Working hard, and more testing

Before last week's tests began, my students worked so hard and did me proud. My advisor observed me the day before the math testing began. They started that day with a math lesson on measurement, then we did storytelling, which they hadn't done in a while, and learned about the word "artifact." They did an activity around how to look at artifacts.

Then, after lunch, they did a very challenging artifact study, behaving as if they were in a museum studying artifacts. We had to go back and reorganize the items, and ask that students not touch them, as that caused problems during the lesson, but we were able to regroup so that everyone was able to study them closely without touching. Nice recovery.

They were incredibly focused during the study, and did some beautiful work. They didn't want to stop, even though that artifact study went over an hour, and including the morning introduction, they had been doing artifact work for two hours. Between that and measurement, their brains were full, but they still did some scientific observation as part of their animal studies at the end of the day! Amazing.

The next day, Shamiqua* was really discouraged by the first day of the math test. She dragged her feet, and her coat, getting to the cafeteria. I had her and another girl, Oksana*, who is not known for her patience (unless *she* is trying to get ready, in which case she becomes enraged if you rush her at all- but anyway!). Shamiqua is shuffling down the hall at a glacial pace, coat dragging behind her; Oksana and I are 20 feet ahead, waiting for her to catch up. I figured Oksana would have some impatient comment for poor Shamiqua.

But no. In what was, for her, a very rare show of empathy, this is what Oksana did. She walked back to Shamiqua and stood beside her. Then, she matched her pace, step for step, all the way to the cafeteria. It took about 10 minutes, and every other class in the school, it seems like, pushed past them on the stairs, but it didn't matter. They were in their own slow space, not talking, but sharing nonetheless. I told Oksana she was my superstar for the day, and she gave me one of her very rare, non-smirking, very beautiful smiles, and said, "Why?"

*names are not real

If you can go to a garden, go

We went to my community garden today, as part of our science unit on plants. PSOhYes has a garden, but we went to see the composting, mostly. There was also still a lot to see, even in mid-October, as a lot of things like pumpkins had not been harvested.

Can I just tell you how excited these kids were? They ran up to me saying things like "I did SIX sketches and I want to do six more!!!!!!" And you know, even if they stopped after two, they were still running around looking at the pumpkins and the other plants, looking for snails, wondering why the mosquitoes were not as bad in the sunny, open parts of the garden- they could not have been more engaged.

I had one of my fellow gardeners, who works a lot with our compost, come to talk to the students for about 15 minutes about compost, what goes in and where we get it, what comes out and what we do with it, and what happens in between. He found them some worms to play with- very exciting!- and some intrepid kids put their hands on the steaming, partially-cooked compost. The steam coming off of that pile got a big "Ooooh!" as well.

It was, all in all, a really stellar field trip, and we really didn't have to do much except set them loose and make sure they understood the rules. Some kids even contributed to the compost pile with scraps from their lunch!

Here is an excellent example of some of the sketching they did today: