Cristo Rey Network New Teacher Orientation: Day 1

I'm catching my breath after an incredible first day of meetings, sessions, and college cafeteria food before heading to catch some city life. Let's reflect.

Sunday I took the train from Detroit to Chicago where I am staying in a dorm on the campus of Loyola University. It's surreal being back on a full-fledged university campus complete with cafeteria food, tons of obnoxious kids (middle school camps?) and great conversations. Also, stackable beds. If I had a dorm mate I'd insist on stacking the beds for nostalgia and childish humour, but I have a roomy two-bedroom dorm all to myself. The first order of business was setting the air conditioner to a comfortable 62 degrees Fahrenheit (or 16.66 Celsius for my friends in every other country in the world).

I'm the only representative of Detroit Cristo Rey High School for this training and let's face it, I've taught a total of three sections of sophomore technology ever in my life, so I am clearly a veteran educator. While you mull over the brilliance of this statement, let me point out that technology has not been on the network conversation much of yet so, in a weird way, I have the opportunity to shape the role of academic technology throughout the Cristo Rey Network. Thankfully there are a few new faculty who will be teaching technology in our schools but all of them are new and have little existing curriculum so we're all, in a way, in the same boat (but I'm the captain, of course, and T-Pain is on the boat too).

Today's highlights included a session with the president of the Cristo Rey Network that was interrupted by a fire alarm. After the session I was able to chat with him about web standards and profiles for the schools network-wide and it looks like a conversation will continue further out of that. Likewise a group of us discussed the importance of nutrition in low SES (socioeconomic status), urban schools and are serious about pushing that discussion to top priority in the Network.

We spent a few hours wrestling with the great information in Ruby Payne's A Framework for Understanding Poverty and have plenty more to discuss the rest of the week. Payne's book provides a plethora of resources for understanding the unique situations each of our students represent and will serve to be a key resource for me going forward at DCRHS.

Most importantly were the conversations about curriculum management, lesson planning and classroom environments. It turns out that my liberal arts education did not prepare me to be a high school teacher so the fact that the Network provides these resources to us is a huge blessing.

As should be no surprise, I have morphed into the conference IT support specialist, fixing laptops, projectors and even texting a Cristo Rey school president from the moderator's cell phone so he could arrive at the right location. All that in one day!

Tonight I'm off to visit Goose Island with Margaret and Patrick. That is all that I know.

Reporting from Chicago...