Notes from a Teacher

I realize that ya'll want to hear more pet stories, but today I have some happenings from my school. The past few weeks have been hectic and crazy at work, with report card grades, field trips, parent conferences, and today I was being formally observed during my reading time. It's not that I am scared of observation because I think I'm doing things wrong and making my kids stupider, but I just don't like formal things.

So I was a tad anxious to start the morning, but I was well planned and ready to go. I sat down at my desk, just before the kidos arrived and said a quick prayer just for a peaceful spirit throughout the morning. I felt good and the kids came in.

So I sped along our breakfast routine and thus the lesson began. We started with DOL (Daily Oral Language) which is simply a few sentences with misspellings and wrong punctuationthat I put up on the overhead. Well I picked up the overhead chord to plug it in and noticed it only had one prong. Deep breath. Was it going to be one of "those" mornings? So we scrapped DOL and I put two sentences that were my starter activity up on the board. Just as I did that the vice principal walked in and thus things continued. I read aloud a nonfiction text to them and we worked on how to answer today's journal question on context clues together. All was going well. Then I called back the Seals, a group of my lower readers. I gave them a word in their text which they had to figure out its meaning. This too was going well, until I got to "Billy". He started to read about a man who shines shoes and when he got to the sentence about the man using a toothbrush in a cup to clean the shoes, he lost it. Billy started reading, but he was laughing and laughing. I fought the urge to laugh and the vice principal cracked a smile.

Although I haven't had my follow up meeting with my vice principal, I think it went well. After 4 years of basically doing the same curriculum I feel like I'm in a groove. As Holly, my coworker said, "It's Gene's year!" Well it may be the Year of Gene or it may not, but whatever type of year it ends up being, I thank God for it, because I know He is ultimately where anything good I do lesson or otherwise, comes from.