First Week

It's that time again...time for lesson planning, assessments, perfecting your "teacher stare", disciplining 20some students, wondering if you made the right career choice, researching alternative career options, thinking about why teachers need to be given summers off... and doing all of these things on no more than five hours of sleep.

I've already learned a couple of things upon completing my first four-day week of grade 8:

#1 - It's almost useless to plan a lesson using the Brock lesson plan because the lesson rarely goes the way you intend it to.
#2 - Portables often smell like a rotten egg of adolescence (I'm NOT looking forward to the summer time...or after an hour of phys-ed)
#3 - The very first thing you need to do is get to know the names of your students (your homeroom AND the ones you teach on rotary). Disciplining will not be effective if you call the student by another name. They actually won't even respond, believe it or not.
#4 - Be careful the way you word questions. For example, for an 'exit card' activity, I asked students "Can you guess what the Pythagorean Theorem may be used for?". The majority of the answers that I recieved simply stated one word: "NO". You can't even get mad at them...they answered the question. I'm still learning...

Although life is busy and hectic once again, I think I still love teaching. I hope you all feel the same as well. I'm looking forward to my next six weeks! :)