Small Wins.

My very own Red Jacket.

This is one of the most important things to remember to look for when working at City Year. It's so much harder to go through a week, let alone a day, of service without pinpointing and recording them. I've made myself get into the habit of using the whiteboard in my bedroom to record these small wins on a daily basis. It not only helps to motivate, but it helps to track the progress you are making.

For example, this past week I had several small wins with my students:

-AC admitted to me that our 4th teacher, Ms. Bean, "wasn't so bad" and is "actually kinda funny". Considering how resistant my class was to her teaching style in November, this is HUGE.
-DH, who knows himself very well and knows he has some difficulty controlling his temper, for once did not fight the teacher when she called him out and asked him to move his seat to the front of the room. Sure, he had a nasty scowl on his face the whole time, but he didn't answer her back, he didn't escalate the situation, and for that, I am extremely proud.
-The 3 boys on my math focus list get extremely competitive with one another, which makes my job a lot easier. If I can make multiplication drills into a competition, they literally want to do nothing else than see how much faster they can do multiplication tables than the other two. AND one boy went up 20 whole points on his Winter MAP test, and is now only 2 points away from being Proficient (for middle schoolers, going up even 1 point is huge; so this is astronomically awesome).
-For all of Wednesday, AW sat and focused and completed ALL of her math classwork (correctly, no less), even while chaos ensued with her classmates around her.
-My 3 girls on my literacy focus list all improved their fluency scores, and I made them some bomb-ass trackers for them to see their improvement.
-This last win has nothing to do with students, but I made myself and my team a comprehensive after-school resource binder, with spaces for session plans, unit skeletons, and other worksheets, student contact info, and other awesome things.

That's been my week in a nutshell. Other than the fact that I was 90 minutes late for work on Thursday, but it's fine. It happens.

Now, off to Whole Foods to food stamp me some lunch, and then off to my favorite Alterra coffee shop in Milwaukee to work on some logistical stuff for Black History Night and my Senior Corps application. WOOHOO!

Stay awesome.

Let's Get Some Joys, Ripples, and Appreciations From the Week

My joys from the week:

One of my literacy focus list students, D, proudly showing off his fluency tracker (a thing I designed to track his Words per Minute, expression, and phrasing) to his best friend in class.

One of my math focus list students, E, being the only student in the class to remember the rule of rounding decimals, and then properly completing the math worksheet I gave him in our tutoring session for homework. This student used to be absent every other day, either from being suspended for fighting or just didn't feel like coming to school. Now he comes every day, and eagerly asks me when is it going to be time for our tutoring session.

Two of my students, J and F, who aren't on my focus lists asked to spend their recess time with me working through math problems that they were having difficulty with. J also told me she was going to bring in a present for all the City Years at her school on Monday because she said, in her own words, "City Year does such hard and good work here and hard and good work deserves to be rewarded with a present."

Yesterday we had our first LACY fair for the corps - it was held at the Manpower Group's headquarters downtown. I went to sessions about networking, how to build your personal brand, and finding jobs using online resources and social media. We had a late start too - 8:45 am - which was a nice break. Even though I woke up at 6:30, it was still an hour later then I usually get to sleep during the week. We also got to hear from the President and CEO of the YWCA of Greater Milwaukee, who was a totally kick-butt lady named Paula Penebaker. She is actually from small-town Ohio, went to Xavier, and worked at Procter & Gamble for a number of years before landing herself in Milwaukee so I felt kind of kindred to her, coming from small-town Ohio for college. She was so awesome to listen to, and I think I will take a lot of her advice to heart.

The World Spins Madly On.

“Night is here, the day is gone, and the world spins madly on…”

There are many times throughout the week, day, hour even, where I feel like this. City Year kind of has that affect on a person. It is my nature that I become extremely obsessed with one thing, and will not stop focusing on that one thing until I am just so sick of it that I never want to look at it again. This, unfortunately, is how I have been with some students. Until now.
Again, like so many other things in my life, come back to skating and the lessons I learned from it (another reason why sports are so important in a child’s development – they teach the child lessons they will not forget for the rest of his or her life). A person only has so much energy s/he can expend over a given time. For skating, that given time might be a senior long program, or 4:30 min. If a skater expends all of her energy in that first step sequence, she has nothing left to give for the remaining 3 minutes, where a lift, a NHSS, and a bunch more elements occur. With City Year, if a corps member expends all of his/her energy in the first three months of service, the months of January through May are going to feel MIGHTY long. The days making up those months are going to feel even longer. Pacing oneself is as important in skating as it is in City Year.
I think back especially to my junior year of college, when I had the most trouble with skating because of being on senior, having a ton of asthma issues, etc., and I think how I can relate it to my city year. You have to practice like you perform. You have to put forth 100% effort 90% of the time. While this is not ideal obviously, we are all only human, and just as our Dean of City Year, Charlie Rose, said, “You have 135 days of service left this year. Give me 130 great ones.”

It’s awkward to interrupt your own thought process, but a song just came on my iTunes as I was writing that I just HAD to put down. It’s a group of lyrics from “The Cave” by Mumford & Sons, and I think it’s a silent pledge I’m going to take for the rest of the year. It’s a pledge I’m going to make to my students.

“I will hold on hope, and
I won’t let you choke on the noose around your neck
I’ll find strength in pain, and
I will change my ways
I’ll know my name as it’s called again”

Mathapalooza!

