Field Trip Permission Form Standard: Fill & Download for Free

The top factor was, of course, that both districts are historically “safe” Republican seats[1]. The 9th has not sent a Democrat to DC since 1963, and is rated by Cook as a R+8 district.It’s not really about “gerrymandering” for this district, which actually became more compact following re-drawing.Here is how the district looks now:Here is what it looked like previously:The seat should be an easy win for the Republicans, and Democrats are talking about how it is a moral victory because the margin for Bishop (about 4,000 votes, or +2%) is less than Trump’s margin in 2016. This has some truth, but it’s also a warning sign for the Democrats, in that in the 2018 Blue Wave election, the margin for pastor Mark Harris was 900 votes. So McCready actually did worse this time than last.It is a sign that Trump is in trouble in NC, but it also is a sign that the “blue wave” might have crested.This is a seat that honestly should be Red, but that the Democrats have to be disappointed that they failed to take it.In the end, the Democrats lost a ‘flippable’ seat.Footnotes[1] http://1 SFUSD | Field Trip Permission Form (Standard Day Trip)

“You can come early, you can leave late, you can take work home with you, but don’t try to do all three.” That’s the advice I was given early in my teaching career, and I found myself violating this rule several times a year. This is a sample:Preparing lessonsChanging lessons you just delivered in the hopes they will be more effective next time.Documenting, not just a percentage grade, but whether a student meets, exceeds, approaches, or is well below a few dozen learning standards or objectives.Differentiating lessons for different levels of readiness. For example, some of your 7th graders read on the same level as typical third graders, others read like high school or college students. Your lessons need to be meaningful for all of your students and encourage all students to grow. Good luck.Trying out various technologies, especially the free or inexpensive ones (or the ones your administrator bought in a panic at the end of a fiscal year, or the tech bought with a grant that somebody off campus decided your school needed) trying to find tech that will do what you need it to do and/or make your job easier. For example, designing a database to help you document mastery of learning objectives and print reports for parents. But it will only work on your home computer, so you have to export it as a pdf, email it to yourself, and print it at school.Trying to improve a child’s classroom behavior by communicating with parents who think their parental duty is to argue with you.Communicating with parents who do not want their bright child to be challenged, they just want their child to get A’s.Reviewing, discussing, changing, adding, removing, trying to implement, or documenting that you have implemented special measures for disabled students.Creating a template for students who are not doing well to create a plan to improve their grade, checking to see which students have finished writing their plans, which parental signatures you still need, then preparing grades for those students, so they can discuss with their parents whether their goals were realistic, and whether they took the steps required to bring up their grade.Meetings, endless meetings. Especially meetings where someone who used to be a teacher tells you that you should be doing the things that you would be doing, if you weren’t stuck in a meeting.Cleaning sunflower seed hulls out of desks.Partially filling out disciplinary forms with the names of the usual suspects and their usual disruptive behavior and photocopying the forms, so you can more quickly get back to teaching when the behaviors occur.Filling out forms to request necessary classroom equipment be repaired and unnecessary classroom equipment be removed, knowing full well that you’ll probably lose that battle.Throwing out 25 years of material that the last three or four teachers who had the classroom before you hoarded.Explaining how every expenditure of your classroom supply budget will directly impact student achievement, or giving up and ordering it from a non-approved vendor on your own credit card because it’s easier.Planning field trips. Counting field trip money, accounting for it, rolling the coins, noting the names and amounts of students who need change, contacting a bus company to reserve three buses, calling them back to cancel one of them. Taking ten late permission slips and explaining to the child who brings the 11th that there are no more seats on the bus.

