The Most Glorious Days... Finally the Weekend

Wow. I have never been so happy to see Saturday come around. Even if I did have to drive an hour to take my certification test. I think it went well but we'll see. I have to pass it in order to teach in Texas, just a little pressure. I have been so unproductive all day, it's been great. And this coming after our new assignment we have to turn in: an action plan, in which we schedule out our days by 5 min increments and turn it in to TFA so that they can help us maximize our time and make sure that we're not just wasting time. Seriously. They suggested scheduling in things like "call mom." Really?? (I've had some friends say they're going to write in things such as "10 mins: take a dump," or "5 mins: flirt/lay groundwork for weekend") The bureaucracy and micro-managing here is incredible. We have to find subversive ways to survive, even if we just joke about it. They actually had us walk around on Friday and look at our advisors' personal organization systems, so we could have an idea of what would work for us. And I just remember how many questions I had to answer during my interview process about being organized. With all these Type-A personalities that this organization seems to attract, you'd think we'd be able to do this without a required assignment. Maybe not. After all, I did waste a bunch of time this morning just trying to get motivated to start working. Not even sure what to call that: "zone out time" or "procrastination time;" I think it's an inevitable part of this process given how much we work.

Yesterday was better than I expected. I pulled my lesson plan together, barely, by the time I had to go into the classroom. And my difficult student was being resistant and disruptive again, at the very start of class. So I got the others started on a writing assignment and pulled her out into the hall to have a conversation about how she stormed off the day before. And I think it went well. She rolled her eyes and claimed that "it goes in one ear and out the other" but I know she was listening. I can tell she's had a hard life and has some issues with her self-esteem and her confidence. I just tried to reassure her that she can succeed, but that she'll have to work hard for it, and that people do care about her success and don't want to see her fail. Anyhow, I could go into my excellent pep talk further (but maybe not on the blog). But we went back into class and she was 99% better. She even volunteered to read. She still rolled her eyes but at least she was being cooperative. I was able to meet up with her other three teachers and they've had similar behaviors come up in their classes. We made a group commitment to providing her with lots of positive feedback and limiting how often we pull her out of class for a talk, since each of us had done it at least once this week, which must've been a little overwhelming for her.

Anyhow, it's hard for me, having had this conversation with this student, not to want to do everything I can to push her, to help her prove to herself that she can succeed. But 1) I don't know really how to do that, 2) I'm only teaching her for another 3 weeks, and 3) if I'm going to put more effort into pushing this one along, I need to push them all along. Even though she is the one crying out the loudest for extra attention, for extra help, for validation, for encouragement, it doesn't mean that the others do not feel the same, and do not deserve just as much of me. Now it's just an issue of me not having the knowledge of the steps to push her and each of these kids. What do I do? What homework do I assign? How do I structure it? I would think I may be able to figure that out from our diagnostic, except that the way it turned out, I don't think my data is valid or helpful.

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Sunday. I finally get to sleep in. And I enjoyed it after a late night out with my roommate and a few other friends here. After a lot of wrong turns, we ended up at a cowboy bar, which was pretty fun. I tried the two-step and will definitely need practice.

I'm feeling much better today. I'm sure the extra sleep is the main ingredient. I wasn't as productive today as I would've liked to have been but I feel okay about that. I don't feel as guilty or as helpless as before. I have the work done (mostly) that I need to turn in tomorrow (and it's only 10pm!!), and I have some thoughts on the lesson plans that I was gonna try to get ahead on. This week we may even get to use our "differentiated professional development time" to actually do some work, instead of using it to administer tests that now I don't know how to incorporate and don't anticipate having help on how to incorporate them.

Tomorrow am -- back to the classroom. The good thing about this week is that we move into teaching more writing. I'm supposed to be doing a Language Arts class, but I structured the unit plan to be more writing intensive, since that's what I know and that's what I'll be teaching in the fall so I want to have some practice teaching it (maybe they are my guinea pigs, bad Gretchen, no they are not), and they can ALWAYS use writing help and practice. The bad part of the coming week is that some students are re-taking the TAKS, which is the Texas state standardized test. So we'll probably have to drop a day of our lesson plans to do TAKS-prep/test strategies with the kids. And then another day or two to actually do the test. And our school director has been really unclear about this so I have no idea if most of my students will be taking the TAKS, all of them, only a few... and if I'll be administering the TAKS or if those students will just go elsewhere & I'll keep teaching. Very unclear. Like most of this has been so far. I'm just fine-tuning my skills of rolling with punches and being adaptive and flexible. Welcome to teaching, right?

Big goals for this coming week: go to bed by midnight each night. Work out at least once. Get better and faster at my lesson planning. Smile more. Laugh more. Be more energetic in class. Call people back.