year one reflections

I started this post the last week of school last Spring. I had every intention of working on it a little after summer had started and then posting some fantastic reflections on my first year of teaching. However, I didn’t ever go back and work on it, so I’m going to post it as it stands currently. In the next few weeks I hope to put down some thoughts about this year, but I felt they needed to be compared to last year.

1. I will always be confused when trying to refer to how many years I’ve been teaching, thanks to this whole starting midyear thing. Next year I will be a first year teacher according to the state of TN, but clearly this will not be the case as I am now wrapping up courses that I taught beginning to end. My principal is sure going to hold me accountable for the test scores my kids made this past week, next year he is not going to refer to me as a first year teacher, and yet I will be.

2. On the first day of my first “real” job I spilled orange juice all over my blouse and pants while attempting to unlock the door of the house I had lived in for less than 12 hours. Then the teacher beside me had her room catch on fire during fourth block, crazy day I tell you, crazy day.

3. I love the people I work with, love them. Each of the main people I spend time with everyday are  fantastic for completely different reasons.

4. Next year will look nothing like this year. It is not that I did a bad job this year or that there weren’t redeemable qualities, but next year will be different.

when will i EVER use this?

Choosing the most annoying question high schoolers ask is a tough call. Because honestly I think it would drive anyone insane to realize they have so much responsibility over other people’s bladders, I am asked up to 10 times an hour if someone can go to the bathroom. I mean I control when 76 people urinate, that is power.

Urination aside, the most frustrating question students ask is, “When will I ever use this?” (or some variation of that idea).

When will you use it? When will you use it? I don’t know,  when do you think it might be important to know what the government can and can’t do? One of my favorite math teachers had a student ask her last week when would he ever need to use parallel lines. She answered him (with a straight face), “When you are painting the white lines in parking lots. ” He didn’t understand, in fact his buddy had to draw him a diagram before he could laugh at the joke.

However, questions relating to specific content aren’t actually the most irritating. The most irritating question came last week as my students were complaining about the fact that I required them to read the whole paragraph in order to figure out the context of the vocab terms. One student asked, “When, if I am not going to college and don’t get an office job, when will I EVER need to read a WHOLE paragraph?” I was flabbergasted. A whole paragraph? When won’t you need to read a whole paragraph? If nothing else you will need to read your eviction notice when you are kicked out for breaking parts of the lease that you didn’t read.  I guess whole paragraphs are just one more causality from the whole 6,473 texts per month situation.

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.