05/09/2013

as i approach the end of my first year of teaching with 33 school days left, i am becoming reflective about my practice. a lot of this year has involved me trying to toughen up my sensitivity about what the kids said about me. i think it is time to look at what i did well and what could definitely afford some improvement over the course of the next year.

i was very dedicated to staying after school whenever possible to help student make up missing work. i was often generous about allowing students to turn work in late or excusing assignments when students had crises that negatively impacted their ability to catch up. this ended up being a lot of extra work, but i am glad that i did it because i believe it benefited them from an educational standpoint. however, this can reflect poorly in a way because i did not prepare them for the real world when hard deadlines become more and more important.

another thing i did well was that i did not sacrifice rigor. i sometimes attempted to meet students halfway when it came to rigor and i did not achieve every learning goal that i believe students should have an opportunity to learn in eleventh grade. specifically, i could have done more with MLA and more with actual writing and grammar instruction. i really did not do much at all with grammar. i haven’t quite figured out how to incorporate it in a prescriptive fashion with mini lessons. this is something i hope to work on in future years.

with regard to weaknesses this year, a lot have been echoing in my head lately. although i can be silly with students and laugh with them and i talk to some of them one on one and try to stay really interested in their lives, i have been distant. i know this derived from a fear of losing control, so behavior management became my obsession and i policed them and made the overall vibe of my classroom a little more anxious than i would have preferred it to be. i have not mastered behavior management, which is okay in the big scheme of things because i am still a rookie, but i do hope to learn from my mistakes and move on. i need to have more clear guidelines and consequences regarding behavior and respect in the classroom. frequently, i make fun of myself both as a teacher and in real life in an attempt to remain humble. i think this is important, but it also invites disrespect to some degree. i allowed students to say mean things to me while trying to remain unfazed because i was more interested in keeping it together than i was in calling for a level of respect. in the future, while it was and remains very important to not take things personally, i need to demand respect. i don’t want to do this in an intimidating way. i guess i haven’t really figured out how to do this in an appropriate way.

here are some things i am not sorry for…i am not sorry for being hard. maybe i didn’t need to assign as much homework as i did. maybe i could have really keyed in on the concepts that mattered most. but i would prefer to be a "hard" teacher than a pushover easy one. that is unfair to everyone to have someone who isn’t fully interested in helping them learn.

this is kind of disorganized, and i plan to continue to add to this list, but i hope to become a better teacher and i don’t want to give up despite my difficulties this year.