Day 20

Today is the first day of the rest of my blogging life. I have decided to start a blog to capture my experiences as a first year teacher. I have survived four weeks of teaching and I am in a reflective mood. it is 3:00 in the morning and I am tired, but awake. What is keeping me awake are thoughts of all of the things I am doing wrong, or are not doing right in my class. I have so much to do and feel I have accomplished so little in my first month. The school year is already one ninth done.

There are a few things specifically keeping me awake. I have a meeting at 8 am with our school's Case Management Comittee to discuss one of my struggling students. He has some very specific needs that have not been met in the past. I am meeting with the CMC to discuss the interventions I have made and to receive guidance on what other interventions I can make. I will blog more latter today about my first CMC.

I am also awake because my students are not doing well in math, reading, writing. Their handwriting is atrocious, and their grammer is worse. I have been more miss than hit in my approach to teaching them these skills. I have an idea and will work on it over the next couple of days to see if I can help them make some progress.

As far as math goes, I though I was doing a pretty good job teahing them the concepts, however after having the majority of the class fail our first two tests, I have to figure out how to get them to rembember what I have taught.

Today my students start their IOWA test. I am not sure what the results will be used for; however it is required.

I will discuss later about my school, my teaching position, and about other related ideas. I want to go back and try to create a blog for each of the previous 19 school days. Time will tell if I can remember what happend way back then.

I will update you more after school today as I reflect what happened on Day 20.