Frustrated and anxious

This was a rough week but it was my first week of teaching my own plans and teaching completely on my own. I am exhausted and overwhelmed. I think I worked an average of 10 hours every day and then came home and did more work. Then I spent 4 hours in the school on Saturday making plans. The worst part is, that for all the planning, everyday forces changes. Some kids get some things and others don’t. One class forges ahead quickly while another is stumped by the first concept. And then there is the inclusion class where I am now working with a first year inclusion teacher who wants all the plans five days in advance. I am feeling very unsuccessful. I don’t seem to be having the sort of encouraging moments that made fields so amazing. I just find myself failing and falling behind. I wonder if this is normal.
I have my first meeting with a parent of a student who is on a 504 and has been diagnosed with an auditory processing disorder but who has not gone back to the doctor for any follow up. Dealing with this child (and the class he is in) leaves me feeling as if I’ve been hit by a bus. Here’s the kicker, I like this kid, he is a bright kid, and if I could spend my day working with him one on one I think we could get somewhere, but I’ve got 60-some other kids, 17 of which are in his class, and I cannot let him run the class which is currently what’s happening. I’m really nervous about this meeting.
Grammar is failing. The kids hate it. And I do too. I have an English degree and edited text books and I don’t know the definitions of the words they are supposed to be learning. I hate this. I asked J what she thought I should do to make this more successful and she paused and said, “I don’t know what to tell you.” She was nice about it but I hate feeling like I just got the stuff she didn’t want to teach. Poetry is going better. I used Robert Frost and Ozzy Osbourne to demonstrate symbolism and it was great. The kids loved it and they got it. They were all able to then independently identify symbols in other poems I gave them. Plus they wrote their first poem for me and they were so cute. Once they figured out that there were no wrong answers, they went nuts. One kid in the inclusion class said, “so you mean if I want to say ‘I’m from heavy hard headbanging highway to hell’ that would be ok?” I was so excited! And made him write he*% instead of hell because profanity is not aloud in class. He totally got it. And that was cool.

How in the world do you re-engage kids who have been out for almost an entire week? They are off the wall today. And I was lucky enough to get to teach the second half of the day. I had some severe disrespect issues with one girl (she is the stereotype of a attitude filled middle school girl). She is bright but completely disengaged. I was so taken aback by it, that I failed to deal with it immediately and therefore lost my ability to deal with it at all. I’m prepared for next week though. I have a feeling she could be my first detention. Julie and I went over some strategies for how to handle it next time. Such as, simply handing her a detention in the moment and making the class aware I’m not a marshmallow (which, I am). Afterwards, I will have a private talk with her about her behavior and potential, which she has a ton of. She has an A intellect and a C average performance. I plan on challenging her in the next five weeks, poor thing. I just think she needs engaged at a higher level. And she needs a little bit of being put in her place by me. Otherwise, no matter what lesson I throw at her, she’ll never respect me.
Also, I’m trying to plan for my grammar/poetry unit and I am feeling completely overwhelmed. How do you make Grammar engaging for kids as a standalone unit! I tend to want to make everything connected and this is not how Julie teaches. This is good for me though, my big picture thinking can lead to details being dropped, by being forced to become an all detail person, I am flexing and developing muscle that has been sadly neglected.

Snow Day!

Two days off of school! It's crazy and I'm realizing the perks of teaching. It's giving me a chance to catch up on my other two classes that I am currently taking. Also, I got my praxis scores back and I PASSED! Yay! I was worried for no reason. Rob laughed at me, I really thought I failed and it turns out I came darn close to acing both.
This is all starting to feel incredibly real, like I could be a part of the working world someday soon, with a paycheck to boot. The really crazy part is, I'm actually in a career that fits me like a glove, that I am excited to do, and that I want to be great at. It may have taken me longer than most to get here, but I'm darn glad I'm here.

Day 5

Today was a test day and…it was snowing. This means chaos in kid land. The school was abuzz with early release rumors which turned out to be true. Julie shut the blinds and refused to let the kids talk about it. And here is a big difference between us. I wanted to open the blinds, embrace the snow, and make the kids write a paragraph from the snowflake’s POV as he floats down on a scene from one of their historical fiction books (POV is what we have been working on all week). I wanted to embrace the excitement. Because there is a part of me that is still a middle schooler who is all worked up over snow.
The kids got out after lunch which means 6/7, which is behind the other classes to begin with, is now even further behind. Ugh.

