education and teaching | matching tracksuits

Fight

Thursday 17 August 2023

The Boy told me about it the moment I walked into the house. "There was a fight at school today. A big fight." Apparently, two boys got into it during lunch, and it happened right in front of the Boy.

"Were you scared?" I asked.

"Yes!" he replied without hesitation or self-awareness of the fact that such a response would definitely mark him at some schools among some kids. One of those involved was someone E knows, and he was a little worried about what was happening to his friend and a little worried about what might happen him.

"I'm definitely in middle school now," he concluded.

Tuesday School Thoughts

Tuesday 15 August 2023

On the one hand, I'm responsible for teaching them to read and write better. That's my bottom-line assignment at work. Traditionally, that's all a teacher has ever been expected to do: teach the course material.

Yet some of my students fall under the rubric "at-risk" in one form or another. They can't stay focused for more than five minutes (at best) or five seconds (literally, at worst). They can't keep up with their materials until the next day (at best) or the next minute (at worst). They can't accept "no" as an answer, and they take everything personally and turn things into battles that have no business being fights to begin with. They come in without materials -- no pencil, no paper, no nothing.

These are the kids whose behavior, quite honestly, disrupts the learning of anyone and everyone else in the room. They are black holes for attention: their every second is a new event horizon to resist. Interactions with them can be quicksand, pulling everyone in and restricting movement completely. Working with them for five minutes can be utterly exhausting; working with them for a whole class period can have one questioning one's sanity.

Yet what option do we have as teachers? No one else is teaching these kids (only a few -- perhaps 7-10%, and not even that many who are so demanding and high-maintenance) these skills. At least it seems no one else is teaching them the skills. And someone has to teach these kids the basics of how to interact successfully with the world.

But it's so exhausting...

Lockers

Friday 11 August 2023

Working

Thursday 10 August 2023

New Faces

Tuesday 08 August 2023

At this point, I barely know any of their names. They have 4 new names to learn; I have almost 120 new names to learn. Still, we're getting to know each other, learning what makes each other tick...

A good first day at school.

School Year’s Eve

Monday 07 August 2023

Tomorrow, I begin my twenty-fifth year teaching, my sixteenth with Greenville County Schools. Am I ready? I've reviewed and signed all my IEPs and 504 plans. I've worked with other eighth-grade teachers to create this week's lesson plans (and of course, the administration tweaked the lesson plan template, as they do every single year). I've spoken to teachers and administrators about which students I need to focus on early in order to form a good relationship so that when things sour, I have that good relationship to appeal to. I've spoken to my co-teacher in my inclusion class about what we'll be doing and had a fruitful discussion about how we will work together. I've watched (almost) all my safety training videos (the same ones, year after year after year after year after year...). I've done everything I'm supposed to do, and I still don't feel ready for tomorrow.

Part of that is because of what I've heard about this year's group of kids. "They're the toughest bunch we've ever had" was the common assessment of most seventh-grade teachers. I'm not looking forward to a year like that. Yet they always mature some over the summer, so I'm hopeful that will mitigate things a bit.

The Boy, though, feels even less prepared than I do. "I just want to go back to elementary school" has been his mantra. New starts always make him nervous, but K pointed out to him all the new things he's thrived in this summer: a new scouting troop; summer camp with a different scouting troop; band camp with a group of strangers. Still, he's reticent. I can understand that.

The Girl is just ready to go. She's got so many AP classes this year that it's troubling (seven out of her eight classes are AP: four the first semester, three the second semester), but she's stubborn and resilient. She'll make it.

K is not looking forward to the morning rush, but she and I will slip back into it.

Only the animals are calm about it...

Staff

Friday 04 August 2023

Here's a picture of our entire school staff -- teachers, custodians, counselors, paraprofessionals, administrators, and cafeteria workers.

And here are all the people who were working here when I first started teaching at the school:

I am, in short, the seventh-longest serving teacher at the school at this point.

Books

Thursday 03 August 2023

This is my new reading/focus corner. All those books? Mostly provided by the generosity of the state's education department. But the state has also said all books I have students read have to be vetted. By three teachers. So I don't know if it applies to these books or not. If so, I'll hang a sign on the bookshelf: