Sunday, November 4, 2018

Shock-tober!

October. Was. The. Longest. Month. Ever.

I genuinely thought that it would never end. I cannot tell you how many times I just sat up frustrated by a seemingly never-ending list of things that needed to get done. It felt like I would finish something just in time to have three or four more deadlines pop up. October was a lot. I am not sad that it is over.

The crazy part is that I do not remember October being this difficult last year. My high-stress points last year were the time between Thanksgiving and the end of the fall semester and the entire month leading up to the fifth grade science STAAR. I think this officially means that I have completed the fun honeymoon phase of teaching and I am starting to feel the normal cycles of teaching. I do hope that October is not always this unpleasant though.

I wish that I could speak more about the struggles but everything now feels like one big fog. The minute that November started, everything started to feel better. I can almost guarantee that a lot of that has to do with my birthday happening very early in the month, but even my students seemed a bit more relaxed.

I have put up quite a few strings lights around my classroom so that I can leave the fluorescent lights off most of the time. I think it makes it easier to keep the room calm and it seems as though my students are a bit more focused during the day with this new lighting. I hope that this is not just because it is a change and in a few weeks things will unravel again because I really enjoy this new ambiance as well.

There are a lot of things that I am excited for as the semester starts to wind down. My classes will finally start to wrap up this semester, meaning that I will be that much closer to a Master's Degree. The holidays are also a wonderful time to reflect and celebrate. I will get to see my family more often. Not to mention all of the wonderful foods that come with this time of year. With a year of being a vegetarian under my belt, I am excited to try out some new things to make our traditional dinners a bit more adventurous.

I am officially committing to reaching out to more people before the end of the year. I know that I have not great at staying in touch recently (since summer really) and that is an important form of self-care. This is going to be a time for me to create and/or restore habits of communication. Please feel free to reach out and keep me accountable to this commitment!

Yay for good times in November and beyond!

Tuesday, September 18, 2018

One Month: Round Two

I just realized that one year ago, I made my first post about the first month of school.

This year, I am currently in the fifth week of school, but the idea is more or less the same. Looking back, it seems that I felt so much more relaxed. I do not really know how I accomplished that feeling, but I did. Just reading about where I was a year ago makes me wonder how I kept things so simple. It was my first year of teaching, everything should have felt like a blur.

Here I was thinking that year two would be so much smoother than year one. That has not happened yet. In fact, I feel as though this year has been far more hectic. I stay at school later. I am completing far more work. I have to make more decisions. My desks at school (yes, I said desks...) are always stacked with papers that need to go somewhere. I just do not understand where it all comes from.

I do not mean for that to sound all doom and gloom. Despite these differences, the feelings are still quite different and I would not want to go back to my first year at all. Even with all of the extra responsibilities and tasks that lay before me, my approach feels far more developed. Despite seeming calm, both in writing and demeanor, I recall feeling absolutely overwhelmed but everything. It seems more likely that I appeared calmer simply because I could not manage to feel any other way.

If I had to describe how I feel this year, I would say that I am reminded of standing in water that is surrounding your face while you stand on your tippy toes. I know that I am not drowning and if all things stay this way, I can maintain for quite some time. However, we all know that life never stays the same. I know that very soon I will have to find a better way to manage everything that I am responsible for, drop some of those responsibilities intentionally, or drown in my stubborn refusal to say "no".

One thing I know for sure is that I am still only continuing to get better. I know that I am still working with an open mind and an open heart and with those two things I am confident that I can succeed. I know that it is okay to make a mistake, but it is not okay to continue making that mistake. I write these things more for myself than anyone else. Staying positive is the only way I keep my head above water. Succumbing to negativity will only guarantee that I fail.

On a rather unrelated note, I am trying out Camp Gladiator too and I have learned/reinforced quite a few things about myself. The first is that I am not a social person in the morning. The second is that I do not like working out with others. The third is that I am incredibly competitive. I do think that I am going to go back to working out on my own afterschool though. I need a break from school and working out was an intentional way that I separated school and from home. I have to get back to that.

Sunday, August 19, 2018

Back Again!

I am not sure when those first-day-of-school jitters go away, but I can tell you that your second year of teaching is not when it happens.

It has been quite some time since I posted anything. This is mostly because it was summer time and I wanted to take some time to reflect and rest. That is not exactly what happened but I tried. It was a busy summer, to say the least. I can now confirm, from my own experiences, that summer is not all beaches and vacations for teachers. I attended PDs, sat in meetings, and even picked up a job for a while.

