Week 11: Conferences

Monday:

            One more week until Spring Break! This semester is seriously flying by, but I absolutely love this placement. It’s just sad to think in a few weeks I won’t be with them anymore. They all mean so much to me, but I am very excited to move on and move forward in my teaching career. A few of the teachers are trying to stay on top of the openings being listed online. They said they promise to tell me when they are listed on the district website!

            Today was my first time doing full time teaching. To be completely honest, it wasn’t that much different than how it has been. I just have to do all of the grading now, which is kind of a bummer! =) But other than that, I really don’t feel nervous about it. Andrea has made it very easy between each transition. Honestly, it’s hard to think that I went to schools for the past three years and just sat in there. If I were to go back in time, I would be bored out of my mind! Now that I have had the experience of being responsible for everything in the classroom I can’t imagine going back to that.

            Other than the first day of being full-time, it was a pretty easy day. You can tell that the students know they only have one week left as well. They were extra chatty today, but they continued doing their work so I didn’t really mind as much. And since we didn’t have class today, I got to make almost all of my copies for the week because I stayed after school! It was a nice day to catch up on everything. =)

Tuesday:

            Finally that stinking test on word problems is over! We started a word problem test on Friday. There are about 12 actual word problems on the test, and it took my class a very long time to finish. Most of them have trouble with reading the problems in the first place. So I decided to read the test to them because I wanted to test their math skills, not necessarily reading skills.

            This is a difficult concept to talk about, because I could see why people are against reading problems to them. If I weren’t there, would they still be able to do it? Honestly, the scores would have probably been a lot lower! However, I’m still okay with my decision because they showed me that they do have the thinking skills to figure it out once they know what it says.

            Another interesting thing that happened today was with my little penguin on the desk we call “Petey”. Every morning in the message we read together, there is always a picture of a penguin. He is kind of like our classroom mascot, I had no idea it would get so out of hand! There is a little girl in my class who has this newfound obsession with the little penguin on my desk. She did a partner project with him today! It was really cute and funny, but I had no idea this would happen.

Wednesday:

            Today we had a tornado drill! It seems like the school is really getting on top of the emergency procedures. Andrea told me they haven’t done a tornado drill in a few years either! I’m glad that they are going through and making it a priority. Things like that are very important for children to feel safe. A few of them were being silly during it, but at least they knew what to do. =)

            I had a few issues with classroom management today. However, thanks to our discussions we have in class I actually had a few ideas on how to keep them engaged. Whenever they started getting a little too chatty or out of control, I used a new attention grabber today. I would say very softly, “if you can hear me ______”. I had them do some silly things, but it made it easy to get everyone’s attention! Classmates would see everyone doing something and they would start paying attention again.

Thursday:

            Today was the first night of conferences! Wow this was a long day. Andrea and I only had five conferences today. We had one parent not show up; it was the parents of our new student. I wish they had called ahead, just because it would be nice to know if we had to stay in the room or if we could roam around a little. It’s hard to stay inside the classroom for almost 12 straight hours!

            Parent conferences are really interesting to me; parent communication in general is very interesting. I wonder how involved they really want to be and how closely the two should be tied together. Some of the teachers talk about how they don’t like it when the parents ask for advice on how to have their child do homework. They don’t believe it is their place to tell a child to do something at home because they are not the mothers. I completely understand why that would be frustrating; but at the same time I wonder how much communication there should be between the two. That is something interesting to think about for my future classroom.

            In honor of the conferences, everyone made a breakfast dish and we had a faculty breakfast. I absolutely love this staff. They’re such a close-knit group of people and they are so easy to feel comfortable around. Things like this are nice too because then I get to know them in a little bit of a different way. Andrea would be included in that! I basically felt like I was just spending time with a friend for a good portion of the time. However, we did plan the next few weeks with the other second grade teachers. So it’s nice that all of that is figured out already!

Friday:

            During the day, we pretty much didn’t have time for anything except math and writing! They got out an hour early, we had an assembly, and we had a special activity with a third grade classroom. (The third graders did state projects and we were able to go around and ask them about their states.) However, I did a mini lesson on acrostic poetry! It was a lot of fun, and they all created their own poem about spring. For “n”, a lot of them put “no school”; I must say they were very creative with this! I underestimated their creativity.

            While some of us teachers were waiting around, we found out that Howe will be audited the week we get back. There is something going on with their special education program. I’m not sure if they want students pulled out more often, or if they need to be more integrated in the regular classroom. Honestly, I don’t know where I stand on this issue. It’s not that I don’t want to put in the work to specialize lessons for students because I will do that. But when the student is gaining much from being in the regular classroom, I feel like there should be a change. For example, we have a student in our class with an IEP and he has a lot of issues in the classroom and can’t do any assignments on his own. I’m not sure if it’s an attention thing or a developmental problem; but in situations like that I think he would benefit more from being pulled more often than being integrated more.

In the end though, Spring Break is here! We even got out of conferences an hour early because no one had any more scheduled for the night. I’m very happy I was able to experience conferences though. It was a good experience, and now I see why we do this for an entire semester. This has given me a good idea of what to expect when I’m on my own. =)