Dude... Teacher Workdays Rock!!!

I think I’m finally beginning to feel like – dare I say it – a real teacher. We just had our first official Teacher Workday the other day, and it was so relaxing, so peaceful to be at school and not have kids. Loved it. Looooovvved it. Got so much work done. I designed my new class tracker for the upcoming Quarter, cleaned, filed, did inventory, and a whole host of other things… all before noon. Wow. Yeah. I really like Teacher Workdays. J

It’s kinda scary to think that a whole Quarter has gone by already. We’ll begin the second one on Monday, which reminds me that we’re heading swiftly toward the half-way point of the school year. It was so cool to be able to track the kids’ progress these last few months, and see them get excited as they color in their part of the class chart to show how much they’ve grown on a particular objective or skill. I’m really getting attached to these kids. They make my day.

I have so many plans for this next quarter. So many things I’d like to try with them and teach them how to do. Question is… how to find time to do all this AND plan AND manage to have some semblance of a life outside of work with my family… there are just not enough hours in a day!

So this quarter, I’m thinking hard about starting an online Book Review page for the kids on our class website. They can do one a week in order to earn our class currency. I’m also looking into establishing a class blog, where the kids can start their own (on our secure webpage) and blog about things that interest them. I’m really trying to find interesting ways to incorporate technology into the classroom, and I figure these two would be a great start in that direction.

We’ll see how it goes!

A Note of Thanks

It’s hard being a first-year teacher. Simply put, it’s freakin’ exhausting. I mean like, bone-dead, whole-body-hurts, can’t-think-straight kinda tired. Somehow between making the decision to become a teacher and going through all the crazy training and preparation that this Certification Year has set up for me, my brain has turned to mush and I can’t seem to find the energy to rescue it.

I’m tired.

And what’s worse, it sucks to feel so isolated. I mean, you’re not only the new kid on the block at the new job, you’re also a brand new teacher who doesn’t know so much, who’s trying to feel her way through what sometimes feels like a literal jungle of gossip and criticism and people waiting to see just how much you really don’t know… and very few people put forth the effort to check up on you.

It’s like they somehow forget what their first year was like, what they went through, how they felt. It’s like they feel that, if they had to suffer through it alone, well… so do you. I see now such a rich opportunity for teachers who have been in the field for a long time (or even several years) to reach back to that first-year teacher on their hallway or in their learning community, and let them know they’re really not alone and that things really will get better.

Because, there are soooo many days when it feels like they won’t.

I wish I was on a hallway or location where there were other new teachers. Other people who are also going through their first year, who are also trying to learn the how-to’s and who could come together and help each other. Instead, I’m surrounded by (very nice, thank goodness) a bunch of experienced teachers who mean well and are very pleasant, but who are also trying to keep their own heads above water with all the massive stuff they’re supposed to get done in an already too-short day. So when I do make a mistake or forget a procedure or something, I end up feeling like a total idiot, which really sucks. Yay me.

This is when it really (I mean reeeeeally) helps to read the blogs of other novice teachers to see what they went through and how they navigated their way out of the quagmire that is first-year teaching. Fellow writers, your blogs give a ray of much-needed sunshine to those of us who are trying so hard to keep our heads above water while still managing to pull off some modicum of looking like we actually know a little of what we’re doing.

Thank you, fellow teacher bloggers. Thank you.

It's 'That' Time...

What is it that seems to happen to otherwise well-behaved children come the month of October? Is it the change in the weather, or perhaps the crispness of the cool fall air that causes them to GO HOGWILD??? We were doing so good. So, so good. Rules explained and taught. Practiced. Role-Played. Expectations laid out, clear, concise, kids following them and doing a great job, week after week after week.

Until now, that is. Something happened to them all today. Today, they all (ohhhh, just about all 25 of them or so) decided that rules were suggestions and that teachers were buddies who somehow understood  their sudden lack of restraint… After about my second class of chaotic-acting kids, I was pretty much exhausted and wondering what the heck happened to my classroom structure???

