Survived the in-service process on Thursday by largely listening and staying vulnerable. As I typed up the notes from the meetings, I felt overwhelmed from the negativity expressed by some of my colleagues. I responded honestly about the feelings and went out camping near Dinosaur National Monument over the weekend. The fresh air and hiking helped drive out the depression and cleared my head.

Received good feedback from several colleagues and deafening silence from some others. I deeply appreciate some of the newest teachers who have a far more positive attitude. One woman joined the team because she couldn't grasp the curriculum. She wound up presenting a PowerPoint at the in-service. Her constructive atttitude helped move me along the process. A new male teacher asked where do the critics think curriculum comes from. After all, in a traditonal school, they would be responsible for creating all of their own lessons. No one would be responsible for creating it for them.

The best feedback was from my principal (whom I often criticize) who said she though I was courageous to step into vulnerability in my comments. I thanked her, but also said that approach generated a whole new set of feelings and that being angry is a lot easier and more familiar. We shared a good laugh on that one.

So two consultants are in this coming week. I will be meeeting with one on Thursday afternoon to continue to construct the curriculum.

We received a postitive rating from our Unified Improvement Plan report which has all of our academic measures in the green zone over a three year average. Since last year's scores were at an all time low, we'll need to keep progress up. However, hope in not impossible to generate with what we are doing so far.

On the other hand, the Colorado Department of Education send in a team last week that will be showing us what to do next. This is the same team that confused the heck out of a team of teachers two years ago over the course of two sessions in Glenwood Springs. When pressured, they admitted that they were unable to answer some of the questions.

The first question was did it make sense to target schools that were alternative classification in the first place. Of the 35 schools on their turnaround list, 17 were alternative schools. They already know that we are composed of largely failing students. The degree of success we achieve can often be viewed as a net benefit since all of our students arrived to us after failing in a tradtional school setting.

In the next year, tne CDE changed our classification to Alternative Education Campus. This compared our performance with other similar schools. Our classification went from "red" in the overall comparison to "yellow" last year. This year's evaluation has us as a "green" school.

To our principal's great credit, she has not crowed about the successes and has pointed out that last year's scores will certainly cause a dip in performance unless we do better this year. The good news is that the areas I can most impact, academics and behavior in school, are doing fine. The area that is still in the "red" zone is attendance. This is far more of a systemic problem and I believe requires more of an administrative intervention.

Time spent on communicating with others has changed the way I do business. I used to be able to use my time in planning to work on lesson development and grading. As a techer in an Alternative Cooperative Education Program, I have job coordinating duties that ensure that the student has a vocational placement in the community and that we tie the duties to the classroom. Ultimately we prepare students for entry level employment. I used to have plenty of time to visit employers and chat up the possibility of using our students in challenging jobs.

Those days are gone. I now have several committee assignments and larger curriculum development projects that pull me away from my former duties. What I find most challenging is the communication part. The school district has adopted a common curriculum. Between the English and Careers classes, I am challenged to develop lessons and protocols that are acceptable to a cohort of teachers with varying degrees of skills and abilities. Limits to technology access creates issues when we are trying to develop 21st Century Learning Skills.

Most of all, I am impatient. I can see where I'd like to go and I am not satisfied with the rate of progress.