Miss L the Broken Record

The top 10 things I say while teaching:

1. "Have a seat." (also supplemented with "Park it" and "sit down.")
2. "I'll wait."
3. "Get in line."
4. "Thumbs up if you're ready."
5. "Why are you out of your seat?"
6. "Quickly." (when asked 10,000 times a day to go to the bathroom)
7. "I like how ________, ________ and _________ are working quietly."
8. "Sad day."
9. "Nice job."
10. "You're awesome."

Learning experiences are exhausting. I'm quickly figuring out that learning how to teach is basically just a condensed series of failures. All you can do is learn from the lessons you teach. Things I learned this week so far:

- it's okay to scrap the lesson and start over if it's not going well. I have discovered that I teach under a ridiculous and completely unfounded fear that if I don't exactly follow my lesson plan and plow through the predetermined material, something terrible will happen. And that really is not the case AT ALL. Yes, of course there are certain things the kids have to learn and benchmarks that must be reached. That's obvious. But there's no use conducting the struggle bus through a failing lesson from which no one's actually learning anything just for posterity's sake or to say you "got through it." This is actually something that really surprised me about my teaching, because I'm not a by-the-book person ordinarily. Give the kids what they need at the moment, not what you thought they needed when you planned the lesson three days before.

- teaching is an incredibly delicate process. EVERYTHING affects the kids, from the time of the day that we teach certain subjects to the manner in which we go to the bathroom and sharpen pencils. They are smart, perceptive, and sensitive little beings. I now find myself pondering things for longer amounts of time than probably anyone in any other profession does. Every single object, activity and process must be explicitly defined as it will affect my kids at that exact minute. I meditate on everything from pencil sharpeners to whether or not we should tape the kids nametags down to which side to kneel on when giving a kid one-on-one help. Who knew? Who thinks of that? Teachers.

- kids smell fear and inexperience, and I have to find a way to stop letting my insecurities show. Some of my kids still don't respect me as "the real teacher," and that needs to change.

- don't yell, they'll just get immune to your yelling all the time and start to yell over you.

- plan, plan, plan, plan, plan FOR EVERY POSSIBLE FUCKING THING THAT COULD HAPPEN IN A 20 MINUTE LESSON. You think it's unlikely that kids will start rolling fake joints with the post-it notes you pass out too far in advance? Think again. It will happen. Plan.

- relax and have fun. At the end of the day, you're still working with 9-year-olds. If you're not having any fun during the day, that's a problem.

Luckily, I almost always am.

My brain's fried.

I will catch you on the flip side.

On to my 10:30 old woman bedtime.

Keep your hands to yourself,

Miss L