The Ups and the Downs

Every day the thought which possesses my mind is "This is HARD". This adventure is harder than I ever expected or imagined. When I think about what I've gotten myself into, it's a little ridiculous. Not only am I a first year teacher with very little training (hard enough). But I'm in the lowest performing schools in the lowest performing state. I don't understand the culture of the students or families, and I'm barely getting my lesson plans done the night before I have to teach them.

In addition to the logistical crap, I have days where these phrases come out of my student's mouths.

"Ms. S, I don't mean to hurt your feelins or nothin, but your class is the worst class I've ever been in. Can't we do anything fun?"
"I'm bout to call my mama and tell her that I can't learn anything from you GOLL-LLY. Your class be the WORST"

contrasted with

"Ms. S, can I come into your classroom this period?"
"Your glasses be lookin great today"
"Ms. S- what country are you from?" Me: same one as you, why? where do you think I'm from? "Oh, we thought that you were from Asia or something."
me "Student, how are you liking reading "The Lion, the Witch and the Wardrobe" so far?" Student: "It's AWESOME I love it!" me "Well you know that there is a whole series of those books, they're some of my favorites!" Student: "Do you have ALL of them in the Library so I can read them?" (*cue heartbreak.. in a good way!)

I think that Walt Whitman was thinking of TFAers when he wrote the following poem. It describes my life perfectly right now... with some minor editing on my part.


O ME! O life! of the questions of these recurring,
Of the endless trains of the faithless, of (classrooms) fill'd with the
foolish,
Of myself forever reproaching myself, (for who more foolish than I,
and who more faithless?)
Of eyes that vainly crave the light, of the objects mean, of the
struggle ever renew'd,
Of the poor (quiz and homework) results of all, of the plodding and sordid (students) I see
around me,
Of the empty and useless years of the rest, with the rest me
intertwined,
The question, O me! so sad, recurring-What good amid these, O me,
O life?


Answer.

That you are here-that life exists and identity,
That the powerful play goes on, and you may contribute a verse.

week 3: complete.

This week was TIRING. I experienced a bunch of different parts of the teacher-job that I hadn't encountered yet. Let me fill you in on the parts of my job that I've experienced for the first time this week.

First, this week was my first duty-week. This means that I have morning duty: making sure kids enter the cafeteria in proper dress code, and enforcing complete silence while they wait to eat breakfast (it's not easy). So, I start my morning with my teacher face all ready to go, and stand and threaten kids for 35 minutes. From there I go straight into teaching for 2 hours (with the same students) until recess. Then, I usher kids out the door for their 10 minutes of recess, during which they must walk around the circular drive in front of our school. No playing, no running, they eat snacks (hot fries) and walk. From here, I go back to teaching for another 3.5 hours until lunch. I always take my kids to lunch in the middle of my 5th hour. Once again, lots of teacher face, lots of threatening to send them to the office if they can't walk down the hallway in silence. After 5th hour I have my planning period (whew, sigh of relief). During which I try to get some grading or last minute-copying done. 7th hour usually drags on forever. The kids are full of bottled-up energy due to the lack of recess or general kid-time. I am drained of energy from a day of teaching. This usually results in the first 35 minutes going really well and the last 10-15 being chaos.
After this long day, I immediately go outside for bus duty. Girls are on one side of the entryway, boys on the other. When buses come, I must make sure that the stampeding herd of children does not cause anyone to be trampled under the bus. Usually the kids are gone at 4pm, and I'm back to planning, planning, planning for the next day. Luckily I only have duty every 3rd week.

Next, this was my first week with parent conferences. A couple of my kids have been pretty consistently bad in class and so I had to write a few of them up and send them to the office. If these kids are not on the paddling list (e.g. the principal does not have the parent's permission to spank them), the parent must come in and talk with the principal and the teacher. These always make me scared, because while I know that I'm in the right and just doing my job, I never know how the parent will react. Luckily so far, all my parents have been on my side, but I know that some parents have the concept that their children cannot do anything wrong and will come in swinging against me. Hopefully this is not true for any of my kids.

Finally, this week introduced me to insane amounts of meaningless paperwork. I thought that just trying to be a first year teacher was stressful- but now I have to fill out mandatory parent call logs (which I do on my own already, so it's double the work), peer observation forms, and supposedly I'm supposed to write down what specific skill I'm working on weekly with every single child in my learning strategy and compensatory reading classes. Now, this would work in theory if I had, say, 15 kids in the class. But I have 3 sections of these classes (about 50 students total). There is not time enough in the day for me to be planning individually for these students PLUS planning for my other 3 sections of English classes. Who do they think I am- superteacher?? I'm barely keeping my head above water preparing for my regular classes!!! So- that paperwork just doesn't happen. I'm slowly learning that alot of this stuff you can just conveniently 'forget' about and the administration is so swamped that they won't notice. It's not a good strategy, but it's essential to my survival right now.

