May 27, 2021

Lessons from the past school year. Plans for the year ahead.

What went well this year? 

The use of technology: Educators said one silver lining of the pandemic was the fact that it forced schools and districts to upgrade technology, and it forced teachers to learn how to use it.

Some students thrived and gained valuable skills during the pandemic: Consistently, we heard from educators and parents this year that some students were doing really well with online learning. In the K-12 setting, teachers shared that highly motivated students who had support at home had more time to devote to projects and learning new skills. Teachers also shared that virtual learning helped students with behavior issues as well as students who struggled with self confidence. As a result of the positive experiences for some students, many districts and community colleges are planning to have a fully virtual option next year and in future years.

Better collaboration between educators; better communication with parents: As many educators have said, this year made all teachers feel like a first-year teacher again. One benefit of that was increased collaboration between teachers and faculty as everyone learned new techniques and strategies. Educators and parents also shared that communication between parents and educators improved during the pandemic. While internet access was a challenge for some families, educators said their communication with families increased and some pointed out that parents gained a better understanding of teachers’ roles.

Educators grew, reflected on their practice: Finally, many teachers and faculty members said they have grown as educators during the pandemic. Educators at all levels were proud of the way they adapted and responded to the challenge the pandemic presented.

Congratulations Patty, you're the KUIC Teacher of the Month for May 2021! Congratulations again and thank you for your hard work!

Parent letter:

Mrs. Raina is passionate and clearly loves what she does. The teaching profession has evolved greatly over the last year and a half and she hasn’t missed a beat. As a fellow teacher, I can attest to the challenges of delivering a quality education via distance learning. Mrs. Raina makes it looks easy. She has successfully engaged Kindergarten students during distance learning and has made the transition back to in person seamlessly. She goes above and beyond to reach her students, support families and makes learning fun every day! She is a rockstar teacher! Congratulations to Fern for being recognized by SELPA CAC youth and community for having gone above and beyond in their service to special education. Fern Decena will be recognized at the board meeting on May 27th.  She received recognition as someone who goes above and beyond for students with special needs. She was recognized by one of her parents.  Please congratulate Fern and let her know how much we appreciate her commitment to our students.   Upcoming dates: May 28- May 31  No School  June 1- Staff meeting/social 3:15 at Backroads  June 1- June 8 (no dancing on 6/4)  Royal King dance starts; 7:45 am teacher dance practice by the mural of the Dragon  June 4-  AR deadline and Report cards due to Jas, virtual family cooking night June 8 11:30 Drive thru Promotion- teachers please join us to celebrate our 8th graders June 9- Last day of school; minimum day schedule has been shared with you Aug 9 - PD- buy back day could be in person or virtual TBD 8:00-3:30 Aug 16 - Welcome back staff meeting  Aug 18 - First day of school

May 21, 2021

 

Here is a link to the full article https://www.cultofpedagogy.com/easy-button/  Below is part of the article: 

As humans, we’re wired to go for the easy button. And we have so many of them nowadays. Here are some of mine:

• I have heard bad things about how Amazon treats their workers, but I still order from them at least once a week.
• I have a lot of books I’d like to read, but instead I watch Netflix. 
• I have reusable shopping bags, but sometimes I don’t feel like dealing with them and I just use plastic.

This struggle between what’s good for us and what’s convenient, I believe, is part of the human condition.

And we do it in education as well. Here’s just one simple, common example: If we really wanted to find out what a student knew about a topic, having them answer open-ended questions would give us a pretty accurate picture of that knowledge.

But essay questions, or even short-answer questions, are a lot harder to grade than multiple-choice questions, which only ask students to choose correct answers. There’s a chance they might not actually know the material, but just guess the right answer. Still, because multiple choice tests are so efficient, and because we have so many students, we might lean in this direction more often.

Let me repeat that last part: because we have so many students.

