Declutter your house: 40Bags in 40 Days

Published on February 28, 2017 by EmilyMaxwellMcLemore1 Comment

Tomorrow is the start of Lent.

In our house we have been talking about what we are going to give up for the next 40 days. It is a hard conversation to have with a 7 year old. Kylie immediately said that she would give up soda. She doesn’t drink soda. I explained to her that really Lent is a reminder of the sacrifice that Jesus made on the cross for us, so what we give up should be a sacrifice. A small token sacrifice, but it is the mindset, not what is actually given up.

This year, I am replacing 40 of my typical meals (donuts or fast food) with super healthy meals (this is a big sacrifice for me).

I am also once again completing the 40 bags in 40 days challenge. We love using this time to declutter our house. It is amazing how much junk accumulates over the year! 40 bags is incredibly easy to fill. One year we started with grocery store bags as it seemed scary to try to fill trash bags, but we quickly realized that trash bags were the way to go. I might even use contractor bags this year!!

If you have never done a declutter challenge, start someplace easy and non-emotional. Don’t start in your closet. Start with the kitchen junk drawer. Work your way to the emotional areas like your closet and the “skinny” clothes and your child’s toy box.

I have attached my file that I use to keep track. It is a jpeg so that you can download it and print it as well.

Good luck and let me know how you did!

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Student Privacy vs Friends, Friends of Friends or Public

Published on February 24, 2017 by EmilyMaxwellMcLemore1 Comment

Student privacy is this weeks #edublogsclub prompt. Ouch and ugh and all of those step on toes feels here.

I LOVE taking pictures and sharing all of the cool and wonderful things that go on in my world both as a mom and a teacher. I took 86 pictures TODAY.. and today was a ho-hum Wednesday full of nothing special, but 86 picture worthy moments in my mind.

Here are some of the pictures from my classroom today.

Because I know that I am going to take thousands of pictures over the course of the year, I send a special release form home with the students at the start of school. While the vast majority of the pictures that I take are of hands in action, I do have clearance to take pictures of faces and video of students in action.

On my release form I also ask about posting to social media and the identification of students. While I have a couple of students each year that can’t be identified by name and face because of CPS issues and such like that, almost every parent wants the pictures of their student posted to social media so that they can share the pictures with their family and friends.

In fact, any of you readers who might be interested can watch the shenanigans from my world on:

Facebook at Stephenville High School Art
Instagram at emilymaxwellmclemore or SvilleArt
Twitter at artsymac or SvilleArt

If you are interested in seeing completed art projects, you can check out my student’s work at Artsonia at Stephenville High School I am very proud to say that I have published 1000 pieces of art just this school year! I can’t wait to see what we will be able to do next year when our campus goes 1:1 and the students can easily upload their own pieces!!

What is frustrating here is that Artsonia changed their user agreement this year and required parents to sign on with their email address and approve their child’s accounts. Previously, parents could sign a consent form and authorize the school to upload their child’s work without an email address.

In my world of economically disadvantaged students with a great number of non-English speaking parents, this has been a continuing problem as many parents will happily sign the consent form, but they don’t have access to go online and set up parent accounts. I expressed this frustration to Artsonia, but to no avail. Because of this, while all the parent/guardian’s approved their child’s artwork to be published online, 69 students or 418 pieces year-to-date are hidden from the public. Sad.

Nonetheless, I can say that yes, I take tons of pictures and post students in action almost on a daily basis. I understand privacy issues but sometimes get caught up in the moment. Living in the land of teens, I am usually just focused on making sure that I don’t get shots of cleavage while taking a picture of hands at work or making sure that I don’g get a clear shot of what is on their phone. While it is almost always the screen of their music.. you never know!

In the end, student privacy and social media is an ever evolving issue. In today’s world filled with constant scrutiny and fear over loss of educational dollars, using social media to promote the incredible authentic teaching and learning that is going on in public schools is crucial. The best defense is an even better offense. I make sure that my community, district administrators and parents know that when student’s enter my classroom that their time is used wisely, that they are engaged in meaningful activities and that visitor’s are welcome.

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7 reasons why I love working in a public school

Published on February 18, 2017February 18, 2017 by EmilyMaxwellMcLemore2 Comments

THE LISTICLE – #EDUBLOGSCLUB PROMPT 7

I didn’t even know what a “listicle” was when I got this week’s #edublogsclub prompt! Thankfully, they had a wiki article about them… basically its a short form of writing for the internet that uses lists.

Well, I am all in on this one. I LOVE lists!!

