Wednesday, June 28, 2006

Happy TFA Day and welcome to my new classroom

Oh what a day! After my near breakdown yesterday, some conversations with the resource guys, my school office manager and my CS, I decided it was time to make some changes. Namely that we weren’t going to screw with the teacher anymore. I bought a kitchen timer and today they wrote rough drafts. Every last one of them. We timed it and when we were done with one section, they moved on. If you can’t write that fast, guess you should have paid attention yesterday. I also created them a packet with the outline of the letter so they stopped asking me questions every two seconds. When my CMA came in to observe, every single student was WRITING. And they were self-directed, they looked at their packet before asking me. Oh my goodness it feels so good.

I also got a pencil manager. The conversation went something like this:
Me: Pablo are you a punk?
Pablo: A punk Miss? I ain’t no punk.
Me: Pablo, you’re in charge of my pencils. You’re going to hand them out and collect them. If someone gets out of my room with a pencil then they punked you.
Pablo: I ain’t no punk Miss, you’ll have your pencils.

Tomorrow Tyneeshia (who is now my all-star because I give her extra work) becomes my morning pencil collector as well.

My day was going absolutely amazing and then in the afternoon announcements, Mr. H put a huge damper on it. He called an emergency meeting for all TFA teachers and told us to bring our grade books and attendance. Ehhh… only problem is that my grade book was so not updated. We headed to our CS room and waited for him to come yell at us for whatever we had done wrong. When he started talking we were all thoroughly freaked out. By the time he told us to go home because we had the nigh off, we didn’t even get it. Today is TFA Day, a little celebration they have on the middle of institute where they give us all the night off. Mr. H was screaming at us and then he was just like “you work too hard, I’m giving you the night off, go home.” It was so funny.

So happy TFA Day, the middle of institute and the day it all turned around in my classroom.

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