After a decade in New York City charter schools, I moved to a rural, low-income school district outside of Bakersfield,CA in the Central Valley of California. The teachers dearly love the students they serve, and with a school as small as ours, it often feels like a 300-person family. Even our Principal used to be a student there, and later, the head custodian!
A short anecdote: while deciding whether or not to apply to teach at Edison, I visited the campus. I watched a fifth grade Math class who were busy creating bar graphs on whiteboards. Suddenly, the teacher stopped the class. "We should make some graphs using real life data," he said. "Let's go outside." Students walked out into the courtyard. "We're going to pick up trash. Categorize it, log it, and then we'll come back and graph what we find." Students spent the next ten minutes cleaning up, all the while wearing big smiles. They were literally running to pick up more trash. They were loving school on that very normal Tuesday.
About my class
After a decade in New York City charter schools, I moved to a rural, low-income school district outside of Bakersfield,CA in the Central Valley of California. The teachers dearly love the students they serve, and with a school as small as ours, it often feels like a 300-person family. Even our Principal used to be a student there, and later, the head custodian!
A short anecdote: while deciding whether or not to apply to teach at Edison, I visited the campus. I watched a fifth grade Math class who were busy creating bar graphs on whiteboards. Suddenly, the teacher stopped the class. "We should make some graphs using real life data," he said. "Let's go outside." Students walked out into the courtyard. "We're going to pick up trash. Categorize it, log it, and then we'll come back and graph what we find." Students spent the next ten minutes cleaning up, all the while wearing big smiles. They were literally running to pick up more trash. They were loving school on that very normal Tuesday.
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