why I have 56 students in my 5th period class.

Apparently many of my non-k-12 teacher friends are unfamiliar with the concept of leveling (also called CBDS) in public schools. Let me take a moment to fill you in on the process. If you're not infuriated by the time I'm done, I will be greatly surprised.

As you may or may not know, school districts are reimbursed by the state via ADA (Average Daily Attendance) per student. The more students we have, the more sections of classes we are allocated. Site administration can then use those allocated sections to hire more teachers or (as they prefer to do) ask teachers to do "extended day," i.e. teach an extra section, giving up their prep period.

The trick is to get your numbers just right. Many students move away over the summer, and don't tell the school that is expecting them. We always expect a certain number of no-shows. Similarly, students move into the district and often don't show up until the first day of school. There is almost no way to predict what the balance between those two will be. Until we can actually get a week or so of actual classes underway, we really can't determine the actual number of "bodies in the seats," and then go back and ask for more sections/teachers.

Notice I said ask for more sections. Almost always, schools are under-allocated. For the school district, it is cheaper to run really large sections for an extended period of time (maximizing their current teacher productivity), and then wait until the last possible minute to actually hire more teachers and/or ask more teachers to do extended day. For the district, once you hire a teacher, it is very difficult to say "whoops! we were wrong! it turns out that we don't need you." So they would rather err on the side of caution and just jam pack our classes with students until such time that they are actually forced to hire more teachers.

By contract, the district has six weeks to level classes. For most teachers, this means that we have to deal with the uncertainty of not only large class sizes, but also with students that are coming and going, often on a day-to-day basis. By the time we reach the six week deadline, many students have had three or more teachers per subject. It is very difficult, to say the least, to build rapport with students who may or may not be there tomorrow, next week, or even next month. By the time leveling day arrives, you just never know who will still be in your classes. To say that this tampers with class morale would be an understatement.

Despite all of these obvious difficulties, we are still expected to teach our standards and administer our common assessments. Is it little surprise that our students lowest test scores are always on the very first assessment, i.e. the one that takes place before classes are leveled? Grading is also a nightmare when students have gone from one teacher to the next and often have not had a chance to turn anything in!

When you have so many students in a class, it necessarily changes the types of instruction that you can do. I had planned on doing an activity in class on Friday where we were going to practice moving our desks into different configurations that we're going to use throughout the year. I don't think that is going to be possible when students can't even literally move around the room!

What is really frustrating is that I know it does not have to be this way. Friends in other school districts tell me that their classes are leveled by the third week. It can be done. For whatever reason, in RUSD, six weeks is the deadline. It's always surprised me that parents put up with this nonsense. For six weeks, your child is in an over-crowded classroom, with his or her class schedule open to a complete change multiple times. Does this create a climate that encourages learning and bonding with a teacher and classmates? No, it does not. Parents should rise up against this. It hurts teachers, sure, but most importantly it hurts our students. and it does not need to be this way.

Fun Places to take the Kids Part II-CDMOD

CDMOD? What is that??

It stands for Children's Discovery Museum of the Desert, it is one hour away, and it is, outside of Legoland, perhaps our favorite place to go.

but it's an hour away! That's so far!

why, yes it is. However, I would like to point out that it's an EASY drive. Compared to going to Pasadena or Los Angeles, there is very little traffic. Driving out to the desert is relatively stress-free, unless you decide you want to go out there on a Friday afternoon, in which case I would seriously question your sanity.

Anyway, back to CDMOD. We started coming to this museum in 2007 and have been regulars ever since. The first thing you notice is the reasonable admission price; just $8 a person. We have traditionally gone the membership route, since it is only $25 per person (after three visits, it's FREE!) and that includes four guest passes, which I usually use to bring Grandma or Grandpa along for the ride. The weather in the winter is fabulous, obviously, so we try to come during Thanksgiving vacation, Christmas, and then a few times afterwards.

While this museum is smaller than Kidspace in Pasadena, is packs a lot of fun into a small footprint. For my kids, the enduring favorites are the grocery store and the pizza parlor. Even now, my big 8 year-old girl LOVES to make pizzas and my tomato STILL loves to push a shopping cart around the grocery store. They even have aprons for kids to work the cash register and pretend money at the ATM. For some reason, kids find pretend grocery stores to be incredibly fun. Even when he was barely 1 1/2 years old, my Tomato loved the grocery store and would play forever.

