatever. I loved that they showed that the teacher goes room to room-that's reality for music teachers in schools like Abbott, and usually it limits you to recorder, voice, and whatever you can stick in a tote bag.

The last one I went to was 3 days in an Embassy Suites conference center. :) I remember one PD where the day before a break, the district brought in a guest presenter for all the elementary music teachers in the district. It was awesome! Not only did we get to hang out with other folks who do the same thing we do,but we got out of the party zone of overstimulated kids for the day. (I think my principal replaced me with a teacher's aide and a VCR...)

I obviously went to the wrong conferences.... The school I used to teach at is now a charter, and Melissa's sister is exactly right. Here, when a charter comes in, the employees stay with the district and are moved into vacancies, and if you want to stay in the building you've been in for years and teach the same kids, you have to apply. There were teachers who had taught those kids' parents who got kicked out.

Also, oil based styling products tend to smother them. One benefit of teaching in schools like Abbott-lice were a non-issue. But when I started teaching at the University lab school....I cut my stick straight white girl hair real quick!

In my first year of teaching in a school much like Abbott, I was ready to step between two kids who were squaring off to break it uo when one of my 6th graders PICKED me up and said "Don't do it, Ms M-they like to kill you!!". Another went to get the campus security officer, who agreed with him after the fact-that those two kids, when they got into it, would have taken me down without even noticing who I was. I was regularly asked for my hall pass as a student teacher in a middle school.

Realistically, current policies require trying a couple of levels of interventions before testing, so Melissa would need to support and document Mya in class, and probably do a small group before testing beyond what is done for everyone. While I appreciate where they're going, the conference where a teacher proposes testing would not be the first time the parents have heard of concerns. Split grade classes in my district were still the same size, or sometimes smaller, so counting the same number of kids makes sense, and since books get a lot longer when you move from picture books to chapter books, Melissa's 3rd graders don't get an advantage unless they're being allowed to count books below their current reading level. I wish they'd brought back Courtney. Gifted kids can game the system on something like this. My kindergartner once had the highest point total for the whole school on AR because the librarian wouldn't let kindergartners go outside the little kid section, and the class library was at a similar level. So, my kid who read mostly science books from the adult section of the public library for fun, racked up a ton of points because in an hour library period or free reading period in the classroom, they really could read 25 or more kindergarten/1st grade level books and test on them. It wasn't until the librarian looked at the point totals that they realized that, yeah, maybe we should let the kid read Wizard of Oz and the Chronicles of Narnia...

I assume that the kid isn't a class clown,but a ND kid with a special interest. If you can connect with those interests, you're golden-and it's a lot easier when that interest is, say Bluey, or Pokemon, or anything else that peers also generally like vs something like computer OS versions. A lot of kids with autism can function academically, but struggle socially, and getting such a child referred and actually assessed is often really hard for teachers, especially in 1st grade. If so, doing a referral to the office is often helpful in providing a paper trail. I have written referrals with a note to that effect-that I didn't need the principal or counselor to intervene, but that I knew I needed to do those steps to actually get a kid evaluated because while they could get by in elementary school where classes moved together, they were going to get lost in middle school-probably literally.

I kind of wish they’d had another parent who was less than thrilled. Because I can easily imagine little ones coming home and asking about those words that they managed to decode and parents coming into Ava’s office mad. Because early readers read everything. One of my favorites was the kid who read the graffiti on the playground and was upset that they’d misspelled Duck and that “Duck you” didn't make sense on a tunnel. I agreed with her...and told the janitor we needed to get that painted over before a kid who knew what thaf word was noticed it! When urban public schools/districts have uniform codes, it's not because they want to look like private schools. It's because they're heading off problems at the pass. Parents don't need to wear a polo shirt and khakis, but they need to avoid anything that's gojng to cause trouble

I've done egg drops with multiage science clubs. We do it outside. Doing it in the gym even for 8th graders seems likely to be messy. Even if kids understand science, it doesn't mean they're good engineers! Sometimes the little ones beat the older ones :). We also did egg bobsleds during the winter Olympics (make your container that holds an egg driverso it rolls down the track and hits a arop at the end, see if the egg survives. The best model for that one was a kid who put the egg inside a piece of pool noodle so it was suspended in the middle and then put that in a hamster ball. The driver may have been dizzy, but it made it. I think she was 8. Melissa's plan actually makes sense for younger kids for an indoor drop-hard boil the egg, and check for cracks to see if it survived. Less mess, but you can still see if it works.

I assume the Bride was scheduled to leave this week. Because there was no way in the world the Avocado beat them.

To get some idea (and I’d love to see Abbott address this) we had a student who really needed an IEP, but mom refused, saying we just didn’t understand her baby. We supported as much as we could legally, and figured out that if he was busy and doing something to help, he’d often participate really actively. He couldn’t read or write at level, but he knew a lot. He made a ton of folder games for kindergarten, sharpened probably thousands of pencils, loved to stack chairs and sort books…he was everyone’s favorite helper. His mom got him into a new KIPP charter via lottery. Now, KIPP is all about extremely structured, almost military-school type behavior. It was literally the last thing this kid needed-it guaranteed that pretty much everything he did would be wrong, even just walking down the hall or eating lunch. Not sure what happened, but he ended up exploding, and it was bad enough that the police were called. And I mean the kind of thing that makes national news, where it takes multiple armed officers to subdue a small kid. The one good thing that came of it was that the juvenile court ordered the evaluation that the kid needed, so when he came back to us, we could give him more of what he needed, instead of having to just modify as best we could. But yeah…we got a kid back who had been severely traumatized and had added a ton of anxiety on top of autism, dyslexia, and adhd.

