First Two Days

The first two days of school are done!  Yay!  The school year has officially begun.  These students have a great benefit of seeming to believe that they are adolescents yet.  This gives them a great advantage over those that come into my classroom certain that they are already fully grown or whose heads are so full of certainty they don't have any room in their heads to learn anything else.

Keeping kids on track is really about keeping up with the details and being consistent with our policies and policing.  I am going to work very hard this year to keep up with the drudgery of nipping behavior in the bud before I have to deal with the headache of trying to get students back on the path to learning.

It is near the end of the week and one side of my head says I have really gotten a lot done and I am well on my way towards being organized and well planned for when the kids come to school next Thursday.  The other side of my head, no surprise, suggests that I have a million things that I haven't nailed down yet and I will fly into the school year once again holding on by the seat of my pants.

I have the first two days covered and the first week is covered.  After that I am not certain that what I envision for my classroom is what will take place or for that matter is what I am planning what I want to take place.

One of the fun things about writing a mostly anonymous blog is whether or not I make sense is really not that high a priory or issue.  Needless to say I will know more when I come into contact with my students.  For now all I can do is push the furniture around and hope everything has a place when the music starts.

Begin again

Today was the first day of teacher meetings for the 2012 school year.  This is my second year teaching and I am torn between feeling more confident and experienced as I enter this year and feeling less confident and insecure that I haven't prepared or learned as much as I wanted to from the first trial by fire that was last year.  Time will tell.

I decided to use this blog as a less censured forum for talking about teaching and growing as a teacher.  I wrote every Friday a short paragraph or two on my classroom website last year.  However, the message was presented to both parents and students as a motivational reflection on what we did and accomplished throughout the week.  This blog should be something more of a under the hood expression that is geared for other new teachers or teachers in general.

This post is simply a breaching of the silence that has gripped my writing of late.  I really need to get back into the practice of putting words down on paper. It will make me a better teacher and the skill of writing is something that I have been proud.  I don't want to see my skills atrophy.