It is Friday of my third week of summer school, and as I am sitting in the teacher work room 30 minutes before the day begins, I am realizing that my time management skills are not what I thought they were. I am still in the honeymoon phase, where even on my worst days I find something positive... or at the very least I try to turn something negative into something funny.
Will my optimism subside? I hope not. Have my first couple weeks been way harder than I had imagined? You bet. Here is the deal. I have learned so much in a short two weeks of summer school, and my teaching abilities have taken the drastic jump from non-existent to passable. I have gotten to the point where, on my good days, I actually feel like a teacher, not just a college graduate beginning the next step of my life. So that gives me hope.
As far as my students go, they are great. They are bad. But they are great. This is the first year that summer school has had enough students to actually simulate a real school year, so the behavior problems I have encountered have been very authentic. We have 30 kids enrolled in our classroom, which means we have somewhere around 25 on a given day. For a first-year novice at classroom management, that is a lot of kids. But like I said, it's great.
We eat lunch with the students everyday so I have gotten to know them outside the class. I'm not sure yet if that has helped or hurt me. There seems to be such a fine line between having them respect me and having them be too comfortable. So I don't know if my recent slip in effectiveness is because they are too comfortable or because it is week three and they realized that they only have two more weeks with me.
At some point, I will have all the answers to these questions. I'll let you know.
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