WELCOME!!
I am excited to meet you all and to get to know you all. I hope you are ready for the craziest, most insane, most exhausting two years of your life. Who am I kidding, there is no way to prepare for this.
I was asked to give some advice to the new class but I am sitting here and I am not really sure what to say. I mean I only completed my FIRST year. I am no expert. I mean I am changing most of the things I did in my classroom this year. But I can give you some words of advice on surviving.
1. DO WHAT YOU NEED TO DO TO STAY SANE. If this is exercising or talking on the phone to family every night or traveling on weekends, do it!! This kind of falls hand in hand with finding something to do such as a hobby. Its going to inevitably happen though. You are going to be consumed by teaching at some point this year. You are going to eat, breath, and sleep school. But it wont last. You will either see the light or have a mental breakdown. When that occurs, find a hobby. My hobby? Travelling… Thanks to my neighbor. It was sometime in the fall when the one and only Charles Preacher said “we always need a trip to look forward to.” From that day one, there has always been something, whether big or small, that I have to look forward to. To me, spending money to get out of the delta is 100% worth it.
2. SLEEP. As I was cleaning out my classroom I found some goals that I had my homeroom write back in August when we were holding classes. I wrote my goals for the year down too. On my middle finger I wrote “Get at least 7 hours of sleep a night” I am proud to say that 98% of the time, I stuck to that goal. I coached soccer so sometimes it just wasn’t possible. I never stayed up late doing school stuff. You just have to realize that its not that serious. Things will get done when they get done. Didn’t finish all the grading you wanted? That’s fine, do it on your planning block. Didn’t call all the parents you wanted? That’s fine, finish it tomorrow. If you don’t sleep, I promise you that the kids are going to sound ten times louder than the actually are the next day.
3. Teaching is one big science experiment in which every day is a new day and you can change things however you want. If something is not going the way you envisioned, change it. As long as you are on board 100% and you are enthusiastic about it, the kids will eventually accept the change as well. Change the look of your classroom. Change the consequences. Change the way you teach. Doesn’t matter. Just realize that you are the scientist and the classroom is your lab. Don’t go overboard, but don’t be afraid to change things.
4. Serenity Prayer…this has been my motto all year. Once I let go and realized that I can’t control everything, my emotional well being vastly improved. It doesn’t matter the quality of your school, you just cannot control everything. I told myself and eventually I started telling my students, I don’t care what happens outside my classroom, but in here, I run things. And still you can’t control whether or not a student wants to learn in the classroom. As long as your doing everything you can do and as long as you can go home at night and say “I tried” then you are doing your job. I turned to laughter. Crying was too emotionally draining. Find a friend and just laugh about the ridiculousness. Don’t complain about. Just laugh. Realize that this whole experience is sort of what Alice felt like falling down the rabbit whole. Reason goes out the window so stop trying to make sense of it all.
And that’s it. I have no other wise words to depart on you. I am here for you though, especially if you want a good laugh…remember that time my students stuck neon green gum to my chair and I sat on it?!?!? Yeah that was funny…
Saturday, June 4, 2011
May 24, 2011
Well that’s it. Year one down. Like my roommate said “it was kind of anticlimactic.” The year as a whole was a rollercoaster ride, however, waking up for the last day of school seemed no different than any other day. And when the bell rang to let the kids go, I packed up my stuff and left too. That was that.
I am pretty sure I was just in shock that I made it to the last day of school. I mean there were certainly days in the year where I didn’t think I was going to make it. Heck, there were days in May when I thought “Can I really make it another 13 days?!” But I did.
What were my thoughts on the year? Too many to rehash. Do I think I grew as a teacher? Its really unclear because its hard to discern what I changed consciously and what I changed because of “outside” forces. I do believe that I learned how to mentally deal with my situation and that’s how I made it to May. I learned how to not let everything bother me. I learned to keep my school work at school except for on Sundays. I learned to just turn my head and laugh at the insanity around me.
But what was the best part of the year? The friendships I have made over the year. I have a small group of really close friends and I am not sure what I would do without them. They make this whole thing bearable, especially my roommate and neighbors. I am not sure I would have made it to May without them. Really and truly. They make this whole ordeal worth it…
But here I am speaking as if it’s over! Ha. Far from it! Yes its true I am moving on to a different school, however, I am still in the program and I still have one fully year of teaching to go before I can truly talk of the “bonds between friends that will last a lifetime.”
Summer school starts in two days. In January I realized that I am going to have to take summer school seriously or at least more so than most second years. I need to undo the bad habits that I have picked up and re-teach myself how to be an effective teacher. But the thought of re-teaching myself everything in just three weeks is overwhelming. So I decided to focus on two things that I think are crucial to any classroom and that I personally need the most work with: consequences and rewards.
