Sunday, February 28, 2010

School Limbo

I have been meaning to post about this for a while, but haven't had time. But, for some ungodly reason I'm locked out of my online gradebook, so I might as well post b/c it's too early to pump before bed.

A few weeks ago we were called to an emergency UFT (United Federation of Teachers, the city's teacher union) meeting and were told that our school had been placed on some State-wide shit list and that one of four options would happen to us:

1. we would be closed down
2. we would be turned into a charter school
3. we would all stay, but next year we'd be under crazy surveillance and without UFT protection, therefore if those observing didn't like us or our test scores, we'd be fired. bye bye.
4. half the staff would be "replaced" to restructure the school.

The union representative who delivered the message said that they had no idea which option the city would choose, but that as soon as anyone knew, we would know.

Nice, huh?

Let me clarify that we are on this shit list for graduation rates below the city's average for 2006, 2007, 2008, although we had a graduation rate HIGHER than the city average for 2009. We are NOT on the the list for test scores, only graduation rate.

I have worked at my school for nine years. No, it is not a great school and no, I would not send my kids to it, BUT it is a functioning school. 80% of our students live below the poverty level, our special education population is edging towards 30%, and the majority of the 9th graders enter reading at a 4th grade level, having scored 2's and 1's on their 8th grade English Language Arts exams (out of a possible 4). And, in spite of our student population and the challenges they bring, we have many loving, dedicated, and hard working teachers who not only bust their butts teaching things they don't know (ahem, I am NOT trained to teach reading, but literature), but they also mentor these kids in many ways--buying prom dresses, taking them to movies when their house has burned down and they have nowhere to go after school, calling colleges and trying to explain that the kid shouldn't lose their scholarship b/c her stepfather is an asshole who refuses to file his taxes because he's afraid of the government...the list is long.

So this is what I don't get: In the meritocracy that is the NYC DOE (high school is an application process, students take a test in 8th grade to get into specialized schools like Stuyvesant, one of the best high schools in the nation. Stuy admitted 9 Black students into their 2010 freshmen class of 700. In NEW YORK CITY. It's a public school. Yeah.), what the hell does the City think is going to happen to these kids?

I can tell you one thing that's going to happen: These schools are going to lose the good teachers. Teachers get so much crap in general and it's exhausting. I honestly believe my mission as an educator is to teach the population I currently teach, and that I am a good teacher, but I can tell you that after 10 years in I am tired of the bologna that comes with working with my student population. I love them, but what would it be like to work in a school with grade level students, that had resources, and didn't freak out every year about test scores?

The kids and schools who need good teachers are going to lose them under the guise of "aggressive actions" towards "failing schools." And then who will teach these kids? Great work--Obama, Bloomberg, & Klein. A-freakin'-plus.

Saturday, February 20, 2010

The Sh*t Hits the Diaper


The amount of cliches used to describe parenting and having kids is long and overused, but until you are a parent yourself you have no idea of how true they all are. Especially those of the "kids grow up so fast" and "it goes by so fast" persuasion. I am in constant amazement of how quickly Alexandra has turned into a little girl who is 2 going on 13, and our wee babe, Nico, is no longer so wee. It really does go by at light speed, and those nights when both kids scream for over an hour at 2am on opposite ends of your 800 square foot apartment get lost in the love.

Nico just recently started eating solids. The joy of having two kids separately is that you faintly remember life with kid #1 and it can save you some pain with kid #2. I'd say about 75% of the time I don't have my flashback to Alexandra's babyhood until the current drama with Nico is over, but every so often I can see the writing on the wall and I am able to switch up the situation and come out on top.

For example: starting solid food. Alexandra started nursing about 100 times per night between the age of 4 and 5 months old. I wasn't sleeping at all b/c the kid was on my tit and hungry all the freakin' time. But, being the au natural mom I was/am, I was NOT about to give her solids. No solids until 6 months was my mantra. Breastmilk is all she needs. Blah blah blah. Why? No idea. No idea where I even got those ideas from. But after a month of wasting away b/c I couldn't keep up with her, I gave in and fed the darn girl. Total relief.

We sleep trained Nico around 3 1/2 months--crying it out, the whole nine yards--and he was awesome. After three nights he slept like a lamb...for about 2 weeks. Then he was waking, and screaming like a banshee, and my memory was jogged. Feed that boy! We started him on cereal, and sweet potatoes, and pears, and banana, and today some prunes. The first time I fed him he cried between spoonfulls because I couldn't get it in his mouth fast enough. Little piglet.