Because that’s really the root of it, and I want to be very clear about this: Most of the time when we hit that easy button it’s because we have to. Most schools and districts have been set up in ways that make us feel like we have no choice: Large class sizes, a focus on standardized tests, and a lack of funding means we’re always being asked to do more with less. The conditions under which most teachers teach are not anywhere near ideal for good quality teaching. So the easy button becomes more like a panic button, and we hit it not because we’re lazy, but because we have to survive.

We hit the easy button, and hit it, and hit it again. Cutting corners. Making choices that we know aren’t really best for kids but that we hope are good enough.

And then the pandemic hit. And we tried to keep doing what we’ve been doing, but remotely. And kids started to fail. Students who used to get straight As stopped turning work in. When class sessions were scheduled over Zoom or Google Meet, less than half the class would show up—even if the meetings were called mandatory.  

I’d like to propose that we enter this new phase of teaching, this new period in history, with a new mantra: No more easy button. Let’s start to look at every decision we make about the way we do school with a more critical lens, and every time, before we move forward, let’s be asking ourselves: Is this the best move, or are we just hitting the easy button? Before I start talking about what I think it could look like, I want to emphasize that I’m not talking about MORE. I’m talking about different.

USING THE MANTRA: WHAT WILL IT LOOK LIKE?

So if we adopt this new mantra—if we consistently try to move away from that easy button—what will it look like in our teaching practices? Let’s explore four areas: lesson design, assessment, inclusivity, and relationships.

LESSON DESIGN

• Less fluff: In many classrooms, we gave “assignments” that made it look and feel like students were interacting with and processing our content, but that were actually just keeping them busy. What this meant was that students had a lot of work to do, and we had a lot of grades to record, but real learning wasn’t necessarily happening. It’s this shift, this removal of fluff, reducing our overall quantity of work to only the stuff that’s more densely packed with learning, that will give us room for all the rest of the changes I’ll be suggesting today.
• More active learning: Another shift would be to plan more hands-on experiences, more project-based and community-based learning, more movement-based learning, and more field studies that let students use their surroundings as part of the curriculum. I think being forced to teach through our computers has given so many teachers a renewed appreciation for the things we can only do in person. And if we cut some of the fluff, we’ll have more time for things like this.
• More collaboration: We can start giving students more meaningful work to do together. Managing collaborative work is definitely not easy: It creates more chaos in the classroom, you lose a lot of control as a teacher, and there’s always a chance that students aren’t actually doing what they’re supposed to be doing. Doing it WELL is even more challenging, at least at first, because students need training and practice in collaborative skills to make the most of this time. But if you put that time in at the beginning, it really pays off in the end.
• More pre-recorded content: Now that most teachers have been forced to shift their instruction to digital delivery systems like screencast videos, they’ve seen the benefits of offering direct instruction—in other words, lectures—through video, which allows students to access the content whenever they need it or as often as they need it, and frees up class time for more interactive stuff. Although this takes more work ahead of time, it’s work that’s worth doing when you can. When we had unlimited face-to-face time with our students, some of us allowed far too much of that time to be consumed by passive learning. Now that we have a renewed appreciation for the value of that time, we can use it more deliberately, shifting instruction to digital formats when possible so we can make the most of our time in person.