Today though, I find myself laying in bed trying not to go over every possibility for how tomorrow could go. My lunch is packed, the dishes are done, my lesson plans are turned in, and activities for tomorrow are printed and copied. I am clearly prepared but the jitters are still there. I still question how prepared I am. I can't stop asking myself if I did everything possible to prepare tomorrow.

At the same time, I feel incredibly tranquil. I get to see 60+ bright new faces ready to start their final year of elementary school. In a few hours, I will be smiling and assuring parents (who probably feel first-day-of-school jitters too) that their precious children are in good hands. From my door, I will get to see teachers experiencing their own first days of school. It is all so exciting.

For a few hours tomorrow, my focus will be on taking care of the students in front of me. I get to forget about the grad school class I will need to sit in later that evening. I get to forget about the readings I need to do for my class on Saturday. I get to forget about the meetings I will need to attend before the end of the week. I even get to forget about the lessons and copies I need to make for the next few weeks. It all just melts away on that first day of school.

Tonight, I want to keep things short (so I can get back to trying to fall asleep). To all those teachers fighting the first-day-of-school jitters, it is going to be amazing! For those teachers who have found a way around those jitters, please tell me the secret! Those that do not teach, send good vibes to all the teachers you know (and maybe a treat too 😇)!

Happy First Day of School

Wednesday, June 20, 2018

Year One

I can officially wear an "I survived my first year teaching" badge!

The great thing about the end of this year is that I felt like I did far more than just survive. There were certainly times where it felt like an immense struggle to keep my head above water. There were certainly times when I felt as though nothing was going right. These were ultimately just moments in what was an overall enjoyable year.

This next year will, of course, be nothing like what I had planned. One major change that I will need to adapt to is being the team leader for 5th grade. As excited as I am to have this responsibility, it certainly was not something I anticipated taking on until my third or fourth year teaching. This is certainly an opportunity that I am grateful for and cannot wait to take on. Of course, any advice and best practices that anyone wants to share would be more than helpful so I can avoid as many silly mistakes as possible. 

As part of this new role, I was also allowed to take part in interviews for teachers coming onto the fifth-grade team in the new school year. I honestly thought that sitting in an interview as the person asking the question would relieve some of the pressure. It does not. I was incredibly tense and I felt so much responsibility and pressure. How do you truly determine whether someone is a good fit for a position, team, and campus? What questions really let you get to know others and how they work? How can you tell if someone is great at their work or great at interviews?

Luckily, we found people for the team pretty quickly. No more interviews, but the tension has not really lifted completely. In some ways, I feel particularly responsible for the success or failure of this person next year. This is a wildly new experience for me and I am not too sure how to navigate it. The pressure is so real and I hope that I can find a way to make it work in my favor as we march closer to the start of the next school year.

This summer, I have also had to opportunity to work as a Science Curriculum writer here in Fort Worth. It was certainly one of those serendipitous opportunities that I just sort of stumbled into. I was in a training and one thing led to another and I was getting recommended to be a part of the team. I have learned an incredible amount about Fort Worth, the school district, and the people that live and work here. Not to mention it's a nice short-term summer gig to help pay for graduate school.

As the school year came to a close, I was also completing my first grad school class, a Maymester. Those two weeks were incredibly intense (and expensive). However, I learned quite a lot and it has actually prepared me in part for the additional leadership I will be taking on in the Fall. Based on this experience, I think I will have an alright time completing the rest of this degree in time to graduate next spring.

I did not get to write this post as early as I would have liked, but I didn't know that the sprint to the end of the year continued long after the students left the building on the last day. Pretty soon, I will get to stop and breathe and enjoy this time away from work. The amazing thing about finding myself in a career I truly enjoy is that part of me has been ready for the next school year to start. I am so excited to apply the things that I have learned about myself and about teaching. I am excited to get to know a new group of students. This really shows me that I have really found a great place to be.

Sunday, May 6, 2018

My Final Exam

I cannot believe that it is already reaching the end of my first year. There have been so many memorable moments, both great and not, that I am sad that I did not get to document or share them all. Often, I wanted to share questions or stories but found myself absolutely exhausted at the end of the day wanting to do nothing more than eat, sleep, and not use my brain for a bit.

With the end of the year also comes those final reflective assignments. I have decided to complete of them here as a way to share my thoughts from the entire year. I am just copying the questions from the assignment and answering them here. Nothing fancy, just thinking and writing.