“…No matter gay, straight, or bi, lesbian, transgendered life, I’m on the right track, baby, I was born this way…” Lady GaGa’s anthem to individuality, also known as “Born This Way”, streamed through my semi-broken headphones as I hurtled through space from New York’s LaGuardia to Milwaukee’s General Mitchell airport. This weekend seemed like a blur. And it was a long weekend too. How did that happen?
Thursday was a whirlwind in and of itself – all of HLCS’s team was running around getting things set up for Mathapalooza, the inaugural math event at our school. There were balloons everywhere, string tangled around desks, streamers creatively hung from banisters, and plenty of sweating and stressing, but the event all came together in time. Unfortunately, I had a plane to catch, so I could only stay through the set up, but from what I understand, the school and CY MKE’s staff were very impressed with Mathapalooza and our team overall.
This is a huge step for our team I think, because we definitely came in as the underdog team. We’re the only team serving at a brand new partner school, so we’re facing frustrations the other teams aren’t in terms of getting teachers/admin to understand our role in MPS. Our school has been a SIFI (School Identified For Improvement) for at least 5 years. Mathapalooza, however, engaged over 100 students and parents, in addition to several teachers and school staff. Our principal couldn’t say enough good things – one of them being that any time we wanted to hold an event at HLCS, we had the green light, and that Mathapalooza was exactly the kind of event he imagined for his school.

City Year, what time is it?!

Another Friday. In City Year Milwaukee, that means another Unity Rally down at the Sunburst sculpture, another day full of trainings (today's happens to be about how to effectively tutor math), the sharing of crazy stories from school teams, and more. For me today, and probably for the next 40 or so Unity Rallies we have, I will be thinking of my middle school boys. During after-school on Wednesdays we run a program at our school called Weekend Wednesday. This is a little more active than the other clubs we run, but we still try to incorporate an academic/CY focus. This Wednesday, we ran our own version of the Amazing Race. The students were divided into teams and had to follow 4-5 clues around the school to figure out who their CM was. At each station they had to do a task before they could get their clue, or in the case of the last clue, have free time in the gym. I was racing around with 5 middle school boys, and their last task was to perform four sets of CY Power Lunges. This is a PT move we do as a corps at Unity Rallies sometimes, and it's a fun call & response/step. Teaching it to these boys and watching them perform it and get really into it is something I'll never forget. They were watching me so intently, making sure they didn't miss a beat. With huge grins on their faces the entire time they were learning, I had them do an extra set just to test them, and it was awesome. It's always a great feeling when you're able to impart wisdom and know they understand what you're teaching them, but having them be excited about it just takes it to a whole other level. I'm starting to think I need these students just as much as they need City Year.

"What do you say to 50 bucks?" "I say, '50 bucks? You are more than I have.'"

Man. I remember being frustrated with CY people who didn't update their blogs frequently last year, but now I completely understand why. The days are long, the kids are exhausting. And that's only Monday through Thursday. Fridays are always kind of unpredictable, which is nice. I find myself telling my students that Thursdays are the new Fridays, and since Wednesdays are "Weekend Wednesdays" in after-school, technically the week only consists of Monday and Tuesday.

I suppose I should speak about my students a little. I currently have 5 "focus list" students, or students that I pull out for 1-on-1 or small group tutoring in E.L.A. Lucky for me, though, this will all change next week. Because of a lovely little thing called "Third Friday" in urban teaching circles, our school has had its budget slashed, resulting in the layoff of at least 5 teachers. My teacher is one of them. This, conveniently, disrupts the whole middle school rotation, because he teaches science for all 6-8 graders. That's the way my middle school works, by the way. There are four teachers for mainstream classes. They all have their own homeroom in the morning - two 6th grade classes, one 7th and one 8th. After homeroom, they teach an hour and a half reading block to their homeroom students. Then, they follow a block rotation throughout the day, and teach their specialty area to all the grades. However, because my teacher is leaving, the school has to fill the position from within the school. For my class, this means a 3rd grade teacher is coming up. She's only certified to teach through 6th grade, however, so the social studies/7th grade homeroom teacher now has to teach both social studies and science, and my class will move from a block rotation to a self-contained classroom. One teacher, one room, one class of 6th graders. All day.

"Oh, pilot, can you help me? Can you make this last?"

I have survived Month 1 of being a Milwaukean! It's been such a crazy couple of weeks, full of learning, meeting and greeting, laughing, sharing, crying, listening, Unity Rally-ing, hugging, venting, and questioning. It's been exhausting, but it's been awesome. I am proudly serving as a CY Corps Member at Hopkins Lloyd, and I FINALLY got to meet my kids yesterday. We got off to a rough start due to some technical difficulties, but by the end of the day things were much better, and I didn't want to say goodbye!

Today we had our second official Unity Rally down by the Calatrava and the Sunburst sculpture, and then a day at the office full of training and a guest speaker. I was skeptical about the speaker until I saw who he was - State Rep. Jason Fields. During his session, I found myself getting more and more inspired about what CY is doing. There were several times I wanted to either jump for joy or just run up and hug him. I, of course, did none of these things, but just sat back in awe. He talked about his dream of making Milwaukee an international hub. He talked about honor being the most important virtue someone our age could have.