So it's been a minute, but I have good reason. After a lot
of difficulties at my previous school, I decided to take an invitation from a
former colleague to be part of a new high school startup. It's just a 9th
grade - fully public and all that, none of that charter market-driven nonsense
- and it's co-located in Lehman High School, one of the last of the grand old
city High Schools. There's a lot of problems with co-location and I knew
that coming in, but . . . here I am.
My program is interesting because it's truly literacy-focused.
Half of the time, I'm teaching a class on language at the word and
sentence level. The other half of the time, I'm teaching very small and
very intensive English classes
These classes are sort of a mixture of self-contained and
ESL support classes. Basically, it’s a
couple classes where I work with 9 and 6 struggling readers, respectively. It’s fantastic. We’re already showing huge gains. I wish I had a better baseline to put up
here, but it all was thrown at me so quickly, I just jumped right in with the
“Masque of the Red Death” startup. Like
Jacotot’s Telemachus, I just know
that it works because it’s what I’ve done . . . I don’t know that there’s
anything special in it. But it works.
I have lots of ideas . . . some are already underway. This is exciting.
No comments:
Post a Comment