What a Teacher Does on Sunday Morning

I'm always thrilled when I can find something I've filed on my computer, and today, preparing lessons for the week, I wanted recommended counselors.  I went to a folder called Educational Concerns and did a search for counselors, and it came up in a file I'd labeled "Recommended Counselors."  Amazing that my thinking this morning matched my thinking at an earlier date!  These are just the ones that one of my students recommended, but notice how many times he saw them! 

Downtown   -  Ms. Joanne X. Huang,
John Adams -  Mr.Wong, 

Ocean camp.-Ms. Osborne.

All together I have about thirty six appointments with more than twelve different counselors for one year.

I know that I am a high-maintenance person, however shabby I may seem.  This was a high-maintenance student, and he wasn't so shabby.  

Anyway, I want to describe a little bit the process of doing lesson plans and getting ready for the next week of class.  (I wrote "A Day in the Life of a Teacher at Lycee Bencheneb" when I was teaching in Algeria, and I really shouldn't retire before I've written "A Day in the Life of a Teacher at CCSF."  When I do, it won't be a Sunday, but it will incorporate a non-teaching day.)

After making a big pot of tea and looking through the Sunday paper--particularly at A Diary of the Planet--I come into the study and try to focus on the beauty of my way over-priced area rug instead of on my recklessness in buying it without doing any research or thinking at all.  Then I sit down to the forms students filled out the previous day and I add information to what is already there on the first-day lesson plans.  I have a normal number in ESL 142 (Speaking and Listening) and in another section of ESL 140 (Academic Reading and Writing), but the class I met at 8:10 last Friday has only 7 students enrolled, and only 5 of those showed up.  Two of them were students I had last semester.  One is repeating ESL 140 because he failed it last semester.  But among the five who showed up, five countries are represented:  Belarus, China, Poland, Saudi Arabia, and South Korea!  Our ESL coordinator told us to act upbeat and not to hint that the class may be closed and the teacher and students sent in different directions, and that's how I acted.  But I wrote the union to find out whether I can retire as planned if I owe units.  The students will be taken care of.  

A beautiful dog came to the door when we were getting started, and I invited him in.  He came in and I indicated the forms to fill out and the textbook, and he walked out.  "Oh, too much work!"  I said.  "You don't want to work like a dog?"  But he came back in.  However he didn't fill out any forms or really look at the books.  He just drooled on the flap of my brief-case-on wheels.

Anyway, back to lesson planning.   I see that The students have not filled out the forms correctly.  They quite often don't know the names of their previous teachers.  Two of them are new and haven't had any CCSF teachers yet.  One didn't circle the grade earned, but I have that information on a printout called teh Program Prerequisite Validation Report  (SWRT).  . One graduated from Galileo High School in San Francisco. The Saudi Arabian student just got back the day before classes began!  

I sometimes write a letter of introduction to my reading and writing students, but this time I gave those students the bio that's online and asked them to create additional questions to find out what's not in that bio.  Then I'm going to ask them questions and ask them to use them in a bio of themselves.  I'm using something a wonderful retired colleague of mine shared with me, 

We didn't finish going over the SLOs on Friday, but I noticed that the students weren't taking notes--not even copying what I was writing on the board to help them annotate (hah!) their handout and unlock the vocabulary with English synonyms (another laugh).  I had to ask them to take notes, and only one person had paper.  I sometimes think a studies skills class should be a pre-requisite, but maybe that's part of what we're providing in every class we teach.

I am error-prone, and one good example of that is that I left out one of the weeks in the sample of how they could date the white attendance card.  I re-did that yesterday.  I also had my sbcglobal e-mail instead of my ccsf one on one of the handouts, so I need to re-do that and replace the one that's online.  They've all indicated e-mail addresses other than the one CCSF provides.  That's one reason they don't get my messages, which are supposed to be sent out from our school's e-mail account.  

Organizing is a great big part of teaching, and I am not well-organized by nature, but it's a value I have, so I do what I can to keep my stuff together. I usually enter the classroom with everything in perfect order, but within 15 minutes, papers are all over the place, and I can't find what I'm looking for.  So now I neatly get together the lesson plan I tape into a bound composition book (whose pages I number), the name cards, attendance cad, handouts on how to write a composition about themselves, a vocabulary fill-in the blank sheet for SLOs, an example of how to follow Manuscript Rules, In case we get to anything beyond this, I have copies of the first unit in their book, which is called "Untruth and Consequences" and I have three articles that pertain either to this unit on the media or to other units in our book:  One is about the 15-year-old girl who killed herslef after photos of her sexual assault were texted to classmates. Another is about the dolphin mom who vocalized to her baby before its birth (for our unit on animal intelligence). A third is about the Jahi McMath case, where someone dead is being kept alive through artificial means, which contrasts to the Hermanson's case denying medical help for a diabetic child given our textbook.  

Now I have another class to get ready, and I'll be joining my meque in bed in less than 45 minutes before a 10:00 AM 49ers game he wants to watch.  (He brought eggs so he could cook for us here instead of going out as we usually do.  Was that sweet?)  This afternoon I need to make the arugula, grilled butternut squash, Brussels sprout salad I'm taking to the gathering of our View and Chew group, which is honoring our wonderful host this evening.  The beat goes on.

I'm writing two knowledgeable retirees about what happens if I owe units before I retire.