Megalopolis

I am feeling the effects, at awkward times, of this first year teaching gig. It’s not that I’m unhappy, or that I wake up on some days and don’t want to go to school. I genuinely want to go to school every day, and regardless of the day before, I am excited and anxious. Each negative day before normally turns itself into motivation to change something about the next day.

This has gotten to the point where I am revamping my behavior plan COMPLETELY by the start of 2nd quarter. Don’t ask me how yet, just know that I’m doing it. And that it’ll still involve tickets, personal goals, and our POWER cheer. It just will no longer involve misbehavior.

Anyway, all of these inopportune lapses in happiness and faith have led to the understanding that I needed a break, conveniently located on Game 3 of the Cubs-Dodgers series. Luckily for me, I am going. I drew on my wipe-off map of where i was going, and my kids were sad! I think maybe they were secretly excited about having a sub and not having to learn, but they know how to make their teachers happy.

Also, the chuck it bucket is still somewhat effective! They write when they get frustrated and put it in the bucket and then they’re not allowed to complain about it to me. Darrell still calls it the cluck-it bucket, but today Ashleigh told me they played school this weekend and they had a chuck-it bucket of their very own! I almost cried…I wonder if she had a better behavior management plan than me in her imaginary classroom.

And for KTV, who I love and who loves me enough to know exactly what I need to hear/read.

“Courage doesn’t always roar. Sometimes courage is the quiet voice at the end of the day saying, “I will try again tomorrow”. -Mary Anne Radmacher

I appear to be climbing into the pit of after-school remediation, which is a dangerous place to live. However, it is AMAZING what I can do when there are only a few children in the room. I can…(gasp) tell each of them what it is they need to do and what they might be doing wrong.
James, for example, stayed after Thursday and Friday. His mother had grounded him last week based on his last math test score (something around a 15%) and this test, he improved to a 36%, but that is…well, its not the kind of improvement we wanted. For that reason, I told my whole class that after i showed them their scores, if they wanted to improve them, they needed to come in after school for at least one day to address exactly what they missed on their test. At the end of their time, they would take a brieeeeff assessment, wherein I’ll probably just change the numbers to the math problems from the test, and see how they do. If they get them correct, I’ll add those points to the test. This will be credit for both putting forth the effort to come in after school (something 11 year olds don’t really enjoy) and for hopefully learning the math that they didn’t understand.

I told them they could come in Monday, Tuesday, or Wednesday, but they needed a note from home. We’ll see how it goes. I’m positive.

Although I am exhausted from my first ever field-trip-chaperoning-experience, I will tell you my positive for the day.

Throughout the field trip, children I had only rarely seen and vaguely recognized were begging for my attention and approval. That is nice.

I know it’s general, but it really is a pick-me-up, especially when field trips are so emotionally trying.

I wrote Rakiesha, my new student, a note yesterday to have on her desk this morning. It said “Rakiesha, I’m so glad you’re in class! You’re such a great role model and I love how excited you are to learn. Thank you for coming into my classroom. I am so excited to see how smart you are!”

This morning she read the note and came RUNNING up to me and gave me a big hug, by far the most genuine one I’ve gotten all year.

Today we had a science overload, in which we learned about organisms, populations, communities, ecosystems, and biospheres (in that order). We defined them as a class, wrote the definition, and then we were supposed to draw a picture of an ecosystem and label each part. Darrell, my approval-seeker, raised his hand, and I went over to help him. We were having a good day! So, we reviewed the definitions he didn’t know, then I asked him about his picture.

“Darrell,” I said, “Where is your organism?” He pointed to something that looked like a tree. “Great!! And what about your population?”

Darrell looked a little nervous and pointed to three arched lines across the bottom of his page. “Well, I haven’t colored them in yet…”
“That’s ok,” I said. “So what is it?”
“It’s a rainbow!”

Writing prompt: choose a noun (person, place or thing). Think of our descriptive writing helper questions, ie the 5 W’s and our senses!

Dareion’s response:

“Ms. D:
1. She is pretty.
2. Curly hair.
3. long hair.
4. Nike flats (lots)
5. were pretty skirts.
6. she has glass.
7. wear earrings.
8. wear nacelaces to shool.
9. has pretty teeth.
10. love sweaters. “

We are starting tomorrow by creating personal goals for the week and taping them to our desks so we can check off (with stickers) whether or not we meet it each day. My personal goal for this week is to find the happy parts of each day, because I realize that this blog is overwhelmingly negative. Therefore, you all have that to anticipate.

Starting today, positive things are: this week we have 2 field trips (one is just to the gym in the afternoon) and picture day. Therefore, I have SO much less to prepare, which allows me to focus that much more on the things I do have to teach.

