Awesome Achievements

There are times that I wonder why I ever decided to become a teacher. Its usually after I've been flipped the bird, or had a string of curse words describe my family & parentage. The feeling also shows up at times with administrators. Its hard not to take those things personally, even though I logically know I should not. And there are other times where I know exactly why I made the choice I did.

Last evening, I was privileged to watch several members of the senior class receive scholarships & academic awards from community groups. At the evening ceremony, I used the camcorder we purchased with the Best Buy grant to video tape the events. This morning, I watched more of those seniors receive awards for participation in clubs, academic & sporting success. A few of the highlights from this morning's ceremony that stuck in my mind: Almost all of the seniors from the functional academic program participated in the senior processional. This particular group was the first class I taught at my current school, and they did a wonderful job. I was able to watch several members of the community service club I've co-sponsored receive awards, including one student receiving the bronze level Presidential Volunteer Service Award.
Today was the last day for most of our seniors, and although the students from the functional academic program will return next year as post-graduates to work on campus and continue their education, its not really the same. Prom is tomorrow evening, and I am sure that, as with the last 2 years, I'll need those extra tissues that I always forget to shove in my purse. I'll probably also need them next Friday at the club's end of year gathering, and at graduation a few days later.

Masters of Disaster---LIVE!

Hm... Okay, maybe that headline is a bit kitschy even for me, but I couldn't resist. This afternoon we had a tornado warning while we were at school. To help make that a little more understandable: A tornado WATCH means the conditions could possibly produce a tornado, and the National Weather Service is keeping an eye out. A tornado WARNING, however, means that a tornado has been spotted, either on the ground or in the sky near you.
We were puttering around in the classroom, packing things up for the summer. I have one student that enjoys looking at the weather, and often does this if he has the opportunity. He was doing that while I was looking up something for another student, so he leans over to me and points at the scrolling bar on the Weather Channel homepage. And I see it: bright red, scrolling slowly, TORNADO WARNING. He has seen it too, and wants to talk about it, but I needed to stop him so the other students wouldn't get scared. I simply said, "If it was for this area, we would be in the safe room, in the position that we practiced." He nodded, lost interest, and went forward. I can honestly say it wasn't more than 3 minutes later that one of our assistant principals came on the PA system and said, "All instruction will cease." I never thought I would hear those words out of the mouth of a principal! He requested that all students & staff report to their assigned safety locations, and then the school lost all power. Now, our school is a Red Cross shelter site, and has generators (I know this because, 3 years ago, before I ever knew I was teaching at this school, I did the shelter survey... it was one of the first things I did for the Loudoun Chapter!), so the hallways had lights as did some classrooms. We stayed in the room for about an hour, and ultimately dismissed all students by 4:15 p.m.
But, I was very proud of my students... they knew exactly what to do, and although they were scared and had some high-pitched voices going on, they did what they were told to do. I have to attribute at least SOME of the ability to what we've talked about in class with the MoD adaptations.

Masters of Disaster Adaptations

For those who heard about the MoD adaptations that were created by myself & the Loudoun County, Virginia Red Cross can look here for the Intellitools Classroom Suite files. The first module, Disaster Safety & Preparedness are available here.
Please note: The current Classroom Suite files are in Version 3. They are compatible for version 4, but once saved in version 4 they will no longer work in version 3. I hope to have time this summer to port the older activities to Version 4 over the summer as well as create the activities for the Fire Safety module.

If you are interested in print activities, and can provide proof that you have purchased a kit (or several kits) for either your chapter or schools & other groups in your area, I'm happy to email you the PDF files. If you would prefer to receive a CD of the print activities along with the IntelliTools activities, please contact me. There will likely be a minimal cost for the purchase of CDs and shipping.
I'm choosing to require proof of purchase for the paper activities in order to protect the copyright on the MoD kit. Groups that use the computer-based activities will typically have students that cannot access the print kit at all and so need more assistance to get this important information to their students & clients.

I would also like to thank the parents who previewed the activities for me before they were released, IntelliTools, Inc. for hosting the files in their activity exchange, and Mayer-Johnson, Inc. for allowing us to use the Boardmaker-PCS symbols in the activities without charge.

National Youth Institute---Day 3

It was really hard to get up this morning after being awake so late for the dance. We were definitely not the only group that was super tired. It seemed like a number of people left early because of travel, but there were still enough there for things to happen. We missed the social media session on Sunday morning (could this be where they showed the videos? I never did see them!) because there was just no way we were getting up at 6:30 for a 7:15 session. After breakfast, we checked out and headed to the conference hotel and our second session.
We spent 4 hours working on our action plans for next year's birthday party project. I'm afraid that I was so brain dead at this point that when the groups started explaining their projects, I became lost. I thought everybody was talking about their clubs, even though I knew from yesterday that most of the people didn't have active clubs! I got some nasty looks from the other groups, which I definitely deserved. I am pretty sure that my brain oozed out of my ears at that point.
When it was our turn to present, I made the youth do it. It seemed to go well, and we had fleshed out some of the ideas we had from the previous work period including specific places to get donations from for the project, and how to present it to our principal.
The only real downside to the presentations was that one of the people in the room was very gung-ho on us being a complete Red Cross club, and felt that she really needed to explain to us how the Red Cross did things. Since this was similar to the problems we had with another service organization, we were all less than thrilled at what we were hearing. I've never really experienced another Red Cross volunteer pushing Red Cross on me, especially not in youth services! I've always run a general community service club, and while the students do things with the Red Cross because I'm active, they aren't required to participate. I was a probably little snotty when I held up my ID badge to explain to the commenter that I was a Red Cross volunteer on my own. I was pretty annoyed, although some of that was purely being tired. I'm still minorly annoyed, as you can tell, since I'm blogging about it... I hope that everything will settle out, since one of the students who came with me expressed an interest in doing things at the chapter as well over the summer the previous evening. Overall, though, the conference was well done. I think we are going to try and go there next year, especially if the price stays at $75. It would be nice if it was a little closer; then we could drive and take more students.

Pictures from NYI Day 3--6/1/08

National Youth Institute---Day 2

In the morning, I went to a conference on writing grants and exchanged some ideas with other youth advisers. One of the better ideas I heard was Tommy the Safety Cat, so we're going to see if the other club members like the idea of teaching the information to students at our local elementary schools. The students went to a workshop on creating and marketing an idea. We had a general afternoon session about writing an action plan, and then spent the rest of the afternoon working in groups to develop a plan. We were one of the only groups that was already an established school club with connections to both school & chapter, so we created a plan for an activity. Many of the other groups seemed to be making plans on how to get more club members. While this is certainly something we need to work on, the decision to find an activity that was recurring and on-going seemed a better to do it, at least for our group. The idea was to have birthday parties for children who are in emergency shelters (not for a disaster). After the workshop was over, there was much discussion and planning on how to handle that evening: there was a strong desire to swim, so we grabbed swim suits, got back over to the conference hotel... and wound up swimming inside because there was another thunderstorm. Then we found dinner, went back to the hotel to eat and change for the dance. The dance was enjoyed by all... especially all of the costumes that people brought with them!!

Pictures of NYI Day 2
Saturday evening, of course, was the dance.