Category Archives: Miranda

Embrace Possibilities: Can I do a “peer observation” of Alisha?

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Embrace
Possibilities: Can I do a “peer observation” of Alisha?
Our girls love Alisha. Case and point is that our frosh
council, after only being students here for a few weeks, insisted that Alisha be a part of their homecoming wall. True to the “There’s No Place
Like Homecoming” theme she is pictured as Glenda the Good Witch helping our little
cartoon protagonists over to CHS (aka Oz).

What strikes me is the rapport and community that Alisha is
able to build with our girls given the fact that she only gets to interact with
them in the brief moments of the day when they are crossing the street. How
does she do that?? I wanna be like her!
I am wondering if we should be doing “peer observations” of
our non-teaching staff and thinking about what insights there are to gain by
seeing our students out of the classroom? How could we better serve or
empathize with our students? What insights can we gain about being role models?
I would love to stand at the cross walk with Alisha for a day, be with Cuco in
the Garventa Center during break serving up hash browns, sit in the attendance
office with Malissa during flu season on a rainy morning with heavy traffic, sweep
the halls at the end of lunch with Chris and Darrell, or sit in on a college
counseling meeting.
My goal for this year is to embrace possibilities and to
look for new ways to gain insight to our community and the people in it. I do
plan on doing these peer observations next semester and hoping a few of you
will join me. Maybe it could be a thing?

For Frosh: Weighting grades by MONTH rather than on TYPE of assignment

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Frosh: Weighting Grades by month rather than by the type of assignment.
I am playing around with weighting grades in a new way if I
get to teach frosh next year and I am looking for feedback.
When we assess the work that freshmen are doing at the beginning
of the year we are NOT assessing the skills they have learned in our class, we
are assessing what they learned from their teachers in 8th grade.
An essay that a 9th grader writes in September is
a bigger reflection of what they learned from their 8th grade
teachers about writing than it is an assessment of what we have been able to
teach them. To me this leads to grades that do not reflect what a student has
learned in OUR CLASS and therefore are not really valuable assessments to
determine how effective we are as teachers.
We know that there are inequities in the quality of
education that our incoming 8th graders are receiving. I know this
full well having been one of those incoming 9th graders who came
from a K-8 where quite frankly my education sucked and I was way behind until
about junior year.
Here is what I propose: we weight the grades based on how
far into the semester we are. So in other words assignments and tests from
August count for 10% of a student’s grade. Assignments and tests in September
count for 20%. Assignments and tests from October count for 30%. Assignments and
tests from November to December count for 40%.
By giving weight to the assignments at the end of a semester
we are allowing students to grow and demonstrate content mastery without being
so heavily penalized for work that was subpar at the beginning of the year. A
student who cannot write a coherent essay in August should not have that essay
count to the same degree as the writing that they are doing in December.
This also put more responsibility on US – to make our grades
reflect what we have taught them instead of how much skill they already have
coming into 9th grade.
What do you think – has any one tried this?? Do you hate the
idea?? Is it worth a shot??

I walked out of Mass after the homily on Sunday and it’s got me feeling feelings.

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I left Mass on Sunday after the homily. I quietly excused
myself from the back (cause that’s where all the good Catholics sit) because my anger was so great I couldn’t sit still. If you were
raised by a super Catholic family like me (i.e sinning=hell + lots of things are a sins) leaving Mass
before the priest walks out and the final song is done is a huge no
no.

