So...yeah...not much to blog about. Kind of boring.
PSYCH.
I hope you enjoyed that joke. Because it seemed pretty funny to me, but then, I've been slowly but surely adopting my students' senses of humor. And they laugh for like 10 minutes about each individual fart in class. Seriously, each fart is a 10 minute class diversion. So maybe it wasn't that funny. Because before I started teaching, when I had a good sense of humor, I think my laugh time to fart ratio was no more than a minute. Now, that my sense of humor is changing, my ratio has gone up to between 2-3 minutes depending on the duration, tone, and perpetrator of the fart.
Anyway, I've been meaning to catch up on old blogposts for record-keeping sake AND I want to keep a decent record of my experiences teaching. Every day is definitely an experience. I've had to say things I never thought I'd say in my life. Here are a few examples:
1. Jevon, stop blowing your burp stank in Janae's face.
2. No giving wet willies when my back is turned! [Looking back on it, I don't know exactly why I said this. It is not as if wet willies are allowed when my back is not turned...I'm generally against wet willies in the classroom]
3. Though the intense debate about whether a hamburger is a sandwich is interesting, we need to get back to physics now. Plus, I don't want anyone to get into a fight today. Especially not about sandwiches.
4. It doesn't matter that I didn't see how you got in the class. You weren't here when I took attendance. You are late.[the student dropped on the floor and army crawled to their seat so that I couldn't see them]
I have so many struggles. I fail every day, and I started to write a list of struggles here for everyone to see for the sake of openness, honesty, and record keeping . But then it started to get awkwardly long and seemed overwhelmingly whiny. So I deleted it. This is the cliffnotes version: I procrastinate, fail to work smart, stress about my students' college applications, worry that I'm not actually preparing my students for college, don't know how to handle the issues of my students who have children and/or are pregnant, and I regularly use my first hour as a tester hour for my lessons (poor kids - they get typos, bad explanations, everything in the bad first-year teacher gauntlet).
Here are some of my more recent victories:
1. The other day, Korin, a boy from my advisory, ran up to me and say "Momma! Momma! I got into Grand Valley State University!" and then hugged me. It was awesome to feel like I was one of the first people he wanted to tell and feel like those few seconds of my life could be in an inspirational film (even though ten minutes later, I would be teaching my sixth hour which usually looks like it could be in a teacher what-not-to-do film). Some of my advisory students call me their school mom and have more recently abbreviated that to momma in conversation.
2. I gave my students a pretty difficult test, and the average between all of my classes was about a 75%. At first I was a little down about this; after all, I want them all to succeed (and for me that traditionally means A's!). But after reflecting on how far my students have come, I have since realized how amazing this average is and how much progress they have made.
3. On Thursday, a student was complaining about the way I graded the test (specifically taking off points for missing units). They called me petty. And for once, I actually didn't care. It was the weirdest thing. Definitely my first time not caring. I just thought "haters gonna hate hate hate hate hate hate" and moved on. I've decided that's going to be my new theme song for unpleasant conversations with unreasonable students or administration. That song is definitely going to be overplayed on my inner radio station, because, unfortunately, I have a lot of those interactions. I guess that's why I'm finally getting better at ignoring the haters - more exposure, more practice. Basically, through my trials, I have finally evolved to be the kid in the video below.
Ahhh...evolution at its finest.
3. I have continued to get some funny/nice notes from students. Here are a few:
- Thanks for giving us another day to study for the test
- I love your class and advisory
- Your my favorite teacher [wrong "you're" :(]
- You da real MVP
- My number: (313)-xxx-xxxx
- Have a nice day.
- I like your class
- your nice [again wrong "you're"]
- Since I'm not your favorite student, you're now my second favorite teacher [from Trevon, who I always call my favorite. That day he acted up, so I told him his status as favorite was threatened. He responded with this note. He cracks me up every day]
- Jus' call me Mr. John
- I missed you. [I was absent for a few days on a trip to Boston]
I love my students. I honestly don't know if I will survive another year of teaching past this one. But I will definitely finish this one because my students need me to. They deserve that from me and so much more.