And then a funny thing happened. The weather cleared up and the October chill lifted, yielding a beautiful, springlike fall day. So I opened my classroom window. In wafted the sounds of happy children playing on the blacktop, enjoying the excitement of the soon-coming weekend. In also wafted the sounds of teachers – wonderful, hard-working, way, way more experienced-than-me teachers – who had finally had their fill of kids going haywire. I heard countless times as classes passed by my open window…”What is this? Why is everyone acting so inappropriately? This is not what you all were taught in our classroom!” … and “Excuse me, but did we just for-geeettt all our rules all of a sudden? You all know we don’t act like this! What in the world is going on?”

And suddenly, I began to feel better.

I realized that it’s not just because I’m a brand-new teacher who somehow must have failed miserably with the classroom management plan that I thought was working well up until now. No, I’ve still got lots of learning to do. But it’s not all me.

It’s just October.

They say hindsight is 20-20...

It’s pretty amazing that October’s almost gone already. I look back on things now and realize that, even in this very early part of my career, I can think of things I wish I would  ehave done, things I wish I’d have known before. Here’s just a few of them. Hopefully, this can help some other soon-to-be first-year teacher out there to miss some of the hurdles I’ve come across:

1.     I wish I would have known just how overwhelming this whole thing would be. I didn’t walk into teaching thinking it would be a cakewalk – I felt the opposite, in fact – but I had no clue just how crazy things get once school actually starts. There is a whole SLEW of things that come up once school begins – new requirements, workshops you’ve never heard of that you have to take right away, new responsibilities from literacy coordinators and Aps and just about everyone else you can think of, that need to be done, yep… right away

2.    I wish I would have known how much I would come to loathe my school email account. Before school started, I’d have like, 4 emails a day. Okay, maybe 5. Once school started, that number increased to easily 25 to 30… A DAY.  And once the workday officially ended, the night-emailers start and the number begins to slowly build to ANOTHER 25, 30, 35 for the next day.  And that's all well and good if they're simple, informational emails that don't add to your already incredibly overloaded 'to-do' list. These, however, add and add and add and ... add some more. Yay.

3.    I wish I would have known how quickly you’ll get sick from being around kids. Coughing. Snotting. Sneezing. No mouths covered. Dirty tissues that somehow seem to ‘miss’ the garbage can way too frequently. So far this year, I've lost my voice for a solid plus weeks, working at almost a whisper each school day, because of a cold I caught that just wouldn't seem to go away no matter what I tried. Two full weeks with absolutely no voice, people. And most recently, my unfortunate discovery of you can tell that a child is really, really sick (and soon to barf or worse…) from the thick cloud of uncontrollable gas that emits from a poor, incredibly embarrassed student. In just the last few days, there have been numerous students with headaches and stomach aches and fevers, flushed cheeks and all, going to see the nurse. Guess it’s just that season. Sick days, get ready.

4.    I wish I would have realized that there is very (v.e.r.y) little “getting yourself together” time in between classes. Like, none at all. You’ve got to have every class’ stuff already laid out (or in my case, ready to be laid out after you remove materials from the class that’s just leaving), or else you’re in trouble. There’s so little instructional time as it is already, and losing precious time trying to organize stacks of worksheets and papers and things between classes can be very costly.

5.    I wish I would have known that a glue gun and five cent glue stick would make just about anything stick to my classroom walls… before I spent $5 each on countless rolls of heavy-duty mounting tape, that is. Nothing I tried on these walls in the beginning of the year worked… staples wouldn’t go through the wall. Tape wouldn’t stick. Posters and even the lightest papers would fall down all the time. And then…Eureka… the daggone glue gun worked like a charm. Who knew???

6.    I wish I would have known that I would end up changing my classroom management system not even a full month into the school year. I cut up all that paper and got all those little pockets ready, only to realize that we never really needed that system anyway. By the end of September, I’d chucked that green/yellow/red card stuff in favor of a much more effective, more kid-friendly classroom economy system.

