How Did I Pull That One Off?

I've decided to blog about my class I had today. Ms. Crosby came to evaluate me, and normally this would not bother me. I usually forget that she is there, and things go smoothly. I ALWAYS have everything planned just so in order to keep anything from throwing me off of my game. But when I woke up this morning and saw so much snow on the ground...I was a bit nervous.

I happened to see on the news that Cave City's buses were going to be running two hours late, and this made me feel a little better. After all, this wouldn't affect my evaluation now, right? My evaluation was scheduled for 11, and everything would go off just as I had planned. WRONG. I arrive at school at 9:30 only to find out that the school was not taking attendance today due to the fact that some roads were still icy and not all of the buses were able to make it to every house. This meant I was going to have absent students. A lot of them. My 3rd hour class was tiny. Of course I had a lot of absent students...just as I had expected. I knew that 4th hour, the class I would be evaluated in, would be the same way. Normally, this would not bother me. I would go about my plans, be evaluated, and everything would be okay. But not today. Today was peer review. Today was the day for the big workshop that I had planned so hard for, and now I would hardly have any students. Would this even work?

Students start coming in for 4th hour, and I have six. Six. This was less than half of my class. How am I supposed to work with this? As the students did their bellwork, I quickly rearranged group members so that everyone would be with an appropriate partner. I had to completely re-plan my grouping strategy and assign some students a new color. When I put students in groups, I give them colors so that they know how they should transition. For example, reds stay where you are, and blues go find your reds. I managed to pull it together, and class started. The students were wonderful. They were engaged, and my lesson went perfectly. Well...as perfectly as it could with half of my class gone. Ms. Crosby loved my lesson, and everything worked out. I don't know how I did it, but I managed to have a productive class with only six students. NO TIME WASTED HERE!!

Absolutely Mortified

I’m, once again, frustrated with my class. 3B specifically. They have, officially, lost review game privileges, and I am absolutely sore at them at the moment. Sometimes it seems like that treat me like a teacher, and they sometimes seem to think that I cannot actually do anything to me. They seem to think that how they act towards me will have no consequence, or, more accurately, I have to be the nice, fun teacher. And I like to be fun – that is no lie. I like making class interesting and making up a lot of different activities for teaching the subject that we are going over. I like turning the class over to the students for discussion, only facilitating a lot of the time. It is certainly a lot more interesting that lecturing all day. But 3B makes that impossible, and that doubles my workload because I have to make a lesson plan for them and one for the other classes that do not act out.

            I was so embarrassed on Wednesday, the last time I was in class with them. I had reviewed with 2A and 3A earlier in the day, and that had gone well. The Jeopardy game was a success, and everyone did fairly well at it. Those who did not do well were able to go online to prepare too, so that went well.

3B had to ruin that trail of good feelings. I don’t know – maybe it is because they had been cooped up in the cafeteria because of rain for the last two days, or maybe it is something in the air. My mother swears her classes act out on the full moon, and there was a full moon approaching, but they were loud enough that they disrupted the next class over. It was embarrassing, and I was mortified when Mrs. Walls came in. We assigned them book work for the rest of the class period, they had review game privileges taken away, and they were assigned extra homework to finish in lieu of the game review.

I have been left to stew in my feelings over the experience. Clearly I have a lot to learn about classroom management. How do I get that class to behave? I cannot be that bad at classroom management either, given that my other classes all behave. But what am I doing wrong?