Edward Harris middle school seems to sit in a fairly nice residential neighborhood with a lot of new houses being constructed in the area. Perhaps half a mile from the school there is a retail center anchored by a home improvement store, with several fast food places and other stores. Conjoined with the middle school there is a large library area, and on the other side of the library area is a high school. During class transition times a gate is kept open to allow students to travel to the high school to attend certain upper level and elective classes. Otherwise the school grounds are kept closed and the only way in or out is via the school office buildings. The school also has a secure area for students to park their bikes, and I thought this was a pretty good way to encourage bike travel and reduce thefts.
The classrooms at Edward Harris
Jr. middle school are arranged in multiple standalone buildings, with
each building containing roughly 6 classrooms. In the center
of each building is a small common area which functions as a teacher
lounge, meeting room, and common supply area. Given this
layout, it makes sense to dedicate each block of classrooms to a
particular concentration of classes, and so not surprisingly most of
Mrs. Nelson's neighbors are also math teachers. This
arrangement seems like it would encourage collaboration between the
teachers of a given subject, and I rather like it. Each
building has its own teacher bathroom which is accessed from the
outside of the building using a key code. Since they are only about a
year old, the classrooms are very clean and in good repair.
Mrs. Nelson had the desks arranged in the standard row arrangement facing the classroom front. The classroom seemed pretty full as the desks extended all the way to the back wall and pretty much to each side of the classroom (although there was a pretty fair amount of room at the front of the class). Unfortunately I neglected to count the number of desks - which in hindsight seems like a pretty obvious thing to do. There were 15 colorful and interesting math posters arranged nicely about the room (somehow I thought to count them instead of the students). These had been purchased by the teacher, and so if she left the school her successor would have to redecorate the room. In addition to the colorful math posters, there were a number of school posters related to tardy policy, student creed, classroom consequences, and school mission/core values. In general the school supplied posters were pretty uninteresting and had little to draw the eye or make the classroom more cheery.
Mrs. Nelson had a full desk in one corner of the classroom, including her own PC. However, for teaching she didn't use power point slides on the computer, but instead used an old fashioned overhead projector. I'm not sure, but I didn't notice that her classroom is equipped with the sort of projector that could connect up to a computer. I suspect these have to be requested by the teacher when needed. In any case, overhead projectors make it easy to step through math problems line by line, and Mrs. Nelson pretty much ran her entire lesson presentation sitting in front of the overhead projector. However, only about half of Mrs. Nelson's time in the classroom was spent on lesson presentation - the rest was given over to her students to work individually while she monitored them, plus there were times she spent taking care of various business such as collecting homework, different school business, and just generally maintaining order.
I noticed that each teacher seemed to be responsible for keeping their classrooms locked when not occupied. If any of the classrooms were unlocked while they were unattended, students would have access to all the other classrooms as well since the doors to the common area are not kept locked.
Schedule: The school has what I consider to be an unusual schedule. On normal days, school starts at 8:00 and ends at 3:00, and there are four 85 minute classes and a 25 minute advocacy class (every teacher teaches one of the advocacy sections regardless of their own subject area). This leaves 30 minutes for lunch - which I guess keeps the kids from getting into trouble but I'm sure they have to learn to eat and socialize pretty quickly. Seventh graders and eighth graders have lunch during different periods (11:30 and 1:00 respectively) - which I assume helps the lunch staff feed everyone in such a short time.
Every Thursday the school has a "professional day". On these days classes start at 9:00 so that the teachers can attend a morning meeting. Classes are shortened by 10 minutes and the advocacy class is skipped that day to make up the time. Although school starts later, the buses still arrive at their usual time so a great number of the students are left to their own devices for an extra hour on these mornings.
Note: The school has a pretty good website that can be
accessed at http://www.egusd.net/ehms/.