So here you go…

7 reasons why I love working in a public school

You are challenged every single day to work to improve the lives of all people with no regard to race, color, creed, mental ability, disability or social status.
You are challenged to do more with less resources than you thought possible. (Sure, we would all love more resources, and we deserve more resources, but being able to create magic in the lives of our students with sometimes nothing is pretty amazing.)
You are given the opportunity to love thousands of students in the course of your career. As a high school teacher closing in on 20 years of teaching, I’ve already taught, mentored, and can tell you personal stories about more than 3000 students.
You are given the opportunity to hone your craft, adapt your teaching style and become a better mentor with every new crop of students.
You are offered a chance to learn from the past and start fresh every new academic year. Yesterday’s problems and last year’s power struggle don’t have to impact tomorrow’s promise.
You are offered a chance to learn new curriculum and teach new subjects. Just because you started off your career as a reading teacher doesn’t mean that you have to finish your career as one. Trust me. I hold 8 different certifications and have taught over 20 different subjects!
You are NEEDED! You are IMPORTANT! You are VALUED! The world may say otherwise, politicians may make your life harder and give you more hoops to jump through, but at the end of the day, society needs you, children depend on you, and YOU MAKE A DIFFERENCE!

In this time of educational uncertainty where every time I walk by a news source and am horrified at the state of our political system, I am reminded that at the end of the day, the education system and public schools are filling a basic need in the lives of millions of students. This need will not go away no matter what politicians do to the system. So instead of wallowing in the uncertainty, I am choosing to celebrate in the daily successes my students.

May we all in public education fill our news feeds with celebrations, successes and the triumphs of teaching a truly diverse and incredible group of public school students.

A deeper approach for better results

Published on February 18, 2017February 18, 2017 by EmilyMaxwellMcLemore1 Comment

In January, with the start of the spring semester, I deepened my approach to teaching basic drawing skills to my art 1 students. While they were not necessarily thrilled with this decision, they quickly saw the benefits to adding the “Drawing on the Right Side of the Brain” techniques. It’s something that I have wanted to do for years, but trying to fit in such a hands on approach during the middle of contest season just never seemed to work. But this year, I decided that even though I couldn’t do all of the steps, I could at least do the basic introductory steps.

I have Betty Edwards workbook and have adapted her lessons to fit a high school classroom. Her workbook is phenomenal and I wish we had time to do the entire book. (If I had just a drawing class, this is absolutely what we would do!) I take her concepts and teach basically the first five or six lessons.

What is truly amazing is that these techniques, because they are visual lessons and not language dependent work for ALL students of ALL abilities. Given that my classes are made of mixed abilities from the valedictorian to the non-speaking life skills student, I truly value lessons that work for all students!

Over a couple of weeks, my students learned to see every day objects with new eyes. They learned how to use a simple transparency to transform their drawings. They learned how to break large concepts into small manageable segments. And oh man, it has changed the way my students view drawing!

After working through basic lessons, I took a couple of my daughter’s old bicycles up to the school and set them up for the students to draw. Students then took their drawings and enlarged them onto a 18×24 piece of paper that they then had to create a positive and negative pattern on. This felt like it took forever.

But the projects are fantastic! This is the first drawing project where almost every one of my students were not only successful, but created a quality piece of art! Students that are frequent fliers in detention worked bell to bell for weeks on this piece! How I wish I could show you all 100 pieces and tell you the story of every student while you looked at their piece.

But I can’t. So I’ll show you a few really cool pieces.

So anyway, I just had to share this success story. It’s so gratifying when going that extra mile and doing that extra hard thing is rewarded. That’s a rare thing in education!

And the next time I want to set aside the lesson plans and take a few extra days to teach in a more meaningful way, I am going to remember this feeling and these results and give myself the grace to go rogue.

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CHALLENGING SITUATIONS

Published on February 13, 2017 by EmilyMaxwellMcLemore2 Comments

CHALLENGING SITUATIONS – #EDUBLOGSCLUB PROMPT 6

This week’s #edublogsclub is about challenging situations in education. Wow. Well, as a veteran educator, I feel like I know a thing about challenges in education just from surviving this long in this profession.

I’ve been pondering education and what I consider to be the overarching challenges no matter the age or subject and these are my top 3 challenges. I found pictures from my phone to illustrate!

The greatest challenge in my opinion is knowing how much pressure to apply on students and teachers. Too little pressure and the results are lack luster. Too much pressure and the teacher and/or student folds under the weight of expectations.

