Are You There, Eva? It's Me, Kate.

Tuesday, August 4, 2015

Optimism: A Homesteader's Take

Today was the first time in three or four years that I realized that, when Andy and I go to the Addison County Fair and Field Days, we pay $10 a piece to look at sheep, ducks, chickens, prize zucchini, campers, tractors, trucks, and other implements and critters. Somehow, the tradition outweighs the lack of sense it makes for us to walk around looking at things that we already own. Also worth noting about our Field Days excursions is that we always get caught in the rain. Today was no exception.

The foreboding clouds swept in over the fairgrounds right on schedule, after Andy had downed the last bite of his cheesesteak (we can usually make it to lunchtime before the weather turns traitor on us). Fair goers were looking up at the sky in much the same way the citizens of Oz bustled around when the Wicked Witch of the West circled overhead spelling out her message of doom to Dorothy, so we knew it was our cue to take off. On the way home, I realized that I was in a race against time with this storm; I had left the roof vents of the camper open when I left the house! I needed to get there in time to close them lest there the kitchen table (aka, my office) and the back bed get drenched (I speak from experience). We had come in two cars and Andy was ahead of me, having started out at a good clip and giving me confidence that we would make it home in time. What I saw next changed all of that.

Three cars ahead of us was a Buick.

I don't think you need me to explain what being at the mercy of someone driving the official pace car of the AARP parade (with impending clouds of doom overhead, no less) did to our timetable. By the time we hit Ireland Road, the storm was in full rager mode and, as we cleared the last corner, I spied piles and piles of white. Too soon for snow, yes, but not too soon for devastating hail. The camper and yard looked like they had been on-lot for the first day of shooting a Jerry Bruckheimer-esque cautionary tale about climate change. Take a look:

Everything was devastated. I felt the urge to look around the blackened basil, smushed lamb's ear, destroyed squash, hacked hydrangea, and sorry little sunflowers for the giant or witch that had come fee-fi-fo-ing through my summer pride and joy and crushed it. I couldn't even muster anger or tears, it was just a letting out of breath as I walked through the detritus, knowing that there was no way we were going to make a full recovery in the month we have of reasonable growing season left. It'd take something close to a miracle to salvage everything after a whalloping like this. It felt a lot like defeat.

The sun popped back out and began to warm the air, but the temperature had tumbled from near 80 degrees to just above 50 in less than half an hour. In other words, it has a big job to do. As I began to trim away the squash leaves that were beyond saving--it was the only thing I could think of doing that seemed remotely productive--I heard two familiar sounds. One was the buzz of the bees who make their living in our gardens. They are ever-busy and particularly in love with the salvia that is slowly taking over certain parts of the garden (fine by me!). The other sound was these two chuckleheads trotting through the pasture, happy as clams at the sudden boon of fresh, fast, frigid water and all that it brings.

I'll need to see a little bit of a rebound in the raised beds and surrounding environs before I'm as happy as the ducks or am able to just get back at it like the bees, but they helped me realize two things about this flash storm, or anything that doesn't quite go our way here on Hell Mountain (which happens a lot, as it turns out). The first is that you've got to dust yourself off and remember why you're here. The second is that pausing for a moment to remember how wonderful it is that you're not doing this on such a scale as to make it your livelihood is every bit of perspective that you need to take when you're feeling crushed. And then the long-gone (but not forgotten) copywriter in me decided that it was time for a new motto:

"Hell Mountain Farm: Could Be Worse"

Has a nice ring to it, don't you think?

Tuesday, July 28, 2015

1, 2, 3 What Are We Assessin' For?

Ask any teacher in my district about the merits of our current report card and s/he will blankly stare at you. If said teacher is part of a group of teachers, s/he will turn to her/his colleagues and say something to the effect of, "What'd I miss? Our report card has merits?" (See, because most of us think that it doesn't...)

It is a perfectly functional piece of paper with a lot of statements on it that sound pretty good and I am sure, at one time or another, it served our district well. The problems with it now are many and everyone knows that it's an item in need of some serious attention. As a member of a district-level team that talks a lot about curriculum and meeting the needs of all of our students, particularly through personalized learning, I have become more and more keenly aware that changing a report card, even for six elementary schools and one middle/high, is like turning around a battleship. Doesn't mean we don't know that it has to be done. Doesn't mean that we don't think (a lot!) about doing it. It just means that you can't just decide to do it one day and that's that.

Kate's Note: Well, yeah, you can. I mean, I feel pretty strongly that a well-paid group of dedicated teachers who "get" the CCSS and NGSS and who "get" the things like the project-based and personalized learning that our district already does really well could transform the report card in an intense July work session. I mean, I'd certainly sit at the table for that. Just sayin'.

