Ernie Rambo's blog

Five Gifts Received

Last month, I posted my list of seemingly little things that amazingly disrupt how I teach each day. Today, I’d like to turn the tide a bit and list gifts that I received that have made my job more rewarding and have motivated me to work harder to ensure my students achieve. These gifts don’t have monetary value – they cannot be purchased or wrapped up and placed under a tree.  But the gifts hold great value for me.

I wasted the first five years of my teaching profession. Maybe I didn’t truly waste those years, but I spent a few moments wondering why a few faculty members seemed to take charge of meetings or make presentations on our professional development days. What I didn’t realize at the time is that some teachers emerge as leaders of their colleagues.

    Over the past few years, the only year that my school made AYP was the same year that we utilized a block schedule – where students meet with their core teachers every other day, for ninety minutes at a time instead of a traditional schedule where students meet with each teacher every day for classes that last about fifty minutes. In addition to using a block schedule that year, the core teachers had two separate preparation times. One preparation time was to take care of personal teaching duties, such as grading papers and contacting parents. The additional preparation time was devoted to collaborative activities with teachers’ interdisciplinary teams and grade-level department lesson planning.

     At the start of the school year, I felt overwhelmed with all of this year’s requirements for teachers. At our school, we’re transitioning to using the recently released Common Core Standards, the teachers are required to use a district-wide online template for writing lesson plans, and moving toward including results from a growth-model as part of teacher evaluations. Additionally, our principal reminded us that in addition to knowing our students as we always have, that we needed be able to recall each student’s data bank of assessment results.

How often do you see this statement? Does seeing this statement make you want to justify why  June, July, and August are not the reasons why you teach – and would you be surprised if those actually were the reasons why most educators teach?

Here’s a statement that defines my summer “vacation:”

 Adapted from Momentum by Jraygor1/Licensed Creative Commons Attribution on July 17, 2011.