For the first three months, I did really well with following a consequence ladder and it sort of worked. It worked well for the kids who were truly good kids but stepped out of line every once in awhile. It didn’t work well with the “bad” kids and it didn’t work well once I sent them to the office. But by November I stopped being so consistent. It was a lot of work on myself and I was barely staying afloat. Come January, I was making up consequences as they came to me. You have detention! You stay when the bell rings! You go sit in the corner! It worked for the most part, however, there were major consistency issues that even the kids would call me out on and they were right! Someone would get caught eating and would have detention while someone else caught doing the same thing may just lose 5 points for the day. That’s were the issue lies. The kids need to know if they do x, then y is the consequence no matter who the offender is. Children really seem to pickup on fairness. If you treat them fairly, they will, more times than not, react appropriately. So I am going to pay close attention to our consequence ladder in the classroom this summer and make sure I am CONSISTANT.
BUT more important than consequences, in my eyes, are rewards. Ideally, I want my classroom to be based around rewards and not consequences. I want to motivate the kids to learn, not beat them down. At the beginning of the year, I plan to come down hard with consequences, but I will also come down hard on rewards. I am not sure entirely what my reward system will be like yet, but I believe its going to be centered around groups. As the second semester progressed, I used groups in my classroom more and more until I finally just left them in groups. If managed correctly and if the rules are clearly stated, groups work wonders. I do a lot less running around and the kids do a lot more working. By May I rarely had a kid asleep in my classroom and I believe its because they were able to ask neighbors for help instead of just put their head down and give up. I want my kids to take pride in their groups and I want them to motivate each other in the groups. I may not be able to practice this in summer school because everyone (the other teachers) may not want to work in groups. However, I can practice praising the kids and their good behavior a lot more than I did in my classroom this year.
There are a lot of other things I want to change and I will contemplate this as the summer progresses.
I am pretty sure I was just in shock that I made it to the last day of school. I mean there were certainly days in the year where I didn’t think I was going to make it. Heck, there were days in May when I thought “Can I really make it another 13 days?!” But I did.
What were my thoughts on the year? Too many to rehash. Do I think I grew as a teacher? Its really unclear because its hard to discern what I changed consciously and what I changed because of “outside” forces. I do believe that I learned how to mentally deal with my situation and that’s how I made it to May. I learned how to not let everything bother me. I learned to keep my school work at school except for on Sundays. I learned to just turn my head and laugh at the insanity around me.
But what was the best part of the year? The friendships I have made over the year. I have a small group of really close friends and I am not sure what I would do without them. They make this whole thing bearable, especially my roommate and neighbors. I am not sure I would have made it to May without them. Really and truly. They make this whole ordeal worth it…
But here I am speaking as if it’s over! Ha. Far from it! Yes its true I am moving on to a different school, however, I am still in the program and I still have one fully year of teaching to go before I can truly talk of the “bonds between friends that will last a lifetime.”
Summer school starts in two days. In January I realized that I am going to have to take summer school seriously or at least more so than most second years. I need to undo the bad habits that I have picked up and re-teach myself how to be an effective teacher. But the thought of re-teaching myself everything in just three weeks is overwhelming. So I decided to focus on two things that I think are crucial to any classroom and that I personally need the most work with: consequences and rewards.
For the first three months, I did really well with following a consequence ladder and it sort of worked. It worked well for the kids who were truly good kids but stepped out of line every once in awhile. It didn’t work well with the “bad” kids and it didn’t work well once I sent them to the office. But by November I stopped being so consistent. It was a lot of work on myself and I was barely staying afloat. Come January, I was making up consequences as they came to me. You have detention! You stay when the bell rings! You go sit in the corner! It worked for the most part, however, there were major consistency issues that even the kids would call me out on and they were right! Someone would get caught eating and would have detention while someone else caught doing the same thing may just lose 5 points for the day. That’s were the issue lies. The kids need to know if they do x, then y is the consequence no matter who the offender is. Children really seem to pickup on fairness. If you treat them fairly, they will, more times than not, react appropriately. So I am going to pay close attention to our consequence ladder in the classroom this summer and make sure I am CONSISTANT.
BUT more important than consequences, in my eyes, are rewards. Ideally, I want my classroom to be based around rewards and not consequences. I want to motivate the kids to learn, not beat them down. At the beginning of the year, I plan to come down hard with consequences, but I will also come down hard on rewards. I am not sure entirely what my reward system will be like yet, but I believe its going to be centered around groups. As the second semester progressed, I used groups in my classroom more and more until I finally just left them in groups. If managed correctly and if the rules are clearly stated, groups work wonders. I do a lot less running around and the kids do a lot more working. By May I rarely had a kid asleep in my classroom and I believe its because they were able to ask neighbors for help instead of just put their head down and give up. I want my kids to take pride in their groups and I want them to motivate each other in the groups. I may not be able to practice this in summer school because everyone (the other teachers) may not want to work in groups. However, I can practice praising the kids and their good behavior a lot more than I did in my classroom this year.
There are a lot of other things I want to change and I will contemplate this as the summer progresses.
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