But anyway...

Back to the title of this post and what inspired me to write it (I'll come back to report cards in a bit). A couple weeks ago, I got a Facebook message from a wonderful parent of a student in my class joking that a late-July backpack cleaning session had produced a report card. Another parent chimed in that a mid-July backpack cleaning session had worked the same magic at his house. I laughed to myself and them, knowing that summer is hectic and, these being families who are in touch with teachers and active members of the school community, there was probably a strong sense of their students' achievements already. A report card was probably going to be confirmation of things they already knew about their children as learners. Fair enough, right?

But then I got to thinking: If these two families aren't clamoring to find the report card at the end of the day on June 16th, then who is? If reading a report card escapes the minds of parents--albeit busy ones--who are involved in their children's learning and in school community, then what about the ones who aren't able to be as active and involved (for whatever reason)?

I started to think about what I had heard from parents about report cards I had issued over the course of the year and the answer was almost absolutely nothing. One family had raised a couple of questions at the beginning of the year that we addressed at a conference, but for everyone else, there were crickets...

Initially, I had been nervous sending the last two rounds of report cards home because our existing report card didn't reflect the NGSS standards I used for the makerspace engineering and design unit that comprised the bulk of my science program last year. Our system's option was for me to enter the code "N" in each of the spaces where a pre-loaded standard was listed that I did not assess. In this system (PowerSchool), "N" stands for "Not Assessed." For the sixth graders in my Connected Math Program class, I had to write a bunch of Ns as well because we didn't assess certain standards just by virtue of the scope and sequence of the program. There are only a handful of options in both math and science and they are so broad as to cover an entire year's worth of content. It would be impossible to meaningfully (and legitimately) assess all six or eight of the standards at once!

Kate's Note: Just to be clear here, I don't teach a "canned" science or math program. If something that comes out of the box isn't part of the CCSS, then I don't teach it. But if our report card doesn't reflect the standards my programs are aligned to, I'm not really giving anyone any valuable information, am I?

Back to all of those Ns making me nervous... I was really worried that parents would see a few Ns and think to themselves, "Well, if she's not assessing this, this, and this, then what the heck is she assessing?" Knowing the limitations of our report card before hand and to be safe, I had written my own set of rubrics that did assess the science standards I was teaching. That felt productive, but also added a pretty giant layer to my trimester grading process. Not only did I have to go through 20 report cards and write "See attached rubric" in the field for science curriculum, I had to score a design tech and innovation rubric for each student. Now, a good rubric will make grading easier, but it doesn't make it any less thoughtful or time consuming but I knew that my rubrics were bridging the gap between what I was teaching and how things were being reported in our system, so I thought sure that I was sending along enough information to spark a dialogue. For my math reporting, I tried a different tack and relied on extensive narratives for each of my sixteen sixth grade students, sharing with their parents what we had worked on and what particular successes and challenges their mathematician had uncovered through that course of study.

Report cards went home on a Friday and I tried my darndest not to check email so that I wouldn't have to face the vitriol I was imagining for myself. No rubric will save me from a torch-wielding mob of legal guardians who think I am not assessing their children! I even drafted an email reply while I was still clear-headed so that I could just cut and paste it into the thousands of angry missives I was sure to receive.

Remember those crickets?

Sounded like the first night of summer camp in my inbox.

No vitriol, no complaints, no questions, no comments, concerns, input, or ideas! Okay, okay. This was weird and when things get weird, I really get to thinking: If parents don't seem to be particularly keen on reading and responding to report cards and teachers (at least many in our district) don't find our version of this document a valuable reflection of the educational targets we set for the students in our classes, what the heck are we spending hours every trimester to get these things done (including numerical scores, narrative comments, rubrics, collating, copying, filing, folding, getting the blasted things to print without one side being upside down...)?

But before you, dear reader, get out your pitchfork and join the angry mob I invent in my mind every time I go out on a limb, remember that it doesn't take a piece of paper with an alphabet soup of standards coded on it (even one that is CCSS-aligned!) for teachers to know what works and doesn't work with our students. Any time you have ever said, "Yikes, that didn't work" or "Okay, so this kiddo needs X instead of Y" you're assessing and, to my mind, that is the most valuable form of doing so. It is tailoring teaching to the needs of the student in a moment, a series of which is more than likely on the charted course of learning needs that student is going to have for a good chunk of your working relationship with her/him. As we all know very well, those needs aren't always neatly identified by a code. Sure, sometimes they are, but what of the times they aren't? And what of the times when how we report doesn't reflect all that we are accomplishing? And what if our efforts to report--however we feel about them--are being lobbed into space to float around (for whatever reason) and that communication loop never re-addressed or even closed? Is this a problem that only I have?

