Rollercoaster

Remember what I said about the first two weeks being Golden? In many ways this week was anything but. It was more like a rollercoaster...

On Monday, two people came to observe my classroom unannounced. Whereas the first two weeks had been going well, Monday was close to a disaster. Students weren't paying attention, and I had to constantly move students around the classroom and threaten to send them to an undesirable classroom in the school (A teacher I'll call Ms. K, who I'll talk about later). To make it worse, one teacher sat in the back discussing everything I was doing wrong in a voice loud enough for me to hear and incidentally, loud enough for my students. So not only was I having basic management issues, but now the students felt the right to question my competancy. When they left a student shouted out, "You're getting fired!" And it was all I could do to remain calm and not burst into tears.

Not only did I have the observation, but I had to meet with both of them later that day. In the meeting one asked if I knew anything about teaching reading and said some other harsh things about parents potentially needing to call the superindendent of schools. It was hard to hear, but ended much better as we came up with an action plan to improve instruction. So Monday was pretty awful.

But Monday night I worked my butt off planning, and came in excited on Tuesday. I brought in artifacts from China to help students to connect to a story on Chinatown, I had a fun math activity, and I was determined to have a better week. My lessons went well, and I felt great. But then I had a student write a threatening note about wanting to be a murderer...which nearly ended in a fight.

Wednesday, while I was tutoring a student after school, the student found a small, yellow plastic bag on the ledge of another student's desk. It was about one inch by one inch and had no other purpose than to hold drugs. After she found that, I looked in the students desk and discovered another bag, this one holding white residue and a few small rock-looking things. I brought it down to our dean of discipline who said it was probably residue from crack. He called the parent, and 15 minutes later the child was at school with the grandparent. The students denied everything and said it was planted on him. A conference with the parent was schedule for the next day.

Thursday, in the morning the dean of discipline was having conferences with both the "small plastic bag" student and the "murder note" student. Meanwhile I was being observed by my university supervisor (from my grad school). The morning wasn't perfect, but we had a decent vocabulary lesson. I met with my supervisor later and she said I had improved a lot from the beginning of the year and was making improvements. Yay!!

But later in the day, both the students who had met with the dean were sent back to my classroom. They decided that the "crack" was actually chalk (like writing on the board chalk) and he was given a two day suspension for lying and for having a look alike drug substance. But the suspension didn't start until the next day. The murder note student, who had tried to stab another student with a pair of scissors was sent back and said to only need personal counseling.

As you might expect, the afternoon turned somewhat disasterous. I was interupted while introducing a reading lesson when someone came to the door, which gave the murder note student and another student the chance to get into a brawl and made it difficult to have good lessons from there on out. Thursday ended up to be not the hottest day.

That's what I mean by rollercoaster--lots of ups and downs and up agains and down agains. In the course of the week, I was told I was both a horrible teacher and a wonderful teacher, I had a student threaten to murder another, another who brought what was either blackboard chalk or crack to school, and a number of smaller incidental issues thrown in along the way. There some great lessons and some bombs....and hopefully in there, a few teachable moments where they learned.

In upcoming posts: more about my school, for reals, and a little about "Ms. K."