A Day In My CY Life

I realize that the majority of my friends and family outside of City Year have very little idea about what a Corps Member's work entails on a daily basis. The interesting thing about the organization is that everyone's experience is a little different, based on their school, their team, and the teacher they work alongside. To give everyone a frame of reference for when I talk your ear off about my students, here's an average workday for me!

6:30 AM-Leave home

I take a metro and then a bus from our apartment in Northwest to Ferebee in Southeast. The commute is typically between 45 minutes and an hour.

7:30 AM- Morning prep

I try to get to school a little early so I'll have time to make copies, print my lesson plans for the day, and get anything else that I need.

8:00 AM- First circle

City Year days always start with a brief team meeting so we can talk about what's going on that day. 

8:15 AM- Breakfast

Probably the worst part of my day, breakfast is just plain chaos. It's the only time that all the students are together in one place, as they all get free breakfast. With that many kids in one overheated room, it gets noisy and miserable really quick. I spend 40 minutes passing out breakfast and trying to keep kids in a seat instead of running around or fighting. 

9:00 AM- Planning period

I get 45 minutes each day to prepare for my small group, lunch club, and after lunch reading group. I also serve as my team's Events Coordinator, so I use this time to plan for any event that we have coming up, like our recent fall themed literacy event, "Harvest Hallways."

10-11:10 AM- Literacy small group

City Year's mission is to give students extra help in the three ABCs: Attendance, Behavior, and Course performance, in order to keep them on track to graduate. Corps Members go about this by building focus lists in behavior, attendance, literacy, and math. Our lists are students who are sliding off track in those areas. I have 6 students on my literacy list; all of them are well behaved for the most part, but struggling a little in reading. The teacher that I work with and I decided that it would be most effective for me to take these students out of the classroom because it is often impossible to concentrate in there, and we believe that if they're given a chance to focus and some extra attention, they can get back on track. 

For this hour, I focus on guided reading activities with them. Right now we are in the "Living World" unit, and have been reading about animals and their habitats, extinct species, fossils, and coming up soon, climate change. 

11:20-12:45- Math small group

With the same 6 students, plus one more who isn't quite at their reading level, but can keep up with the small math lessons, I spend almost 90 minutes each day teaching math. It's third grade math, so obviously pretty basic stuff, but sometimes it is really hard to explain something that seems so intrinsic, like multiplication. 

The vast majority of my class is far behind in math, with most of them scoring around 20% on their most recent standardized math test. So my goal for my 7 students is to give them a chance to not just get back on track, but to get ahead of the rest of their class. I believe that with more one on one attention, all 7 of them have the potential to start grasping advanced concepts and eventually score much higher on their next test.

12:45- Lunch club

Each Corps Member leads a group of students in a lunch club each day. Since I'm the only CM in my 3rd grade class, I have split the entire class up into 5 clubs, one for each day of the week. The focus of these sessions is leadership. Each week, my group does an activity focused on building leadership and citizenship. They aslo participate in a program called 50 Acts of Leadership, where they try to record 50 instances of leadership, which encourages them to build their character skills outside of their lunch club day. 

1:20- Lunchtime reading group

The principal of Ferebee is highly focused on building literacy, so he instituted a lunchtime reading program for Tuesdays-Thursdays. Instead of going to recess, each student has a reading group based on their Leveled Literacy (an alphabetical scale that indicates a student's reading proficiency). I have the advanced group of 3rd graders who are reading at a Level Q or above (scores in my class range from B to S). For 20 minutes, I try to minimize the girl fights they are constantly in so that we can read aloud a few pages from a book that I chose for them. 

1:45- Lunch

2:20-3:15/4:15

On Tuesday-Thursday, Ferebee has an extended learning day, and school dismisses at 4:15. On Mondays and Fridays we get out at 3:15. For the last part of the day, I am back in the classroom with all of the students as they finish their work for the day and participate in a character building curriculum. I use this time to work one on one with students outside of my small group who have struggled that day, and with students on my behavior focus list. These five students all have serious behavior issues which are debilitating to their learning and that of students around them. I often take them out of class for a few minutes at a time, just to chat about their day and their behavior. 

3:15/4:15-5:45- Afterschool

Ferebee has two afterschool programs, and I go with the 3rd graders to Dream Academy, a program designed for students at risk of incarceration, run by an outside organization. I'm mainly there for support, as the Dream Academy staff runs the curriculum. I help the afterschool 3rd graders with their homework, and sometimes I get to go downstairs to aftercare and play with the Pre-K to 2nd graders! 

6:00- Commute home

And I'm home by 7:00! Except for the next three weeks, as my teammates and I go to study after work so we can prepare for the LSAT. 

Everyday is different at Ferebee because so much of it is dictated by the behavior of students that day. But I am loving my work, especially the freedom I have to teach my reading and math groups. It's really fun to give those 7 students a different curriculum, and because there's only 7 of them, I can make the lessons a little more interactive and engaging. Hopefully all of this daily routine will contribute to increased academic success for all of my 3rd graders!