One of the things I get to teach is the constitution! Get ready for your polisci major teacher, studentbabies. I recited the preamble for them last week and they stared in awe, wondering HOW i did that. I then made a connection for them, reminding them of the time when the entire class sang the i-n-d-e-p-e-n-d-e-n-t song to me. I almost peed my pants. best part was they all sang the radio edit version, and I question whether or not they truly understood the self-imposed pauses in the song lyrics. Hiiiilarious.

This week rose and fell like a Delta sun, I swear. It began with mommy (I think…was that this week or last? Who can even keep track) and ended with me failing miserably at any sort of paperwork. On Wednesday night I gloriously I relaxed, having somehow become “completely prepared” for my parent meetings, only to discover on Thursday night that I did everything wrong, including the grading, leading basically every parent to believe that their child is failing (which is more or less true anyway, but my faulty accounting led to the situation being exacerbated.)

Oh, did I mention two students transferred out of my class? Yeah, about that. Turns out the stimulus of most of my behavior problems in class transferred out. Apparently, he has switched classes…every year. For this reason, I “shouldn’t take it to heart.” Trust me, I don’t. I do, however, take to heart the switch of one of my other students. She was there, in all her defiant 11-year-old qualities, and I appreciated her, but I have to assume the word “experience” came up once or twice in the phone call between her mother and the principal, in that she was transferred to the more experienced teacher. There are other reasons as well, but I’m not going to blog about them. Let’s leave it at the fact that I’m not supposed to feel bad when her class has 24 students and mine has 17 (I know, I shouldn’t complain about it). It’s just the nail in my incompetency coffin. No, I apparently have no real skill in teaching. Yes, your child may go to another, totally overcrowded (poorly behaviorally managed) class. No, it won’t hurt my ego.

Oh wait.

However, this evening I came home after rearranging my desks and thinking of investment strategies and decided to go for a run. Running south down the lake front is beautiful in and of itself, but in between houses to my right I could see glimpses of a red, mid-September sun, and so I turned right, slightly altering my route. Now running west, I attempted to keep up with the sun that seemed to be attached to something that wanted to set quicker than the sun itself. It was gorgeous and red and cloud lines across it began to melt into the football field until it turned a more neutral color and finally disappeared all together. The most beautiful moments of sunlight never last long, but they’re enough to keep you running towards the horizon. Somewhere you remember that if you just keep going, the sun will eventually rise and set again.

for as ridiculously painfully homesick/syracuse-sick as i am right now, i really do feel like i am settling in. Sort of. We’re getting to the point where we can complain about each other, to each other. I feel like that means a lot.

I feel stricter enforcement of no pants tuesday coming on…

For my sanity, I am taking a few minutes out of my Monday evening to blog. It feels like Thursday. I wonder what I’ll feel like on Thursday…

This weekend was wonderful and full of my mommy and bb king, which is half-delta, and half to warm my heart. The music was amazing and the bb king museum is AMAZING. If you come visit me, anyone, i will take you there. Well worth it! We escaped Ike somehow, which was miraculous considering our roof still isn’t fixed (but we have hot water again! thank jesus!)

This morning, my mom came to school, handed out pencils (intimidating all-black pencils with white words- DEPARTMENT OF ENERGY)- so official. I should convince my kids that our brain power plant is part of a government project! Here was a series of questions and responses I observed when I let them ask her questions.

mom- you know about george washington? Well he led our country to its founding, and a lot of that happened on the potomac river.
kids- do you do a lot of fishing there?
mom- no, i don’t fish.
kids- does your husband fish?
mom- no he doesn’t fish either.
kids- what kind of fish are there?
mom- oh, lots of kinds i imagine.
kids- catfish?

Ignore our government, our country’s founding, and a new exciting guest…let’s get down to the issues. Do you FISH?!

This is the beginning of week five, to which I say WHAT?! I have no honest clue how I have been teaching a month. I feel like I have the experience of teaching two days, at most. Somehow I recognize that they listen to me, at times, but beyond that I just don’t think I’ve made much of an impression. That being said, I’m about to make an impression on all the parents, because progress reports are due Thursday. Hey, guess what? The highest grade on our math test was 68 (second highest-37?). On our open response questions, 8 kids just flat-out didn’t answer them. My students, for some reason I haven’t quite figured out, HATE open response questions. They asked me why the had to answer them, and I told them it was a good way to get your brain thinking in more than one way. I also said that many times in life, you can’t just tell someone your answer, you have to explain your thinking. They didn’t buy it.

I have a lot of work to do.
major goals- cubs make the playoffs (i take a personal day and spend half my paycheck), my kids don’t do as badly on their next big test, i don’t feel like punching something at the end of the day.

minor goals - keep my sanity. keep my friends. go to bed before 11 (i actually accomplish this on a regular basis!)

Seriously though, I have no clue how I’ve already been here 2 months. it’s going to be weirder when it is actually a significant amount of time that i’ve spent here. In the mean time, every day feels like a million years/3 seconds, and then it is gone and a million things have happened and i don’t know when they occurred because its all a blur. Is normal, non-teaching life like this too?