First Week of School is Over

Oh readers - how I have missed you! Since my last post I have not had a single minute to myself until school let out Friday. And I mean that totally seriously. I get up at 5:30, drive an hour to work, am at school until 4:45, get home at 6:00, eat dinner, then work until I go to bed. That schedule needs to change if I'm going to keep my sanity. I'm hoping that this will only be this time consuming the first few weeks. I can't push myself this hard for an entire year.

But I have so much to say! So much happened this week. Was it the longest week EVER for you guys, too? Like did you wake up on Tuesday and think it was already Friday before realizing, no, you have 4 more days! I really think I got stuck in some kind of time warp. So let me start off by saying that right now, I'm in a pretty good place emotionally. I just don't want you to worry too much when I tell you how my week went because it was really terrible. But Friday was a good day, so I'm ok now. Let me start at the beginning.

So I last posted after the second day of staff development before school started. Unfortunately, I can barely remember what happened those second two days. I know I spent hours and hours trying to decorate my room which apparently wasn't decorated up to par. We also went to more meetings about teaching to the standards and stuff like that. Nothing interesting enough to write about here. Then, I spent the entire weekend preparing for the first day of school. Making the letter I sent home to parents, student surveys, parent surveys, etc. In order to make all the photocopies I needed (about 550 copies) I needed to go to my boyfriend's work. Without revealing too much, I'll say he works at a place that uses a lot of paper so no one would notice a missing ream of paper. This is great connection to have since I have to buy my own paper in DC. There is no school supply of paper. Isn't that ridiculous? DC spends so much money per student but that can't include the cost of paper? Oh - and the photocopier in my school barely works. It jams everytime you use it, prints in shades of gray, and is often broken. Shall I continue with how materials are lacking in the school? The overhead projector I found in my room doesn't work. The staff lounge has no air conditioning. I have no basic art supplies like colored pencils or markers or big paper. The four computers sitting in my room aren't hooked up to anything and so are completely useless. That includes no computer for me as the teacher. I can keep going, but I get angry and upset when I do, so I'll stop.

First day of school was pretty ok. Nothing of incident happened. The student body was assembled in the auditorium, yelled at for a while, and then every teacher called the names of their homeroom students off the role. I think only about 8 of my students were there on day 1. I explained some of the procedures of my room, had them fill out some paper work, come up with some classroom rules, make nametags, and then took pictures of them holding ther nametags to help me memorize their names. This ended up looking a lot more like mugshots than I had intended, but I highly recommend it to all teachers. I did this student teeaching, too, and it helped immensely in learning names. I just load the pictures on my computer and flip through them like flash cards. Anyway, homeroom and 3rd period went fine without incident like I said, and then I had a free period before the school day ended. I worked until bedtime and then it was day 2.

Day two went very badly. On even days (periods 2, 4, and 6), I have 8th graders which are an entirely different breed. I did all the same activities, but the classes talked over me the whole time. I'd get them quiet, talk for 5 seconds, then they'd talk again. I'd wait, run my timer deducting time from their 15 minutes of free time on Fridays, and a while later they'd finally shut up. They just totally didn't care about the Friday time. 4th period had two students that were talking and defiant so I asked one of them to go to the time-out/behavior corner, and he wouldn't go. So I said he'd have lunch detention. Then I said that if he finished he work quietly, he could go to lunch. This worked at the time, but I realized later I should not have done that. I undermined my own authority. 6th period is a GT (gifted and talented) class that is being piloted this year and they were just as bad. I was so dissappointed and discouraged. Very very discouraged. I felt terrible.

Over the next two nights, I called the homes of all my 8th grade students introducing myself, making sure the kids gave their guardians the stuff they were supposed to, and that they would have the materials they would need. I left messages at most homes, and a few numbers were disconnected. I can say that I didn't notice any difference in the behavior of those classes on Thursday.

Wednesday's 7th grade classes were behaved ok, but were bored out of their minds. I explained all the manners and had them break off into pairs to perform little skits modelling most of the classroom expectations. (By the way, I changed my rules a bit before I gave them to the kids. I got rid of the ma'am thing, deodorant thing, added a hands-to-yourself thing, and some more I can't recall.) Getting these kids to participate in this activity was harder than pulling teeth. Meanwhile, I was being observed by one of my administrators. I can only imagine what kind of negative comments she was writing about my teaching watching this. The kids barely had a pulse!