It can't be.

So what is the balance? Who cares about formal and standardized assessments like report cards? Hey, why do we do them? What do parents want to know about their children as learners? What are we missing?

Then it occurred to me. The way we personalize learning experiences for students in our district should be reflected in personalized assessment plans for them and their parents. After all, what value does a report card have to anyone if it isn't something that actually does what it's talking about and reports on things that we care about as a teaching and learning team? Parent A might want numbers, maybe a few comments. Parent B might really only be concerned with the social side and has identified a narrative with key examples as a way to help their child succeed. Parent C might want comments for ELA and numbers for math. Parents D-Q might be happy with an email alert if things start looking dicey and a conference at the end of each trimester. Parents R-W might never tell you what would help them and Parents X-z are probably still looking for last year's report card. I'm not bothered, though, because they are all getting what they need and what they asked for and I'm doing record-keeping that is focused and relevant.

I stumbled upon this listicle by Mike Barnes over at Brilliant or Insane and it got me thinking even more about the conversations we should be having with parents--from both sides of the table. I feel like I need a customer service vest with a pin on it that says, "Ask me! I'm here to help" because the only way we're ever going to know how our kids--and I do mean our--are doing is if we talk and use documents or strategies that are useful to a plan of action for everyone involved.

Does any of this ring true for you? How does your district do things? How do YOU do things at report card time? Do you feel like it's time well-spent? How do you engage parents at report card time? What advice do you have for me?

#Updates

I just looked at the blog and the last post was in February. I guess I didn't fulfill my promise of becoming an all-star lifestyle blogger about my kooky corner of the world.

Didn't fulfill it yet...

There is no time like the present to shout out a couple things that have happened since February, which is (eek!) the last time I blogged.

Regarding the weight loss goal that was a key impetus behind getting behind the wheel again, I'm down 34 pounds. This also means that I have spent all kinds of time shopping for new clothes and I really do hope to talk more about them soon. I was fortunate enough to discover Trend Up and that has helped mitigate the havoc a new body has on your wallet when it comes to preventing public nudity in tasteful and trendy ways. I have always been happy in my skin, but I guess it just feels better for me when there is less of it. I will always have, as Fat Amy would say, a "fat heart" and I'm fine with that. For now though, I am going to enjoy the lighter body encasing it.

Andy and I acquired a camper a few weeks back, which I am sitting in right now. Though he will use it as a deer camp in a few months, I have hijacked it for now, making it my woman cave (see picture) and it's a really fun space to occupy. While I did spend the better part of the summer working on lesson and unit plans and site directing a summer program in town, the QT I have in the camper involves things like reading and writing for pleasure, which are among my favorite activities.

I'll update you on just a couple of things because I want to start writing again and I figured that it would be odd to just jump right in without setting the scene. I'm fairly confident it's just me and my mom reading this, but if you're out there and something I say is interesting to you, please comment.

Monday, February 23, 2015

Cabin fever reliever? Not a chance!

Yesterday was the first day in months--since before Christmas, at least--that the weather was seasonable in Vermont. This meant that it was in the mid-to-high 20s and sunny and we haven't seen the sunshine since... I don't know when.

We were having a pleasant day at the homestead; it was late afternoon, about 3pm, and Andy was watching the Daytona 500 while I read and pottered around the house. The sight of a bulldozer on the road, however, turned our hum-drum day into something just a bit more exciting.

New scoot, the 2015 Q3. Dreamy. (And not fit for a ditch!)

The amount of snow at our house is always substantial and Andy is usually able to keep up with the plowing on his ATV. After the blizzard-like conditions we have been having, though, the driveway had gotten a little tight. I didn't yet mention that I got a new car last week when my Jeopardy! ship sailed in, but I'll tell you now that sinking that beauty into a ditch in our own driveway would turn things into the Shining up in here. Real quick, too. The driveway always becomes a gauntlet this time of year and a break in the sub-zero temperatures can make it even sloppier. But 'm getting ahead of myself, here.

So, in walks the bulldozer. As I said, things didn't get interesting until Andy spied it heading down the road past the house. I should have known that things were going to get interesting when he asked, "How much cash do you have on you?" but for some reason, my Hey Wait, Is This A Bad Idea? switch didn't flick. Andy's scheme, a good one to be sure, was to flag the 'dozer driver down and see how much he would charge to plow out the driveway. Like I said, it made extraordinarily good sense.

