1st week of hell

Wow. What can I say? I survived. Survived is pretty fitting since I'm pretty positive I was sucktastic my first day. Even though I told my students I taught middle school last year and taught in Michigan, they smelled my noobness and I think I came close to losing my homeroom. Thankfully I'm team teaching this year, so my afternoon class was a lot better because I was able to learn from all my mistakes in the morning and they at least are afraid of not following my instructions.

Teaching Rule of Thumb: Always, always, always start the year off tough and incredibly strict on expectations. Under no situation do you give the kids new freedoms than what you clearly stated unless you are a teaching guru.

I made that classic mistake again when after an amazing first morning, I loosened up and started smiling and being friendlier with the students. Mistake. They immediately sensed that shift in my demeanor and took the tiny inch I gave them, and ran with it. The rest of the week was spent doing damage control. Today I blew up the seating chart and laid the smackdown in taking away all groupwork privileges and implementing a silent independent work probation period of 2 weeks before trying to integrate groupwork again.

No lie, teaching is tough. Many times, I really want to strangle some of the kids, especially the ones that are blatantly disrespectful. But that all comes with the territory, and as many teachers share with me, those end up being the ones you care about the most. Probably the hardest thing right now is the enormity of responsibility that is on my shoulders; based on how well I prepare these kids for the next level (whether the TAKS standardised test or even for middle school), it will play a huge role in defining them. This is what I always say I'm in teaching for... but actually being in that position is terrifying. There's so many things I need to keep in mind, meetings up the wazoo, and continuing to learn better teaching techniques, I am finally realizing that education is so similar to how our faith should be. The moment we think we've learned all we need to know is the moment we've lost that spark.

On one hand, I'm really encouraged to be working with a mentor teacher (and frankly the entire staff) that are so passionate about teaching that I really wonder how I got chosen to teach at this school. There's so many things I want to write about but I should catch up on sleep.

Don't worry about me though... each day is getting a little bit better. I am no longer running around like a headless chicken, although I'm still ripping out my hair trying to figure out how to work with this autistic kid who I have absolutely no authority with... ughhhhhh.