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."