School Update

The kiddies come back tomorrow (or as you're reading this - today). But the last two days have been teacher days and some interesting stuff's gone down.

Monday started off with a meeting at the high school. The director, Mark, went through our enrollment for this year and projections for next. This actually was more of a State Of Kihei Charter School Address. We are adding a Performing Arts program next year starting with a 6th & 7th grade. Then an 8th grade will be added and so on until 12th - just like the program I'm in now. The high school may have a few more students as well and we add our 8th grade next year. But the stuff that was pretty fascinating was the problem we're going to be running into - facilities. The space we use at the high school is being sold from under us (though it's taking a while because the market is so lousy now). Plus, our lease at the Tech Park has only 2 years after this and we'll need more space anyway.

So, all of these ideas are being thrown around, by the school board, but we're also being told that our input is needed as well. It's literally - we have no idea what this school is going to look like in 2 years. Scared, Kids? Wait. Two years ago, they had no idea that we would have all these kids and starting a new program as well. There's going to be a KCS, but what it will look like? Who knows. It's pretty sure that the STEM & Performing Arts programs will exist. STEM is wanted by local & state leaders. The performing arts program has facilities that are dirt cheap from the Maui Association of the Performing Arts (MAPA). There's the possibility that the high school could go virtual, with very few classes actually taught. Students would be do service learning, internships and classes at the local community college. I could get sucked into that program, because....

I mentioned to some while I was home that I was preparing some recommendations for changes in the STEM system. Well, like my school board platform, it kind of took on a life of its own. It was a bit more extensive than I originally planned, but once I got going...and I even wasn't able to put in the research that showed why my stuff works.

So I sent a rough draft to Peggy, one of the other teachers. She loved it, but gave me a couple of recommendations. I'm pretty sure I used them all. Then I sent it to Dan, our lead teacher, but he took a day or so to check it out. In the meantime, on Monday afternoon, all the staff were at school. And as we tend to go off on tangents and end up in improvised meetings together (the joy of being in a small school) I ended up getting the following changes starting tomorrow:

*I'll be teaching sign language every afternoon, focusing on fingerspelling and English grammar. Yes, I know. It won't be ASL and there may be a fatwa put out on me by the Deaf Community, but I'll worry about that as soon as I can find the deaf community here. It's an in to start teaching it, then hopefully make it a full ASL class next year.

*We've gotten rid of the external reward system that was just freakin brutal. There's going to be a rotating student committee that recognizes students for academic and social postitives. Each Friday morning, that committee will report their observations to the entire program. It will be specific, "On Tuesday, Johnny helped Betty with her spelling when she was having trouble." Etc.

*I started us down the road to getting rid of grades. It may take a million years, but I got the ball rolling. I whipped out some examples of School Without Walls progress reports and suggested we develop our own and work towards replacing number grades with them. The conversation was a little uncomfortable and I had to do some serious negotiating...and this was all improvised. The topic of how unsatisfied we were with what the grades were showing (and not showing) came up then BAM. So I will now be using a progress report (that I have to develop) for Language Arts for this quarter in order to show the team what I am talking about. We'll still have grades for the class, but I'll have a ton of extra duty to show that this is the way. It's huge. I'm psyched and a bit intimidated, but I'll make it work.

*This is what I'm planning on for our planning session on Friday... currently, we have something at the end of the day called Advisory. It sucks royal ass. Each teacher has 16 kids and we're supposed to be doing activities that creates a bonding amongst your members. Two problems. One is I've been assigned the group from hell. [warning: Hillside reference ahead] Think of the 16 most obnoxious Hillside kids you've ever worked with and have a daily community meeting. The second problem is, the middle schoolers are so over the place in terms of maturity level (which is normal for this age) we can't get a real coherent thing going.

So, I've proposed it already, and Peggy likes it, but Friday I'm going to drive it home. I'm proposing we still call it Advisory, but instead of doing group stuff, we meet individually with 2 kids a day for 15 minutes to create that student-teacher bond and have the individual kid work on goals that are specific to him/her. (Yes, I stole the idea from SWW) It'll kick ass.

If everyone's on board with that I will have my main goals for change that I wanted at least started. There was a ton of stuff left on my list of recommendations, but it looks like I got my main ones.

Quick Notes:
I don't know if you know this...I bought the domain name atias.org. (sorry family, it's mine...you'll have to settle for .com or .net) So if you want to see on occasion what I'm up to in class you can check it out.

That was a long one...sorry, not too funny. I'll try to tickle ya next time...oh, and I'll be on the air Friday night, 8-midnight my time. I wish they'd just give me the shift already.