...At the time. You see, you go a bit crazy when you have been cooped up for weeks and it has been not much above zero and the pipes have frozen (inside the wall, no less), and you can't even walk to your own garage without nine layers of frostbite protection. The first time Mother Nature gives you a bit of a break, in the form of seasonable--even mild--temperatures, your urge to get outside and do things that feel productive and put you back in control of the winter rises to a fever pitch. What you don't remember is how these seemingly good ideas always end up looking like hair-brained plans when they are in your rear view mirror. We never seem to remember the trouble we can get into when the weather fools us into thinking we're the boss.

At any rate, the driver happily obliged and said that, for $25, he would gladly open up our driveway and get the end of it, the part often smeared around by plow trucks, cleaned up as well. For this, he would use a plow truck that had been trailing the bulldozer down the road. As you can see from the photo, there was a fair amount of snow to be moved. When the fella finished up with the 'dozer, his friend got out of the plow truck, the two switched, and the 'dozer made its exit, presumably to a trailer for hauling back home. No sooner had the bulldozer vanished from view did the plow truck promptly slide off the driveway and into the very same ditch that I had been hoping my shiny new Q3 would avoid.

My first thought, which I shared with the gentlemen in my company, was to hop on the ATV and catch up with the fella in the bulldozer to get him back up to help dig the plow truck out. Now, I don't know if, "We got this" was actually uttered at this point, but it was certainly the prevailing sentiment. I can be sure, though, that this was the moment when I went back into the house to grab my glass of wine. I knew I was in for a show and I wasn't disappointed.

Needless to say, the plow truck driver couldn't get himself out of the ditch and a tug from Andy's truck didn't do the trick either. The truck was buried and, as anyone who has ever been stuck in soft snow on a slope of any kind--even a pretty shallow one--knows, the more you spin those wheels, the deeper you go in the wrong direction. What makes it worse is that, often, it feels like you'll get it out, you just need to rock it once more. That's just the mirage of a long winter playing tricks on you once again.

By the time I snapped the picture above, the plow truck driver had borrowed the ATV to skip down to his buddy's place to enlist his truck, which would be positioned on the down side of the buried truck, for a tug out. Here's the video of the first attempt:

You'll notice after the beep (the driver of the towing truck is deaf in one ear, so a shout wouldn't do) that the tow strap broke on the first pull. Andy's logging chain didn't fare much better:

It was soon decided that the fella on the outside end of the driveway would head back to his shop to get his tractor to winch the stuck truck out of the snow. That ended up being the silver bullet, but it took a while, even then. I have video to share, but Blogger is being picky, so here is the clip on YouTube:

In the end, the plow truck got stuck once more, but with the tractor on hand to winch it right back out, it wasn't too big of a deal. After the truck was liberated, the driver did some touch-up plowing and buried himself again, this time at the foot of the driveway. The tractor finished up once and for all and we called it a night, but not before offering $20 more to our new plowing friend for having fallen unwittingly into the trap that is life on Hell Mountain. I've got to say that all of this had nothing to do with the skill of the plow truck driver. I would call him again in a heartbeat. The snow. The winter. The illusion of it being a quick job. These are the things that messed up everyone's plans.

Through all of this, everybody kept a smile on their faces, which is also the beauty of living where we do. When stuff like this happens, you have no choice but to play along and hope that next year, you remember what a fool's errand it is to try to be anything short of a shut-in until late April. What you would miss, I suppose, if you didn't venture out, are your neighbors and days like yesterday remind us that when it comes to a nasty winter, we're all in it together.

By the way, our heroes jokingly told me not to put anything on YouTube because they always seem to get into these sorts of predicaments when they're together. Perhaps they didn't need any evidence to prove their theory! I will say, though, that if you live in our neck of the woods and you ever need anything done around the house, I would highly recommend Luke at Paul Hallock Excavating and Tim at Joint Venture Homes, the two guys we are now glad to know, even though it took an afternoon in a snow bank to do so.

As for me and the rest of the winter? Well, we're back down in the single digits again today and our time in the relative warmth was literally fleeting. With the driveway widened a bit and now firmed back up, we shouldn't have much else to deal with until spring time.

Shouldn't being the operative word.

Wednesday, February 11, 2015

J! Dust Settles & More Kicks Up

Phew! Glad that's over. Well, sort of. At the very least, it's good to finally be able to talk about most of my Jeopardy! experience. After tonight's game, almost all of the cats will be out of the bag and we can watch the Finals without too much fear of spoiling. By Friday the 13th, it will all be over. Ominous, huh?

