It worked!

Today was an exciting day at school. To begin with, we had an enthusiastic "game show" for the homecoming king and queen candidates. It is always fun when the whole school can come together for the sake of school spirit. However, the best part was that I got to use one of the strategies I learned during my Effective Instructional Strategies class this summer. The strategy was called concept attainment and I used it to teach my 9th graders sentence fragments. By the end of the lesson, my students knew all of the characteristics of complete sentences. I was even to walk my struggling students through the process with a little more guidance. What really made me happy was that I didn't feel like I was being boring. Usually I can't stand listening to myself when I am introducing a new grammar topic - but today wasn't anything like that! The students were involved with the lesson and figuring things out without me just telling it to them. Yay for today! It was a good day to end a week that started with a discipline referral. Hopefully I can keep the excitement going next week.

Honeymoon is over

I guess the honeymoon is over. I wrote my first discipline referral today in school. Unfortunately, it wasn't for anything "cool," just some overused inappropriate language. I always seem to struggle with discipline referrals. I hear about kids getting kicked out of class by other teachers, but it just doesn't occur to me. Why would I want to send a kid out of my room so I have to spend more time telling them what they missed in class! I would rather just inform them that they will be receiving a discipline referral and then continue with class.

When it comes to classroom management, I often wish that I had a few days to go to other teachers' classrooms. I would love to see what their classroom management skills are. Today's discipline referral wasn't an issue of classroom management, just a 9th grader who felt like he need to swear. However, I sometimes if an issue with a student is due to the student making bad choices, or my lack of classroom management skills. I would like to think it is the former, but how do I know when I don't have other classrooms to compare to?

I hope that the rest of the year continues to run smoothly. I think I reached the maximum amount of time that my small 9th grade class can remain responsible for their own work time, so that is good to know. The more I get to know my students, the better my lessons plans for them will be - hopefully!

I am sitting here on Sunday afternoon planning my lesson for 9th grade English tomorrow. I HAD the perfect plan before, but now I cannot use it. The class I took on web 2.0 social media gave me this great idea to use glogster.com in my classes. I was even more excited when they introduced Glogster Edu for teachers and students. This version wasn't even blocked on our school computers. However, because our computers are slow or have superhero blocking programs, none of the text will load on the glogs. Everything else works except for the text. I can't have my students make glogs about the parts of speech if they can't type anything on them!

Therefore I am now working on Plan B - and I can almost guarantee that it won't get nearly as good of a reaction as glogster would have. I thought I have found a great motivating lesson and now I'm worried my grammar unit will be much like those I have taught before - boring, anti-motivational, and unauthentic.

Hopefully I will be able to get something figured out to make glogster work before we start our mythology unit when I was planning on using it again.

I can't believe I am done with my first week of my fourth year of teaching. I must say this has been the smoothest and most relaxing first week I have ever had. I was a little bit nervous with the schedule change and I am teaching a different mixture of classes than I have in the past. However, none of these things caused any real problems. Instead, my students were surprisingly attentive and courteous.

One of the things that I hope will make this year so great will be implementing all the different lessons and strategies I learned over the summer. Between my instructional strategies class, my web 2.0 class, and preparing my action research project, I feel like I have plethora of fun ideas to keep me going all year long.

My only concern now, however, is whether or not the excitement of the first week will last. I hope to do all I can to keep it going. As my friend Emily recently quoted on her blog, "Teaching isn't a job; it's my life." That is precisely how I feel. Now that I know other people feel the same way, I don't feel so bad spending so much time preparing for school. I am happy to spend the time doing what I love - and most days it doesn't feel like a real job.

Cheers to Week 1; all the best for Week 2!