First Days of School

Well, actually, the first days of school are over. I was back at work on August 9, and the students were back for half-days on August 21. Classes started last Monday.

The year is looking good. My role at YWLCS has changed, and now I'm teaching two math classes instead of four (and still advising a dozen girls and teaching reading in the morning). I am officially one of two Middle School Academy co-facilitators. This means I do a little bit extra beyond what everyone on my fantastic team does to make things run smoothly: planning for our meetings, mostly. Starting probably next week, I will also have more of a presence in my colleagues' classrooms, making observations that may be useful to them and, if needed, helping out with discipline.

My own classroom management (which is the fluffy term we use these days; "discipline" sounds too disciplinary. Too much like locking kids in closets and beating them with scary paddles--which I think every teacher has, at some point, wished for) has grown so much since last year. I feel much more in charge of my classroom. It's not that I didn't have a sense of authority last year, but I was much more willing to negotiate and much less willing to give direct commands which I refuse to compromise. One thing that's really helping is lunch detention, which the middle school has started. It's the perfect consequence; they can't refuse to do it because they have to catch some bus (the problem we had with afterschool detentions), and it really sucks for them to miss having lunch with their friends. Each teacher is in charge of lunch detention for one day a week, with a partner, so the work is shared, whereas last year, if you assigned a detention, you had to host it yourself. That made it a lot harder to manage, so it was a lot less likely to be assigned, and a lot less effective with students.

The highlight of last week was probably the POW Song. We have math Problems of the Week, which are complex problems that require long write-ups describing what the problem is, what your solution is, and how you went about solving it. I had my groups each write a verse relating to some section of the POW write-up, and they're eating it up. They beg to sing the song every day, and they did a great job of coming up with creative lyrics to the Concentration, the letter A rhythm. It's really catchy.

Anyway ... I'm really looking forward to this year of teaching.

Patrick and I spent Labor Day Weekend in Iowa. It's a nice state, and I guess I wouldn't mind living there for a few years if that's where he got his first job, or something. It made us both kind of homesick (him for Iowa and me for Cali), but it was great to see his mom, and she gave us a ton of food!

Hope you're all well. Love you.