After 4 straight days of 14-15 hour work days and very little sleep, I finished up my first week of teaching and let me say this right up front: I ADORE MY KIDS! They are funny, smart, kind, and genuinely good kids. Although, I feel sad for so many of them because they have made some really, really poor choices. Two of my senior girls are pregnant and there are many, many more (boys and girls) who have a child or two. These babies are giving birth to babies. Some of my other students have just about given up on school and I have to convince them that getting an education is important. I do have a few who are committed to their education and want to go to college. I plan to do my best for all of my students. But....
Because I have fallen in love with all of them and do want to do my best, I had the first (of what will be many) panic attack/crying jag tonight on my way home from school. All of sudden, I realized that I'm in way over my head and I have all these kids who are looking to me to teach them and I have no clue of what I'm doing! By Tuesday morning at 8am, I need to have a week's worth of lesson plans to my principal and assistant principal and (thanks to TFA's non-training) I'm in full on panic mode. I will be spending the next 4 days in sheer unadulterated terror, scrambling to figure out what I'm doing. You might wonder what I did to cope with the panic attack. Simple enough - I ate a pint of ice cream. Emotional eating is probably not the best way to handle this, but it was the best I could do in a pinch. Besides, Edy's Slow Churned Mint Cookie Crunch is really, really yummy.
What do I need to do this weekend? By Tuesday morning, I need 4 days of lesson plans for 5 classes on 4 subject matters and they must include differentiated instructions for my ELL/Special Ed students. They all have to have assessable learning objectives and must include a "Think-Pair-Share" or a "Think-Write-Pair-Share" activity - something my students loathe (by the way, I loathe them too). I have zero clue on where to start. On top of all of this, I also need to include 10 minute mini-lessons for grammar and vocab because all of my students are severely lacking in these basic skills. OMG! WTF!
It's days like this that I wished I still drank! :-)
You know when they say "Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it." I really wanted to have diverse classes - well I got it, much to my chagrin. See, the other two new English teachers (Cheryl and Chris) whom I mentioned in my previous blog are also teaching 5 classes, except they teach the exact same 5 classes. Cheryl teaches 9th grade writing and Chris teaches 9th grade reading. So they basically need to create just one lesson plan and duplicate it for all 5 classes. Boring day? Yes! Almost zero stress! Hell yes! So yyyyyyyyeah... be careful what you wish for!
You know when they say "Be careful what you wish for, you may receive it." I really wanted to have diverse classes - well I got it, much to my chagrin. See, the other two new English teachers (Cheryl and Chris) whom I mentioned in my previous blog are also teaching 5 classes, except they teach the exact same 5 classes. Cheryl teaches 9th grade writing and Chris teaches 9th grade reading. So they basically need to create just one lesson plan and duplicate it for all 5 classes. Boring day? Yes! Almost zero stress! Hell yes! So yyyyyyyyeah... be careful what you wish for!
 |
| Can you take back a wish?? |
No comments:
Post a Comment