reflections from one month in

I realize that I haven’t written a single word on here about my new job. So for those of you who missed it: I moved out of Mississippi and life-guarded in Birmingham for a few weeks before accepting a job offer in Cleveland, TN as a high school history and sociology teacher. There are many reasons for my lack of posting about the new job, the main one being that time for actual reflective thought seems to be a commodity lacking in my current life routine. I wake up every morning and normally do 30 minutes to 90 minutes of school work before leaving the house, then drive the 30 minutes to work, stay incredibly busy all day there, stay for 30 to 60 minutes after work trying to get ahead, drive 30 minutes home, then feel the need to pass out or be social. The truth is I love my new job. I could not imagine a smoother transition for a first time teacher, especially mid-year. My school is in soo many ways a dream environment when compared to other public schools. I have fantastic collegues, who I enjoy being around and look foward to building relationships with. The admistration seems to have a good balance between big ideas and practical demands. And no my kids are not all angels, but if that was the case where would the challenge be?

Actually the true challenge is not so much in figuring out how I’m going to handle the classroom as much as figuring out where I am going to be getting my advice from. All through school people warned me that you should never listen to gossip in the teacher’s lounge, and that each teacher really has to figure out their rhythm on their own. And while there is some definite truth to that, and I have already noted the teachers that I sure don’t want to take advice from, there are also some amazing teachers doing crazy amazing things in classrooms right beside me all day. It seems wasteful not to learn from them. So my on-going project is collecting these ideas and attitudes, then synthesising them into actual helpful concrete things for my classroom.