Good quotes from this week:

student: "Ms. S! Ms. S! I'm going to marry you one day".  Me: "Keep dreaming, student."

Lesson on Abstract and concrete nouns:
Me: "What is the definition of an abstract noun?"
Student: "Something you can't touch"
Me: "Exactly, an abstract noun is something that you can't touch or see, something that doesn't exist in the world, what is an example of an abstract noun?"
*student eagerly raises hand
"The MOON!!"
"No, D, the moon is something that we could touch if we had a rocket ship, so it is a concrete noun"
"Ms. S (said matter-of-factly), no one has ever touched the moon, you crazy. It's too far away."
"Actually, D. People have touched the moon before."
"No they haven't!! Ain't no one been to the moon before"


After reading an article on the MLK monument titled "Man of Peace"
A: "Ms. S. I know that Martin Luther King was great and all, but why are we always hearing about men? I want to hear about women of peace."
Me:"You're right! Isn't that interesting? Why do you think that is, that we hear about men more than women?"
A: "I don't know, but it's not right."
Me: "You're right."

Ms. S- the mean veggie-eater

First week of school!

Thoughts:

• holy crap. teaching is HARD
• Structure and consequences are your friend
• I have to keep saying the mantra "even though your kids degrade, disrespect, and try to make you hate yourself, you are a loving, valuable person" to keep from feeling like a failure 
• It's only going to get easier... right?
• it's only TUESDAY? when will friday be here?
• smile? no way- not until December. I thought that wouldn't be my teaching style, but it HAS to be in order for me to have any sort of control over the classroom.
• If I would be this kind of teacher in the North- I would be fired. 
• YOU CRAZY CHILDREN JUST BE QUIET FOR TWO MINUTES SO I CAN THINK STRAIGHT

Anecdotes:

• During lunch, I am in charge of the class with the worst behavior in the school. Even the veteran teachers have bad management days with them. So, during lunch I don't get to sit down and enjoy my food like the other teachers- I'm on edge and ready to jump in and correct poor decisions. Usually I pace in a circle around the table so I can keep them all in line. This isn't conducive to a varied lunch choice- so usually i bring a bunch of veggies to munch on. This is pretty normal in Madison to eat raw food. NOT in the delta. The kids and the faculty are so confused by it. I brought a bag of sugar snap peas to eat during a meeting and my principal looked at me and said " Now I KNOW you're not going to eat those raw" and looked like she was going to pass out when I started munching on them. The kids can't even identify what most of the veggies are (so sad!!) One student thought that my carrots were cheetos. Another student thought my peas were okra, and they were just confused when I brought in a red pepper to munch on. Many of them ask "How do you eat that without it being boiled first and people forcing you to eat it?" I tell them that veggies are really tasty plain without being cooked - they don't believe me. 

• My kids are babies when it comes to temperature. Our rooms are programmed at 72 degrees. Pretty typical. They whine and try to bury themselves in their shirts because they're cold. There has been so many times where I have to tell a student that they aren't a turtle and to get their arms and head out of their shirt and start working. 

• My students have this issue (probably because of the crappy food they eat) of having to pass gas ALL THE TIME in my classes. I was super confused the first time a frantic student called me over and asked to "step outside in the hallway cause they were bout to lose their manners". I was thinking that they had an anger issue and were going to explode, but they explained "no m'am, I just have to fart really bad and it's gon' smell." I don't let them out because then half of them would be in the hallway during my class. So- I asked other teachers what they do to solve this problem. They told me- just use spray. Keep spray in your classroom and go spray it by the student so you don't have to stop teaching. So that's what I do. On my teacher desk in the front of my classroom, I have my behavior chart, my sticky notes, my markers, and my spray. All within arm's reach. It works wonders. I never would have anticipated this problem...

So the first week is over. I survived (barely, at times) and not without much stress, anxiety, and tears. But I made it through. My classroom management still needs to step up- some kids think that I'm 'soft' and this is an issue. But when I put my foot down and am what I consider and perceive to be the most heartless, ruthless, borderline mean and angry teacher possible- they are perfect angels. The culture is just so different- this kind of teaching is what they respond to. I don't know if that's good or bad thing- it is what it is. 

It's going to be a long, hard year. This last week was harder than all of college combined. I'm convinced.