This is a painful story arc because I've been a teacher in a school like Abbott when the state was pressured into turning over failing schools to charters. All the teachers who knew the kids, the neighborhood-the Barbaras, the Melissas...gone. Retired, went to other district schools, or flat out quit. Even the younger ones mostly had enough senority to leave and stay in the district (which had better contract protections). Few teachers were going to stay after being told how miserably they'd failed. The schooL has, since, been a revolving door of short term, often just out of college TFA and similar program teachers and for profit charter companies. They come in, change everything, fail for a few years, and then someone else gets the charter. Having said that, it does give an opportunity to really push the message that public schools are needed and that school choice hurts the kids, badly.

Special interests are honestly the best way to connect with many kids, especially those who are ND. I have a program-wide Pokémon theme this semester because I have several kids for whom Pokémon is a special interest, but also have pulled in Among Us, Minecraft, Animal Crossing, Disney movies and characters, The Avengers, Harry Potter, Star Wars, and Stranger Things at times. Even for kids who don’t have the intense focus that a child with autism has, it still is a connection to something they like and a connection between the teacher and the students. And, one of the lessons I learned early as a music teacher was NOT to sing with full voice because the kids either found it silly or rolled their eyes the way Barbara’s Kindergartners did. One of my mentor teachers was an opera singer before she moved to teaching, and said that her students always found it hysterical when she sang with vibrato. I will say that it makes it easy to be heard across a playground :).

Ironically. I’m enjoying this show more because it doesn’t have the big bad, story arc. I am enjoying Jen having to figure out how to be She Hulk, not as a superhero, but just a normal person…who happens to also be a hulk. I love the super powered support retreat :). (Like the bad guys support group in Wreck it Ralph). Not everything has to be major story arc, earth shattering. It’s nice to see a lighter part of the Marvel-verse.

I loved this episode. My headcanon is that Jacob has a degree from a big name school in something else, came in via TFA or something similar, and has fallen in love with teaching-but is now only starting to realize that those loans which were supposed to be easy to repay as a lawyer are harder as a teacher in an urban school, where if you want your kids to have supplies, you're probably sticking them in your Amazon cart. They've given us a lot of cues that Gregory is neurodiverse. The sensory issues, not understanding Gritty, not understanding the kids' pictures, not quite "getting" how to engage the kids or relax with them, his need for structure, and his statements about not qualifying for the gifted program, not even close, and "if you only get snakes, you don't think you deserve chickens". It's nice to see a functional, put together person with ND traits. And it really isn't that uncommon for ND people who did reasonably well at school to gravitate to teaching because it's familiar and has a structure. I think a lot of what they're showing us, with finding the desk, the ramp, ASL, etc, is that Abbott is a school that will accept him, too. In urban districts, it's fairly common for most teachers to start their career at urban schools, and to move up the ladder to more "desirable" schools. The ones who stay, stay because they want to-becuase they're making a difference. I won't be surprised if Melissa gets an offer to come teach at a private school this year and has to make a decision as to whether to stay at Abbott with increasing cutbacks and stress (teaching a split section is tough, and 3rd has a LOT of new content). I'm glad to see the grant is being used and the sheer joy in meeting the needs for the kids that the teachers have. I currently teach at a community rec center, and this show makes me miss teaching music in an elementary school.

I really like this format. I wonder if they're getting more celebruties that want to do it just for fun, but can't commit to an indefinite run? I kind of feel like this show has a Muppet show effect, where it started with having to take whoever they could get, but as it continues, more and more people want to do it.

As a music teacher, I'd have the kids put their recorders in cases and give them all to the teacher in a tote bag. It's a lot easier for the classroom teacher to stick a bag in a closet than it is to find storage for 500 recorders in the music room (not an exaggeration) So Janine collecting them makes sense to me. And yes, recorder is used because a)cheap, and you can put an instrument in every child's hands-it's a rich school that has a class set of mallet percussion or deskbells, and Abbott isn't a rich school. In my district, they were coded as "Grade 3 workbook"-and then we kept them and had the same kid use the same recorder through 6th grade. b) that reading music is something that is much easier to teach using instruments than singing And C)it provides a transition to band for those kids who want to do it in upper elementary/middle school. I'd love to see more about Abbot's special skills (music, art, PE, Library, sometimes computer, etc)-because if teachers are struggling for resources in the classroom. Special skills really, really is.

If you have ESPN+, Camryn is in the show about the Southern University dance team, "Why Not Us". It's a lot more documentary vs staged reality.

The vocal impressions changing the song was done better by the Brown brothers. And it's hard to see it as something new when someone else did it a few weeks back. She has a good voice,but the options were picked to be in her singing range and weren't huge changes. Not impressed.

Hoping his piano instructor at Berklee corrects his hand position. It's not as bad as some I've seen, but it made my wrists hurt to watch him.