MISD Minutes - The Art of Dairy

Legacy HS graduate places 3rd out of 9000 nationwide entrants in the Lucerne Dairy art contest. Contestants submitted ideas for the contest and finalists created their visions on life-sized dairy cows.

Related

• Mansfield student artist wins big with creative cow

Linda Nix Memorial Garden Dedication

On Friday, June 5, the staff of Ben Barber Career Tech Academy gathered to dedicate a small garden outside of the campus in honor of Linda Nix, a business teacher, who passed away in early December, 2008 after a long battle with cancer.

Attendees of the dedication heard from a few of Nix's co-workers and family members and each received a balloon to release along with bookmarks with advice that she gave freely. [Dedication Photo Gallery]

Linda's Advice for Living:

1. Find your passion and pursue it.
2. Uncover your natural talents
3. Try out lots of different jobs before you choose a career.
4. Meet all kinds of people and stay in touch.
5. Live below your means.
6. Do for others.
7. Exercise, eat right, don't smoke or do drugs.
8. Travel.
9. Read everything you can.
10. Find the "right one."
11. In relationships, isolation is a bad thing.
12. Do your best for yourself.
13. Always do the right thing.
    

Linda Nix taught business in the district for over eleven years. In addition to preparing real-world projects to supplement state approved business classes, she wrote proposals for several innovative business/finance courses. She pioneered the BCIS II course in which students have the opportunity to take the Microsoft Office Specialist certification tests. She applied for and received a Tarrant County College Mini-grant in order to fund the certification service for Ben Barber students. She also received several of the Mansfield ISD Education Foundation innovative teaching grants as well as the Heartbeat Award.

Photojournalism students give back through Giving Gallery

Note: This is a guest post by Sharon Ellman, Summit High School Photojournalism Teacher

[On Monday, June 1] a group of my advanced photo students took a big check over the the Mansfield Education Foundation to surprise the Executive Director Linda Bacsik. I think she really was surprised and the kids had a great time finishing what they started.

In case you haven't been following my story I'll give you a recap. The Mansfield Education Foundation awards innovative teaching grants

to teachers in MISD. When a teacher wins they have a prize patrol that comes to the teachers classroom with a big check for the amount of the grant and balloons. The prize patrol consists of school board members, the superintendent, members of the foundation and the media. It's all very exciting for the teachers and students.

I have been the lucky recipient of several innovative teaching grants. I won my first one in 2003, my first year teaching in Mansfield for a grant I called FACES: Friends Across Cultures Experience Success. I was so surprised and excited, that year they even had our school drum line marching through the halls as part of the prize patrol! This fall I won a grant called

The Giving Gallery where my students would host a galley show and sell their photos in a silent auction donating the proceeds to charity. Since the Foundation has been so generous to me and my photo students I thought it would be appropriate to donate the proceeds to them and my students agreed.

Our show was a huge success and we raised $1815 through our silent auction. We decided that it would be fun to turn the tables on the Education Foundation and have our own little prize patrol to surprise Linda to give her our donation. Richie, Terry and Jerry over at MISD communications helped us set her up with a "meeting" so she would be in her office when we arrived and Richie and Jerry came with us to present the check. It was great! Thanks to all the people who bought prints at the auction and supported my students. Thanks to all the people who helped us with our prize patrol today. Thanks to all my students who inspire me to be a better teacher every single day.

If you are interested in making a donation to the Education Foundation to support innovative teaching grants, please visit their website.

(See the photo gallery from the surprise.)

We dropped the ball

It has been far too long since our last post here on the district blog. In our defense, our department has had our sleeves rolled up dealing with communication needs for issues such as Swine Flu, construction delays at a new elementary school, and even Tuberculosis! Plus, we've had a hand in the district's employee reception, administrator retirement receptions, as well as preparations for high school graduations.

(Whew!)

That said, we want to continue to provide a trusted source for district information, behind the scenes knowledge and useful updates so we will work to get (and stay) on a better schedule for you.

You can help
What would you like to see covered here on the district blog? What do you want to know about within the district? There may be a few posts out there waiting to be written.

Thanks for your patience and for your valuable time. Also, look for more guest posts from other people in the district. There are great stories out there and we'll try to bring them to you.

Questions on Hiring of Non-Certified Teachers

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Note: This is a guest post by Mrs. Venetia Sneed, MISD Coordinator of Personnel for Recruiting and Retention.

In response to the questions regarding Mansfield ISD’s hiring of non-certified teachers, I would like to share the following:

Mansfield ISD considers fully certified teachers for all of its open positions. “Fully certified” means that an applicant has completed all of their university or teacher preparation coursework, passed their content and pedagogy state exams, fulfilled their student teaching or one year of internship requirement and has been issued a Standard Teacher Certification from SBEC (the State Board for Educator Certification Agency.)

Teachers issued a Probationary Certificate are still in the process of completing one of the aforementioned components. Currently, MISD does not have an in-house Alternative Certification Program nor do we officially partner with Teacher Preparation Programs to hire their interns or provide the one year internship opportunity.

Once a teacher has obtained a Standard Certification, whether it was acquired via the University Education route (or "Traditional Certification" as mentioned in Dr. Cunningham's previous post) or an Alternative Certification Program, they are eligible to apply and be considered for any MISD opening they are certified to teach.

