It’s Tuesday. I’m home from school. Time for a blog post… Alright, here goes…opening iTunes now…shuffle on…Play:

Another lucky strike! One of my favorites.

“Mandy” – The Langley Schools Music Project.

In the late 70s a group of rural school children from Western Canada, with little musical schooling put together an album of pop songs called Innocence and Despair. Despite the unfortunate title, on it is some of the most passionately (albeit dissonantly) sung music I’ve heard. This cover of Barry Manilow’s “Mandy” is simply wonderful, and the joy with which the kids sing is literally palpable from the echoes of the scratchy tape.

It’s stuff like this that makes me wish our school has a better music program. In LAUSD, music is the first thing from a school’s program to go when kids do poorly on standardized tests. Right now we have one set of piano classes (about 120 students total enrolled) and one set of band classes (about 120 students enrolled). With an enrollment of 1800 students, this means that only about 13% of our kids get any sort of arts exposure in school. Unfortunately, this is the sad state of things here in LAUSD and within other urban districts across the country. Hopefully, higher test scores will encourage administration to begin including electives again within the curriculum.

Regardless, this is already shaping up to be a long two weeks. The biggest thing is that I’m embarking on a 5-day co-teaching experiment with one of the other math teachers in our department. Today was day one of this, so we together taught her 4^th period class (my (now not so very) free period). This should hopefully be a good experience for her kids in this new situation. While this is definitely a worthwhile use of time, it means that I don’t have another conference period until Tuesday, May 6^th.

We currently find ourselves exactly three weeks away from the big California Standards Test, a test which is essentially designed under No Child Left Behind to grade our school, but which we 8^th grade teachers hold over the heads of our algebra students as the gateway to getting into Geometry in high school (rather than repeating Algebra I). This is my second time teaching algebra, and I’ve found that I’m lucky enough to have some extremely competent kids who actually stand a good chance to pass this test. Regardless of that fact, this test is nuts! Here are some types of questions these 14 year olds are expected to know. (From the Released Items).

Needless to say, there’s some heavy duty preparation which we’ll need to do, currently in the form of after school joint tutoring sessions that are being offered. Another algebra teacher and I are offering these sessions which are currently drawing about 75 students. Again, exhausting, but worth it.

Anyway, time to go do some real work now!