the first week, encapsulated in one blogspot

Each day brought its own challenge, but each day built upon itself. My first day was quite the adventure, as I never really knew whether or not I was going to receive students and, subsequently, have a class to welcome into my arms--this is because the previous week, I never got a roster, so I was pretty clueless about the student-getting process. Now, I'm all ready to go, and then, suddenly, the scheduling person, E., comes in and the conversation goes:

"So Mr. R., since you don't have students, then you'll be down in room 148 on the middle school side, helping the middle school Read 180 teacher."

"You mean, like, share his class?" says I.

"You'll be splitting his class, because there's an overflow of students. Ok, bye!"

Obviously it wasn't exactly like that, but it seemed like that to me. I was in utter and complete shock, because I had just set up this lovely, lovely (and it really is--I still haven't had time to take a picture, so maybe tomorrow I will) classroom and put my heart and soul into cleaning out the shite that's all up in there; I thought I was no longer going to be in this room, and was relegated to sharing a room that had nothing to do with my class (148 is a social studies room, and not mine...which is a big bummer, cause we have to set up the library, etc for the students!). I'm still a little upset, and confused about the configuration, but it's worked out so far. In truth, I love middle schoolers--they're freakin hilarious and fun to work with. I'm sure the 9th graders are, but it's still fun to work with 7th and 8th graders.

So, that was that. I'm now a first period MS Reading teacher! As for the 9th graders, I'm still workin on that. The story is, since I had all these free periods, I spent the majority of it going around and gathering spelling tests (arguably not very accurate when talking about ability, but it's an entryway into judging whether students need my reading test, because it judges their phonemic awareness (I think...haha) and word recognition (this is true) for stuff like normal sight-words like "mine," "alike," or "red." As well as grade-level vocab (although lieutenant is in there, and, I mean, common, it took me a minute to think how to spell that one). Anyways, so after the correcting, I took kids in all Thurs/Friday to have them tested for my reading class. I now have about...40 some-odd kids, so like, two periods, which is perfect.

Tomorrow I have some more testing to do (but only two kids). The rest of that time will be me heading down into 148 and setting up the library during our lunch period.

Here's to week two! I'm excited!