I love the idea of clay on a pottery wheel as a metaphor for education. When we throw clay on a pottery wheel, it is important that the clay be wedged, have the right moisture content and be placed on the correct spot on the wheel. If any of these aren’t done correctly, the piece that is going to be thrown won’t look/work right. Further, as the wheel spins, only so much pressure can be applied to the clay at a time. Too much pressure from one side without balancing the clay in other hand will force the clay to move across the batten (base) and eventually the clay will spin off the wheel!

img_7935-2 — Learning to use the right amount of pressure.

Such can be said for education! The expectations on students and teachers are spinning out of control. The increased pressure to perform better with fewer resources has caused schools to spin faster and faster and teachers and students are being slung from side to side and are holding on by a raveling thread.

Next, those that legislate education seem to forget that educators can only do so much without the proper tools. I thought this picture from my phone was perfect. A few weeks ago I need to get a cork out of a bottle, but I didn’t have a cork opener. I did a little google searching and found a you tube video that showed how to use a key to get the cork out of a bottle. I figured why not, worse case is that I ruin the cork and I can’t drink the glass of wine. So I used my house key, followed the instructions and amazingly it worked! The cork, while it didn’t look great, survived and I was able to use it to close the bottle back up.

This is totally the way education works! In order to get to the “prize” of good test results or an appropriate level on the state’s accountability scale, educators are expected to figure out how to reach students without ruining the love of learning in the process and without the correct tools! The concept of “making do” is such a part of education that it’s not discussed, it just is.

And finally, my third challenge to education is that the curriculum that needs to be taught is not and can not be the priority because we are teaching children and these children deserve more than just robots that spout platitudes and absolutes.

Understanding that what you want and need to teach is wrapped up in knots and is buried under the weight of a student’s life, the educator’s expectations and the government’s policies.

This picture from my phone is of a large mess of yarn and string tangled together. This is the very definition of teaching! Every piece of yarn represents one of my students and the pieces of yarn are tangled, knotted and completely and utterly dependent on each other to be untangled and to be given lives of their own. Sure I can pretend that the mess doesn’t exist and I can try to pull out just one piece of yarn at a time, but the reality is that in order to teach one student, I have to figure out how to teach the masses, the messes and the tangled jumble of lives. It is only when we have the yarn ball at least somewhat unraveled that we can begin to move onto teaching and learning curriculum.

So there you have it. This is where I see the challenges in education.

Google and the difference it makes in Education

Published on February 2, 2017 by EmilyMaxwellMcLemore4 Comments

FREE WEB TOOLS – #EDUBLOGSCLUB PROMPT 5

The world of communicating with students has changed. While some might bemoan the technology takeover, I for one, am a hardcore believer in the benefits of real-time appropriate communication with students that is made possible because of technology.

For example, last night from my own home:

I communicated with a student about a project and the deadlines that are looming for contest. It didn’t matter that it was after 10pm. The student sent me an email and I was able to respond and give the encouragement to finish the project.
I proofed a student’s work and sent feedback to the student using the comments section on Google Slides. Changes that were made were seen immediately and I could clarify where needed.
I read an article for my own classwork. I took notes and used a highlighter…all in a virtual format. No printing required!
I posted to a discussion board about education.

All of these things were time sensitive and so much easier because of the technology tools available.

One of the best and most useful platforms that I have found to use with students is Google’s FREE Productivity Tools. The school district I work in is a Google for Education school and we use the G Suite for Education services. But I also use these services for my personal work, blog and other needs.

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If you haven’t started using Google Productivity Tools, I highly suggest trying them out. These tools truly change the game. How? For one, every change, edit and fix is automatically saved when using Docs, Sheets, Forms, Slides and Sites! These tools have replaced my need to use Microsoft Office tools and even better, because they are cloud based, it doesn’t matter where I want to work on files created within these programs, they are available if I have the internet.

The tools also work from a phone or tablet. Google Drive is where I store just about everything these days. I also use Google Photos to store my pictures. I can upload my photos from my phone and then delete them to free up my phone storage. I can then access the pictures from anywhere, send them to print, add them to blog posts, whatever I need. Even better, file size doesn’t matter as the storage is unlimited with the Google for Education service. I use this with my personal gmail account as well and I have 15GB free.

Lastly, if you are a teacher and expect students to collaborate on projects, using a Google product lets you really see what students did. Instead of getting a finished project that only 1 student worked on out of a group of 4, but you don’t really know what was done and when, so you have to give everyone the same grade.. now you can give a grade based on actual work provided by students! You can even have the file tell you the percentage of authorship of the file. It is really quite cool.

I could go on as there are so many more amazing Google tools, but for now, I’ll leave it at… just try them! They are free and they just might make your life easier.