School Daze- Sorry, pictures hopefully coming soon

Ever since getting back from Hawaii, I’ve been non-stop teacher meetings and in my classroom (except that Friday and Saturday I took out to move and clean). I had team meetings, district meetings, new teacher meetings, and school meetings. It’s been so, so very crazy. In the meetings, I would always think about how much I wasn’t ready to start school, it was creeping up on my WAY too fast. I don’t regret the meetings, I learned some good things in them, but they made me anxious because I felt like I could have been using that time to organize myself better in the classroom.

Finally Tuesday, August 18th rolled around. That’s the day that our rooms NEEDED to be ready to go because it was open house aka MEET THE PARENTS NIGHT. Dang shoot. I did have everything together in my room, all the decorations were finally up, the kids’ desks had name tags and supplies, the homework and spelling and writing folders were all made, and the few things that weren’t quite organized yet could fit into the closet which I then locked up so that parents couldn’t see that “not quite ready” part.

Okay, meeting the parents wasn’t really all that scary. In fact, I didn’t meet many of the parents. I might have focused a little too much on the kids. Oops. But I figure that open house is more to get the kids excited about school, so if I build a good report with them, than that’s good, right? Plus, sometimes the kids would walk in with people that I didn’t think were really their parents and I didn’t want to say the wrong thing, so I just kept quiet. Like, for example, I’m pretty sure one girl came in with her older sister, but just incase she was a really young mother, I didn’t want to comment. Or when students would come in with two women, I didn’t want to assume that the older one was the grandma just in case it was the aunt. Get it? I know, I know, I should have talked to the parents more, it’s true, but I was nervous.

I had the majority of the students show up that night. I had 17 students on my list, and 12 of them came. That’s pretty good numbers considering the area that I’m teaching in. And like I said before, it really wasn’t that bad. The kids came in, I helped them find their desk, asked them something fun they did this summer, handed the parent notes to the parents, maybe chatted with the parents for a while, and then they were out. Oh, and I got a room mom right away. I think it was the second family that came in. The mom right away asked if I had a room mom yet and if I wanted one. Of course I do!!!! Okay, to be quite honest, I’m not exactly sure what I’ll have her do for me, but I hear room moms are great and I’m excited.

Well, once parents’ day was done, I got one more day to prep everything and then today was the first day of school. Holy freaking gracious. I can’t believe I’ve actually had my first day as a real teacher. It’s crazy, and I know it’ll sink in for sure later, but it’s still just crazy right now. And speaking of crazy, that could be a good way of describing the day. I’m kind of just kidding. For the most part, it was a really good day. The kids like me, I like the kids, no one was injured, lost, or left, and I actually did get a lot accomplished. But, being self critical as we all are, I can definitely point out what went wrong. One, I did not get two (I feel like it’s more, but thinking it through, it might just be two) things done that I had planned. Two, I have some challenging kids that I am not quite sure how to approach just yet. And three is that I just feel like everyone else’s first day went better than mine. Shoot, writing it down, it makes it sound like I had a really good first day though because only two things went wrong and the first one I wrote isn’t even that big of a deal. Well then, I sure am glad I’m writing it then because I’m not going to lie, I had a little bit of a freak out after getting home.

So I had my day. The morning flew by. That’s where the majority of my activities got skipped/moved around to different times. All of a sudden it was 9:15 and time for the later gators to show up. Then all of a sudden it was 10:15 and time for recess. Then it was 11:45 and time for lunch. After lunch, however, the day slowed down for real. Normally, kids would go to specialties after lunch, but those won’t start until Monday, so I had the kids a half hour longer than I usually will and the kids were much harder to keep focused after lunch (plus it didn’t help that that was the time the tech lady finally showed up with my computer and of course needed to talk to me about it). We did make it through to 2:15 when the early birds go home. I teach basically the same lesson to the later gators that I did the early birds, but I was moving faster by that time of the day, so the later gators got more accomplished than the early birds. They did a pretty great job staying focused and moving through their work that last hour. All except the girl that tried to go under her desk and sleep. That wasn’t too cool. I kept teaching and got the rest of the class working on a project and then took her out into the hallway and explained that I understand that it’s been a long day and that she’s used to summer time and not being in school, but that she has to get used to being in school again and she cannot sleep in class. For real, we only had maybe 20 minutes left of class when we went back in. I’m happy to be able to report that she managed to stay awake for those 20 minutes, although she was not highly productive :o)

Oh man, those kids. I honestly do have a great class. They are all so willing to help each other out and I’ve got a lot of really bright kids that are eager and able to answer and help and whatever they need to. Of course I also have those extra bundles of joy that are going to cause me some premature gray and a few more worry wrinkles, but what would teaching be without those little angels?

Oh, so should I tell you about the freak out? The students leave at 3:30, I’m contracted to stay until 4:00, and I left at 5:30. I still had things to do, but decided that I needed to leave before I ended up spending all night there (which would be easy to do, there’s plenty of work for me there). I took time to myself at first, read my book (I’m at really good part in Mansfield Park- a girl got proposed to and she blew him off thinking that he didn’t mean it, but he does mean it and won’t stop pursuing her), ate dinner, and took a bath. After getting out of my bath, I started thinking about how I really don’t know what to do about one of my precious wrinkle causing angels and didn’t know what I wanted my classroom rules to be (which we’re going over tomorrow by the way). I had a mini little panic attack over that until I just decided to pray to calm down. I love the calm down prayer, because every time I say it (and that’s plenty, believe me), I don’t even have to say the whole thing and I’m already way less stressed and way more relaxed. So after the prayer I sat down at my computer, typed up the rules and consequences without much trouble, realized that the books I have won’t help me with this particular angel and that I’ll have to take it one day at a time. I stopped freaking out, and instead went back to not thinking about school by blogging (oh wait, I’m blogging about school, suck).

I’ve already planned that tomorrow after school I’ll be there for a while, but I’ve also told myself to not stress out about today because it’s over, I’m ready for tomorrow and I need this down time, to have Brooke time, and get away from all the Miss Kerby time I’ve been having. I hope I can balance both this year. I KNOW it’s going to be hard, but I don’t want to fail either one of me (and for sure don’t want to fail the kids). So wish me luck, and apparently I didn’t get off to as rough of a start as I had initially reflected on, so that’s a super bonus :o)