  1. What worked for you this year?
    • I was pretty successful at making sure that my students knew I believed in them and expected only their best. This was something that I committed myself to doing before I even walked into my classroom. I knew that I wanted to be someone that pushed students to do their best, even when they felt like their best wasn't good enough. This might seem like something intangible and unmeasurable, but I tried to capture it anyways. I gave my students an anonymous survey (while I was absent so there was no way I could pressure students into giving positive responses) and I learned quite a bit. One of the good things I found was that when asked to respond to "My teacher expects us to do our best in this class", most of my students selected "Yes, Always". There was not one response lower than "Maybe/Sometimes". For me, this means that I have to continue pushing students to be their best at all times. It really does mean something to students to have someone in their corner believing in them.
  2. What didn't work for you?
    • Speaking of anonymous surveys, there were two areas that I really feel need to be improved next year: respect and empathy. I saw this show up in some of the questions that my students responded to in the aforementioned survey. They generally did not feel as though their peers followed directions the first time or respected the teacher. It is not in my nature to be incredibly strict so I knew that was going to be a challenge from the start. Seeing this show up for other students really means that I have to be far more serious with how I approach the first months of school. I don't want to have to move to the "no smiles until November" ideology, but I also have to find a better way to balance the way my classroom runs. It's year one. My management overall did not work. It doesn't feel great to say, but I would rather face the facts and make a change then pretend things are great and continue to struggle.
  3. What are one or two strategies that you want to focus on implementing next year? Why? How?
    • One strategy I want to focus on next year is differentiated instruction. This year, I felt as though I was barely able to develop a general plan for all of my students, much less multiple sets of plans for students of varying abilities. I know that this is something that comes with experience and I will get better at, but it never hurts to start in this upcoming year by adding an option for assignments here or there, finding a wider variety of multimedia to cover topics, or even expanding my knowledge of educational technologies.
    • Another strategy I want to develop farther are stations. This is something that I felt I got a start on this year but did not really take it as far as it could go. I know that this will ultimately be one of the greatest tools in my toolbox for ensuring student success, but right now my stations make my head spin and I can never tell if they're going well or are more like a train wreck. This is one that I will spend quite a bit of time over the summer refining and placing into my lesson plans.
  4. What are one or two units that you want to focus on improving next year? Why? How?
    • Matter and Energy
      • The properties of matter is just a lot of information. There are a lot of new terms, tools, and ideas. I think this ultimately just means I need to find a better way to introduce the components of this unit earlier in the year (use a tool here or there) and review and spiral constantly throughout the year. It was pretty easy to see how my instruction could have improved for this unit.
    • Earth and Space
      • This unit had a mix of difficult concepts and poor timing. There were quite a few ideas that were a bit abstract and hard to find a way for students to interact with meaningfully. In reality, how do you get students to interact with an idea like "climate occurs over longs periods of time" in the span of a week? It was certainly a challenge I want to find better methods for. Plus, this unit was split by Spring Break and that just made teaching anything far more difficult than I ever realized.
  5. What is the biggest takeaway from your first year?
    • Teaching is so many things. Hilarious. Exhausting. Inspiring. Draining. Scary. Intense. Rewarding. Often multiple things in a single hour, if not in the span of ten minutes. I found a way to survive it all this year. I will only get better as time goes on.
  6. How does this year leave you? Are you inspired? Dejected? Tired? Horrified? Excited? Ambivalent?
    • I am certainly tired. This is not even the physical type of tired. Most days, I can still make it to the gym or throw the football with my students at recess. I just feel mentally drained. It is a pretty new feeling for me. I think like working out though, with consistency, my mind and body will develop the stamina required to make it through the entire school year without feeling this drained by May.
  7. What do you need to be the kind of teacher that you want to be?
    • Summer. Vacation. I knew teaching was hard but wow. This summer will be about relaxing for sure. I will spend quite a bit of time away from curriculum development, classroom management strategies, and other forms of professional development. I need those things, but I also need a break. I am wildly excited for summer to refresh and come back in the fall ready to try a whole new set of ideas and make the most of my time with students.
  8. What did you learn most from your students?
    • I have learned that I really need to relax. I get really caught up in wanting everything to be perfect and when you're in a room of 20 or more 11 year olds, absolutely nothing is going to go perfectly. In fact, one of the things I can count on is that no matter how well I think things are planned, it is impossible to foresee all the possibilities. I just have to be flexible and roll with whatever walks into school every single day.
  9. What did you learn most from your colleagues?
    • I am grateful to be at a school where the people I work with are incredibly supportive. I have learned so much from everyone I get to interact and I am grateful for the experience. I think one of the most grounding things that my colleagues have taught me, especially the other teachers on my team, is that I am more than the test scores of my students. It is important for students to do and there is work that goes into that. The trick that they have really emphasized is that I shouldn't beat myself up when scores are not what I expect because the scores do not always represent the human or the story behind it. They are just numbers and at the end of the day, I should not lose sleep or worry myself silly over them.
  10. What did you learn about yourself?
    • I am getting better and better about taking risks. Twice this year, I have found myself on stage dancing in front of my students. I still won't tell my students how old I am or that this is officially my first year teaching, but I think they all know by this point. I think that being honest with students really shows them that you are someone they can trust. I know I need to do better at this, as I am not a naturally trusting person myself, but it means a lot for relationship building. I really think that I can push myself even farther and be a positive role model for students who are afraid to open up and be themselves.

