The Wild World of Teaching

Needless to say, it has been a wild and strange few days. The first days of school have shown me a great deal of new things. So far I've been trying to figure out the stories these kids are trying to tell. They hold their heads a certain way, project body language a certain way, and use words a certain way. What kind of things have these kids had to deal with at the tender age of 12 and 13?

Today I was greeted by several of my kids covering their notebooks with graffiti about a teenager named Fat Head. Fat Head was the street name of a young person named Aaron. He was shot and died last night in the neighborhood where some of my students live. This is the second teenager to be shot to death in our area in the past two months. We are a small Southern town. We have less than 68,000 people in the entire county. You wouldn't expect to have this level of violence in the little backwoods area where we live.

How did these children react to the death of someone they knew? There were no tears. There were no sighs. Just drawing and writing. Frankly, the lack of emotional display bothers me almost as much as the ending of this young life.

Coming up for air

I'm trying to take a moment to come up for air. So far I've been working for 8 days straight and don't really see myself taking a day off in the next week, possibly for 2 weeks. Because of the fact that I've spent most of my past days in meetings, I've had to spend evenings and a good part of the weekend getting my classroom ready for the first day of school on Wednesday.

Tomorrow is another morning of meetings, and then I head over to my school to try to pull together a simple lesson plan for Wednesday. The meetings have hit all parts of the the spectrum as far as their usefulness. At the top of the usefulness index would be the meetings presented by the publisher of our new textbooks. This was informative, to say the least. Going lower down on the scale of usefulness would be the county's presentations. This vacillated between very useful and 'wake me up when we are done.' Finally, at the very bottom, was the presentation by the state representative on standards. Seriously, dental work would have been less painful.

What I have been both delighted by and grateful for is the support being given to me by my colleagues. These are truly wonderful people. Not only do I have the great fortune to have an amazing mentor assigned to me, but our department head and another senior teacher have taken me under their wings.

Teacher Question

Busy, busy week. I've been in new teacher orientation and training the past couple of days. Fortunately the soon-to-be ex has helped out by taking Monkey Boy with him to the Michigan House, so I can focus on my work. I have a question for those of you who are teachers: Is being asked to join a school district committee a good thing?

I was wrapping up at orientation this morning and someone asked me what my last name was so I told her. After telling her, the trainer whipped around and asked, "Are you [insert real name here]?" I suspiciously asked, "Why?"

"Human Resources forwarded your resume to me because they were so excited about it. They said that you could do some teacher training and we want you on our technology committee."

You see, I'm not just a geek. I'm their queen. I've written several books and once upon a time, I was a trainer for Microsoft. I was informed by the trainer that my resume has been circulated around the county already. Very scary.

Hmmm, is this request to join a committee a good thing? Seems like a good thing, but I'm such a newbie, I don't know if this is something I should get involved with. Any feedback would be appreciated.

New topic: I'll try to get photos of my room posted this weekend. I'm in a trailer, which they actually call trailers at my school. No pretty names are being used for these things like 'pods' or 'instructional cottages' or 'mobile training units.' Nope, they just call them plain ol' trailers. I have decided that my students and I will not be calling it a trailer. I've renamed mine to the Cabana. I like the sauciness of it. How about you?

Wow! What a week!

Wow! There's no other word to use. I'm still reeling from the whole 'I got a job' thing. I've checked out my classroom. I'm in one of those lovely trailers that seem to pop up around schools like mushrooms. I'm not being placed in a trailer because I'm the new kid. It's just the classroom of the person I'm replacing. I actually like it. At least I won't have to deal with hallway noise, plus think of all the fun we'll have once hurricane season is in full swing! I've picked up my textbook and got my 'Sonny Dollars,' so named because the governor of our great state, Sonny Perdue, supported allocating $100 for each teacher in our state to buy classroom supplies.

So here I am, contemplating what I'm doing. I'll be teaching math to 114 kids. That in itself is a little scary. Add to this parents, administrators and surprise evaluations and it adds up to very scary. I hope I don't screw this up.

I'm a Teacher!

I just got a phone call with the offer. I'll be teaching 7th grade math!!

I PASSED!! I PASSED!! I PASSED!!

I passed my teacher certification exam!!!!!!! I actually have to wait until I get the official copy of my test score, but they posted on the exam site at 5:00pm today whether or not you passed, and I did!!!!! I just need to make sure that the state of Georgia has my transcript with my SAT scores and I can start interviewing. Excuse me while I spend the rest of my evening playing music really loud and dancing like a fool!!