• ASSESSMENT

  • More feedback, fewer grades: A letter grade will never help a student grow the way specific, timely feedback will. But grades are so much quicker to give, so we fall back on them. We also might give a lot of grades because our schools or districts require a certain number of points or letter grades to be posted on a regular basis. If we want higher quality learning to happen in our schools, we need to move away from grades and toward feedback as much as we can. If we’ve gotten rid of the “fluffy” busywork assignments and are doing fewer, more robust, collaborative, project-based tasks, this shift should happen naturally, because these assignments lend themselves better to conferencing and rubrics rather than one-off grades.
  • More iteration: Speaking of one-off grades, let’s cut way back on those, too. If a student needs improvement in some area, isn’t it better to give them multiple opportunities to improve, rather than stamping them with a single grade and moving on? If we can make room in our plans to allow students to re-do assignments, we’re likely to see more growth. A system like the mastery-based classroom we featured earlier this year would be a good way to do this.
  • More fluid or incremental deadlines: This past year, many teachers have had little choice but to give lots of grace on deadlines. For the first time, everyone was facing unprecedented conditions that messed with our concentration, threatened our social-emotional wellbeing, and put us in a steady state of low-level anxiety; this made it easier for everyone to give everyone a break. But pre-COVID, we know that many of our students were dealing with other factors that also made it difficult to keep academics at the top of their priority list, and those things aren’t going to magically go away. We can carry the grace we gave each other during the pandemic into the next phase, setting up assignments so that they have more fluid deadlines or, if the assignments are larger, incremental check-ins so that we know students are making progress and can provide feedback and troubleshooting to keep them going.
  • More open-resource tests: We used to refer to these as open-book tests—the name change is meant to reflect the variety of non-print resources we now have available to us. Having school go remote last year, students were suddenly able to “cheat” like never before, again, because we weren’t there to watch them. But why wouldn’t they? We’ve known forever that information is readily available online; memorization is becoming much less desirable. What we should be asking from our students is doing something WITH that information—like developing and defending an opinion about it—some other higher-order task that requires a level of originality that can’t simply be Googled. If designed well, our assessments could be open-book, open-note, open-resource, and still be an excellent measure of what our students have learned.

  INCLUSIVITY

  • More universally designed learning experiences: One very typical way to give an assignment is to have students read something, then do something in writing to demonstrate their learning. This type of task favors a certain type of learner, but we can now offer many other options to students so they can choose the pathway that works best for them, like letting them learn the content through video or audio, preferably with some sort of captioning or transcript to accompany them, and demonstrate their learning by recording a response in audio or video form. Providing all of these options takes extra time and extra work, but if we’re giving fewer assignments overall, treating more work as formative instead of having to assign a grade for everything, and working together with our colleagues to share the workload, we’ll be creating learning experiences that reach far more of our students.
  • More introvert-friendly options for participation: Oftentimes, we can have what we think is an excellent class discussion that feels vibrant and energetic, but if we were to watch a playback of it, we’d see that in fact, only a handful of extroverted students were actually carrying the conversation. Teaching remotely has shown us that when we put students into an environment where participation no longer requires speaking up spontaneously in front of a group, we get more participation from introverted students and those who simply process their thoughts more slowly. As we transition to teaching in person, we can be thoughtful about finding ways to allow these students to keep contributing in ways that are more comfortable for them.
  • More remote and hybrid pathways: Even if we are fully in-person, we can continue to offer options for at-home learning for families who need them, circumstances that demand them, and students who happen to learn better under those conditions.
  • Better representation in classroom materials: We can make sure the books and other materials students learn from reflect our students, their families, and the diversity of our world. Sites like We Need Diverse Books and Diverse Book Finder are good places to start working toward this.

RELATIONSHIPS

• Regular, dedicated time for relationship building. It seems that everyone in education is quick to agree that relationships are important, but if we’re not scheduling in time to build them, those relationships will be flimsy at best, and they’ll be uneven: We’ll get to know the students who demand the most attention and let the others slip through the cracks. It was really hard to do through a video screen; as we regain the privilege of being in the same room together, let’s not waste it. This system for getting to know your students is one way to make sure you’re connecting with everyone.
• More restorative practices: Although it’s quicker to suspend a student for misbehavior, exclusionary discipline practices and “zero tolerance” policies don’t solve the root problems or prevent repeat behaviors. In fact, they often make things worse. By contrast, restorative practices are more time-consuming and require more thought and emotional labor, but if they’re done the right way, they get much better results. (If you’re new to restorative practices, get a taste of it by reading about the repairing harm strategy.)
• More anti-bias work on ourselves. The starting point for improving relationships with all students and creating an environment in our schools that feels safe and welcoming to everyone is to study our own biases. Plenty of books and other resources are out there for doing this work; one that has been very successful is the Courageous Conversations About Race book and training.
• More fun. It’s been a ridiculously hard year, and being physically separated has made a lot of people value face-to-face time in a way they never had before. So now that in-person time is becoming more possible, let’s make the most of it. And that doesn’t mean cramming every minute with productivity. It means making time for joy, every day. In January of this year I asked teachers on Twitter to tell me how their instruction would be different once pandemic restrictions were lifted. Many of the replies contributed to the content of this article, but my favorite one of all came from a teacher named Travis Welch, who simply said, “We are going to laugh. A lot.”
• So let’s not go back to the way things used to be. With this fresh start, let’s take that wisdom and use it. As you plan for the upcoming year, keep looking for ways to lean away from the easy button, to do the slower, more nuanced, more satisfying work of prioritizing quality over quantity and creating schools where each student, and each teacher, has what they need to thrive.

