How to Survive Institute

Our CMA's modeling the behavior management cycle:
I see Sara nightmaring about lesson plans, I see
Brian breaking down in tears, I see Alexis chewing her
own cheek off...

We’re halfway through the teaching part of Institute, and I’m beginning to feel like I’ve got it. Oh, I don’t mean to say I know how to teach. They threw us in the water to watch us sink or swim while they behavior-narrate our flailing, and when I say I’ve got it down I mean that I have a solid doggy paddle.

Before Institute they sent us email after email on how to survive Institute. How to remain a healthy person and get all our work done. How to give ourselves alone time but also attend every workshop. They made it sound very, very difficult. Today, after two hours of reading Romola, I want to reassure all you would-be-TFAers. And to offer my own minute-by-minute play of how to survive your average day at Institute without any wasted time.

Wake up 20 minutes before the buses leave. There is no hairdo worth the extra hour of banging around the bathroom I hear my fellow corps members engage in every morning. Just put it in a bun and be done. Take five minutes to dress, five minutes to eat breakfast, five minutes to check that you have everything you need to teach your kiddies, and head busward.

In the morning, bus time is for sleeping, meditation, or lesson-review. DO NOT talk. You may think this is a good time to meet fellow corps members. It is not.

The morning fluff session is when you start planning your lesson plan due for next week. Get the key points down in this bit while they’re running the summer camp part of the day, handing out yeehaws and little gold boot statues that you cannot for the life of you figure out why your fellow corps members crave. As soon as they dismiss, run for your classroom and get it ready for your kids’ new day: update achievement tracker posters, pre-distribute returned tests and homework on their desks, and write everything on the board ahead of time. Then go greet your kids.

We're all in the "Survival" setting

Breakfast is key student relationship time. Take kids aside to teach them things they didn’t quite get the day before. Sit with every table and ask them how their afternoon was before; does any kid look sleepy or sick? Are any upset or have spectacular news to share? This, and waiting with the kids for pick-up, is the most fun part of the day. It’s true what they say about kids. They say the darndest stuff. And it is endlessly entertaining.

We start the day with AIH. That’s Academic Intervention Hour, for all you non-cult members. My biggest advice for AIH is that you demand that someone show you the curriculum for it. I only discovered there was one today, and am a bit disgruntled. A whole bunch of people were shocked when I told them about it.

For AIH, each member of a collab group (a collab is typically 3, sometimes 4, sometimes 2 if an unlucky collab has a dropout) gets a section of the class, based on ability, for ten minutes of vocab and a half hour of reading. I’m doing something unorthodox, and running three sections at once: advanced, intervention, and dear-god-what-am-I-doing curse-my-brains out frustrational. The advanced are my little bit of gleeful play in the midst of a day teaching math; I get to cavort with them through the text and watch them light up as they figure out the stuff I’m getting them to think about. I haven’t yet told them that I’m pulling from AP curriculum levels. The intervention kids are the cutest couple you will ever see. When I set them to a game where they have to race to identify characters and setting in the books they’re reading, they tackle it with such earnestness and gusto, the other groups stop in their tracks to watch them. And then there’s my frustration kid. The resource room doesn’t stock books low enough for his testing level, and so he’s bashing his brains out against books double his ability. I’ll say this for him—the kid may have a learning disability, and he may be antsy and get antagonistic when he’s frustrated, but he works like the devil when he knows what he’s supposed to do and can do it. The difficulty is in getting him to stop simply copying words onto worksheets, and getting him to read. Because he knows it’s going to be hard. All I can say to you: don’t give up.

If you’re teaching first block, do your thing. Teach. Love those kids. Figure out how to shave down the 70 minute lesson plans TFA gives you for the first week into half hour segments, and how to cram all the prereqs of multiplication and long division your students missed their first five years of education into a half hour. Give them, in that half hour, the full fervor of your excitement about their learning. Spread the hunger for knowledge. Reward them for hard work, for curiosity, for cooperation and competition both. Teach them how to win at school, because that you can do every day, regardless of what’s meant to be passed on in those thirty minutes of madness. Then feed them and high-five ‘em out the door, shake hands with the parents and tell them with smiles how great their kids are and how much you wish you spoke their language to share the specifics.

After teaching comes sessions. What you must know about these is that the key to succeeding in Institute is the same as the key to succeeding in middle school; both involve completing your homework under your desk while your teacher drones on. Sessions are the name for the informational sessions that can range from diversity dialogues to behavior management 101’s. They’re the perfect time to grade, enter data, create worksheets (four different versions for each handout for the advanced, average, ELL, and LD students in your classroom), finesse lesson plans, and google creative ideas on classroom setup. If the staff gets huffy that you’re not paying attention, completely ignore their rebuke and immediately engage them on the topic at hand—they will always take the bait of getting on task and forget they were meant to reprimand you. Also, it shows you didn’t lose by multitasking. Basically, any time you’re not with your kids is time to prep for when you’re with your kids. And it means that by the end of the school day at 4:30, you’ll have finished everything for the next day (and the lp for a week ahead). You can board the bus with the rest of the day ahead to brood about what to teach your frustrated reading kid. Or to share bitch sessions with your regional corps. Or delve into your kindergarten art skills and make posters for your classroom while creeping on your resource room crush. Or go for a jog-and-faint routine through the hot summer sun. Or, sometimes, if you’re ahead of the game enough, you can read George Eliot.