four days in the belly of the APS [View All]

So, we started the summer institute for the Atlanta Public Schools alternative certification program on Tuesday.

Sweet Jesus. I'm fried. My homework last night, writing two lesson plans and editing one unit plan, took seven hours to finish.

Planning. Everything, of course, is keyed now to The Standards passed down from the fine folks who work in the Capitol. Ever seen a set of educational standards? http://www.glc.k12.ga.us/qcc/homepg.asp

The fun doesn't end there. Those standards get massaged, stroked, referred to (always!) and injected with meaning via Bloom's taxonomy of mental rigor and then shoehorned into unit and lesson plans. As I say, seven hours for two lessons and one unit. I'm told that this time allotment will decrease dramatically as I become familiar with the process. I can only hope that it is so.

Classroom management. In past teaching gigs, this has been my weak point, so I'm glad that they're spending as much time on it as they are. Still, the summer institute only lasts five weeks, and they're throwing us into our student teaching at 7:30 am this Monday. I'm slated to teach MID (moderately intellectually disabled) elementary starting in August, but I volunteered to student teach seriously intellectually disabled middle school kids for the experience. Do in order to learn. Much as I have a leg up on my cohort mates because I've been in front of a class before, I've never dealt with MID/SID kids and part of me is, honestly, petrified.

Cultural sensitivity. APS is majority minority and urban. The school where I'll be doing my student teaching is in what's delicately called an "at-risk" neighborhood, around the Lakewood/Hi-Fi Buys ampitheater if you're familiar with Atlanta. Culturally sensitive lefty though I am, cultures do still clash and I'm about as white as they come. I wasn't even half kidding when I asked my curriculum specialist today to write up a list of terms currently in use among the kids.

We had a fairly frank, but short, discussion yesterday about race, class, categorization and prejudice. I like my groupmates a great deal, and I think we're going to be able to rely on each other a lot. We'll need to, especially if some goddamned politician somewhere decides that the time is ripe to push for even more testing or more teacher accountability standards any time soon.