So my first 5 days of teaching have come and gone. It’s exactly what I expected in some ways and so very far from it in others. I have a rambunctious class of 20 third graders, most of whom are 8 years old. I have 2 students who are receiving special education services, 6 students receiving ESL, and 3 students who are repeating the third grade, having failed their end-of-grade tests (EOGs) last year.
My first two days of teaching were trying, to say the least. I broke down sobbing both days as soon as my students left the room, feeling completely out of control of my situation and my classroom. I’ve worked with a lot of students with behavior problems before but never in a situation where it’s 20 on 1 and the behavioral system in place is ineffective and incomplete. I quickly learned which students were going to cause me problems and which weren’t, and quickly decided that I needed to do something to make the next days different.
That having been said, I haven’t figured it out yet. I have a student who has been sent out of my classroom each and every day since the second day of school. I have students talking about other students’ mamas every single day. I have students tattling every single day, telling me things of which I can’t either confirm or deny the truth. It doesn’t phase me anymore, which is both good (because I stay much more composed) and bad (because I can’t settle for anything less than 100% of my students behaving 100% of the time). I’ve added about 7 levels to my classroom management system, including whole-class and individual student rewards and consequences. My students, though, don’t seem to care. Until they have to walk in a silent, single file line around the playground at recess instead of playing, of course. That having been said, they don’t really do that either. Even when they know they can play as soon as they walk a lap right. I guess that’s too delayed, since the laps are long.
[Author’s note – I’ve picked up this entry after day 9 of teaching] Today I was the recipient of my very first death threat – one of my students was mad at me for making them walk laps at recess, and wrote a note to one of my other students that said “I going to jail I’m going to kill Ms. H.” The other student wrote back “Why?” The first student responded “She made us walk laps at recess.” Needless to say, a bit of an overreaction, I believe. I’m not at all scared for my safety, but it was definitely unexpected.
[Author’s note – I’ve picked up this entry again after day 10 of teaching – that’s just sort of how it goes…little bits of everything slowly] I found out who wrote the threat, dealt with it, tried to call his parents, but couldn’t get a hold of them. Hopefully I hear back from them sometime this weekend, because I think it’s very important that they know. If I wanted to, I could have this child suspended. I’m not going to do that because I don’t think he deserves it, but his parents need to know. He apologized and will be writing me a letter this weekend explaining what happened, why it happened, why he knows that it’s a very serious situation, and apologizing for his actions. If he does it, I’ll be pleased.
I gave my students their first 3 post-instruction assessments (“real tests”) yesterday and was surprised to see some of the results. Some of the students performed exactly how I expected them to. A significant number of them performed disappointingly poorly. Most of them, though, impressed me with how much they actually learned. This was particularly evident in math, because I had two sets of pre-test and diagnostic scores with which to compare these first objective scores, so the growth was concrete and measurable. Just shy of half of my class scored 80% or above on the first math test, which was evaluating place value and number sense. These two things are a consistent struggle for elementary students, especially those coming from low-income backgrounds. So to have almost half of my class master the material at 80% or higher is something to celebrate. There’s still a lot of work to do to get the rest of the students where they need to be, but we’re getting there. I was especially struck by my students’ performance because my lessons over the course of the first 10 days of school felt so off-handed and poorly executed that I was certain my students weren’t absorbing any of it. To see that they had, though, was completely reinvigorating.
Those lightbulb moments – those are why I teach for equality.
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