All of these ideas are good both for student teaching and applying for future jobs as well.Delete all of your social media accounts. One drunken picture of you, or your arm around a 17-year-old girl when you were 18 (or vice versa) is not great, even though neither are in any way evidence of illegal (or even necessarily termination-worthy) offenses. But schools are super skittish these days. Notice how I never swear here, and how I don’t answer questions about taboo topics? Now you know why.Get pictures of you working with students. Ask permission first! But a picture is worth a thousand words. The picture of me with my school’s Science Olympiad team 100 miles away at the state championships went farther toward getting me hired than my GPA. Seriously, teachers get good grades. But will they take a Saturday and supervise a club or sport? That says a lot.When you are student teaching, be sure to volunteer to help coach / sponsor / tutor. Whatever makes your future boss aware that you are the kind of teacher who does stuff after school.Fill your portfolio with at least 1 of several different types of lessons. An inquiry-based lesson, a technology-based lesson, a lesson involving a field trip, a lesson involving student presentation or the creation of an artifact, a lesson involving interpreting data, and MOST importantly, a lesson in which students analyze and improve on SAT / ACT like questions (if you’re doing high school) or your state’s standardized assessment (if you’re K-8). Administrators love this because they are judged on their test scores. So soon will you be! So show them that you’ve given some thought to how to improve your kids’ scores. Don’t make the lesson “today, we practice ACT questions.” Instead, make sure you are including strategies for improving scores like Process of Elimination, Unit Analysis, the “always / never” rule, etc. This lesson will almost certainly be the least educationally valid in your portfolio - but your boss will think it helps him or her keep his or her job. That’s worth a lot.Make a webpage. Stock it full of your lessons and a calendar. Make a theoretical one for the courses you’d like to teach next year. This doesn’t have to be perfect, but it shows that you plan, and you take time to think out the long term ramifications of those plans. Plug some of the lessons in from step 4. I recommend finding out what platform schools in your area tend to use. We use Google Docs / Google Classroom, and those are common choices, but other districts use Blackboard or Moodle or other options. Use whatever your favorite district uses, or if you really have a lot of time, use multiple ones so you can tailor your answers to their specific questions.Collaborate with other teachers in creating your mock lessons. Talk about how you went to the biology department and worked with a bio teacher on your lessons about the Black Death. See the English teacher for your chemistry lab report rubric. Collaborative teachers that work well with others are a principal’s dream. Be one of those teachers.Keep a contact log of all of the parents / counselors / administrators you contact during your student teaching. Beforehand, show your schools a mock up of this log. Seek the help of other teachers in making this, and communicate that to your administrators. It is nearly impossible to keep up on parent communication in some districts - to follow my district’s guidelines I’d be spending several hours on the phone every day. But show that you at least care about this and have a plan to keep track. Very little is worse for a principal than an irate parent and a teacher with no documentation. But if you can say “well, I told the parent here and here, and emailed the parent on this day and this day, and here are her responses, and here’s where I emailed the kid, and the counselor, and here’s the referral I wrote and I logged all of that on this handy dandy form”, a principal has a much easier time saying “well, it seems Mr. Jones or Ms. Smith here has gone above and beyond to try and help your child.”Give some serious thought to classroom management. This is a topic sorely underrepresented in teacher education courses, but it is the make-or-break issue of your career. All the research and training and preparation in the world goes out the window if your students aren’t mentally present. To that end, observe other teachers that have good classroom management. Take notes. Discuss good plans. And then have a good plan. Talk about each step in the discipline process. Remember that each school has its own policies, so bone up on those, too. Make sure you have an answer for the question “OK, so let’s say you do all of this and it doesn’t work. Your kids are bouncing off the walls. Tommy and Johnny get into a fight right in front of you. What do you do?” Suggestion: DO NOT touch the children. ;)Ask good questions. What is the average percentile for your standardized test scores? When they ask why you want to know, say “I have to tailor my lessons to where the students currently are.” What is the ethnic population of your school? When they ask why you want to know, say “I need to know if I need to spend more time coordinating with the ESL teachers.” What is your policy for special education students? When they ask why you want to know, say “I like to work hand in hand with support services to make sure each IEP and 504 is followed and every child gets a chance to achieve his or her highest potential. I need help to do that.”Spend a little time studying data collection and analysis. Show your employer that you know how to look at the results of a test and see that question 13 was really hard for the students - maybe you want to reteach that concept. Spreadsheets are best here - no fancy or expensive software. Schools mostly don’t have that kind of money.Practice your public speaking and interview skills. This one boggles my mind, but the most common reason I’ve seen for teachers not getting hired (and I’ve sit in on dozens of interviews) is that the teacher can’t answer questions competently or has very little interpersonal or speaking skills. Your job, at the end of each day, is to be in front of a crowd ensuring young people that they are on the right track. Most of what you do is student centered, but some small parts are teacher centered, and they are hugely important.I’m sure I’m leaving lots out, but essentially schools want you to start with a full toolbox. That means you can collaborate, design differentiated and unique lessons, analyze data and help students improve that data, and manage classroom behavior. If you can show all of that, you’ll get a lot of offers.