Tag: school

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Apropos of nothing, I love my freshman homeroom.

I moved into a new room this year, and I am… ok, growth mindset… I have a lot of room for growth when it comes to organization. I mean, the room was kind of a lukewarm mess when I moved in: bare walls, 13 desks, and three giant cupboards that after two full days of going through them are *still* part mystery to me, and may at some point cause an avalanche. I did my best to improve it before school started, but my best was… like I said, lots of room for growth. I haven’t even put up most of my own posters yet.

Today, we had about 15 minutes at the end of homeroom with nothing left to do, so I mentioned it’s a new room for me, and I asked “So, do you think this room looks absolutely amazing –” and before I can finish the question, they already have “I am too polite to say otherwise, YES, absolutely YES” look on their face. And I continue with “or a work in progress?” and they’re like “Oh, yes, it is a work in progress.” (You could just see the relief, like Oh good, I don’t have to lie to my teacher.)

And I told them a lot my students are seniors this year, they’ll be with me for a year, but this room is THEIR room, they’ll be in it with me for FOUR years, so let’s make it really amazing. Their response was so great! I had kids coming up with puns based on my name, cheerleaders making the sparkliest poster ever, a kid looking up pictures of Día de Muertos type skeletons so he could make a drawing, and another kid making a picture of Dora la Exploradora…

I mean, I’ve got nerds, cheerleaders, weird kids I *definitely* would have hung out with when I was their age, kids who just want to goof off, kids who hate school because they feel stupid, kids who want to impress the teacher, kids who want to disappear into a book and not come out for days… It’s such an interesting mix, and if I do things right, we will be a *family* for the next four years, and I just feel so many emotions about this.

I think I complain a lot, especially in person, about work. I mean, there *is* a lot of stress in teaching, and I *am* often tired a lot of the time. And there’s always politics at school, and there’s always some kind of drama… But there is SO MUCH amazingness, and I need to share this, I need to write about this, because at the end of the day, if I’m just complaining, people will wonder why the hell I even do what I do.

It’s because of this. Because I get to see these kids go from straight-out-of-middle-school baby freshmen that can fit in my pocket, to technically-adult high school GRADUATES ready to bring our world that much closer to being a better place.

Two of the goof-balls asked me what the Gay Straight Alliance was today, probably expecting some sort of reaction, and one of them rushed to say “We’re straight, we’re straight.” And I was just like “Yeah, you can still join, that’s why it’s called a Gay STRAIGHT Alliance” and then another kid told them what the GSA at the middle school had been like. I talked about how it was different now when I was a kid, how I remembered when they started to let everyone marry – because before, only straight people could marry… well, actually no, gay people could marry, but not the people they wanted to. And you could tell they were kind of forcing themselves not to make a joke or a stupid comment, but they DIDN’T make that comment, and at their age, that MEANS something. The whole conversation happened without anyone saying anything disrespectful or getting defensive, and I think it normalized for them the idea of gay people and straight people just existing.

It’s interesting to have kids that I know I would definitely not have gotten along with at their age. But I’m *not* their age anymore, and not only can *I* make a personal connection with each one of them, but I can also facilitate relationships between kids who would usually not talk to each other. Like the Breakfast Club, if the Breakfast Club hadn’t glorified sexual harassment, and wasn’t generally problematic as heck. And also had five times as many kids. And a teacher who cared about them.

Here’s to four years of growth. For my kids, as students and as human beings. And for me, as a teacher, as a mentor, and as a human being as well.

We’re gonna be phenomenal.

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portraits-of-america:

He was a theoretical physicist, so I suspected that he had had a knack for science from an early age.

“Not at all,” he said. “I was still undecided even in high school. Then, in the 11th grade, we had to choose a direction–humanities or STEM. I chose humanities. But then, in the summer, I did some preparatory school, and I went to the math teacher, who started teaching me about trigonometric equations.
He put the whole thing in such a context that it made a lot of sense to me. He would show me a card with an equation, and I would look at it and say, ‘Hmm, so the solution is this, right?’ And then he would show me another one, and another one, and I would solve each of them in my head and then give him the solution.
He called the other math teacher and said, ‘Hey, come here to see this phenomenon!’
And I felt so inspired, because someone made me feel like I wasn’t an idiot. It’s not that the equations were so difficult, or that I was really a phenomenon. It’s just that someone, for the first time, had behaved as if I wasn’t stupid. Until that point, everyone else had always acted as if I was stupid. And if all of the teachers treat you like you’re stupid, you’re going to end up thinking that you really are stupid.
I find that most people have been discouraged by bad experiences that they’ve had with bad teachers. They went to high school and perhaps found out that they were really stupid in the subjects of math or science. And when I ask them why, they say, ‘Well, because I couldn’t do
the exercises.’ But when I ask whether they could remember why they couldn’t do the exercises, most of the time it turns out that they either had no guidance, or that the way they were taught was so stifling, so boring.
The fact is, most people are not stupid, because they are creative and productive with their lives, and that’s all the intelligence you need even to do theoretical physics. There are, of course, the exceptional few who are geniuses, but there aren’t enough geniuses to populate the entire world of science. We need more than one in a million people in order to successfully do science. The rest of the scientists who aren’t geniuses are just like you and me. There’s nothing more to it.”

Preparing for the new school year step by step guide

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alstudygal:

Summer vacation is almost over, school is starting again, maybe already started for some, so we better try to make the transition as easy as we possibly can.

