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. :)