Today was my first day at Gideon Elementary.  It has been a long but enjoyable day.  I can’t remember the last time I woke up at 5AM. And its also been about 6 years since I last rode the big yellow school bus to school.  And yes, I’m so glad to be reliving the dream!  The playgrounds, the yoyos, the icy pops, the cool-aid… those were the days..
Yesterday was the first official day of Summer Institute, and there are hundreds of new teachers living at Georgia Tech for the next five weeks.  These teachers will soon be teaching all over the country- Denver, Jacksonville, St. Louis, Nashville, Miami, and Atlanta.

So I found out Sunday that I would be at Gideon Elementary for the summer.  And I found out this morning that I am a 5th Grade Math Teacher for the next 5 weeks, preparing 16 students to retake the EOCT, a high stakes test for students in Georgia. Now I actually don’t meet or teach my students until next Monday, so we are grading their pre-tests this week to assess each student for the progress they need to make in order to pass the EOCT in 5 weeks.  And we are spending time going over how to set goals, develop a lesson plan, etc.  Its all very well run and really efficient.  I just need some sort of caffeine IV bag I can carry around for the morning time and then I think I’ll be good.
Gideon is an amazing school.  Once the about 50 other corps members and I got off the bus this morning, Gideon played loud pump up music in the halls for us, ha!  And the administration are all good people.  Not to mention the fact that the TFA staff and my advisors are straight up thugs (I wasn’t sure if that was a conceivable status for a 2nd grade teacher, but now I know that it is).  I know its only been a day so far, but I am looking forward to working there this summer.

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This is actually the beginning of my second week here in the program.  Last week at Induction, we spent time getting to know the Teach For America organization as well as getting to know the other 81 awesome people I’ll be teaching with in Atlanta.  The corps was actually just over 150 last year, but Atlanta is not hiring in Fulton County Schools anymore (just Atlanta Public Schools), so they only took on about half compared to years past.

The other folks teaching in Atlanta are awesome.  Its maybe the most opposite experience possible from coming out of Georgia Tech.  Most everyone was a liberal arts major in college.  The distribution is 70% female and 45% Black.  And people are literally from all over the country.  I am so glad to be a part of it all and I am learning so much from the people around me.

I have attached a chart comparing State Exams from an APS school in Atlanta and another school in Alpharetta, Georgia.  It is truly outrageous to see the two results side by side.  Not many people know that unequal education is such a big problem for society today.  Please check it out.
atl_testscores.pdf

I hope to be able to provide more insight into future posts.  I plan to write about once a week.