Week One: Check

Let me take you back, offering high (and low) lights from week one of teaching.

Monday: Standing in the classroom, waiting for our kids to come in, I couldn't have been more excited. The moment I had been preparing for for the past 6 months is finally here. My 3 teaching team members and I have our chart paper hung around the room, with snappy slogans and bright colors. "ATL: Atlanta's Thinkers and Leaders" reads one. "100% of students reaching 100% of their growth goals" reads another. "We can, we will, we must" a third. Mr. S shakes all their hands as they file into the room, and we begin by discussing our behavioral expectations and our management plans. The race is on. They are reluctant to respond to our questions and prompts, laughing at our antics. After that first hour, I had already identified who I thought would be trouble, who I thought would excel, who I thought would 'succeed'. Yes, I did that in the first hour I had met these kids. Yes, I DID read my pre-reading which warned against having preconceived notions about our students. I did it anyway.

Tuesday: One day of teaching under my belt. I realized very very quickly, just about as soon as I began, that there were about 8 things I wanted to do differently on this, day two, of my teaching odyssey. I wanted to do more checks for understanding; I wanted to be more consistent with giving consequences for calling out answers or putting their heads on their desks; I wanted to narrate their behavior, so they would take verbal cues to get on task. It is amazing how much 45 minutes can teach you, if you're really examining your performance. So, day two underway, I hit a bit of a stride. I'm owning the classroom, using all of the space available to me. I'm writing on the board without turning my back to the students. I'm walking up and down the aisles, making sure students are on task. My teaching style was described as "The Entertainer" in a survey we took. That means that teaching is like a big show. At the end of the period, I overhear 'Andy' tell another 'He's a pretty cool teacher'. I can't tell you how good that felt.

Wednesday: Boy, am I ever owning my role now. I'm all over the classroom. I'm moving toward potential problem areas while lecturing, to avoid stopping my lesson, and to give the offending party a chance to change his behavior without calling him out. I'm asking students to make sense of what I just told them, explaining to the class their thoughts. Kids are going up to the board to work problems, and Mr. Manuel is sitting in the back of the classroom, letting them "Teach the Teacher". One student, I'll call him 'Dan', has proven to be one of my most reliable students. He is one of the students I didn't peg for success during that first 45 minute period. He is answering my questions, nailing the assessment questions, proving how shallow and short-sighted I am. And I love it and am very thankful for it. 'Dan' finishes his assessment first, and hands it in, along with the pen I let him borrow. He made a 100 on adding and subtracting positive and negative numbers.

Thursday: As I am looking over my assessment data, the class as a whole is not performing as well as I think they ought to be. I check the data again; then I consult my tests. As I look at Tuesday, Wednesday, and Thursday, I make a stupidly simple realization; most of the tests are not finished. Of course the averages are low; kids are only finishing 70 percent of the problems at best. I have one or two who finish every question, and then the rest only finish about half. Duh. Of course their averages look bad. And that is my fault as a teacher, I'm not representing my kids well by not giving them assessments that help me effectively gauge their mastery. Unfortunately, it looks like 'Mary' and 'Dan' will again have to carry my average for another day. My future engineer has his head on his desk, not paying any attention... Does he realize that almost every engineer can do all of the math in the CRCT test? Or that every engineer knows how to do long division? As Mr. C. (or Coach C., as we call him), the next-door math teacher, famously told one of his students, "All of the Quarterbacks in the NFL have one thing in common, do you know what it is? They all passed the eighth grade. Lets go." These kids have high goals. As a class we are very far behind. They know they're far behind; but I'm not sure if they realize just how wide the gap is. I feel like I'm teaching the material well, and I really do have great control over the atmosphere of the classroom. But we just have so much ground to make up, and such a short time to do it...

Friday: Today is officially the worst day of my young teaching career. My lesson was met by a sea of blank, confused faces. What good are strategies to attack word problems if your math teacher's posters are falling down during the lesson? What good are those strategies if you can't order the information that you pull out of the question? My kids looked at me as if to say, "What in the world are you doing today, Mr. Manuel? Why is this so scattered? Did you not prepare?" About 4 of the 12 kids raised their hands to participate, the rest just stared at me. Worse, one of my better students got pulled out of class for half of the lesson; one of my life-lines, my participators. Even more disappointing was the fact that someone was observing me today; why couldn't he have come yesterday? He would have had much more helpful comments if he had seen a better put together lesson. I guess it just boiled down to being tired, plus the fact that I had just wasted 45 minutes of our precious instruction time that I won't get back, but I just wanted to cry. As my class ended and I ran to my session that started 3 minutes later, I just kept thinking about the assessment I didn't have a chance to give. I thought about the test scores I didn't get to hand back. I thought about the fact that it would be until Monday that I got a chance to recover, and I'M TEACHING THE SAME OBJECTIVE AGAIN. I had to walk out of the room for about 3 minutes during our session because I felt like I was going to cry. I just felt like I messed up one of my 20 days.

I know this is why we're here, to learn. I know that not every day can be a great day; it would be hard to learn if we never felt like we did something wrong. I know that maybe they got more out of it than I think they did. I know it may not have looked as scattered or jumbled as I felt that it was. But for me, it wasn't good enough, because I didn't think it was good enough to help my kids out. It wasn't good enough because if I want to hold my kids to the high expectations I set for them, I have to hold myself to a standard of excellence that far exceeds that which I hold them to; it wouldn't be fair to ask more of them than of myself. But all of that said, it just made me frustrated. I have to wait until Monday until we go again.

So that was a super short review of the week. My strengths are in the E3 strand of our rubric, which means I have excellent pacing and command of the classroom, using my teacher voice, behavioral management strategies, and getting kids mostly involved. My struggles are in planning, writing good key points (which leads to the rest of the lesson).

Maybe my biggest strength is the joy that I bring into the school. I am excited at 6:50 when I walk into the school in the morning; I don't know if I've ever been excited about 6:50. I get excited waiting for lunch to be over and for my kids to come down the hall to shake my hand and get started. I love my students; they are wonderful and unique and gifted. They have such personality, you wouldn't believe. They want to grasp this stuff.

I thank my God for the opportunity to reveal my weaknesses to me. He has made it abundantly clear to me that I will not make it through the day, much less the week and the month and the school year ahead, without his power. Ben Franklin said, "The most acceptable service to God is doing good to man." I think there is great truth in that, and I think that the Lord is providing me strength to do His will. I love the work he has put in front of me. It is a very hard job; harder than any job I've had. The lows are very, very low. I was mad at myself and at my lack of ability today. But the highs are incredibly high, higher than you know. When a kid sees a 100, or hears a great job, he perks up. You can't miss it. They begin to feel responsible for their development. It is a powerful thing to watch. I just pray the Lord continues to open the ears of students, and to help them embrace the knowledge we are trying to give them. They need to know they are loved and cared about even more than they need to know math or reading, though. That is what I most hope they know when they leave my classroom.