So far, the biggest frustration of teaching third grade is management. While I have some really challenging kids who bring their own set of issues to the table, trying to keep a room of eight-year-olds on task for 90 minutes is a daunting task in and of itself. They're wiggly, easily distracted, and goodness, do they like to talk. This means that I spend a lot of my day yelling. I hate this, especially because it means I usually don't get through my lessons with two of my three classes (today, it took me two full 90-minute periods to get through the math lesson with my homeroom. Good thing I didn't have anything planned for the extra time...). Because management is bad, I haven't yet dared try centers, which would let me work more closely with the kids who have been struggling but would be disastrous if the other two groups couldn't work independently.
While there have been many small victories in my first two weeks of teaching--one of which came today, when our biggest behavior challenge, an emotionally disturbed, bipolar seven-year-old who's off his meds, wrote down on a behavior form that the adults he wanted to spend more time with were the two social workers and Ms. L.--there have been far more frustrations. I usually start the day confident in what I have prepared, and come home thinking of all the things I have to fix before tomorrow. Whenever I think I've gotten ahead, I quickly realize that there were 17 things I didn't think all the way through that threaten to derail class at any time. I feel awful for the half of every class that is sitting there quietly waiting to learn, and I feel awful that the other half of the class isn't invested enough for whatever reason to want to behave.
So I guess what surprises me the most is that even in the chaos, my kids still love me--not in a tooting-my-own-horn, I'm-such-a-great-teacher kind of way, because that is not the way I feel at all, but in an eight-year-old's trusting, optimistic way. Barely a day goes by where I don't find some note on my desk around lunchtime, painstakingly colored in crayon or marker, that says "I love you Ms. L." (or some misspelling of my last name). While I greet my kids with a handshake at the door, some of them go in for the hug anyway. Today, when I was getting my last few kids ready to go to the bus, they were dragging their feet in cleaning up the place value blocks they'd been using ("Ms. L., can we please take out the blocks to review what we did today?" Melted my heart. Of course, they spent more time building towers with them than reviewing how many tens make up a hundred, but baby steps.). I told Grant, one of my brightest students in my last class of the day, which is the worst behaved, to hurry up or he'd miss his bus and be stuck at school with me all night.
Grant: But I want to stay with you!
Ms. L: Even though I yell all day?
Grant: ...I can live with the yelling.
The management will get better, I'm told. Special ed push-ins will start soon, giving many of my kids more of the one-on-one attention they need. Hopefully once children get in the routine of being in class and having to follow rules--something that was generally non-existent in my school last year--they will settle down. Hopefully when they find success, they will be more inspired to work hard to build upon it. But for right now, I just feel lucky that despite everything, my kids just genuinely want to be loved.
While there have been many small victories in my first two weeks of teaching--one of which came today, when our biggest behavior challenge, an emotionally disturbed, bipolar seven-year-old who's off his meds, wrote down on a behavior form that the adults he wanted to spend more time with were the two social workers and Ms. L.--there have been far more frustrations. I usually start the day confident in what I have prepared, and come home thinking of all the things I have to fix before tomorrow. Whenever I think I've gotten ahead, I quickly realize that there were 17 things I didn't think all the way through that threaten to derail class at any time. I feel awful for the half of every class that is sitting there quietly waiting to learn, and I feel awful that the other half of the class isn't invested enough for whatever reason to want to behave.
So I guess what surprises me the most is that even in the chaos, my kids still love me--not in a tooting-my-own-horn, I'm-such-a-great-teacher kind of way, because that is not the way I feel at all, but in an eight-year-old's trusting, optimistic way. Barely a day goes by where I don't find some note on my desk around lunchtime, painstakingly colored in crayon or marker, that says "I love you Ms. L." (or some misspelling of my last name). While I greet my kids with a handshake at the door, some of them go in for the hug anyway. Today, when I was getting my last few kids ready to go to the bus, they were dragging their feet in cleaning up the place value blocks they'd been using ("Ms. L., can we please take out the blocks to review what we did today?" Melted my heart. Of course, they spent more time building towers with them than reviewing how many tens make up a hundred, but baby steps.). I told Grant, one of my brightest students in my last class of the day, which is the worst behaved, to hurry up or he'd miss his bus and be stuck at school with me all night.
Grant: But I want to stay with you!
Ms. L: Even though I yell all day?
Grant: ...I can live with the yelling.
The management will get better, I'm told. Special ed push-ins will start soon, giving many of my kids more of the one-on-one attention they need. Hopefully once children get in the routine of being in class and having to follow rules--something that was generally non-existent in my school last year--they will settle down. Hopefully when they find success, they will be more inspired to work hard to build upon it. But for right now, I just feel lucky that despite everything, my kids just genuinely want to be loved.
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