Filed under: Teach For America
I got news today that one of my most favorite students is going to be leaving our school soon. She is a complete sweetheart and I will miss her dearly. Her mom is thinking that the school days are too long for her and she is getting sick a lot more frequently because she doesn’t get enough sleep. I don’t blame her. These days are too long for any human being, let alone 8 year olds.
Also today I get more news that I will be getting a new student tomorrow. Not just any new student but a girl who is transferring from the classroom of the teacher who quit this week. I am so flattered that the mom, who is a TA at our school wanted her daughter to be in my classroom! I have her daughter in my reading group already and she is great. I am happy to have her in our class and the girls in my class are very excited to have her join us. I have talked to her mom many times as both a mom and a coworker and she is one of my favorite parents!
I had an observation yesterday and today from different people. I’ve been observed so much lately that I barely even notice when somebody walks in to observe me. I thought both times the class went really well and I felt so much relief. Upon reflected I realized that I am almost always doing a good lesson in my classroom and they are alwways under control, so I should have nothing to worry about. The anxiety I feel about being observed is purely a habit because I have nothing to worry about. I guess that I am becoming a good teacher, or at least a better teacher. (more…)
Filed under: Teach For America
One of my coworkers quit. She stopped coming into work last week and today she officially resigned her position. This is probably a good thing, but it puts us in an uncomfortable position – not really sure what we are going to do as far as her classroom. We have a TA who will take over the class for the rest of the week but after then anything could happen. I think the TA is going to do great, but it is illegal for her to officially take over. Then again there has been a TA as the official Kindergarten teacher for the past 10 weeks.
I have students who have her as their Reading/Writing teacher. I never really trusted the other teacher and she wasn’t really effective but it makes it so much worse with everything being up in the air. What do I tell my students’ parents about how each day for 2.5 hours I just drop them off with an uncertified teaching assistant. I could understand how upset they could be to have their child have an official teacher assigned to them but get proverbially screwed with the departmentalizing. How do I explain it to them?
Oh yeah, and conferences are this Friday – so I’ll bet there are going to be a whole bunch of happy happy parents at her room and nobody to talk to them.
Tomorrow is Paczki Day and I have found one bakery in St Louis that makes paczkis. They open at 7:00am so I am going to get there right when they open, buy 30 paczkis and then rush to school. I think it would be fun to share this tradition with my students. Although the idea of serving my students a doughnut filled with 1000 calories and tons of fat and sugar is enough to chill my bones.
Filed under: Uncategorized
I never know what to title my posts.
This weeks has been a killer. I think it is having grad school class on Wednesday evening from 6-9. It just throws off my whole week. Wednesdays are so hard because I already have school from 7:30-5:15, then I barely have time to grab some MickyDs for dinner and get to my class. It takes me so long to unwind after such a long day that I can’t fall asleep at my normal bedtime and it just throws my whole week off. Speaking of grad school, my prof is so much worse than I first expected. Whooie! She refused to even grade our first group project (by group I mean the WHOLE CLASS had to do it together, there would be one grade issued to the whole class; it was due the second day of class, mind you) because it was not in the correct format. (As in, she wanted APA and this did not meet APA formatting standards.) Then, we once we arrive in class she randomly assigned one section of the reading to each individual and made everybody present to the whole class about that section of the reading. Of course this shouldn’t be a problem since we all did the reading, right?
School has been hectic to say the least. One of my fellow 3rd grade teachers just stopped showing up to work this week (no call, no show) so I’ve had extra students in my class almost all week. It’s just enough to throw your whole lesson plans off kilter for the week. I feel like a babysitter. I cannot believe that my school does not have a substitute pool. What kind of asinine institution am I working for? Truly, it is bordering on criminal. There was a brief moment today when for about 30 minutes I was responsible for 56 eight year olds. That is true insanity. If I am going to have 30 or 36 or 56 students then I need more then 2 minutes notice to change my plans for the entire day. I need to make extra copies and get more desks if nothing else. At this point I wouldn’t even care if I were just assigned an extra 10 students as long as I had the desks and the power to be their real teacher. It is hard to discipline a student when you are just their babysitter or, more realistically, the adult supervising the holding tank while their real teacher plays hooky.
I need to start writing on a daily basis because by the time the weekend rolls around I have no memory of what happened earlier that week. DC came back to school Monday as defiant as ever. He pretty much spent the day in the principals office because he ran out of the room (again). He refused to return to class. Just wouldn’t move. What was I supposed to do, pick him up and move him to class? No thank you.
I have good news and a little bit of bad news.
1. Good news – My assistant principal (the one who made me cry many times in October) has now taken a liking to me and asked me to lead a professional development session with my team. She has also been stealing many of my ideas and showing them to other teachers who are now implementing them. She has asked me to help in taking another teacher under my wing, which has made me feel oh so special.
2. Bad news – A parent wants her child taken out of my class because when she came to my classroom in the middle of a lesson last week and wanted me to drop what I was doing and explain her daughters homework to her. When I told her that I could not stop what I was doing and asked if she could wait about 10 minutes she said no. So I told her that I could have a student who understood the homework explain it to her. This conversation was all very congenial, I thought. But apparently she found it condescending and wants her daughter out of my classroom.
3. Good news – My administration said that was not going to happen because I am a great teacher and her daughter is progressing in my class. There is only one 3rd grade teacher who has openings in her class but she is not going to be an effective teacher for their daughter.
4. Good News – Some important person at the central office complimented me today and said she loves my data analysis for my students test scores and how the state standards tie into my lesson plans. Hurray!
5. Good News – a parent who is very picky told my lead teacher that she wanted her daughter to be taken out of his room and placed INTO my room! This is also not going to happen. But I feel like it is a nice compliment.
6. Bad news – This semester of grad school is going to be a killer. My professor is a stickler for everything, punctuality, attendance, preparedness, you name it and she’s a stickler for it. She is not fooling around one bit, and I have a feeling that I am going to be up to my ears in boring textbook reading for the next 17 weeks. I believe I have about 100 pages to read for Wednesday but that is an easy week since we don’t have textbooks yet. This is only a 3 credit course, so the workload seems overwhelming. The good news is that when I get an inevitable C- in the class it will only be worth 3 credits. Thankfully there is no known coursework for my internship, which is worth more credits.
Filed under: Uncategorized
If you are reading this and you know me, do me a favor and visit this site for a minute. (It will only take a minute, promise.) I am curious to have some insight on how others view me.
Filed under: Uncategorized
Today was the first day of our student council, and my first day as an adviser. Our group elected a president and vice president, and despite my 3rd grade students running for both positions, the vote went to the older kids. Oh well, there is always next year.
Other than that is was relatively uneventful. My students were extra chatty today and I ended up yelling more than I usually do. We did have a good discussion in social studies today about the diversity of gender because I heard that some boys were teasing girls in gym class by saying that girls couldn’t play basketball. My main point was that some kids are good at certain things, not BECAUSE they are boys or girls but just because it is what they are good at. Being a boy doesn’t make you better at basketball, just like being a girl doesn’t make you bad at basketball and so on and so forth. I thought it really struck a nerve with the kids; I even tied it into Martin Luther King Jr. (who my students LOVE to talk about). It was one of those “teachable moments” that you always hear about. I was surprised at how well it went.
Filed under: Uncategorized
6:45am – Left my house for work.
7:00am – Ran into a pretty bad traffic jam under the St. Louis Arch.
7:20am – Arrived at school (took 35 minutes today when it usually takes 10 minutes)
7:30am – A parent stops by to tell me that she is transferring her daughter to another school. (It is the school where her cousins go, so it is nothing personal.) I am very caught off guard and amazed by how sad I feel. I’ve had some rough moments with this girl, but she’s been growing on me lately. I end up hugging the mom and telling her how sad I am to see her daughter leave.
