One Week Down...

I am offically a teacher. It's a little strange to think about it. I know that I taught this summer, but I didn't have 6 different classes, planning periods, and 130-150 students a day. Now that I do, I can honestly say that it's fun, frustrating, and exhausting. I'm not quite sure if I'm exhausted from dealing with 140 9th graders during a day, working for 9-10 hours, or from getting up at 6 in the morning. Right now, my bets are hedging on getting up at 6 in the morning. I know that right now my dad is laughing at me because of all those times I bugged him about getting up early every day and going to bed at 10. Well dad, you win. Getting up at 6 AM is not my idea of fun. I could work for 14 hours a day as long as I don't have to get up before the sun. I guess I'll just have to give it time and let my body adjust.

The kids were great. I actually had more show up than I was led to believe, but I still was only able to accomplish minimal amounts of actual teaching due to the ridiculous amounts of schedule changes the students were put through. Being a 9th grade campus, some of the students take elective classes at the high school, which is just down the street. Unfortunately, if the high school sees a need to change the time of that elective class, the student is then forced to change just about their entire schedule. I would like to think that these kinks have been worked out over the years, but as I noticed at least three of my students show up to different class periods throughout the week and tell me that their schedule got changed yet again, I find myself thinking that creating schedules is an art form not yet mastered by my district. At least the students remain in high spirits as they're jostled about from class to class. It puts a little bit more of a burden on me as a teacher, since now I have a few students that sit through two of the same classes or miss a class, and all of my group/partner work must be changed on the fly. I find time to laugh at it though when I see those same students on my roster for 4 different classes. They're getting quite the English education.


Snafus

Several of the other veteran teachers have been kind enough to inform me about the bureaucracy that is teaching in the Valley; everyone tries to be the winner of the "not my job" contest. I'm sure that I'll meet my fair share of snafus, but attendance is by far the worst that I've encountered in my first week. With all the schedule changes, I'm quite empathetic for the attendance ladies and the counselors, especially since everyone had to work with paper schedules for the first day. We were told that once we got our online gradebook up and running, we could submit attendance online. "Great!" I thought. "Here's something I can do that plays right into my electronic/technical wizardry that is going to save me time and energy." I stayed after school that night, determined to diagnose exactly why the gradebook wasn't working for the entire district. After about an hour of trying to install the provided "fix" using different prompts, I noticed that the computers were locked out of some essential permissions for running java scripts. Basically, I could do nothing else, so I told my tech guy what I found. Next day, there's a new patch that doesn't require any java scripts to be performed over the net. Interesting. Without gloating (hey, I didn't make the patch, and I could have been completely wrong), I happily began submitting my attendance online. I was happy, the attendance ladies were happy (it saves them TONS of time to have it online), and even the students were happy, because one of them didn't get to be "special" and take the attendance to the office. Wait... did I say that? Cause the kids LOVED that job. Anyways, not a day after submitting all of my attendance online do I get a visitor from the office with a new paper roster, saying that I need to give them a hard copy for the next two weeks. Bummer.

Unfortunately for a few of my students, I did not get my list of "mods" (students with special needs) until Friday afternoon. I can only imagine the confusion they felt when the lesson was nowhere close to what they needed in order to learn. By chance, I happened to teach to the modifications of about 80% of the students, and they did just fine. For the other 20% though... I'll make it up to them.

Distractions

I found myself a little bit distracted this weekend. I felt the need to play around with my copy of Adobe CS3 (specifically photoshop) which I am trying to teach myself how to use. I've got the basics down, from selections, to feathers, strokes, color sampling, and layers (which were a headache in themself to figure out initially). At Mizzou, I figured out how to create graphics using Photoshop that I could then chroma key out in AVID (video editing). For those of you who don't know what I'm talking about, chroma keying is basically using a blue or green screen to create special effects, similar to what your local weatherman uses on his nightly segment. Anywho... I felt like I'd try and get a grasp on it so that I could design a flyer or two for the UIL Journalism group that I'll be a mentor/advisor to this year. Unfortunately, we don't have a room picked out, a time to meet, or our first meeting date. So I promptly changed my gameplan and worked on making a few icons for my desktop. Like I said before, it's a distraction. I'm hoping that during the year this will come in handy.

Student Work Gems

Not one, but TWO of my students said in writing that if they could change their name to anything they wanted, they would choose "Jet Li".

My students, particularly my girl students, are fascinated with my "colored" eyes. They ask if my eyes are really colored, or if I wear contacts. I have to explain to them that I do wear contacts, but my eyes are naturally blue. Funny thing is, they never say "I really like your blue eyes". It's always just "colored".