Upcoming dates:

May 10-27- MAP testing 

May 28- May 31  No School 

June 1- Staff meeting/social 3:15 at Backroads 

June 1- June 8 (no dancing on 6/4)  Royal King dance starts; 7:45 am teacher dance practice by the mural of the Dragon 

June 4-  AR deadline and Report cards due to Jas, virtual family cooking night

June 8 11:30 Drive thru Promotion- teachers please join us to celebrate our 8th graders

June 9- Last day of school; minimum day schedule has been shared with you

Aug 9 - PD- buy back day could be in person or virtual TBD 8:00-3:30

Aug 16 - Welcome back staff meeting 

Aug 18 - First day of school 

May 14, 2021

 Check out this article about our school Click here

Colleen shared this article and I think it is important to remember all the GOOD stuff that happened this year! When something amazing happens in your classroom but only you see it, did it really happen? Sometimes I feel that way. There’s a moment: a quiet, kind interaction between two students who often bicker, or a new game that students manage to play well without a hitch, or when you suddenly remember a long-forgotten idea which is perfect for helping the student in front of you. These things happen and may even catch us by surprise. But then what do we do with those moments?

In the rush of day-to-day teaching, I’m afraid that many of those moments may get lost. Or perhaps more likely, they get buried. So much happens in a school day, there are literally thousands of discrete interactions and decisions made, the majority of which are in connection with other people. And our brains are wired to hold onto negative information to prevent mistakes in the future. So when good or even great things happen in our classrooms or during the school day, they may not be top of mind once class is over. They are more likely somewhere in the middle, sandwiched  between the heated parent e-mail in the morning and the unanticipated extra recess duty in the afternoon. For those of us who teach in environments where good news may not be met with enthusiasm, mentioning and retaining those bright spots becomes another challenge. Lacking an outlet or container for these episodes can also make it difficult for us to connect them with other positive moments we’ve had.

As educators we’re aware of the benefits of positive reinforcement and the need for confidence-building in our pedagogy for students. But that’s often where it stops. When it comes to our own learning and day-to-day practice, how regularly do we apply a similar reasoning? How actively do we acknowledge our wins as fully as our setbacks? In this post I want to advocate for seeking out the good in our own gardens and cultivating our best with what we have right now, even as we are bombarded with stories of greener grass everywhere we look.

WORKING ON WHAT WORKS

These ideas have not emerged out of the ether. My thinking about this approach stems from a program for the classroom, based on Solution-focused Brief Therapy, called Working on What Works (WOWW) developed by Insoo Kim Berg and Lee Shilts. In a nutshell, the program calls on students and teachers to notice and articulate specific actions that contribute to the success of an intervention. Students learn to observe, name and compliment the behaviors that have been identified as positive and nurturing.

Two factors come together in this approach which turn out to be especially effective in building classroom confidence and community: First is a focus on strengths—in individual student behaviors, in the class group, in the observable results. The second piece is an emphasis on student input and feedback on their own progress individually and as a group. Taken together, while Working on What Works, students and teachers learn to keep their eyes and ears open for the good stuff: compliments, celebrations, breakthroughs, perseverance and how to share that news with each other. This video provides an example of the program in practice.

NOTICING THE GOOD FOR OURSELVES

I think there are lots of avenues we can travel in locating our very distinct examples of teaching/learning goodness. The suggestions here serve as a sort of starter pack for collecting your own shining moments and to train your eyes to see more of the bright spots. Some of these can be done on your own, yet many might be fun and enlightening to try with a friend or colleague.