I realized that if 7th graders couldn't model these expectations, this activity would definitely not fly with the 8th graders. I made the executive decision to scrap my entire plan to model expectations with them the next day and to instead load them up with busy work. This was on the advice of other teachers in the school. They told me that the 8th graders are too grown to model rules and that they will only behavve if they are busy 100% of the time. They said the best thing you can do is give them a list of vocabulary words to define. So I went against all previous advice and skipped the day of modelling expectations with them and decided to go straight into reviewing the scientific method.

Oh, but how that failed, too. I went home Wednesday night and stayed up late putting together some worksheets that were intended to review the scientific method and challenge them a bit. Review scientific method? How about these kids don't even remember anything called the scientific method. They don't know what cause and effect means (every single kid in the class said that a rooster crowing causes the sun to rise in the morning). They've never heard the word bias before. They've never heard the word logic before. And to top it all off - they can't read! Good god these poor kids can't read. The ones who can read sentences still can't understand what the sentences actually mean.

So mix this total failure of a lesson plan with terrible behavior. In my 4th period class, the two boys who were defiant last class were replaced by three new little monsters. And I don't mean that lightly. These kids frighten me. I think chaos is the only word I can use for that class. They were shouting and out of their seat the whole time. One girl, I'll call her Cruella, took the boy's notebook and run water over it in the sink. She wrote the F-word on his portfolio. The boy, I'll call him DeVil, ripped up this portfolio (which I had given to him only minutes ago) in front of me and told all the other teachers in the school that I ran water over his notebook. I was totally helpless! I opted to remain calm for fear of showing weakness by flipping out without any effect. I kept thinking to myself that I need to call the front office and have these two escorted out, but I didn't. I was too afraid to look weak to the administration, too. So instead I kept the two in for lunch detention. This essentially punishes me. I can keep them n for 30 minutes then I have to let them go eat. But, instead of leaving to eat, the two of them proceeded to roam the hallways and follow me around asking me why I was going to call their families and how that wouldnt work and bla, bla, bla. I eventually resorted to locking myself in my room as they shouted at me through the door. I mean, what the hell am I supposed to do about this?! I see these two again on Tuesday and I have no idea what to do about it! I know I'll have referrals to the office written up ahead of time since I'm sure I'll need to send them, but that's not enough. I can't teach this class with these two monsters in there. Ughhh...

Friday, thankfully, was incident free again. I dumbed down the worksheets on the scientific method about 10-fold before giving it to the 7th graders and it kind of worked. I also didn't have them work on their own. We went through the worksheets together as a class. Actually, let me be more accurate about that. I tried to get them to come up with the answers, but minus 3 or 4 bright students in the classes, most of the kids either tired really hard and still didn't get it or were just staring blankly at me like, "what is taking you so long to give me the answers, Ms. Newbie?" So, behavior, good. Getting these kids to learn anything, not so good. How do you teach 20 or 25 kids to read? Especially when they are on totally different levels. People will say "differentiated instruction, of course". Much easier said than done. I'll be working on this all year I'm sure.

Oh, and science labs? Psh... yea right. As if I can give things to these kids. The DC curriculum suggests 8th graders drop balls from different heights to find f=ma and make graphs and stuff. Ha! You want me to hand balls to these kids? I can't think of anything I can give them that won't immediately be a weapon. The other science teacher agreed with me. She said that she only did one lab last year. Oh, so sad. So sad.

Oh and speaking of science teachers... Did mention that there's three of us? There's me with 7th and 8th grade, a second year teacher with 6th and 7th, and the department chair with 6th and 8th. The department chair was science teacher of the year last year. She's great. But she's also gone. She quit to take a job somewhere else. As of Tuesday, the school is short one science teacher. Other teachers in the school, including myself, are covering all those classes until a new teacher is hired. Poor other-science-teacher is forced to come up with stuff for them to do. I feel like I should be doing some of this but I'm barely keeping my head above water as it is.

Alright, so talking about all of this just stresses me out. I spent Friday night and all of Saturday relaxing with my boyfriend, but I've got to get back to work. I need to find about five different ways to teach the scientific method. I loved that paper towel idea by the way. I can afford that and it shouldn't result in weapons like I was saying earlier. So thank you so much for that idea! The blog is helping! I'll try to post during the week this week, but if not, I'll definitely update you all come next weekend. Have a great week, everyone!