My First Day, Bearing Witness to Criminal Activities

It's not enough.

The environment is great; Teachers are collaborating.

Students are spending sustained periods of time reading books and responding to literature. Each day of Reader's Workshop begins with a focused, brief but effective reading lesson. Students are given the appropriate amountof support/independence to complete an assignment with the new skill.

Math is good enough. The curriculum focuses on a conceptual understanding on a wide variety of Math topics from several different strands. Some of the workbook pages are unneccesarily complex without leading to greater comprehension. For example, students are expected to solve word problems based on reading a chart of relative distances of world capitals. What's wrong with this? Most of my students have never ridden a plane. Even if they have, the concept of the relative distances of Rome and Amsterdam from Washington D.C. is very abstract and far removed from their experiences. Instead, let them practice reading a chart which shows how many boys versus girls signed up to play afterschool basketball. It makes it hard for the teacher to separate the competency in reading skills vs. comprehension of the context vs. comprhension of the Math involved. I'd rather just focus on the last of the three during Math class.

But that's not my biggest problem.

My problem is that the lack of content that the children are exposed to in a given day is criminal.
Math--adequate
Reading--plenty of time doing actual reading but not enough explicit instruction. Children aren't going to just teach themselves how to read by reading. The instruction must be guided.
Grammar, Vocabulary, spelling, phonics--absent
Social Studies--Non-Exsistant
Science--taught by a specialist. They are exposed to new excellent content every day. On even days they do lab work and on odd days they read texts that support their direct experience with the same topic. Social Studies instruction, currently absent, should be following a similar model.

The lack of instruction going on is criminal.
I would be reprimanded if not fired for letting so much instructional time go wasted.

Fear gets into me. I'm not sure I'm a good enough teacher to change it.

I have one student who is in 4th grade and CANNOT read. He cannot even decode a three letter word such as B-I-G. To my knowledge, he was born in this country and English is his first language. How can such a thing occur?

So he gets 40 minutes a day to stare at pages of a book, NOT reading.
The text he was attempting today was a Kindegarten/1st grade beginning reader.
This kid needs an exemplary Reading teacher. And I'm just not sure I'm it. What if I fail?

Well, it is my first day afterall.
I'll calm down,
Squeeze the fear back out of my heart.
Settle down,
focus.
And go back to taking this thing one day at a time.