Short Week, Easy Street

This week was absolutely amazing. Well, actually the last two weeks weren't too bad. Two weeks ago we had our second round of 6 weeks testing so aside from having to grade 135 papers all in one night and get my gradebook all set up and ready to go, the week was low stress and very little actual lesson planning/teaching. Proctoring tests is about as close as you can get to being paid for doing next to nothing. I spend the entire time walking around the room making sure the kids don't cheat and that they stay on task. I answer questions without giving hints at answers, and the kids are almost deathly quiet except for the sound of pencils digging into scantron bubbles and erasers rubbing back and forth every now and then.

I have a lot to be thankful for this week, but I'm mostly thankful that I finally got a chance to recharge physically, emotionally, and mentally. I was able to show the kids parts of the movie versions of their books (Of Mice and Men and The Outsiders) on Tuesday and gave a quick enrichment lesson on Friday to the few classes I did have since it was a half day. Geez, I still can't believe that I actually had 4 and a half days off. I do have to say though, I'm surprised that we had school on Wednesday. I don't ever remember having school the day before Thanksgiving, but I guess now adays students come in as much as they can. Unfortunately for the high school students, a benchmark exam was scheduled for the Thanksgiving week even though they just took the 6 weeks exam the week before. Two weeks of straight testing, school the day before Thanksgiving... no real breaks. Luckily our students didn't have their benchmark test because my department requested it be rescheduled for December. It just makes more sense to space out tests so that the kids don't get burned out.

Well, I think this about does it for this week's post. While I may be slightly recharged, I'm still not 100%. The last few days let me fix up a LOT of things at home so that I feel like my life is more or less in some type of order, but my car is not fixed, and I still have things to get ready for tomorrow. With that being said, goodnight all, and have a great week.

Spring Cleaning

So it's not actually Spring, but this far down in Texas it's really hard to tell the difference. The birds have all come south for the winter, followed by the winter Texans, but it's still hot as the dickens. I am putting up a VERY short post tonight as I've been fixing up my apartment and getting everything ready for school since grades are due tomorrow by 9 AM. I did have a good weekend though, and it was quite productive. More about the week tomorrow.

FYI - I love 2 1/2 day weeks!

A November to Remember

After grading papers all weekend, I felt it appropriate to reward myself with a few episodes of "Scrubs: Season Six". Unfortunately, I rewarded myself with the worst episode of the entire series, since it was twenty excruciating minutes of flashbacks from other episodes in the series. If you watch Scrubs, make sure to skip "My Night to Remember" as you'll be a much greater fan of the show knowing it never pulled a stunt like a Japanese anime and thought it ok to recycle material wholesale. I'll try to use this as a springboard for my thoughts though, and hopefully come up with something.

Springboard Training

Friday I went with two other English teachers to learn about "Springboard", a curriculum that our district purchased and we can now use. I'm a little at odds, however, since our department already has a curriculum that is based on the New Jersey method and only one of the other teachers is currently using Springboard. I think I'll try it out though, seeing as I have almost enough workbooks for every student in my class.

The training was nice, and quite relaxing, at least until I found out that my students were hellraisers for the substitute. I don't think I've ever been angrier as a teacher when I heard that the sub never wants to teach at my school again, and it's because of MY students. Maybe it's my fault- I told them that if I got a bad report from the sub for a class, the entire class would have a test. I'm thinking that once one of the kids screwed up the whole class decided it was useless to play nice and just went nuts. I'm just hoping the weekend has calmed them down enough to help them get through this week of testing and two and a half days next week so they can gorge themselves on turkey and tryptophan and ride out the rest of the semester with good spirits.

I know that I'm making a difference in at least some of these kids lives, and hopefully I'm a positive figure for all of them. It's just been very tough lately, with attitudes going through the roof, assignments not being turned in, and kids just not paying attention to the lessons. I let it slide for some of the students, at least when I know they understand the lesson and don't really need a refresher. It's very tough to work with such a diverse group of students. Their ability levels are ALL over the board, and it's sad for me to say it, but it looks like it's better to teach to the lower-end students and occasionally have my high ability ones be bored. I try my best to give assignments that allow the students to work at their ability levels but on the same class lessons.

I'm finding myself continually impressed with how well my teachers performed their jobs when I was a student. Maybe I'm just seeing life through rose colored glasses, but I feel like they had their lives MUCH more organized than mine. I know I'm a first year teacher, but I don't think I can use that as an excuse when my job can impact 130 people's lives so much. The stress just seems to get to me at times, and it's possible that it's behind the recent back pain I've been having, but I'll just have to deal with it. Here I go for another week.

Student Gems
-From an essay a student wrote about his first girlfriend and his first kiss.
"I knew what to do, but I felt that love was transferring through our body like a Bluetooth connection transferring songs."

So far English seems to be the best subject for grading, even though it takes forever. None of the math teachers ever get as many one-liners as I do. :)

On a More Positive Note

I realized that while posting on the blog, it seems that I have emphasized the negative aspects of teaching down here more than the positives. That was never my intention, but nevertheless, I have left out a lot of the "good stories". For that, I apologize, as I am not living in a pit of despair, but I do have my own set of problems for being a first year teacher. I apologize to all of you who read this since you may have gotten the wrong idea about my life down here and teaching in the valley in general. I am doing just fine. Yes, I get very stressed and sometimes I feel like I made the wrong decision, but I'm not packing up and leaving. Teaching is very rewarding, and I had to relearn that this week and last week. I'll try to do a better job of balancing the pros and cons of life down here, but just be aware that I still do not intend to sugarcoat things. Writing on this blog is as much a time for me to reflect on what I did incorrectly as it is a chance for you all to read about my life. I just need to also reflect on what I've done well...

