Well, I didn’t actually teach today, but I wanted to journal about today anyway. Today was my first Superintendent’s Conference day. I was actually dreading today because of how the other teachers on my team were talking about it. But really, it wasn’t bad. The only time I was really board was the second session. It was an hour and a half talk about new software that the district is getting. It looks like nice software, but really, software is better learned in a hands-on way. They do plan on having a conference day in September where the teachers and staff will be trained at computers.
The other two sessions that I had to go to were a science department meeting (the first session) and a guest speaker who spoke about poverty (the third session). The science department meeting was nice because it was real. The teachers talked about issues that were relevant to them. One such issues is having the students fill in a second scantron for the part 1 questions on the 8th grade science test. The state is saying that the teachers are not allowed to do it anymore. The reason that the science teachers do that because they spend so much time reviewing that they count part 1 of the test toward the students’ averages. The science teachers at the meeting were arguing that the state has no logical reason to bar them from doing this. This is an interesting issue, and I’m wondering how it is going to play out.
The guest speaker was great. Although the talk was two and a half hours long, sitting there for that long was only uncomfortable because we were in the high school auditorium (nanometers of space between each seat). The speaker also gave us a small break, which helped a lot. The talk was interesting because she was talking about what middle class children are taught that children in poverty are not (she does not like calling them “lower-class” because that is derogatory; the statement that they live in poverty is a fact). I thought that that was an interesting, but true, distinction. She also discussed her personal life and marriage. She was born in a very middle class home whereas her husband was a thug growing up (I am assuming that he is no longer a thug because she married him). She also discussed the behaviors that prevent those in poverty from fitting in to a middle class society (and a bit on what behaviors prevent middle class society from fitting into the wealthy society). I have seen many of these behaviors in my students, and now that I am aware of them, I am wondering how I can help my students. This will be something to continue to think about throughout my career.