OBSERVING AND LISTENING:

• Describe a winning moment/event you observed in someone else’s classroom.
• Describe a winning moment/event in your own classroom.
• Be on the lookout for bright spots in your learning community. Consider documenting them in a journal or through other means.
• When dealing with a student behavior you find difficult, later consider asking: What have you seen the student do well? When is the student most likely to set the difficult behaviors aside?
• When something makes you laugh out loud when you are with students, write it down afterwards. What was it? What was the source of the humor?
• When a student gives you a compliment, listen carefully. Which compliments do you hear from students most often? What do your students love about you?
• When parents express gratitude, listen carefully. What are parents grateful for? How have you served them and their children?
• When colleagues ask for your advice or input, think about what allows them to trust and value your contribution.

READING AND WRITING IDEAS:

• When you examine student work, notice evidence of growth. List all the things, large and small, that you accomplished, helped along, kept in check, turned around, made happen in the process. Capture those reflections in a journal entry, blog post, on the back of an envelope or share with a teammate.
• Write a thank-you note to yourself. (No really, hear me out.) This may sound goofy and feel very awkward but please try it. Sit down and scratch out a few sentences telling yourself what you’ve accomplished, improved, learned. Don’t edit, just write, read and put it in a place where you can stumble upon it later.
• If you enjoy engaging on social media, try finding a few fellow educators who blog about their classroom experiences where student strengths feature prominently. Leave comments to show appreciation or connect it to your own practice. Two edubloggers I find who do this especially well are Julia Torres and Jennifer Orr.
• Particularly if you are looking for a community of teacher bloggers to share wins and practice various modes of writing at the same time, you might consider joining the Slice of Life Community, sponsored by the Two Writing Teachers. Teachers on post Tuesdays and commit to commenting on at least 3 blogs per week. I have enjoyed this new outlet for sharing brief reflections and receiving encouragement along the way.

MAKING IT STICK

Highlighting and keeping track of the wins in our own intimate teaching spaces and inside our filled-to-the-brim heads should not become a new chore. Instead, find a method of collecting and/or sharing these moments that feels right for you and the way you work. Here are a few suggestions:

TO DO ON YOUR OWN:

• Where do you keep your lesson plans or planning notes? Create a dedicated space or use sticky notes. Try recording one good thing per day for a number of days in a row 10, 15, 30—whatever feels manageable. At the end of each week, review them and see if any patterns emerge.
• In any parent correspondence such as newsletters, portfolio updates or class blog, note specific evidence of teaching and learning successes. Reflect on progress made and take a moment to acknowledge what you did or are doing to enable those instances of growth in your classroom.
• Keep a micro journal on your desk to jot down 1-2 bright spots per class (or perhaps create a electronic file to do the same)

While I have not yet been in a position to pursue the full WoWW program, the thinking behind it remains a central part of my teaching practice: emphasizing and bolstering strengths. That’s why I feel it is doubly important that we practice these ideas on ourselves first before showering our students with so much new-found wisdom. Whenever we take an opportunity to reflect on and document our wins in the classroom, it adds to our self-efficacy and builds our confidence as teachers. We fertilize our own growth as educators and cultivate gardens of learning and community with our students. ♦

Upcoming dates:

May 10-27- MAP testing 

May 28- May 31  No School 

June 1- Staff meeting/social 3:15 at  ?????

June 1- June 8 (no dancing on 6/4)  Royal King dance starts; 7:45 am teacher dance practice by the mural of the Dragon 

June 4-  AR deadline and Report cards due to Jas, virtual family cooking night

June 8 11:30 Drive thru Promotion- teachers please join us to celebrate our 8th graders

June 9- Last day of school; minimum day schedule been shared with you

Aug 9 - PD- buy back day could be in person or virtual TBD 8:00-3:30

Aug 16 - Welcome back staff meeting 

Aug 18 - First day of school 

Observable Fish Moments at SV:

Be There: Thank you Vicky, Heather M. and Daniel helping out in the front office this week.

