Well, it's been a crazy week. I'm now back in New Orleans for good, sitting in my house on my new bed and basking in the glory of air conditioning I will soon have to pay the electric bill for. So far, the real world is pretty unglamorous (dinner tonight involved me sitting in bed with a box of pizza watching Sports Night). But institute is over and I'm three days into my new job!
Leaving Atlanta was harder than I thought it would be. I'm really going to miss my kids, and I've already started missing my CMA group. I got spoiled working with such great, funny people who all shared my mindset and my sense of humor, but I'm so grateful for the experience and for the invaluable lessons I took away from it.
One of the hardest parts of leaving my kids was that I left not knowing if I would ever find out if our hard work this summer paid off. The kids all have my email address, but it's on them to let me know if they passed the CRCT, how they're doing in high school, etc. It's a little crazy to have invested five weeks of my life thinking solely about them and their well-being, and then to shift in the span of about 60 hours to focusing solely on the well-being of 80 third-graders I won't meet for another three weeks. Although the last day of school brought plenty of drama (threats of a school-v.-school fight brought the Atlanta police to dismissal), I am really going to miss teaching 8th grade.
Saturday was taken up by one of the more ridiculous road trips I've been on. Jon and I caravaned with our CMA, Evan, and his girlfriend, and the trip took us to Cracker Barrel (excellent!), a fictional Chick-Fil-A (Evan will never live it down), and finally home to New Orleans. It's really weird to no longer be living with the entire New Orleans corps (especially since many of them are still living together at Tulane), but I really do love our house. I won the coin toss for the big bedroom, which is nice (I have a fireplace!), although Thea's window does open out onto the roof which is also a big perk. Getting everything set up has been much easier than I thought it would be, although I will be very grateful when my dad comes down with all of the furniture for our downstairs this weekend. Ideally this eating-takeout-in-bed thing will not become my regular dinner routine.
While most people in my corps are either home right now or hanging out in New Orleans finding a place to live, I've been, well, working. Our PD started on Monday, and it's been a total whirlwind of information. Though I'm teaching in a charter network that has 20 TFA first-years, with 10 at my campus alone, I'm still the only TFA teacher in my small school, and I am, as far as I can tell, the only TFA first-year who is teaching entirely alone (everyone else has either a co-teacher or a paraprofessional in the room all day). This is...well, daunting, although this is the job that every teacher at an RSD school (or many other charters in the city) faces. The way my charter network works is that it splits our school, which serves pre-K to 8th grade, into four small schools: Pre-K - 1, 2-3, 4-6, and 7-8. So while there are two TFAers in the PK-1 school, three in the 4-6, and four in the 7-8, it's just yours truly holding down the fort in 2-3. I'm also the only white staff member at my school and the only fresh-out-of-college teacher (there are three other first-year teachers, but they've all been out of college for at least two years). These were all facts that freaked me out on the first day, but that I've since started to get over. I've begun to accept that this is just not going to be like institute was, even if it sort of will be for my friends who are co-teaching with each other in the 7-8 school. Room 409 is my classroom and no one else's, which is both crazy and empowering. How much math these third-graders learn this year is entirely up to me.
Most of this week has been talking about big-picture stuff (with some long days of literacy training mixed in. Besides teaching math to every third-grader at my school, I also am teaching a 90-minute literacy block every day that focuses on phonics and phonemic awareness). There have been some days with the whole network in one school, and others where it's just us out in our little campus in New Orleans East. I've been getting to know the other teachers at my small school (which will be affectionately known as the sophomore house--our school is modular, meaning it is all in trailers, so each small school gets its own building, or house), though I'm very much looking forward to getting to know the entire staff of the school. My school leader is a total baller, and I'm really excited to work under him. I'm sure things will start to look more daunting next week, when we start to dive more into curriculum and I need to start thinking about how to teach math to third graders, but for now, I'm just excited to be getting started. And after 5:50 am wake-up calls all though institute, sleeping in until 6:45 seems like that much more of a luxury.
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