But now that watery not-so-smelly breastmilk poop is gone. He's got the real poop. It's sticky, it's clumpy, it's smelly, and it's messy. Our brief honeymoon with the less offensive poop type is over, and I'm sad. Sad because my boy is already making man poop (well, not quite--thank god--but he's on the way!) and sad because he's already left that tiny baby phase.

And it's these little things that make you realize that it really does go by so fast.

Thursday, February 18, 2010

Slow Food

The title of this post is misleading as it has nothing to do with the slow food movement, but it does have to do with eating your food slowly--a luxury that is simply no longer part of my life.

Monday through Friday, I eat one meal slowly. Friday night is take out Friday, when Adam and I peruse the orange folder of take out menus and order some kind of crap from a local venue, drink a beer, and catch up from the week. All other meals of the week look like this:

Breakfast: Eaten on the train ride to work. My commute is only four stops, so this eating is FAST. Last week I grabbed a couple leftover pancakes from the snow day (decided that snow day had to = pancakes), threw them on top of my packed lunch, and noshed them on the train practically choking on how dry they were. At least there was something in my stomach before teaching for 3 hours.

Lunch: Eaten while pumping breastmilk in the dirty, smelly, waterbug infested bathroom of the Humanities teacher's lounge. Horrible place to eat, no doubt, but by 11:00 not only are my boobs about to simultaneously explode and implode, but I am also starving. I inhale whatever lunch I have during my 12 or so minutes that the pump is on.

Dinner: Eaten while feeding Alexandra, who, although 2.5 insists "Mommy, feed me!" while pacifying Nico, who is pretty much fed up after being in the bouncy seat while I made dinner. I usually inhale my dinner so quickly that I scare myself and even wonder if I ever put any food on my plate in the first place. That's how fast I eat.

So this week of midwinter break, I have eaten slow and it. has. been. glorious.

Wednesday, February 17, 2010

Oops.

Today Adam and I accidentally took each others phones.

Taking the opposite phone is not like romantically swapping ipods to see if you have compatible music tastes and are destined to be together. It's just plain annoying. And kinda surreal when you see "new text from lori!" and you're lori. It's like God or your subconscious is texting you or something totally weird happening to you like an out of body experience. Not like I have had any of those...recently.

But, it's only a day, right?

That's until I dropped his phone while trying to snap a pic of our cutie pie kids to send him. And I didn't have time to open it again b/c the evening was hell on wheels with cutie pie kid one disintegrating into a hot mess of emotions and pee. And then husband opened phone to find that his screen no longer works b/c wife dropped it. And wife had to be honest and admit that she dropped the phone, which hadn't seemed like a bad drop at the time but now phone was broken. Oops.

At least we got phone insurance this time.

Tuesday, February 16, 2010

The Penis Saga Continues

If you read this post, you know that my daughter is going through what her peditrician aptly informed me was Freud's anal fixation. When I asked Dr. Gold, our amazing peditrician whom I want to give me a make-over (but that's the subject of another post) what was up with Alexandra talking about penises ALL. THE. TIME. she laughed and said that it was totally normal, that no, she was not a young pervert, and that it was just a phase.

She also told me about this hilarious little girl who had named her vagina Charmane and her bottom Bruce just out of nowhere to the amazement of her perplexed parents who knew nobody of either name. (!)

Well, this phase has been going on for months now, and it's getting old. Today we were eating dinner, having a grand time with Alexandra telling me all about panthers that live in the rainforest and the monkeys that are scared of them (unit on rainforests this week at daycare), and then she broke into an impromptu song of "The Farmer in the Dell." The following conversation ensued after the first verse of "The farmer takes Alexandra."

Me: And what do you take?
AOW: A penis!
Me: No, silly, what do you take?
AOW: I take a penis!
Me: That's silly. What would you do with it? (Meant to sound like, why would you do that? A cat, a dog, a nurse, the cheese would be so much more useful, but it didn't come off that way...)
AOW: I put it in my mouth!
Me: *Sigh*
AOW: Mommy takes a penis, mommy takes a penis, she puts it in her mouth and mommy takes a penis! (sang to the tune of The Farmer in the Dell)

As much as my spouse wishes this were true, I am so afraid that she's going to belt into song at daycare with these illicit lyrics and I'm going to get my kids taken away from me. She already staged a nurse-in at daycare (she had all the kids lined up against the wall breastfeeding the stuffed animals the other day), I can only imagine her conducting a toddler chorus of penis songs.

Help me!

Sunday, February 14, 2010

Gangsta Gangsta!