Sunday, February 11, 2018

Time Flies

I'm not sure how it's been so long but the time has certainly flown by I wrote last.

When I last wrote, I was chillin at the bottom of the roller coaster of the school year. The disillusionment phase hit me pretty hard and I was completely ready for the two week winter break. I don't know about everyone else, but two weeks is such a great amount of time. I felt like I was able to get all the traveling and visiting done in the first week and then rest, reflect, and recover in the second week. It was just what I needed to come back refreshed for the second half of the year.

Coming back into the classroom, I tried to shake things up a bit. I spent some time looking back on the things that worked and the things that did not. Based on my experiences and some advice, I entered 2018 with a few new strategies for my classroom. The exciting thing is that some of it has actually worked. There were some things that I have tried that have not panned out all that well but that's okay, it just means I have a few new things on my list of ideas to try again next year (with some tweaking of course).

Something that worked for me last semester that I have expanded on this semester was the creation of student jobs. I started the year with only two jobs in my rotations: a table captain and a time keeper. I added a pencil person (I could not think of a better name so that is literally what the position is called) halfway through the semester to eliminate yet another task that would otherwise fall to me (sharpening and distributing pencils). Students enjoyed these jobs and they increased learning time, even if only by a minute or two a day.

This semester, I added a classroom helper and a committee to the list of jobs that students could occupy. Technically, the classroom helper was already an unofficial position, but I decided to solidify it so that students could apply from all rotations as opposed to me selecting the same three students every time. More students were asking to help around the classroom and I am not one to deny students without a fair and valid reason. Creating this position allowed me to do so without feeling like I was giving any students special treatment.

The committee has proven to be more of a burden actually. It is a group of students tasked with meeting during lunch every other week to discuss ways to improve the classroom. Ultimately, this group just meets during lunch and talks in circles about changes that cannot really be applied to this classroom. I do not blame the students for this. I had lofty expectations but did not give the tools for students to be able to meet those expectations. That failure falls on me and this is a position that I will have to give far more thought and structure to in the future.

I also tried to come back into the semester stricter than I was in the fall. The results have been mixed at best. I yell more, which does not feel great. I have far more power struggles than I need to. I feel a bit more drained by the end of the week. I certainly do not think I will keep this up for the rest of the year. I set the tone for my classroom at the start of the year and while it wasn't perfect, it also wasn't terrible so I think I am spending far more energy than it's worth trying to "change" things. I feel myself slowly returning to my more natural style of teaching, I just hope that my shift did not cause too much irrevocable damage to the relationships I had with my students.

In brighter news, my students' pencil usage is much lower from the fall semester. I am sure that in the course of 18 weeks, we went through at least 150 to 200 pencils. This semester, we've been working with the same 30 since we came back in January. I am sure part of that change came from the fact that I duct taped (shiny bright silver duct tape) erasers (bright multicolored erasers) to my pencils. This made it much harder for students to accidently remove pencils from my class. I also let students know that I bought materials (including colored pencils, markers, etc.) for them and would not be doing so again, so whatever materials they break would be left like that and they would have to do without. Things are still looking pretty fresh, but I will have to refresh the pencils from use, which is better than replacing pencils that constantly disappear.

2018 also marks the year that I got the flu for the first time. I will say that it was miserable. I absolutely would not recommend it to anyone. Luckily, I only had it for about 48 hours and only had to miss one day of work. The stress of missing school is so intense. I was really aiming for perfect attendance, mostly because I really did not want to prepare for a substitute. I think I did alright, but it felt like I stayed behind almost all week. In the end, I am grateful that I recovered so quickly, especially during a year like this one with such a particularly dangerous flu strain.

There is always so much going on. I will do a far better job in the future keeping up with my reflections. It is especially important for this year of teaching to keep myself aware so that my growth in consistent. I also just feel better after writing and sharing my struggles and my successes. It's been a solid start so let's keep 2018 going smoothly!

Shock-tober!

October. Was. The. Longest. Month. Ever. I genuinely thought that it would never end. I cannot tell you how many times I just sat up frus...