Back in the groove of things

The school year has officially started for NYC teachers! After about two months away from the classroom (but not away from teaching, as we have all spent at least part of our summers planning and getting ready for the year, mind you), we headed back to our classrooms this week to set up for the new school year (2012-2013!!!).

I have a new colleague for 8th grade math this year - "Mr. Carter". As I previously posted, Mr. Carter is a first year teacher from Chicago beginning his teaching career here at our school in the Bronx. Appearently, Mr. Carter has an AMAZING record as a student teacher with the Chicago Public Schools, and we're very excited to welcome him to our team. This should be a very nice change for our new eigth graders, who (finally!) do not have the risk of getting Mr. Buchell.

In my school, every teacher met with our amazing principal, Ms. Lopez, and our assistant principal (discipline AP), Mr. O'Klay, to discuss expectations they have for us this year, create goals, answer questions, introduce new school procedures, go over test scores, go over our schedules, take a look at our summer prep work, among other things. We met our new staff and did some teambuilding activities as a large group of faculty! Even cuter... Ms. Lopez got us each a t-shirt with "motivational" words on the back and our school's colors - words like "persevereance", "dedication", "initiative", "character" and "integrity" - that define our school's core values. We are to wear our new t-shirt on the first day of school to remind our students of the character traits that we will cultivate in each of them and expect to see from them.

I have my classroom fully set up and ready to go this year. I'm in the same room as last year, so this task wasn't too difficult. All my posters are up and running, my boards are set up, my technology is working (thank goodness), a new Facebook page has been created and all my lesson plans are up on Engrade. I'm very excited to get started with the new school year! After a pretty successful first year of teaching, I am really looking forward to seeing the challenges and successes that I will be faced with my second year. I'm starting to have dreams about my students,and classes, colleagues and the school year... and these anxious feelings are only going to continue to build and incrementally increase up until the night before school... by then, I probably won't be getting too much sleep...

They say your second year of teaching is filled with applying the lessons learned from your not-so-successful lesson plans and days from your first year of teaching. While I have blogged about many of those, I mostly blogged and experienced positive things last year. Is the second year of teaching filled with using that - and cultivating it to make the success even greater? Or was I just lucky last year? After all, it's no secret that my classes and students are harder this year: greater percentage of student discipline problems, lower average NYS scores (some two to three grade levels behind), family problems, HUGE increase in special-ed population, less pull-out support...

How is this year going to go?

Well, at least I know how my schedule is going to go:
0- Advisory
1- 8th grade math*
2- 8th grade math
3- Planning
4- Integrated Algebra
5- Integrated Algebra
6- Lunch
7- 8th grade math*
8- Free: meetings, conferences with mentors, department chair, principal/AP, lesson planning time, occassional duties, meeting with push-in teachers

* Due to higher numbers of special needs students (9 in 1st period and 11 in 7th), a push-in teacher will be provided during these periods specifically to meet the needs for my special-ed/IEP students.
**Many, many goods to this schedule! Maximum of only two class periods in a row (as opposed to three), and average class size of 30 (as opposed to 32).

How is this year going to go? It's going to be what I make of it. Regardless of what they say about my new classes, I'm going to go in just like I did last year. Build relationships and trust with my students. Ensuring that all my students are understanding the material. Going back for them. Being there for them. It's going to be a great year. I'm their teacher - someone they will remember for their entire life.

Well rested and well prepared, I'm back in the groove of teaching :)