My students are great. They are funny, bright, easily distracted, and garrulous.
A usual day has been going like so:
6:20 wake up
7:00ish go find bus
8:00 First Circle
8:15 Power Greeting outside
8:45 1st period
10:00ish 2nd period
11:15 ASPIRE block
12:05 Lunch
1:00 planning period
2:08 Last period
3:15 Afterschool tutoring
4:30 Various City year things
6:00 Final Circle
7:00 get home
Soooo in more detail....
The bus ride takes around 30-45 minutes. I use this time to either read the newspaper or read a book. DC provides a free newspaper every weekday that has many article summaries from the Washington Post, as well as events happening around DC. Recently, the big news these days are the Pope's arrival (a City Year corps members is singing for him!!), the refugee crisis, and Trump. Bus fare is $1.75 - cheap!
Power Greeting- Every morning, the 9th grade corps members (5 of us) go outside and cheer the students coming to school on time. We have different City Year chants and dances. It's fun and energizing. Recently we've started doing yoga at the suggestion of a different school. That has been great.
1st period is my honors class. I started out the year with 4 kids. They are slowly working on transferring students into this class who are performing well in the other math classes. They are usually quiet.
2nd period is my most challenging period. There are some big personalities. When I'm able to isolate each student though, they seem interested in learning and respond well to tutoring. However in the large group setting, EVERYONE IS CONSTANTLY BOUNCING OFF THE WALLS. It is like teaching in a pinball machine with 15 balls. As a group they are crazy, but individually they are quite fun.
ASPIRE block is like an advisory period. It is 45min of an activity that an administrator creates then sends to every teacher. Some activities include a lecture on code switching, debate, watching "Lean on Me," watching "Fresh Prince," and standardized testing. Some teachers hate it and go through the motions, others really get into it and try to make the best of weird lesson plans.
During my planning period I plan for after school, organize different events, fill out CY surveys/docs, and collaborate with my teacher to lesson plan.
My 5th period is similar to 2nd in that they are also bouncing off the walls, but somehow they are more manageable. There a few more of them, but I think the bigger personalities in this class are able to focus a little better. In this period, a special Ed push-in teacher is present as well, so there are 3 of us to split the class up.
In After school, we started off tutoring the football and cheer team. It was a bit unfocused, so the cheerleaders were redirected to sports and we continue to tutor the football players. I have a few of them in my classes, so I like to tell them in class we'll be working on the homework in the After-School space. This space is good because we get to interact with upperclassmen that none of us have class with. It also makes the football games more fun!
After tutoring, there are various CY things we do each day. Sometimes we have a team meeting, other days it is prep time. Fridays are the best because we do "Life Works." This is a time for one corps member to give a 45min presentation on their life. It's great! Afterwards we get to grill them. I'm not til November.
Finally, we do our Final Circle and head out. I've started working out at the school because they have a free gym! And by then the students are gone. Sometimes we go to the CY office where we can print and use the office resources. We did this last Tuesday to print flyers for our new clubs and handouts for an event the next day.
We also recently got free memberships to Capitol BikeShare. So now I can also ride bikes around town! So much free stuff.
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