8:00am – I learn that one of the 3rd grade teachers is going to be late today, so I get to have an extra 8 kids extra in my class for a few hours this morning.
8:25am – No reading groups, see absent teacher, now I have to come up with an impromptu 90 minute reading lesson off the cuff.
8:35am – I read the story of John Henry to my students, then we did some reading comprehension techniques with the story.
10:00am – Other 3rd grade teacher arrives, extra 8 kids return to regular class.
10:10am – D.C. goes crazy and runs out of the room.
10:10:05 am – I call security to go chase after him.
10:20 am – The principal walks into my room for an unscheduled observation.
10:25 am – I realize that my lesson is poorly planned and is not going to fill up a whole hour.
10:30 am – I make something up for my students to do (Hopefully the principal didn’t notice that it was unplanned. I’ve been pretty good at faking it.)
11:00am – Lunch (and pizza party for my 5 students who were a part of the winning table team and earned 25 good behavior points.)
11:45 am – Office calls me to say that D.C. is down there but that he “can’t sit here all day.” I say, “He is welcome to come back here, but I don’t know how long he will stay put without running out of my room again.”
11:50 am – Math lesson, which goes remarkably smoothly except for a normally well behaved child (whose birthday is today) being quite disruptive and poking his eye with a pencil (on purpose).
1:00pm – First special class of the day….ahhhh…freedom.
2:00pm – Library time with my students where the librarian mispronounces linoleum and agriculture and then gives my students coloring pages and shows them a really juvenile video with a singing peanut butter and jelly who sing about George Washington Carver. Yes, it was the most surreal moment of my day.
3:30 pm – I learn that my student D.C. almost punched the brand new assistant principal (his first day today) and was defiant and disrespectful to other administrators and adults. Sooooo…he’s suspended for the rest of the week. Did I mention that yesterday was his first day back from a 10 day suspension?
4:00pm – The birthday boy was once again argumentative, refused to work and…poked himself in the eye with a pencil. So I sent him out to have a time out with another teacher.
4:30pm – We made a goodbye card for our classmate who is leaving and everybody gave her a goodbye hug. (Her best friend cried.)
4:45pm – Dismissal time!
5:00pm – Birthday boy was being difficult and refused to get in line. I let the rest of the class leave to catch buses while I called the Birthday boy’s parents. Birthday boy decided to make a run for it and ran out of the school. I chased after him and caught him right before he ran across the street. He insisted that he wanted to “walk home” which is not allowed at our school. I had to physically restrain him from leaving the school grounds. I also had to rip a sharp pair of scissors from his hands.
5:10pm – Finally got birthday boy on his bus.
5:30pm – Left for the day after getting a compliment from my principal via another teacher that I am doing a “phenomenal job.”
Filed under: Uncategorized
Last Wednesday I headed back to school after a glorious 11 day break. My break was much less invigorating that I expected it to be. My second quarter as a teacher is over on Friday. After that I am going to be really sad because we are going to be instructing our reading groups in writing as well. Putting it kindly, I dislike my reading group. It’s hard enough because I have 30 students in my reading class, and only 25 desks. Aside from that, they are chatty and have bad attitudes and most have really really poor work ethics. I love my own class. I am so sad that I am going to have to spend more time with my reading group than my own group of students.
On Wednesday we are beginning our student council at school, for which I am an adviser. I am so excited to be a part of this! I hope that it is a positive experience for everybody involved.
I am feeling much more confident about the end of this quarter. I am looking forward to conferences and wish I had more time to conduct them. There is so much that I want to tell my student’s parents. I am putting together portfolios for each child which will include work in all subjects, benchmark test graphs and Terra Nova test percentile graphs. I think that I can give each student a very well rounded and appropriate grade this marking period. It would be hard to argue with my current grading system.