Having said this, if we are unable to fill a shortage area with a fully certified teacher, we will consider an applicant who is still in the process of obtaining their standard certification. As a matter of fact, we hired a few teachers in this category this school year in the areas of Special Education, Foreign Language, Career Technology, Math and Science. These content areas are typically our high shortage areas.

MISD Substitutes and Aides are encouraged to complete the requirements for their standard certification, as well, so they can be considered for open positions in their certification area.

~ Venetia Sneed

Teaching as a Second Career

So You Would Like to Become a Teacher
by Dr. Claude Cunningham, Associate Superintendent Curriculum & Instruction

The current economy has caused many of our local businesses and industries to make work force reductions. The employees displaced have skills and knowledge which may be of great value to the children of our community. If you are in this situation, you may have decided that it is time to look seriously into teaching as a possible career. Teaching is not easy. Teaching is very time intensive and requires a lot of emotional energy. If it is a fit for you, teaching is one of the most rewarding professions in the world. To make this career change, there are some things that you need to know:

Entering the teaching profession as a public school teacher requires that you become certified by the State of Texas. There are two primary routes to certification; the traditional certification route and an alternative certification route.

Traditional Certification
The traditional pathway to certification is to enroll in the Teacher Education program at a local college or university. Typically, you will be required to take 18 hours of professional education course work. These may include a field experience or internship. Many of our local colleges and universities have special programs for individuals who hold a bachelor’s degree who are looking to change professions. The requirements for these programs may vary, but the number of courses is about the same.

Alternative Certification
There are several programs which offer alternative routes to certification. Some of these are proprietary programs; others are offered through colleges and universities or the regional Educational Service Center (FYI, Mansfield ISD is in ESC Region 11). These programs typically offer intense, short term instructional programs in the summer followed by regularly scheduled follow up sessions in group or individual settings. Alternative certification often allows you to become a regularly employed classroom teacher while completing the certification program.

Either route will result in the receipt of a Texas Standard Teaching License. The State Board of Educator Certification (SBEC) has a very helpful web site which lists all the approved teacher certification programs in the state, traditional and alternative. It will be to your benefit to “shop” the various programs as each has unique requirements. Identify the one that best fits your needs before you commit to any particular program.

Next Steps
If you are interested in determining the opportunities available to you in this area, go to the SBEC Web site and pick the region in which you would like to pursue a certificate. You will be given a list of programs and links to each program.

Recipe for Math Success

The following is a guest post written by one of the district's math teachers.

Some people claim that “shortcuts” and “tricks” are detrimental to true learning. I disagree…giving our students tools to employ simply makes them better able to problem-solve in the future. With TAKS right around the corner, I want to share with you some strategies I have employed in the past to aid my students in increasing their overall grades as well as their TAKS test scores. I am hoping that you will be able to reinforce these methods at home and encourage your student to use some or all of these test-taking strategies to increase their achievement on all types of tests.

I have been using the following acronym (I know, I know…not another one) for several years and it has proved to be useful to many students.

We call it the “RECIPE.”

• R - Read each problem carefully twice
  (We all miss things the first time around.)
  
  
• E - Estimate your answer
  (Often answer choices can be eliminated with estimation.)
  
  
• C - Check/Convert units
  (Test writers just love to mix up the units.)
  
  
• I - Is it on the formula chart?
  (If they are going to give you a cheat sheet, USE IT!)
  
  
• P - Picture, Proportion, or Pythagorean Theorem?
  (The 3 P’s can solve about 1/3 of the problems on TAKS tests.)
  
  
• E - Eliminate wrong answers
  (Crossing out obviously incorrect answers takes your focus away from them and increases the probability of getting them right.)

I always add one final question…“Does my answer answer the question?” You would be surprised at how many questions are answered incorrectly, not because the student didn’t know how to do the problem, but because they did not provide the answer to the question that was asked.

Other techniques
In addition to following the “RECIPE” to success, we can encourage our students to utilize other strategies as well, some they already use on the reading sections of tests:

• Highlighting only the important information given in a problem and making notes in the margin about the type of problem or what you are looking for in the problem are both similar to techniques taught in Language Arts classes to help with reading comprehension.
  
• Focusing on one sentence of the word problem at a time helps students by breaking the problem into more manageable pieces to avoid becoming overwhelmed.
  
• Writing out the formulas, defining the necessary variables, and showing all of their work are a few more ways a student can be sure to be successful on tests.
  
• Bubbling the answer document last. So many kids get so bogged down in bubbling that they are not focused on the work necessary to be successful.

If you want to help your student further, there are many excellent resources available on the internet. One would be the Released TAKS test Web page. There you can access previous TAKS tests for each grade level and each subject. At the same site, you can access Test Study Aids on the left. Under the Study Aids link you will find TAKS study guides, released tests and answer keys. On the Legacy High School website, Stephanie Barnes, the TAKS coordinator, has created a series of links to pertinent TAKS information, including those websites referenced above.

Here are some last minutes things you can do as parents to help your student do their very best on TAKS:

• make sure they get a good night’s sleep the night before the test,
  
• make sure they get a good breakfast on the morning of the test, and
  
• send them to school with lots of positive encouragement and, of course, #2 pencils.
  

Good luck and high scores!!!

Kristi Kelton
Algebra I Teacher, Mansfield Legacy High School