Forgot to do my paper journal today, so this will have to do double duty.
Day after Halloween was not as horrific as I'd been afraid. Dylan was out again (second time this week) and several of the kids were sluggish and/or not feeling terribly well, but all in all not a bad day.
I'm feeling badly about keeping them in their desks all day, but am unsure what to do about it at this juncture. They're not even settled down enough for working in pairs, as we demonstrated with the science experiment we tried to do today and Tuesday. Noisy, yelling, not sharing, out of their seats... Frustrating. I want to get their desks in groups, but I have no idea how to do it. So many of my kids are just explosive with each other. Maybe I just need to steel myself for sending home lots of notes for a couple of weeks, and put them wherever I can. It almost feels like setting them up for failure... but on the other hand, the current arrangement is not going to work forever. And they are going to have to learn to work with each other, or at least near each other.
I'm at a loss for what to do about K, the boy I was writing about yesterday. He seems to have some emotional problems, and I'm having trouble finding a balance between expecting more of him than he's capable of providing and letting him get away with things. Sometimes he can take correction gracefully, and sometimes he just shuts down, and I can't get him to say a word. Sometimes he won't even nod his head. Fortunately his old teacher is across the hall... but I can't keep calling her out of her classroom every time he shuts down on me. I need to talk to her in the morning and see if she has some ideas for managing him.
Going to DC this weekend for my dad's concert. taking the business-class train, so as to have space to spread out and do my lesson plans. Looking forward to getting them done over the weekend, so that I only have to tweak them during the week rather than writing the whole damn things every night. I didn't have any choice this week, but hopefully I'll never have to do it again. >_<
About Me
- Sarah Kendall
- Let me teach like a Steinway, spinning slowly in April air, so almost-falling, so hinderingly dangling from the neck of the movers' crane. So on the edge of losing everything. Let me teach like the first snow, falling. -Taylor Mali
3 comments:
Hi Sarah!
I'm sorry I haven't written in a long time. I'm planning on getting back on it when I move into a Real House next week, instead of a very cold barn. But, in the meantime, I wanted to send encouragement and love and other warm happy things.
Also, a friend of Drew's is also a first time teacher down in Florida and has a fantastic blog about it, which I might suggest - although he's teaching high school, so it's a little different (!). But it's at http://first-year-teaching.blogspot.com/
I was about to leave a comment about how I appreciate your patronization of my blog when I realized the connection between you, bradley, drew, myself. Well, regardless of who knows who, I'll be writing more, and certainly reading your blog. I don't see anything wrong with your writing, though I do know the more one writes the better one gets, whether they want to improve or not. So I'm looking forward to future entries about knee-high terrors from the North!
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