  • STEP 1 : Reflect on the previous year;

Think about what you did well, what you could do better this year, what exactly are your strengths, your weaknesses, your study methodes, everything. Find what you want to keep, change or improve and go from there.

  • STEP 2 : Resources and inspiration;

Now is the time to browse your favorite tags in all your favorite places: tumblr, pinterest, etc. Find anything that would be helpful: tips, printables, DIYs, etc, and take notes.

  • STEP 3 : Make a goal list; 

Grab a piece of paper, or whatever pleases you to jot down your goals for year to come, keep them SMART, and organized by importance.

  • STEP 4 : Clean and declutter;

EVERYWHERE. Start from your room, your wardrobe, your laptop, email account, etc. Make it clean, comfy and organized, redecorate it even if you so please.

  • STEP 5: Get a planner and actually USE it;

Start now, fill in the details you know of currently, the more you do now the easier it will be later. You can use a digital one also if it fits your need better, I personally prefer the ol’ pen and paper.

  • STEP 6 : Establish routines;

Morning, night, study routines, I even have a weekend routine. Also choose your fav study methods, note taking ways, … 

  • STEP 7 : Fix your sleep schedule;

It’s time to start sleeping at a reasonable time, and for a healthy amount of time.

  • STEP 8 : Get in shape;

Get exercising if you stopped during summer, do some face masks, whiten your teeth, get you hair done, … Just take care of yourself.

  • STEP 9 : Get familiar with your classes;

Make some tables of all the lessons in each class. Watch some crash course videos in the topics you’ll see the next year Review last year’s notes if you need to.

So this is it, I hope you have a wonderful year, and achieve everything you want. You got this. 😉

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smartstudy:

Hey guys. I’m glad to be finally posting my “mental breakdown survival guide”. As you know I struggle a lot with mental health, and so I have been through a lot of breakdowns. So many that I actually dropped out of university after 3 weeks in 2016 and had to take the whole year off. Because of this, I’ve made it my mission to help others with mental health issues as much as I can, so you don’t have to go through what I’ve been through.

Anyway, here is my guide. I tried to keep it general, and actually useful. If you have any questions or additions please feel free to add them.

And as ever, if you want to talk to me about studying with mental illness or want to see a post on a specific topic, please feel free to message me.

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kateoplis:

“Boys need to be taught that it doesn’t matter if the girl next to them is in a bikini or a burqa, it’s their job to learn algebra regardless, and how she’s dressed has nothing to do with them.”

“Last Monday morning was a little colder than I expected, so I made sure that there was a warm change of clothes in my daughter’s backpack in case she wanted to change. She’d had her heart set on wearing her rainbow sun dress since the weather warmed up so I finally acquiesced and let her. Still it wasn’t too surprising to me to see her walk out of school that afternoon with her T-shirt on over the dress and her jeans on under it.

“Did you get cold, sweetheart?” I asked her.“No,” she said a little crestfallen. “I had to change because spaghetti straps are against the rules.”

I’m not surprised to see the dress code shaming come into my house. I have after all been sadly waiting for it since the ultrasound tech said, “It’s a girl.” I didn’t think, though that it would make an appearance when she was five years old.

Five. You get me? She’s five. Cut her hair and put her next to a boy with no shirt on and she is fundamentally identical. I guess you could argue that a boy would not be allowed to wear a shirt with spaghetti straps either, but the day they sell anything like that in the boys section of a Target I will happily withdraw my objections.

Have you ever stopped to think how weird a school dress code really is? I went and checked out the one for my daughter’s school district and it’s amazing in how hard it tries not to say what it actually means. There are literally no male-specific guidelines anywhere on that list. I mean prohibitions against exposing the chest or torso could hypothetically apply to boys except that they don’t. Not really. They don’t sell boys clothes that do that. There’s nothing that is marketed to boys that is in anyway comparable to a skirt or a sun dress. Essentially, a school dress code exists to prevent girls from displaying too much of their bodies because reasons.

I didn’t pick up my daughter’s dress at My First Stripperwear. It’s not repurposed fetish gear from a store for very short people. It’s a dress from a mall chain store in her size. It covers everything but her shoulders and a small section of her upper chest and back. She’s worn it to church, and in the growing heat she was looking forward to wearing it a lot because it’s light and comfortable.

You know what really grills my cheese about it? It’s not even the shirt they made her put on over her top, it’s the pants they made her wear underneath. It’s a full-length dress that she has to hold up to keep from getting wet in uncut grass. She even had a small set of shorts underneath because it was gym day. But because the top part of her dress apparently exposed the immoral sinfulness of her bare shoulders she also had to pull on jeans even though her legs remained completely covered as part of her punishment.”

“I swear to God and all his Alf pogs I really didn’t think that I would have to face that particular dragon before she even entered a numbered grade. 

Now I have this child, the one that argues scientific points about everything from the top speed of land animals in Africa to the classification of the planets with me endlessly, wordlessly accepting that a dress with spaghetti straps, something sold in every Walmart in America right now, is somehow bad. Wrong. Naughty. And most importantly that the answer is to cover up.

Make no mistake; every school dress code that is not a set uniform is about policing girls and girls alone.”

Jef Rouner: The Apparently Immoral Shoulders of My FIVE-YEAR-OLD Daughter 

If you are distracted by the body of a child, you are the one with the problem, and should not be a teacher. Or anywhere near children.