Day 4

I think I’m understanding why I’m feeling overwhelmed here. Here is today’s agenda; Greek and Latin Root words-2 handouts, short response review on overhead, discuss mood, take notes on conflict and plot. They covered 5 concepts in 88 minutes. And they were not linked…at all. She just went from one to the next. I felt totally frazzled. This may work, and it may be a good way, it is not my way. I am a connections freak. I can’t help but see how this world is connected, it’s what I do. And it things are just thrown at me, my brain wants to put them in order, make them make sense in a larger context or it just throws them out. My teaching style is very different than my MT’s. But that’s part of why I wanted to come back here, I wanted a chance to learn about what doesn’t come easy for me.
Julie has complete control of her class, this is my weakness. I am too nice. She has these kids shaking in their boots. And while I will probably never be this, I have already learned a few basic techniques from her. For example, I cannot be afraid of silence.

Day 3

Feeling more confident today, which is funny because I’m feeling totally wiped out. I’m exhausted and getting sick. I’m starting to really plan for my own teaching and the more I plan, the more I realize what I have to do; grades, regular assignments, what do I need to maintain vs. what do I need to change. There is a large part of me that wants to keep the basic infrastructure of the calss the same. I don’t want to go through the chaos that comes with relearning the basics such as seating, how grading works, etc. Is this how I would do it in my classroom? Well, not really. But the reality is, this is not my classroom, or at least hasn’t been for most of the year.
I learned how to do progress book today which is where all the grades are stored. Just by getting a chance to flip through this and enter some grades I feel better about the whole grading thing. I think I get what I need to do here. I also got to grade some short answer essays today. The kids will be taking the OAA while I’m here so I will be doing a week of test prep with them. This essay is just a part of what they will be doing on the OAA. And it’s ucky boring but I understand it’s necessity. This is how they are judged and I am judged and the district is judged. But I don't like it one bit.

Student Teaching day 2

Met with the Intervention Specialist (IS) to discuss planning for 6/7 period. I guess its time to introduce them, out of a class of 17 there are 14 on IEPs or 504s. It is supposed to be an inclusion class but because of the ratio it is just a very, very large resource room. Because the number of kids with special needs is so high, they tend to dictate the socially acceptable behavior in the class. Which means sometimes you end the day feeling like you were hit by a bus. A very large, noisy, attitude filled bus. But…and this is my insanity which will most likely fade with the years…this is my favorite class and the class by which I will most likely judge my own success or failure in this school. I like the messy kids a lot. They are far more fun than the kids who just do what you tell them to. Heck, I like messy people in general. And maybe we are all messy, but anyway, I like this class a lot.

Student Teaching day 1

I’m amazed at how nervous I am. You would think I was being forced to start teaching on my first day with the lack of sleep I got last night. I spent the night thinking up things I need to learn about before I can possibly teach and convincing myself there was no way I could ever do this. I was in this class room for three weeks in October for my fields so I should have the advantage over most student teachers. I’d hate to see what I would have been like if I was in a completely new classroom.
I stood at the door on the first day and greeted the students. Only about half said hi. It was so cute. I’m pretty sure the standing rule of 8th grade (middle school in general?) is to deny emotions, affections, or connections to teachers who have not established themselves on the list of acceptably cool teachers. You don’t want someone seeing you being nice to someone who hasn’t been approved. At least that’s how it was when I was there age.
The school has adopted readers workshop as their language arts format and the classes are in block form so we get 88min with the kids. I like this because it establishes a routine but there is a temptation to fall into a mindless routine where the kids do the same things everyday and detach. I have seen routine take the place of instruction in some schools, as if, because the kids do the same thing without complaint every day, they must be learning and engaged.
My MT had to recommend kids for honors English and a foreign language based on grades and effort in the class. I was a little disappointed that the kids had no input on the decision. I would have liked to have known where they saw themselves.

Also, Rob is still jobless and I have the increasingly overwhelming fear that I will not be able to get a job after this. Because it is becoming more and more important to the survival of this little family that I do get a job.