Play: Take some time to take your students outside. The weather is beautiful!

Choose your attitude: 

To actually choose how you respond to life, not just react, you must be intentional. Ask yourself throughout the day, "What is my attitude right now? Is it helping the people who depend on me? Is it helping me to be most effective?" NO EXCUSES!!

Make Their Day:   Thank you Sarah Daly for putting our 20-21 yearbook together. You did an AMAZING job!!

 

May 7, 2021

 

SOCIAL & EMOTIONAL LEARNING (SEL)

Hard Classroom Conversations About Anti-Asian Racism

How a teacher and her colleagues are taking on racism and violence against Asian Americans. 

By Sarita Khurana

May 5, 2021

When Dawoun Jyung, a sixth-grade math teacher at Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School in New York City, heard about the Atlanta spa shootings that took the lives of eight people—including six women of Asian descent—she felt a mix of “fear and devastation, lament and disbelief,” she recalls.

At the same time, the violence wasn’t entirely unexpected—the recent surge in xenophobia and brutality against Asian American and Pacific Islander communities, and against Asian American women in particular, builds off a long history of such racism in America. And so, Jyung says, “this is not new pain. This has precedent.”

Then she began thinking about how to address the news with her students, who are, says Jyung, “very racially, ethnically, and socioeconomically diverse.”

We sat down recently with Jyung over Zoom to talk about how she and her colleagues at the Metropolitan Expeditionary Learning School, a public middle and high school run in partnership with NYC Outward Bound, are responding in the classroom to the escalating attacks and violence against Asian Americans and Pacific Islander communities.

Sarita Khurana: Right now, Asian Americans are facing a double pandemic: It’s not just coronavirus, it’s also anti-Asian racism and violence. So I want to start by asking how it’s been for you as an Asian American woman, bringing these difficult conversations into the classroom.

Dawoun Jyung: When the Atlanta mass shooting happened, there were two things going on in my mind. One was: I need to have conversations with my students about this. I need to bring this to my classroom. The other thing was me processing what’s been going on and the fear and disbelief. And so I think as an Asian American woman, as an Asian American educator, I was wearing those two hats.

The victims in Atlanta, Georgia, are mostly women of my mom’s age. And so when I heard the news, I felt fear and devastation.

But when we think about what has been going on in the past year and what Asian Americans have been experiencing, it’s actually no surprise. Asian Americans have experienced a year of rising hate crime, racist rhetoric, and violence. This is not new pain; this has precedent. And this week in New York City, the devastating reports about people being attacked and beaten, pushed onto subway tracks, harassed on the streets—people who are on their way to work or on their way to church.

Khurana: You’re absolutely right, this is not the first time we’re seeing this; there is a much broader historical perspective here. But racism against Asian Americans has been made invisible. And people often don’t see it as a hate crime.

Jyung: There is a history in our country of refusing to call it a hate crime when [violence is] done against Asian Americans. And unfortunately, in our schools, that history has also been missing in our curriculum. We have been deprived of this Asian American history, and we are depriving our students of this history that is so important, yet so invisible and forgotten.

What we are seeing is not something new. It builds on a history of violence and racism and white supremacy. And for us to really understand why mass shootings and anti-Asian hate are happening today, we have to go back to the root of it.

There are deep roots of blaming Asian Americans, scapegoating, othering, and taking away the rights of Asian Americans to participate in our government and in our democracy. And so a lot of what we are seeing and what Asian Americans are experiencing today has deep roots in the history of our country, the racist and white supremacist culture and history.

Khurana: Let’s talk about what’s been happening at your school. After the Atlanta shootings, how did your school respond?

Jyung: So a few colleagues and I got together and planned lessons to share with the rest of the middle and high school teachers at my school.

The first lesson (lesson and slide deck) really focused on humanizing the Atlanta victims, raising awareness about what happened there, and giving students space to make sense of what happened. And so we shared photos of the victims: They were mothers, daughters, neighbors, sisters. So the students got to see the victims visually and connect and empathize.