Professional development is the bane of my existence as a teacher. At no time do I loathe the teaching profession more than during yet another worthless day, afternoon, or hour of professional development. All professional development has done for me in the past few years is provide me with multiple opportunities to realize why nobody takes teaching--as a profession--seriously. Nine out of ten times it's ludicrous. As my old teaching friend Rhonda would say, "I'll cut my arm off--right here and right now--if you can give me something that will work tomorrow in my classroom that I don't already know." Let's just say that I live by Rhonda's creed and I still have both arms.

But I was super excited when my Assistant Principal told me she had booked a guy from the District Attorney's office to come give us the 101 on gangs for a department meeting, claiming it was professional development for us. Wow--it was.

I feel like I know more than most bougie While folk about gangs after my ten years of teaching in a NYC public high school, but the fascinating thing about gang culture is that it is constantly shifting. But Mr. DA's office came in with his PowerPoint presentation on gang signs, colors, graffiti, and a pretty comprehensive history of the big players in NYC: the Bloods, the Crips, and the Latin Kings.

Let me share some facts with you:

--Bloods wear red, but also light brown (brown as in dried blood). They'll often wear brown when in mourning. This was news to me b/c I have a light brown bandanna I wear to workout in all the time. Oops.
--Bloods do everything on the right (tattoos, roll up pant leg, half shirt off), Crips on the left.
--Various gangs frequent restaurants based on their colors and/or what they can spell out from the restaurant names. Crips go to Burger King, BK=Blood Killer. Bloods do KFC, KFC=Killing F*ckin' Crips. They also wear clothing that represent their gangs, Bloods will wear CK (Crip Killer) and Crips used to wear British Knight shoes (Blood Killer)
--the Center for Disease Control claims that the average lifespan for a young man/woman in a gang is 24 years old. Too damn young.

Seriously, I could not process all the stuff the DA guy was telling me. I wish I had taken notes. It was fascinating.

Of course, there's not much we can do if we recognize a student is in a gang. It is not illegal to join a gang. But they said if we start to recognize who is in what gang then we can try to keep their altercations to a minimum in the classroom or just be aware of whose allegiances lie where. Pretty wild shit.

I guess I'd be missing an arm, now, according to Rhonda.

Tuesday, February 9, 2010

Just Say No to generic...


Let me put it out there that I'm a brand name girl. I must have watched too much TV in my developmental years and now I am warped for life. My mom tells me how she used to refill the Heinz ketchup bottle with generic and the Aunt Jemima syrup with generic for all of my childhood just to shut me up.

So, a couple weeks back when I had strange symptoms that mimicked last January's pregnancy symptoms, I freaked out. My gums were bleeding, my boobs had popped up in size again, and I was feeling bloated. Granted, our intimate life has been practically non-existent, but we all know it only takes one time to get yourself knocked up, and after getting pregnant twice on accident let's just say I'm a little gun shy.

Although I am a brand name freak, finances are tough. So I bought some CVS pregnancy tests b/c hey, they were $5 cheaper and at this point in my life $5 is actually a fun amount of extra cash to have. Coffee? Cookie? Pizza? Yeah, you can't buy much for $5 but it's something. That's what life of paying double daycare has done for me--I appreciate $5 again.

So I peed on the stick. No extra line, not pregnant. Whew. Got Alexandra from daycare, made dinner, and while giving her a bath decided to look at the pregnancy test again and BAM! there were definitely two lines. Let's just say that freaking out was an understatement for what happened next. I could barely breathe. I felt like my life was going to be a tragic Irish movie of me looking haggard with crying children all around me...

I took the other CVS test. Again, no double line then 2 hours later two lines. Freak out #2 commences. Adam goes to buy a brand name test. I waited until the fresh morning pee to take it (after not sleeping all night), and it was definitely negative.

The morale of the story is--DON'T use generic pregnancy tests. No. Nope. No way, Jose.

Second morale of the story: We DON'T want three kids.

Snow Day!!!!!!!!!??????????

Tomorrow is my first day since having kids. I guess there was one last year, but I was on sabbatical and they didn't announce it until so late that our daycare didn't close. With the ominous winter storm on the day, the NYC DOE in an unlikely act of prudence announced that schools would be closed tomorrow around noon today.

This is how my brain processed the news, delivered by an ecstatic coworker:

First: WHOOOOOOO! Snow day! (insert jumping up & down here)

Second: Oh.....daycare is closed if public school is closed....Alexandra will be home.

Third: If my daycare's closed, our babysitter/nanny's daycare must be closed therefore I'm home alone with two kids....

Fourth: Oh my....

As crazy as this is to admit, tomorrow will be my first day home alone with both kids since Nico was born. I have both kids from 3:30 until 7ish every day since he was born, but not a whole day yet. Adam hasn't been out of town or anything.

So....looks like snow day has a new definition starting tomorrow! Let the wild rumpus start!