There's not too much I can say about my Semis game only that I went all out, taking far more risks and waaaay over-thinking that FDR question. I'm also hoping none of my Quebecois brethren will disown me for not recognizing Old MTL. Eric threw me when he answered Saint Petersburg. As for Rock of Ages, well, I knew it wasn't the right answer. My boiling hatred for that show is an inside joke between me and Andy, so that was my way to shout out to him. He had been sitting in the audience going on multiple hours for the second day in a row and he deserved a chuckle.

At lunch today, I was scrolling through some comments on the J! Facebook page. I stuck to posts connected to my games and just wanted to get a sense of what folks were saying about our match-ups (and, okay, me). No one will ever encourage the matinee idol response that my pal Colin O'Grady summoned from the female (and male, actually) viewers. Adam's animated reactions, Jay's cool character and "Detroit Lean" on the podium, and Lydia with the one-two punch of brains and beauty were also memorable players who got big reactions from the viewers. One woman had nothing good to say about any of the folks in my Quarterfinal game (Adam, Jay, and I). Her feedback for me was that I was too silly, with all of my "jumping and jiggling." In her mind, this made me a lousy teacher. Another viewer commented and he went to the other two players' defenses but not mine. He agreed that I shouldn't have carried on so and vaguely connected it to my abilities as an educator and the inappropriateness of being boisterous in the classroom.

I have a thick skin, so I am not going to shed any tears or lose sleep over two people's assessments of my entire persona based on 19 minutes of my life as filmed on a national TV game show. What it did get me thinking about was how many people in America feel this way? How many people proffer such baseless ridicule? What percentage of people in this country really have no idea what it means to work with children? Does anyone realize how important joy is in doing that work? A feeling person could argue that, for kids (and adults), going somewhere to be happy and feel safe for seven hours a day is better than going somewhere to take tests under the thumb of some heartless battleaxe for seven hours a day.

When I think about some of the students who have passed through my transom, even in the six short years since I have been working in schools and with children, I can think of many young souls who could use a silly adult in their life, some laughter, a bit of joy. If I am the person who does that for them, if I am the light in their day because I jump and jiggle, then so be it. I won't ever stop being that person and I don't much care if someone thinks that there's no place for a big grin and some exploding fist bumps in the classroom because I know different.

These internet trolls sound like they could use someone jumping and jiggling in their lives and the irony of it all is that, if they knew me behind the scenes, as some of you do, they would know that I am not a feckless nitwit who fritters away her time giggling and smearing a big, dopey grin across her face as she jumps and jiggles around. I'm pretty serious, I'm pretty quiet, and I don't really like to make a big scene. When I am happy, though, I smile and laugh. Being on TV to fulfill my lifelong dream and teaching kids are things that make me happy.

So sue me. I'm going to keep jigglin'.

Monday, February 9, 2015

Keeping It Real

There is nothing like raising farm critters to keep you firmly grounded in reality. Tonight, amid all of the Jeopardy! joy and adoring local news coverage, we were nursing one of our original flock members, who had had a bad accident sometime in the night out in the barn.

Tani Chick (above, left) a gorgeous brown Araucana with the loveliest colors and the sassiest attitude, had become tangled up in the corner-mounted hay trough some time in the night. Her foot was stuck and she was almost upside down, so she couldn't roost and protect herself from the cold. Not only that, she was in a compromising position until Andy found her this morning. He tucked her into the wheelbarrow, surrounded by hay and with water and food close by. When I got home close to 5pm, I figured we should bring her in for the night. She seemed okay, to be getting better even, but around 6:30pm, she had a spasm and went to the great big coop in the sky. Her duck BFF Thierry will surely miss her so.

We don't leave home because there are three ducks, two sheep, five chickens, two dogs, and a cat who rely on us for just about everything. Asking someone to come stay in our quirky (NOT quaint) 140+ year-old Vermont farmhouse and take care of that menagerie is... Well, it's not something that we do. The last time my brother stayed with us, so that we could attend Andy's niece's wedding, the cat died (a different cat, the late Snake Plissken [below] not the one in residence now). These are not the things you want to subject people to, believe me!

But, these are the things that happen when you live where we do. It drives home the responsibility that we have on the farm. We have had to put animals down, we have lost animals to predators, we have endured every leaky pipe and frozen this-and-that that you could imagine. There are windows that don't close, sinks that don't work, and the lovely breeze that comes through the soffit, even though we have spray-foamed the $&@%# out of every crack and crevice.

It takes a certain couple to live on Hell Mountain, and by George, I think we're it.

Sunday, February 8, 2015

J! Links

I'm trying to get everything together in one spot, a scrapbook of sorts. Good luck to me, right? There's more to add, which I'll keep doing as I find it.

Pictures