THE 2012-2013 SCHOOL YEAR HAS BEGUN.
At 6:20 Thursday morning, I got up, took a shower and got ready for the first "teaching" day of school.
6:45. Boarded the subway towards Lexington Avenue - 59th Street. 7:00. Transferred trains and arrived in the Bronx.
7:25. Entered the school building, headed up to my classroom to set my things down and get the final touches ready before students entered.
7:45. Head downstairs, socialized with colleagues and school aides and sat down for a brief meeting with Ms. Lopez, our principal, and Mr. O'Klay, the AP.
8:00. The staff meeting ended. We all head back to our classrooms, finish preparing if needed, breathe and do our beginning of the year rituals.
We began the day with homeroom, and then shifted to our classes for the day.
It has now been a full week and two days since the 2012-2013 school year has started. We are OFFICIALLY in the zone! I know all of my students' names, plus a lot of their personality characteristics as well as their strengths and weaknesses in math.
The first three days, I spent a lot of time building a classroom community with my students. I am a strong believer in the acronym TEAM - Together Everyone Achieves More. Both last year and this year, I communicated with my students the importance of the classroom feeling like a family: a place where everyone gets along, is comfortable with each other, trusts each other and builds strong bonds together. I believe that if each of the students in my class are "cool" with one another (as well as with me), the amount of behavioral disruptions will be diminished dramatically. So, on the first day of school, after taking attendance, the students participated in six teambuilding activities - four of them between each other, and the other two including me. Last year, one of the biggest strengths about the year that my students communicated to me was the teambuilding: it set the culture of the classroom and my expectations right from the beginning. The activities (I posted some last year, for new readers :) ), are fun, engaging and effective. You can feel the environment in the classroom changing and that's a growth I really hope to see continue to develop during the year.
This eventually culminated in a team-wide 9/11 Rememberance service project the students on my team participated in through each of their classes. The goal was to tie in 9/11 and the idea of rememberance to each teacher's content area. The projects were then put together and sent to first responders and families of the victims.
Starting on Wednesday, both my classes started working on bridging the gaps that they might have from 6th and 7th grades that may inhibit their future performance in the 8th grade or Integrated Algebra curriculum. Some of my students are close to grade level, or even on grade level. Others are about 1 grade level behind; the most severe cases range from 2-3 grade levels behind. These students are disproportionally distributed to my first period class. 1st period already has 10 students with special needs or IEP's - enough that the district requires a push-in teacher at least two days of the week. Looks like I know where my hard class of the year is...
As for my classes, I absolutely LOVE them! The students are very pleasant, diverse, funny, interesting and BEHAVED! I think the difference between last year and this year isn't too great - hinting that I'm still on track to having another great year! (I don't know what their teachers last year were talking about... unless they're still in their honeymoon phase.. haha)
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