in short

The Week (in short): fights, craziness, miracles, exhaustion, breakthroughs, and algebra.

Teachers don't have a reputation for being cool. But seriously, folks, my job is the coolest. I still love/hate it, but this has limited impact on the cool factor. The main contributor to my job's cool factor this week has been teaching my kids some basic algebra skills. Algebra, I should tell you, is my favorite branch of mathematics. So what makes this all so cool (besides the fact that I love me a good linear equation)?

The kids are loving it.

"It's our time, sweet babe, to break on through"

My schedule is out to kick my butt in more ways than one. One more day of Algebra Camp before I'm out on my own in rough-and-tumble world of middle school teaching. I've got to finish my portfolio and all my reflections for class to be turned in first thing Monday morning at the latest. But I've also got derby boot camp kicking my ass all night tomorrow and all day Saturday and Sunday from 8 a.m. to 10:30 p.m. Then I've got to get a running start on my job and take care of some more paperwork issues and get my classroom set up and my procedures all laid out. Work officially starts Wednesday, 7:30 a.m. and I got the call from the school secretary this morning to remind me of that. All the other lucky bastards in my class have a couple weeks to recuperate. Next weekend is Satchmo Fest and my uncle is coming to town soon and the kids start in a week-and-half and I have no illusions that I will have any time for anything once that madness begins.

Have I mentioned that I'm exhausted?

All that said, derby was great today. Tough without leaving me feeling like I want to die. And my knee was cooperating thanks to the handy-dandy $20 knee brace. Let's just hope that continues.

The kids had a blast at camp today, thankfully. My lesson went over fabulously but I am about to strangle one of my girls, M. She has no focus and does not follow directions. C is so smart that he forgets that he should read the directions. And F is just an all around good kid to have. My project, LIII, was having a rough time today. He immediately shuts down when faced with a multi-step problem or anything that involves reading. When it comes to the computations he usually knows what he should be doing. But the reading really turns his head around backwards and I struggled to help him stay with the group. It was heartening to know, however, that sometimes when he appeared to be off task he was really just thinking the problem through and I wouldn't realize it until he answered my question 2 or 3 minutes after I'd asked it. I could tell that the other kids were starting to feel held back but none of them stepped in to help him and a sense of snobbery came peering through. They come from a much different school environment than LIII and they don't seem to know what to do with him so they just stick to themselves. I'd hold it against them but that wouldn't fix anything and they're all good kids, flaws and all.

This job is so big and I haven't even really started yet. Commence deer in headlights.

Algebra Camp: Day 3

I can see how teaching can quickly become exhausting. During camp hours I am ON at all times. Who needs help? Who needs separated? Who's got a pencil? What are we doing? How do we keep them under control? Are they keeping up? Are they bored? How do we make it better? Who hasn't had a turn yet? Who went to the bathroom? How many copies do we need? What if we have too much time to kill?

And that ON feeling stays through my drive home, during which I spend the entire time thinking about tomorrow's lesson and my kids' assessments. But when I get home and I get a snack and I sit down I suddenly burn out and turn OFF. It is so nap time right now. But no, no time for naps.

Going to the Zephyrs game tonight with my dad to watch them play the Tacoma Rainiers (go r-bos!). Tomorrow evening is the first night of derby bootcamp which continues Friday evening and all day Saturday and Sunday. The only free time I have between now and Monday is a little bit of time to do school work in the mornings tomorrow and Friday. God, I'm tired. But the kids are still great and I still love what I'm doing and I still think that being a math teacher is going to Rule the Skool. My kids are are not at all what I expected from Day 1 in a lot of ways. I love trying to figure them out.

20 minutes until I have to catch a ferry to meet my dad. Maybe just a quick nap.

think fast!

Today I was reminded why classroom management is the most important thing I will have to master in my teaching career. These kids would be hanging off the ceiling if given the opportunity. But they are so much fun! We were doing signed numbers with them today in two separate groups. One group learned with algebra tiles while the other was on the number line and then we switched them. But because positive and negative numbers are possibly the most boring thing on the planet and also tricky for them, the kids started to fade fast. Especially those who were having the hardest time. I continued to try and work with my personal project, LIII. He's my slow kid, but he's totally my favorite. When all the other kids blurt out the answers, he raises his hand (enthusiastically!) and waits to be called on. Sometimes he looks bored and disinterested but he's really just not clicking with the material and needs some attention. Well, a lot of attention. But when he gets it he turns into this whole other kid. I love it. Doing my best to keep him from getting lost in the shuffle of the other rowdy students.

When the kids were starting to drag and complain, I had to think fast. We have purple masking tape we were using to lay out stuff on the floor so I used it to make a number line on the wall and made two index cards, each with a stick figure on it. The kids named one Lillian Delilah and the other got named LIV (after my pet pupil). Then we rolled dice to determine how many places the game piece would move and a coin to determine whether they would move forward or backward. It wasn't particularly educational but the kids ate it up. They were suddenly all engaged and jockied to take turns moving the pieces or rolling the die or flipping the coin. We got their attention back before they all decided that we were totally lame and algebra camp sucks. Not bad for a game made up on the fly, if I do say so myself. It was complete chaos but I think it'll keep them coming back for tomorrow's lesson. Fractions is our main activity and then I'm in charge of little history activity involving different numeral systems.

Still working on my $1,000,000 lesson that I have to do for Thursday. Math + entertainment is difficult to pull off but hopefully it pays off.

Algebra Camp: Day 1

We got our algebra camp kiddies today. I totally picked the right age group to work with! They are all over the place so think fast. This afternoon's activities were just preliminary assessment and warm-up games. I've got four kids that I'm responsible for teaching and keeping out of trouble. Two go to the International School together--kids who've got just about everything a kid could want--and the other two are on totally different ends of the spectrum. She's friendly and obviously smart and he's very shy and needs some help but, from what I can tell, a very sweet kid. This is definitely a more culturally diverse group than I will have in school but they are all at a different level of mathematical understanding so that is a good challenge for me to have.

Despite how cool it is to have some minds to warp, going to a classroom and being responsible for ten times as many kids is still a daunting prospect. As I've been told many, many times: you can't save them all. Oh, but I really, really want to.