Upstairs there is a fabulous dress-up room that has stuff for boys and girls. I began to worry that when my big girl's foot actually began to fit the shoes in the dress up area that she would decide she was too big for it, but no! She still loves to wear the hats and jewelry and glittery dresses, while my Tomato becomes a construction worker or fireman. They are definitely into their gender roles, what can I say??

There is a great toddler area adjacent to the grocery store and pizza area, for parents who want to keep an eye on both kids. The main floor has a vet's office (always a big hit), an art area, an area where you can paint a VW bug (kids LOVE this, go figure), some more advanced construction stuff for older kids, plus a plethora of hands-on play manipulatives. There is not too much outside yet, but they are in the middle of construction as I write this and so hopefully this part will improve. For now, outside is a good place to eat snacks or lunch under the covered awnings, or just to run and shake off some energy before getting back in the car to go home.

and if you don't feel like packing a picnic lunch, there is an In-n-Out burger right by the freeway on-ramp!!

Really, I can't say enough good things about CDMOD. It's one of our favorite places, and we go a lot. If it was closer, we'd go more often.....

Fun Places to Take Kids Part I-Kidspace

One of the benefits of being a teacher, is that I get summers off with the kids! I am always looking for fun, inexpensive excursions for us, and going to a lot of kid/science museums is always high up on the priority list. Kidspace Museum in Pasadena is one of our favorites.

We'd go to Kidspace more often, but it is a solid hour's drive from Riverside. Having said that, it is definitely a worthwhile excursion.

Having a 5 year old and an 8 year old is sometimes difficult, in that the older one can actually read and understand the exhibit information, whereas the little one mostly wants to climb and manipulate things. What I like about Kidspace is that there is plenty to please both kids, often in the exact same exhibit. Kidspace has multiple climbing towers, which if you read the descriptions, actually have some science and knowledge behind them. While my big girl reads (and climbs) the Tomato is busy climbing up and down and wearing off some of his energy. The inside space has exhibits on insects, a functioning beehive, stuff on the environment and a really cool room with minerals and other tactile objects to manipulate. However, the outside part is great too, with a construction zone, more climbing objects, gardens, a tricycle track, environmental exhibits and plenty of water play. We may have spent as much or even more time outside than inside.

If you have a toddler, there is a section of the museum just for little ones. The first time we went to this museum, my Tomato was still 2 or 3, so I dropped him off with Grandpa in this section and we didn't see them at all until lunch! I'm not sure exactly what play options are in there, but apparently it was lots of fun. The Tomato rejoined us when we went to the outside exhibits, mostly because there were lots of opportunities to climb and run amuck, two of his passions in life.

The museum has absolutely FABULOUS eating options with healthy snacks, but it is also located in the park adjacent to the Rose Bowl, so there are many places inside and out to eat a picnic lunch under mature, beautiful trees. Another advantage to its location in a park is that before you hit the car for the big drive back home, you can always have the kids hit the nearby playground for a last ditch attempt to wear off some of that energy.

Perhaps the only thing I don't like about Kidspace is that it is NOT cheap. At $10 a person (kids AND adults), it can turn into an expensive outing, once you add in the price of gas and food. Combined with the drive from Riverside, it definitely turns into an excursion. These are the reasons we don't go more often, but when we do go, we thoroughly enjoy it.

Why do I hate Justin Bieber?

I was thinking about my knee-jerk reaction to the proliferation of all things Bieber. Why, exactly, do I love to hate him? He's just a kid, singing innocuous love songs to a bunch of screaming teenaged girls, right??

Nope. I'd argue that he is symptomatic of a larger change in the music industry that I find disheartening. He's not an artist. He's a product.

1. I will just say straight out that I MUCH prefer singer songwriters to people who have great talent, but who sing the songs of others. Bob Dylan and Neil Young are not gifted vocally, but they WRITE THEIR OWN SONGS and I think that is awesome. The music is coming from their hearts and souls, not from some paid songwriter. Somehow I don't feel that Bieber is writing many of his own songs at this point, and even if he did, the things he would write about would probably not speak to me. They might speak to your average teenager, but I doubt they are songs that will live in pop consciousness for too long.