Relearning That Teaching is Rewarding
The Friday before Halloween our school had a party. I made a point of staying after school to attend said party so that I could hang out with the other teachers and not feel like I had to prepare anything for the students besides my personality. I had a plan though, and it included a board game: Blokus. I asked my UIL team if they wanted to stay afterschool to play the game, and two of the girls said that it would be fun. So we played the board game for about an hour and a half, after which time the girls left, I walked to the cafeteria and the party, and was immediately stopped by two boys who were intrigued by the game. Mind you, I didn't say anything to them, I just had the game in my hand as well as my bag of work I was taking home to grade. Another two students came up and I spent the following hour just hanging out with students, teaching them how to play a game that is incredibly addicting and quite intellectually challenging. (It's a "Mensa Select" game). Interestingly enough, when I told my two UIL girls that it was a Mensa game and asked them if they knew what "Mensa" was, they laughed at me. I assumed that they were laughing because "why wouldn't they know what Mensa was?" but when I asked them, they just said, "Of course we know what mensa is... but that's kinda mean." I greeted this comment with a dumbstruck face, because clearly I was not on the same page as my students. I asked again, "Do you know what Mensa, the ORGANIZATION, is?" They looked at me with blank stares. I explained to them that Mensa was a group for the world's geniuses, to which they bursted out laughing. "What? What's so funny?" I asked. "Mensa means 'stupid girl' and menso means 'stupid boy'." said one of my students. I hadn't heard of that, but I guess it's slang down here, and it's absolutely hilarious.

Anyways, I felt a whole lot better about my entire situation down here just by bringing in a board game to play with students after school. I had been feeling disconnected with the students and found myself becoming more and more of a teacher rather than a recent college graduate. Now, normally becoming a teacher since I AM a teacher would seem like the right thing to do, but I felt like I was getting more work out of my students and having a better time doing it when I was the "recent graduate who is also a teacher" rather than just a "teacher". One of my strengths in motivating the students is my relatively similar age, and I don't want to forget about that.

This week
The week literally flew by. I spent two days introducing the short story unit, Halloween was a "themed" day with candy and spooky short stories, and the last two days of the week the students were in the computer labs typing their papers. I was very happy to finally be using some technology with the students, even if it was only Microsoft Word. All the students were working, I was able to go around and edit papers, and I helped out students with technical problems. The only problem was that one of my students definitely caught me off guard when his spell checker was in Spanish and he needed it in English. I haven't fixed up language settings in oh... I dunno... 10 years? It took me about 2 minutes to find it, but while I was looking for it, the kid, (granted, he's one of my more rambunctious ones) would say really loudly "What are you doing? You're just clicking on things! You don't even know what you're doing? Ha ha ha!" Ooh... he really got under my skin with that one, but I don't think he really knew it. Still, I managed to fix it, and had to do it about 10 more times throughout the day on other computers. EVERY single other question I had was much more in-depth and I guarantee other teachers would not have known how to bring back corrupted Word files, but I did. The students were not delayed in their work, I was on top of things, and I had the class running smoothly. But dang... if that one student didn't find something that I didn't instinctively know how to fix in the first 10 seconds. Just because I had to read through the menus (Word has that fun "auto-hide" menu feature which bugs the heck out of me because you never know what each menu holds unless you "un-hide" the entire menu. WHY CAN'T YOU JUST LEAVE IT UP THERE FOR ME TO READ?!). Anyways, the students worked hard, I was able to give a whole bunch of editing comments to students, and had at least 12 that I sat down and put detailed comments on and then had the students respond to the comments, fix up their writing, and hopefully get A's. Sure, my students might not have that many computers at home, and some of them are slow at typing, but hot diggity if I was able to give instructions and have students understand them instantly. Well, some of them didn't instantly get it, but a friend would lean over and help. Sigh... if I only had more than 2 working computers in my classroom, the things I could do...

The Positives
I got a note from two of my students. One was from a student who received detention and wanted to apologize to me about missing class. The kid's a great kid, and it takes a heck of a lot of motivation to write a letter to a teacher saying you'll miss class and include all the work you were supposed to turn in. That's the only time I've EVER heard of a student doing something like that... and I wasn't the teacher that sent him to detention. I also received a letter from one of my mod students, who asked me to let him pass the class, but wrote my name as "Mrs. Johnson". He tries hard, but that letter had me laughing so hard, I was just glad I didn't read it while students were there. I told him the next day that it wasn't up to me to let him pass, it was HIS decision, to which he smiled and said "I'm going to get 100% on the paper".

Other Updates
I was working on the school website again. Feel free to check it out. http://todddonnaisd.sharpschool.com The header will change, but I had to send in the new header to the company that owns the servers (I can't change it from my computer). Most of the pages still need to be updated, but I had training sessions a few weeks ago with all the department heads, and told them that if they sent me what they wanted, I could post it for them. Reminder e-mails went out again today, so hopefully the site will look more "finished" shortly. On the bright side, the Todd site is one of the more "finished" sites, and I think it's one of the more comprehensive. :)

I'll be starting novels this week, and I'm hoping to have my students work on a wiki page. It'll be interesting to say the least.