We also felt it was very important to suggest to teachers that they take special care with the pronunciation of victims’ names. There’s a lot of [mocking] of Asian names, and so by taking special care to pronounce the victims’ names, it helps humanize them.

We also wanted to make it very clear that even though law enforcement did not declare this a hate crime, we wanted to be clear that this was a racially motivated hate crime against Asian Americans.

Khurana: Can you tell me a bit more about the first lesson?

Jyung: Yes, so we set norms for having difficult conversations. We borrowed these from the courageous conversation norms: I will stay engaged, I will speak my truth, I will experience discomfort, and I will expect and accept no closure.

We showed two videos (video 1 and video 2) for students to better understand what happened, and students were invited to respond to prompts like “What are your thoughts and feelings after watching this video?” and “What are two things you learned from this video?”

After the conversation, we asked students to share on a Google Forms survey what’s on their minds, in their hearts, and what they want to know or learn more about. Their responses really showed a range of emotions. They were upset, angry, disappointed, and lots of wondering.

Khurana: What about the second lesson—what did you do there?

Jyung: In the second lesson (lesson and slide deck), we examined the historical context of anti-Asian violence by watching a video from the San Francisco Chronicle. As students watched, we asked them to think about: What do you notice? What connections can you make—connections to your life, to things you have been learning in class, or to things you have heard in the media? And then what are some questions that you still have? And so we invited students to share out in the Zoom chat—we are still doing remote and hybrid learning—or share out loud.

Khurana: What’s your hope about what these lessons can accomplish? Why is it important to be planning these, taking this on in the classroom?

Jyung: Our students are raising the difficult questions, and we are giving them the facts and the history, and we’re telling them about the contributions of Asian Americans, and the treatment of Asian Americans in our country (additional lesson and slide deck). And all of this gives our students the background information they need to deal with the feelings [that come up around what’s happening]. These lessons are giving students tools to navigate and make sense of the truths that are difficult to reconcile, but with the message of freedom and democracy and equity. And I think advocacy would be a natural result of these lessons. We’re creating environments where students are asking really difficult questions, and I’m learning with my students as we have these conversations.

Khurana: And for you, a lot of this is falling on your shoulders. It’s a lot to handle.

Jyung: I believe that as teachers, we’re teaching to change the world. We’re helping our young people, our next generation, to think about: Hey, where do I fit into this racism and all these things that are happening? Where am I in relation to that, and what’s my place here, how do I use my voice? How do I use collective power to do something about this?

But also, creating lessons about Asian American history and identity should not fall on just Asian American teachers. I’m really excited about the opportunity to work with other educators at my school—it’s a very diverse group of teachers—to really grapple with how to start these conversations with our students about the Asian American experience and history.

Khurana: For schools and teachers just getting started, what’s your advice?

Jyung: As an Asian American educator, there are parts of Asian American history that I do not know about, that I did not learn growing up. But I cannot wait to become an expert before I have these conversations with students. It needs to happen now. It needs to happen as we are learning. So we’re learning with our students. These stories and experiences have to be shared and enter into the conversation at our schools and in our classrooms.

*Progress reports and Report Cards:  We have electronic report cards and progress reports but at the end of the year they must be printed and put in the CUMS.  Until we go to electronic CUMS this process will have to be done every year.

Upcoming dates:

May 28- May 31  No School

May 10-27- MAP testing begins; 

June 1- Staff meeting/social 3:15 at  ?????

June 1- June 8 (no dancing on 6/4)  Royal King dance starts; 7:45 am teacher dance practice by the mural of the Dragon 

June 4-  AR deadline and Report cards due to Jas, virtual family cooking night

June 8 11:30 Drive thru Promotion- teachers please join us to celebrate our 8th graders

June 9- Last day of school; minimum day schedule has not been determined yet 

Aug 9 - PD- buy back day could be in person or virtual TBD 8:00-3:30

Aug 16 - Welcome back staff meeting 

Aug 18 - First day of school 

Happy Mother's Day