New Day

1. Spend more time at school, and do less work at home.
2. No thinking about school in my bedroom.

Those are my two new rules for staying more relaxed. So far, it is working.

This morning I met with my mentor, and learned a couple of important things. First of all, I can't actually ignore the bad students. In fact, I have to make them learn the stuff anyway, even if they are not cooperating enough to participate. She keeps written work to correspond with all of her activities, so when she makes students do the boring written work, they're actually learning the material.

Oh boy. Now I need to create a library of written work to correspond with all (okay, lots) of my lessons. In time, in time. I will add it to my long-term to-do list, which also includes reorganizing my exams and differentiating everything.

In the short term, she suggested that I rearrange my classroom. Now, instead of having six large tables with kids all around them, I have one giant U-shaped arrangement tables, with a smaller U-shaped table in the middle. I've put chairs all around the outside of the two Us (I'm aware that both "Us" and "U's" are acceptable, but I just don't like a non-possessive apostrophe). This way, the students are all facing me, and not each other. It also makes my class tighter, in that all my students are closer to me, but there is more room to walk around while teaching and while they are doing work.

And you know what? It works. My classes were generally better today. Not great, not perfect, but still better. It makes it easier for kids to watch me, and harder for them to talk to each other. While doing worksheets, they are better able to work with a partner, but less likely to work in loud groups. I can also keep track of all of them more easily. And the new assigned seats don't hurt either.

I've determined that either a) this is a good classroom setup, or b) students are thrown off by a new arrangement. If a) is the answer, than it should get even better from here. If b) is the case, I guess I'll be rearranging tables once a month. I hope not, though, it's exhausting.

My mentor also gave me some daisies for my desk (see above photo). It makes a huge difference in my day. It's like a little bit of artificial sunshine. I may keep flowers here permanently, to help fight the shortening days.

Only 2 parent phone calls tonight. I do need to go buy iodine, though, so I can stain some onion skin and cheek cells to show the kids in a microscope. I have a microscope activity planned tomorrow. I'll have two microscopes that kids can take turns using, while the rest of the class works on a packet about cells. It's halfway towards doing a lab, so we'll see how it goes. I would like to do more labs with them.

Next week is the end of the marking period (I think). After 1 quarter, about 85% of my students are passing. I think that's good? At the very least, it should help get another few students working hard.

I ended one of my classes early, and gave them paper to share their opinions about the class and about the unit (motion). A few of them commented that speed/distance/time is too much like math, and they don't understand how it relates to science. That's good to know. I need to make sure to reinforce how it's important to science. Now I'm surfing Mythbusters clips to find a helpful one that relates speed to science and technology.

It didn't hurt my day that I had a good weekend. My fire department raised over $15,000 for the Wounded Warriors Project. I got to go one one ambulance call. I ate a burrito and sushi. I spent several hours entering data into a stupid TFA tracker that my adviser gave me...and it worked out really well! Even though I looked at the Unit 1 Assessments and saw lots of failure, there was also a lot of not failure. Some objectives were really well mastered. Some weren't, but I already have ideas on how to weave them into future lessons. I actually feel like a not-terrible teacher. Maybe I'm not useless after all. I started this week feeling like a not-useless, not-terrible teacher.

Tonight will be my third of five spin classes. I can't tell whether I'll be sad when the Groupon runs out, or happy that it's done. It's hard work, but kind of fun. Kind of like teaching.