Lots of fatigue and resistance in the moment of return to class after a one-week break. I got through Monday okay--WE got through Monday okay. My students, I owe them a debt of gratitude! But ... what did we do?
We did this. I gave this speech. The author of the speech recommends it as a first-day-of-school thing, but I didn't know about it on the first day of school. So I did it on the 110th day. Better late than never. I was really impressed with how the students solemnly wrote down each thing I told them, each ingredient needed for success in life. They seemed to buy into it more than I had worried they would.
It did not take up the whole class period, which had me pretty worried about 10 minutes in, when I knew I had like five minutes to go, max. But then I had some other ideas; I'd had them switch seats at the beginning of the period, and ... I had them do a milquetoast icebreaker where they wrote down all their new neighbors' names and had them write down one interesting thing about each of their new neighbors. Meanwhile, I had picked the top five-six students in each class, and I pulled these students to the side and had them divide the class into teams. I gave each team an information sheet on which they could write a team name, and then ... some other crap which, though I stressed about them not getting it done early on, I realized later just served as a potential opportunity for them to get to know each other a bit. God, I get all stressed like, "they're not spending every waking moment earnestly professing their desire to live better lives by being better math students," as if I spent a lot of time doing that as a high school student. Oh, sarcasm. Got to embrace it. More so.
Anyway, with all those ice breakers put together the 52 minutes went by pretty smoothly. I started telling the latter periods up front that we weren't going to do a lot of math today, and they were basically like, "Cool."
For my sixth period, I was worried that what had worked Periods 1-4 would NOT work Period 6. I've got plenty of reasons to worry. That class is dysfunctional in every sense of the word. Also, I wouldn't have the advantage of having just reseated them in Period 6; they got a new seating chart the week before vacation, so it wouldn't make sense, I thought, to re-seat them. I was freaking out by the end of my Period 5 prep and almost left campus to make a run for coffee. But I don't know--something calmed me down. I sort of caught myself panicking without good reason. A lot of times I get afraid because what I have planned won't take the whole period, as if finishing early and having a little free time at the end of class is some kind of crisis. And then my version of crisis abatement is throwing some crap together that they usually wind up hating and having a fight with them over their lack of willingness to do whatever it is I've thrown together.
Anyway. We didn't wind up running out of time anyway. I sent one kid outside at one point and got a campus supervisor to come by so I could stick my head outside and have a frank discussion with said kid. This may be insane thinking, but that could be a time when I decide to really let a kid have it. So the other kids could hear it, but it's not in front of the other kids, maybe. I don't know. I'm so dying to impress everybody as a tough guy ... that's probably an ego thing.
This is not a math class! It is a class in success training!
No comments:
Post a Comment