To Prepare for Week #2...

...I need to reflect a little on the first week.

Getting my room in order was a busy, busy affair. With meetings all day, it was hard to want to stick around the building for three to six hours to sort through one-hundred-thousand R.L. Stine/Christopher Pike paperbacks. I got through it, though, and room 109 is clean, functional, systematic-ish, and, in my opinion, downright attractive.

Flowers from my most chivalrous fiance Joel to celebrate my return to school.

Neat rows. You can't appreciate the gum-scraping results from this angle.

Our reading corner. I'm still working on how to best manage this.

Daily Binders, where our class secretaries record short summaries of the day (especially
nice for absentees) and keep copies of assignments.

It's easy to get bogged down with all the small business-y aspects of being a teacher. Attendance is the biggest drag for me. With such frequent and sometimes lengthy absences, keeping up by catching up students is a full time job.

Also, we have new policies in our building and these require increased teacher obligation and vigilance. It's a drag, but we can already see the results of something as simple as a one-way hallway policy, something as simple as having expectations for hallway behavior (and subsequently monitoring, heavily). These changes give a little *ahem* power *ahem* back to the teacher. This causes me a little anxiety, given the authoritarian sense of the word. But, the simple fact that I'm learning in my second year is that the students seek structure, and that has to come from some sort of internal hierarchy, and buy-in to said hierarchy. The students have to be on board with taking direction/suggestion. I guess an easy way of summing this up is that good ol' rule: respect for one's elders. I do think that respect needs to be earned, and it needs to be mutual.

All this having been said, I, sometimes, need to remind myself of the FUN of planning and teaching: seeing something awesome like a comic book or film clip that just nails a concept or literary term on the head. I also just ordered this great new book by an English professor, The Glamour of Grammar, at the recommendation of one of my former TAs from my Teaching Writing class at The University of Iowa. I can't wait to nerd out with it and share some stuff with my students.

Thought to ponder:
My Honors class: 12 students
My Intermediate class: 11 students
My Basic class: 27 students.

This heavily unbalanced schedule is clearly not the best setup in the world. The students that I need to get to know most are the most lost-in-a-crowd. My honors class is perfect, but the intermediate class could stand a few more voices. The problems with the basic class, I think, are obvious. Here's the kicker. The basic class: it's ALL-YEAR.