Serious Inspiration!
If you would like some serious inspiration visit this site. The challenge to break a 2-hour marathon happened and the story is incredibly heart-warming. Some people have compared this accomplishment to putting a human on the moon.
Great Kid Quotes:
- “The tooth fairy left a 12-dollar bill under my pillow!”
- “I love Storyline more than recess!!”
Sites & Facilities Survey
Please take some time to respond to the questions in this survey.
Timeline:
- 1st year [this year]
- Staff Survey Window: Friday 10/18-11/8
- Site Council Input: Thursday 11/21 3:00-4:00
- Leadership Review & Refine: Thursday 12/5 2:45-3:30
- Process due to district Wednesday 12/11
- 2nd year [next year]
- District Sites & Facilities Committee meets regularly over an approximately 6-month period to review school site priorities and needs then makes recommendations to the board.
Visitor/Volunteer System Change
FYI – Red is the new yellow and yellow is the new red. Red badges now signify visitors and yellow badges now signify volunteers. We are communicating this to parents both verbally and with a poster over the sign-in system. (I am not sure about the why behind the change, and yes, I am having difficulty keeping a straight-face as I type this.)
Milage Club Make-Up Days
- Monday 10/21
Upcoming Meetings:
- Monday 10/21 EBISS 4th/5th Grade 2:45-3:30
- Tuesday 10/2 PLC 2:45-3:30 – Core Effectiveness Meetings (see post below)
- Wednesday 10/22 Conference Prep & Conferences
Core Effectiveness Meetings – I will send a document to each grade level team on Monday to guide you through this work on Tuesday afternoon for your PLCs.
PE- activities spreadsheet for classroom teachers.
Dreambox – On November 6th district SIW there will be a training webinar. All elementary Dreambox users (⅔ and ⅘ teachers) at your school will be required to participate in the webinar. This webinar will focus on accessing data and using the Dreambox dashboard.
Good Short Read
Fairly recently I had a conversation with my parents about the changes in parenting and education expectations in our lifetime. This article (summary below; full article linked further below) captured some of the ideas we discussed and I found it really interesting so I thought I would share. I feel the last paragraph in the summary is incredibly impactful.
The Distance Between Adults and Today’s Young People
“It’s not our imagination, kids really are different,” says former counselor and administrator Jen Cort in this article in AMLE Magazine. “Today’s youth face four constructs that adults either did not experience at all or did not experience in the same way as youth today.” Here’s her list:
• Athletics – Many kids “major in sports” as early as seven, and sometimes focus on only one sport. Often it’s, “I’m James, a soccer player,” versus “I am James, I play soccer, baseball, and like video games.” In addition to narrowing their experience and being set up for disappointment if they don’t qualify for elite teams, specialization increases the risk of overuse and traumatic injuries. Some parents get too involved, sending an unfortunate message when victories are followed by an exultant “We won the game!” but losses by, “I’m sorry you lost.”
• Devices – Smartphones are ubiquitous, says Cort, and Google is where kids find out about things that previous generations asked the adults in their lives. One boy was told by his mother that he was too young to know what pansexual meant, so he found out online. Another asked about Charlottesville and didn’t get answers, so he went to YouTube and watched the death of Heather Heyer over and over. His takeaway was that if you stand up for what you believe, you can be killed, which directly contradicted what adults had been preaching about being an upstander. Kids are quick to see the hypocrisy of adults telling them not to be on their phones all the time and doing the same thing themselves. But limit-setting is sometimes grudgingly appreciated: one boy acknowledged that his family’s rule about not having a smartphone in the bedroom overnight was good for him.
• Development – We used to think the maturation of kids’ frontal lobes (responsible for impulse control) was complete by 18, but now scientists say it’s more like the mid-to late-20s. Puberty happens around sixth grade, right? Actually it occurs between age 8 and 13 for girls and 9 and 14 for boys – and physical changes are preceded by chemical rumblings. Families celebrate early developmental milestones – moving from a tricycle to a two-wheeler – but are reticent when it comes to preparing their kids for adolescence. “Parents and teachers serve students well,” says Cort, “by letting them know as young as second grade that just as they grew from babies to second graders, they will also grow from second graders to teenagers. Just as when they were babies, adults are present to support them through these changes.”
• Diversity – Let’s assume that people don’t remember most events that occurred before they were four. That means today’s:
– 19-year-olds don’t remember a time before smartphones and 9/11 (and the subsequent surge of Islamophobia).
– 18-year-olds are the first to grow up with their country at war their entire lives.
– 15-year-olds don’t remember a time before having an African-American president, and may experience having a white president as unusual.
– 8-year-olds don’t remember a time before the resurgence of the women’s movement, the international movement of teens around #Marchforourlives, the legalization of marriage for gay and lesbian couples, and the word transgender becoming part of the mainstream lexicon.
– 7-year-olds don’t remember a time before the #MeToo Movement and the first openly transgender male qualifying for a U.S. Olympic Team.
– 6-year-olds don’t remember a time before media race awareness changed due to the racist response to a Cheerios commercial featuring an interracial family.
– 5-year-olds are the first born into a majority-minority race demographic in the U.S.
“We are moving from believing that if we admit to being biased and privileged, we also admit to being racist,” concludes Cort, “to now, not admitting our biases and privileges means we are racially insensitive – at best prompting the question, ‘who teaches us in between?’ The answer is that we need to do our own work and learn from our students.”
“It’s Different Now” by Jen Cort in AMLE Magazine, October 2019 (Vol. 7, #4, pp. 20-22),
https://bit.ly/31gIWcP; Cort can be reached at [email protected].