A little backstory: I am struggling really bad right now. It
is not easy to teach a class on the Sacraments and maintain your passion for a
church that has really let so many people down recently. The Grand Jury’s
report on the sexual abuse in Pennsylvania and the recent news about the abuse of children in Catholic orphanages in The United States is a huge weight of sadness on my heart. This is not even easy to post, it’s
not like I’m leaving the church or am trying to talk trash but I cant make
sense of how these things happen and not only have to come up with answers for
myself, but for my students who feel that the church has lost all credibility on
issues of morality.
I went to church because I was aching for the priest to
stand up and say something like, “dang we messed up, we ruined lives, we need
structural change, there is nothing we can ever do to make up for this type
of damage but we have to try”.  I wanted
a game plan and marching orders of what to do next. But that didn’t happen. Instead
I heard things like how “only” (that’s a direct quote) nine priests in our
diocese have ever been arrested for abuse and the church is not the only
organization that deals with sexual misconduct.
While these things are true they fail to capture the magnitude
of the cover up of these “few” (please note the sarcasm) priests and the fact
that so many victims will never have anything close to justice in this life. Do
other organizations have issues?? Sure. But Jerry Sandusky & Harvey
Weinstein don’t claim to be the moral teaching authority for 1.2 billion people on earth. Priests are the gatekeepers for the Sacraments, they literally act
in the person of Christ, and at times, have left so many Catholics feeling
less than (i.e. divorced Catholics, the LGBTQ+ community, etc). So, do I think
this is comparable to any other scandal? Absolutely not and I was real mad that
the message was not stronger. You can’t fix something that is not fully acknowledged and brought into the light.
When I made it out into the foyer I was alone except for
another woman pacing. I recognized her – she was the mom of a recent alumna who
like me was really upset. Her daughter had finally come back to the church
after Kairos and was now unwilling to go to Mass. We talked and shared feelings
until Mass was practically over. She reminded me that we, the laity, are the
church. Like the sisters of St. Joseph who rolled up their sleeves and did the
dirty work that the hierarchy didn’t want to do, the work of manifesting
Christ’s love to a broken world is ours. The truth and beauty of our faith
doesn’t become untrue because of the failings of others, but it HAS to be
addressed.  While I missed the Eucharist (another
big Catholic no no – I was on a roll) I encountered Christ through this woman who restored my
faith in a way that sitting there upset mumbling prayer responses mindlessly never
would have.
This is not the darkest moment in church history (cause:
indulgences, Vatican bank stuff, crusades, inquisitions, you know…) but it is
pretty dark. I hope that this is a time for purification for our church. I hope
it is a time for our students to have conversations and grapple with their faith
as messy as that can be. I hope they see themselves as part the Body of Christ
with gifts and perspectives that the rest of us need. I hope they know that I
believe that change in the church will come from their generation, not mine or
older generations. I hope that they can feel confident enough to speak out and
question the system when it is wrong.  And
I hope that I can walk humbly with them in that. Teaching religion comes with so many little issues that teaching history does not, but what a gift to get to show up and do this as a job.  
Any words of advice (especially from any of you raising your kids Catholic) would be much appreciated. 

What Kids Baking Championship Taught Me About Teaching

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What Kids Baking Championship Taught Me About
Teaching

I
just spent the time I should have been using to do school work watching Food
Network’s Kids Baking Championship for the first time. The rules are basically
the same as any of the five million other food competition shows on TV, but being
that the contestants were kids I figured that they would be doing much simpler
tasks…..like I don’t know, making muffins from a box? But no! These kids were
tasked with the same level of challenge that the adults usually are and given the same
tools – blowtorches, sharp objects, etc. eek!
Many
of the child-prodigy bakers are self-taught. On one hand this is impressive,
but then again pretty much anyone can learn anything with YouTube, the desire,
and the right tools.  What is more
impressive is that they have parents who;

  • ·      ALLOWED THEIR KID
    TO MESS UP THEIR KITCHENS ON THE REGULAR

  • ·      LET THEIR KIDS POTENTIALLY
    FAIL OR GET HURT (CAUSE: KNIVES)

  • ·      WERE WILLING TO EAT
    THEIR KIDS’ BURNT OR UNDERCOOKED FOOD AND PRETEND THAT IT WAS THE GREATEST FREAKING
    THING THEY EVER ATE CAUSE THEY WERE JUST SO PROUD OF THEIR LITTER BAKER.
When
I think back to “cooking” or really doing any grown-up task as a kid with the
adults in my life, I remember doing the most menial, safest tasks possible (i.e. peel potatoes). I remember always being warned not to get hurt, having all
the fun tools pried out of my hands, and the look of disappointment (or more
realistically yelling) when I spilled or messed something up, especially if the
kitchen “was just cleaned (insert angry parent taking the Lord’s name in vain).”



To me, this relates
a lot to teaching. I think that we all can be prone to being the kind of
teachers who don’t want a “mess” in our classrooms or who are scared that
someone may get hurt (triggered, offended, whatever) by something challenging, and
assign projects where we have a super specific idea of what the end product
should look like.
I know that I am
guilty of this; especially when it relates to a topic I love in Ethics– I have
an idea of exactly what I want them to learn or feel and I tailor the lesson to
a desired outcome (In other words I am giving them the boxed cake ingredients and
the Easy Bake Oven) when the reality is I should be throwing out an idea and
see where it goes (i.e giving them raw
ingredients and sharp objects) in order to see what they can do on their own.
Kid’s Baking
Championship mirrors what our girl Carol Dweck (the Growth Mindset Lady) keeps
reminding us to do; “derive just as much happiness from the process as the
result.” It’s scary though. Cause sometimes our students are like:


It’s also scary
because we want to be data driven and have solid work samples to demonstrate that we are great teachers. We want to give our students autonomy but also ensure
that we are providing real academic skills that will help them in college.  And when other people walk by our classrooms we
want to look like we have it somewhat under control. So how can we do both?? How do we provide structure and rigor AND be like the parents of the kids in this show? I don’t
know yet.  Something to marinate on.