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Have Not Died

It has been a very busy few weeks. I have four preps this year (because I’m insane!), no extra time to do RTI stuff and two toddlers who must be exercised to the point of exhaustion if I want them to go to bed before midnight. Also, they are no longer sleeping through the night. I may go insane.

Already behind in grading (I’m sure you’re stunned) and I was greeting first thing with an scheduling snafu. Not many people we happy, but I ended up handing off Math RTI stuff to the math department! Someone else will doing the data tracking, meeting attending, etc. Nice for me.

Have sneaky suspicion that I will be expected to enter in behavior data into special RTI behavior tracking thingy-mah-bob. However, have not been trained to do this. Another staff member was trained last year, but never was actually able to do it because.. wait for it… no password to access thingy-mah-bob was ever given to anyone in our building, despite months of begging. Need tips on how to dodge and avoid.

Watched a REWARDS lesson taught to my class today and it did not go well. Several students refused to participate (“this is for people from Mexico” = new english speakers) and one drama queen was trying to distract everyone with hysterics. Amazing how distracting a silent student can be. Back to REWARDS – we’ve had it for the past three years. It has never worked well with the students. No 14 year old wants to sit in a direct instruction class pronouncing vowel sounds, etc. I don’t care what the data says and I seriously question what students they used to gather that data. However, I’ll keep trying to adapt it to our needs because these kids do need to learn these multisyllabic words or at least their parts to get through their other classes.

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