7.    I wish I would have known how much my back and shoulders would hurt from lugging home TONS AND TONS OF STUFF each night, in an effort to plan and try to get ahead … just a little…

8.    I wish I would have known how difficult planning would be sometimes. How much I would have to rely on the plans of gen ed teachers to know what my kids would be learning and when, so I could plan how to supplement for them according to their individual needs. So… if the grade-level teachers don’t make their plans until Sunday night, that means I don’t have what I need to plan my week until… Sunday night. And, that means I’m scrambling to put together an effective week of lesson plans for my kids… at the very, v.e.r.y. last minute. NOT fun.

9.    I wish I would have known that my Friday nights would essentially disappear. I foolishly thought that my workweek would end at quitting time on Friday, and I could then go, energized and excited, into beginning my wonderful weekend. Little did I know I would be so incredibly exhausted by 8:00 pm on Fridays that I couldn’t even keep my eyes open, much less try to go out and do something fun. Weekend? Yeah. Better play up Saturday and Sunday, bud, ‘cause Friday’s a wrap.

Stage Three...

Then the day comes when I finally have to do a real IEP meeting, a re-eval, and I realize how utterly incompetent I am at the job I’ve been hired to do. I mean, these people are paying me. Month after month. And I feel so incompetent that it’s not even funny. I sit through this meeting, and my mentor (thank God for her) literally has to run the meeting (my meeting) point by point and sentence by sentence because I don’t know what the heck I’m doing. I’ve read about re-evals. I’ve sat through workshops about them and really thought I understood what I’d need to do. Until I actually had to do one, that is. And it’s at this point that I just get pissed. I’m heated. Not at the people that I work with, not at my mentor or anyone who’s trying to be patient and help, etc. I’m pissed at the program that supposedly ‘trained’ me for this job. Don’t get me wrong… They taught me – drilled me, in fact – in the mechanics of writing a quality lesson plan. I can do backwards planning on a unit and do a daggone good job at it, too. Meaningful lessons connected to State standards, etc…. all that, yep, got it. What they didn’t teach me was anything specific about dealing with Special Education students. Not the book stuff – the real, everyday, this-is-what-you-do stuff. Like HOW TO RUN AN ACTUAL IEP MEETING with some semblance of competence!!!

I don’t know anything specific about any (a-n-y) of the categories of disability. I just know what the category names are. And yeeetttt… I’m a Special Ed teacher. I don’t have a clue on what the exact steps are (I mean exact steps you follow when you’re actually running the meeting and all the other participants are looking to you to know what the heck you’re doing so their time’s not wasted) to the different types of IEP meetings that you can have. And yet, it’s my job to facilitate.  I don’t know enough about my subject to be able to give the gen ed teachers help and suggestions when they ask for them. And yet, this is supposed to be my area of ‘specialty’. Wow. This is a joke. And what the heck was I thinking in taking this on anyway??? I should have gone to a Masters program specializing in this instead. At least then I’d come out prepared to actually, oh I don’t know… DO MY JOB???  (Can you smell the Disillusionment in the air?? And it’s only October!)

And then there's Stage Two...

Looking back, I can see how riding on this high took me through the first few weeks of school. Didn’t matter that I really didn’t know what I was doing, or that my summer training in no way reflected the situation I now found myself in. I was excited and flying high. I’d figure out whatever needed to be figured out and somehow, it would all eventually get better.

A few weeks in, maybe just three or four of them to be exact, I started to feel completely and utterly overwhelmed. I loved my kids. Loved, loved, loved my kids. But trying to find time to plan effectively for them day after day after day was increasingly seeming like an impossible task that I had no idea how I’d make it through. The first week out, I got an entire week of lesson plans done, had each class covered, and felt great. That kind of victory hasn’t happened since. I’m struggling at this point to figure out what in the heck I’m going to do with four separate groups (and grades) of kids for an hour that’s actually meaningful and will help them learn, versus just throwing something together that will actually ‘cover’ a total of sixty minutes until they leave and the next class comes in.