2. This kind of goes back to reason one, but you can be gifted vocally and maybe even be a great dancer, but if your singing doesn't tell me something about your experience, or connect to a greater humanity, then I'm just not as enthusiastic about you. Take, for example, Christina Aguilera. She has a tremendous voice. However, I don't think that any of her albums have given me a glimpse into her soul. She's a songbird. I don't get any sense of who she is. With each music release, she changes style with whatever producer she has chosen. Adele, or Amy Winehouse, or Neko Case, however, are singers AND songwriters who, though they work with producers, put out music that is embedded with their souls, their stories, their heartache and their triumph. When they sing, you feel it. The downside with this, is of course sometimes those demons overcome the artist (hello Kurt Cobain and Amy Winehouse), but not always. The best music, is universal because it speaks to the human experience. Of course, not all music need to save the world. We can't all be Midnight Oil. There is room in life for silly pop songs that make you want to dance (hello Katy Perry!). But can't there be great pop music that is catchy, well-written AND musically relevant?

3. Pop music has always been susceptible to it (as has most dance music), but I rue the rise of the super producer over the last few years. This tends to go in cycles, of course, as producer-dominated disco once ruled the charts for a time. The new Katy Perry is an example of a hugely catchy CD (and yes, she co-writes her songs), but it's also put together by some of the best producers/songwriters in the business. The fact that I know the names of Dr. Luke, the Smeezingtons and RedOne, is disappointing because really, the names of the artist should be more predominant! There for awhile, when the Neptunes duo were hot, you could hear their songs on the radio in an instant. They all had a similar style, and the vocalists were essentially interchangeable. That bothers me. The vocalists, the artists should not be interchangeable!! Shouldn't they be singing their songs, shaping their stories? Perhaps with an assist with a producer or songwriter (Adele wrote her song Turning Tables with a great songwriter who is also an evangelical Christian, but that's another story), but their own vision should be first and foremost! Otherwise they are not really artists, they are product. They are Christina Aguilera. Or Demi Lovato.

4. Finally, Bieber is symptomatic of a music industry that needs to permeate all corners of pop culture with their product. It's not enough to have a song on the radio. You have to have your own iPhone app, movie, soda, clothing line, perfume etc. Now that people aren't buying music anymore, it's understandable that the music industry would move in this direction. However, when a gigantic multinational corporation is putting together these lines (look! It's the new Selena Gomez perfume!), it just strikes me as so artificial. When the Disney juggernaut decides to put its corporate weight behind a music group (The Jonas Brothers), all of a sudden they become ubiquitous. All of a sudden it's not so much about the music as it is about the product and product diversification. Ironically, the Jonas Brothers are actually pretty good musicians and I don't hate them. Have you noticed, however, how little we've been hearing about them lately? Has the Disney Corporate juggernaut passed them by??

Maybe, ultimately, that's what bothers me about Bieber and his ilk; music as product rather than expression. In today's quickly changing landscape, I realize that musicians can't rely on music sales to make their living. They need to diversify, license their songs to be played in Carl's Jr.s and Mc Donald's and sell lots of t-shirts. I guess I just prefer it when an artist's expression is their own, and not that of a corporate board that is trying to extract maximum profit from a product (Bieber) that has a limited shelf life.

yes, I know. I think way too much about music. This is what happens when you have WAY too much post-graduate education and suffer from a life-long obsession with music.

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I worry about my girl

because I read an article today about a spread in French Vogue featuring a 10 year old girl. A very beautiful little girl, but she is TEN YEARS OLD! WHAT in the world were her parents thinking? What was the editor thinking?

I realize that there are a lot of moms out there that love to take their daughters for mani/pedis, make up lessons and fashion shows. God bless those moms and the jobs that they support, but

I AM NOT ONE OF THOSE MOMS!

The window of girl hood is getting ever smaller and smaller. I love the fact that my girl still loves to go outside and hunt for insects. She doesn't care that her nails get dirty. I love that she still plays "pretend that...." with her little brother. I love that when she dances, she's not trying to imitate any TV star, but just runs around moving to her own muse. I love that she is completely at ease with her body. I know that I can't keep her in my protective bubble forever, but I am clinging desperately to these last few years of little girlhood because I know what's coming. We ALL know what's coming.

Can we please try and keep our kids from growing up so fast? Can we keep them still enjoying the simple pleasures in life, like playing with water hoses and hunting for roly-polys? Can they stay girls for just a bit longer? Really, folks, they have the rest of their lives to put on make-up, worry about their nail polish and strut around in low-rise pants. She doesn't need Vogue to rush her along that path.