About to Start the Marathon!

Sorry, there just isn't a good picture to go along with 6th grade orientation and 7/8th grade picking up their schedules, so you'll have to go without.

Yes, today after 7 hours of grueling in-service meetings (more on those later), we had to get energized and peppy enough to match the intensity level of the rising 6th graders who were on our campus today getting themselves acquainted with the school layout and important places on campus they needed to be aware of. It really wasn't that bad, I had a few flyers to hand out and a few parents had questions they needed answered, which if I didn't answer sufficiently, they made it seem like I did. Shortly after the 6th graders were off with family members to find their respective classrooms, those of us fortunate enough to teach more than one grade level had to book it back over to the auditorium for the 7/8th grade orientation meeting and collecting of schedules. What my mother said on her blog a few days ago (http://gabbysblog-keyofdjonz.blogspot.com/), has really rung true with me over the past few days. Simply put, we teachers and to some extent the students on campus are very accomodating here at the beginning of the schoolyear. Give it a few weeks of seeing no one other than each other, and this great mood of comeraderie and cooperation begins to give way to short fuses and major stresses! Enjoy it while it lasts is all I can say! It was really fun to get to see all the kids we had last year again, though and I'm ready to begin making new mistakes this year. That was one thing TBA taught me: it's okay to make several mistakes in one year. It's not okay to make the same several mistakes year after year. So I'm looking forward to making brand new mistakes!

Did I mention that I have 52 beginning band students and 52 7/8th grade band students? Did I mention I have a percussion class at 8 in the morning that I found out today is not comprised simply of beginning percussionist, but also of high school percussionist? Did I mention I have 5 music class students in my first film music class of the day and 18 in the next? For an average class size that hovers somewhere in the 15 student range for most teachers at my campus, these are huge challenges that I'm going to face this year. I just hope that I'm up to the challenge and that my co-worker can exercise some patience, and also allow me and the students to maintain a feeling of dignity in her discipline and corrections of teaching methods. The idea of dignity in discipline is something that has been preached over and over again during this inservice time.

Check out the smooth segue: Speaking of in-service: I had to give a presentation this morning on the National Middle School Association's goals for middle school level education. We only had yesterday morning during in-service to work on it, and it wasn't that hard. Mostly it consisted of taking bullet points and putting them into your own words. The section I was responsible for was only around three pages anyway. What I was not expecting is the reaction I received from my colleagues once I finished speaking, which has led me to think that maybe I put on an act when I teach versus when I'm around other people. When it was my turn to speak, I just got up and presented my information, but I tried to make it relevant to the audience as well as bring my own sense of unique humor to the presentation. Well, either I was an amazingly dynamic speaker, or my colleagues had never seen me so animated before (take your guess as to which one you lean towards), and I had at least 3-4 people come up to me afterwards to let me know they thought I did a really good job presenting. Maybe I'm a superhero with an alter-ego? Probably not. Definitely not.

It also made me laugh to realize how new teachers (beginning teachers) sometimes overdo things when they first start to teach. I can laugh, because it's me, and every other teacher in the world when they first start out. Case in point: The presentation I was a part of this morning was among the junior high non-core subject teachers like band, art, and PE. The high school had a similar project with a different book, they were supposed to each take a chapter or two and break it down and have it prepared for a presentation this morning. So we junior high teachers finish and sit back down and allow the high school team to go. This lady (girl?) stands up who is a first year teacher, a new teacher to the district, and graduated from here not too many years ago. Folks, that is three strikes against you if you're working to be taken seriously, so I can understand why this young lady acted the way she did (you'll see). The first words out of her mouth were: Can someone help me pass out these outlines? This would generally be a normal request and one that would not cause snickers among the group of teachers that worked on these presentations, however we had been instructed that this didn't have to be very high-tech, that our principal just wanted the information out there for the faculty, and that we were by no means to feel that we needed to do a huge presentation, like a powerpoint, if we simply wanted to write down our thoughts and present that, it would be just fine. So this young lady proceeds to hand these papers to the group, and then goes to the computer and pulls up her powerpoint presentation. She then spends the next 20 minutes explaining not only what I'm sure was her chapter responsibility, but also those of just about every other chapter in the book, knocking out what any other group had to contribute. Not that the other group of coaches minded all that much, they just kept on telling her that was basically right, and she was doing a fine job! No one can tell these coaches they don't know how to look a gift horse in the mouth. Anyway, she did a fairly good job, but I just had to smile, because I know she was trying really hard to be taken seriously by a faculty that largely taught her in high school. I wish her all the best, and realize that I'm not that far away from her.

I also am realizing more and more each day that there has to be a balance between the enthusiasm that needs to be brought to this type of job in order to be effective, and not to overdo or out-think what needs to be done. We as teachers have a tendency to make a very simple problem or project very complex when we don't need to, and it's definitely something I'm planning on watching out for this upcoming schoolyear. Which starts promptly at 7:55 on Monday!

Kayla, Brenna, and I will be at a wedding in San Antonio this weekend, for some people that I don't know, but I hope the food will be good and that I'll be able to rest up some before this long marathon race begins!