Sometimes it’s because in all of my planning and good intentions, I remember to bring home tons and tons of stuff from my classroom to help me with planning over the weekend, but manage to leave the very curriculum books that I specifically need to design the week’s instruction around… Really?? Augh. The best laid plans…  Other times, it’s because I don’t get the weekly email about upcoming grade-level topics and lesson plans from the gen ed teachers until Sunday morning… even Sunday evening, sometimes. REALLY??? And I have to find a way to put together a very effective, very meaningful week’s worth of lesson plans for this grade’s class in how many hours?? Tomorrow starts a new day… a new week… and I’m so, so unprepared for it. I absolutely hate feeling like I’m flubbing with time – just doing ‘fillers’ with the kids until the dismissal bell rings at 3 and I’m ‘free’ for the day, but on weeks like this, that’s exactly what it feels like, and let me tell you – it sucks.

AND THEN… I try to keep myself organized (as much as I can with all this craziness going on around me, anyway) and write out all (alllllllllllllllll) the things that have to be done, and check them off as I complete them, and looking at the end result just makes my head spin. My first week, my To-Do lists were like, one page.  Regular-sized writing and all, everything I had to get done basically fit on that one page and I found that I was crossing out completed tasks with some very comforting sense of regularity. Then the emails started coming. I open my school email during the first week of school and I have like, maybe 4 messages. Come week two, I’m at about 20+ A DAY. And each one of them is from someone new that I don’t know, telling me that I’ve got to complete some paper or training or whatever that I knew nothing about previously, and that was nowhere on my existing, already two-paged To-Do list. Literally, I get to the point where I don’t even want to check my school email during this time, because the demands that I find in there are just soooo overwhelming in addition to everything else that I already have to find a way to do. This is C.R.A.Z.Y. !!!!!

By weeks three and four, I had a To-Do list of a solid three pages, with even more things to be done written in the margins and on any other tiny spot of unused white space there might have been… and worse yet, NO CROSS OUT MARKS. Oh, my goodness…. Talk about feeling like you’re treading water??? At this point, I feel like I’m doing all I can, doing all I know how to do, and I can hardly keep my head above water. I’m getting up early and staying up late trying to get these things completed. I’m working all day with the kids and the moment I get home, instead of spending quality time with my family, I’m emptying out the never-ending contents of my massive teacher bags and trying to get stuff done – planning, online workshops, etc… and before I know it, it’s way past time to go to bed so I can get up and do the same thing all over again, tomorrow. When the weekend finally does come, I’m spending every single day of it pouring over planning materials, trying to work schedules and group divisions and reading levels, and it flies by so fast that I barely even realize how little time I’ve spent with my family in the interim. I look up and it’s already Sunday night, already time to get ready for a fresh week of this new dance that’s consuming my life, and I can barely remember even feeling like I ever had a ‘weekend off’ to begin with. Most times, honestly, I feel like I’m drowning in the river of stuff that has to be done (in ADDITION to teaching my kids daily), and I just don’t know if I’ll make it through this with any semblance of sanity.   Mmm Hmmm… This must be what they’re talking about when they mention the Survival Stage.

Stages of a New Teacher's First Year...

They say there are five stages to a new teacher’s first year: anticipation, survival, disillusionment, rejuvenation and reflection. Looking back on my experiences these past few months, I can definitely find myself somewhere in this continuum.

I can so easily remember being sooo excited, so elated even, about the prospect of being a teacher and of starting my training to learn the how-to of doing my job. Even though Institute was completely exhausting both mentally and physically, part of what helped me make it through was this excitement, this knowledge of the greatness of what I would eventually be doing. I would actually be touching lives… helping young minds to grow and stretch and learn that learning can really be fun…

So when my notice of hire came through, my level of excitement was just through the roof. I mean, I was on a serious high. Nothing bothered me, everything was possible, nothing was too hard – I just needed to look at it a different way to find the solution. No real orientation at your site? No problem – I’ll find a way to learn what I need to know. No access to your trailer? No worries! It’ll be worked out before you know it. Finally got into your trailer but it looks like a train wreck (literally and figuratively)? Not a problem. Nothing a little (or maybe a lot) of bleach and disinfectant and a broom and mop and scrub brushes can’t fix. Painting walls for days until your arms literally felt like they’d fall off if you took just one more stroke? Nooooo problem!! Got kids coming in another week or so! Gotta get it done!!!  Yeah…. Anticipation stage.