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.