Bad teacher day

Hello,

It wasn't an overly impressive day for me. One of the great things about teaching this age is the immediate feedback. We were attempting to classify minerals and many things went wrong. Mineral kits were incomplete, Mineral info card packs differed from pack to pack. I thought I had set up a fool proof system with the minerals, so I didn't do a very effective check of all the moving parts before passing everything out to the class. I'll make sure the next teacher is given a better launching point, which is me not taking the responsibility that I should, but I'm still mad about it. I should have checked every kit like I did with our rock identification, but I didn't. And it was a bit of a mess. My patience grew short. Everything took longer than it should have. Just not good.

I also messed up on the homework. At the end of math class, I handed the homework to a student and asked if they would please pass it out. At the end of the day, kids were approaching me and asking if I was going to pass out the math homework. The child that I gave the task to, said "I thought you said to take one and pass it."  Somewhere there is a stack of math sheets that never found their recipients.

I became aware of the math mess up as we were writing down our homework in our assignment books. Suddenly my mind loss track of the other assignment I was planning on giving them. My mind was a complete blank. I'm sure it was something that connected their learning from prior days... yes, it had to have been fantastic. I just couldn't think of it.  And the clock was ticking. "AAAuuuugh!" I yelled. "No other homework because I can't think straight right now!" At least that got most of them smiling.

We did play an eventful game of Androscoggin. It is a game where you make up words using the letters of another word or words. I'd played the game for years, before finding its description in a 1908 book of games. The book titled the game Androscoggin.  I usually introduce the game, using that title as the word that we use letters from, but we kept with the geology theme and used METAMORPHIC as our word. We built on our homework from Monday night.  I play it as a four team game, but I may change it to five, due to the size of our class.

My busy season has definitely started. I've got to get more organized (and plan better for my lessons) if I'm going to make it through with flying colors. I've also got to make sure I get enough sleep. I woke up at 3:00am last night and couldn't make it back to sleep. I was thinking about all our missing objects in class and my suspicions that some items were also stolen from CREA. We need some maturing to happen quickly in our class. It is difficult to have several groups running at once without trust and independence. I put some more things in motion to help speed up that process.

I'll be asking for some help with next Friday's Harry Potter Sorting. I may need some help with some wizardy snacks and some sewing of some black material into robes. More to come.

Mr. Shea