I realize that my Sunday piece was kind of a downer, so I thought I’d write something about my favorite day of the week: Thursday.

I don’t know why Thursdays are so great, considering I still have to prepare for one day of school before the week is out. But Fridays always seem to be easier than any other school day, and so my Thursday evenings are usually pretty relaxed. Plus, Hopkins is on Wednesday night, and I feel relatively liberated when I leave school on Thursday, knowing I won’t have grad class for about another week. Or maybe I’m just so tired by Thursday that I start to get delirious.

Whatever it is, things always seem to be just a little bit brighter on Thursdays

Sunday is invariably the worst day of my week, simply because it precedes Monday.

Fridays are useless. Every Friday, exhausted from fighting the good fight all week, I typically barely have the energy to properly celebrate making through the week. I’m usually on my way to bed by 11, promising myself that I’m going to get a whole bunch of work done on Saturday. This never happens. Saturday is my day to forget about everything (unless I have Hopkins class). In any case, all the work I’m supposed to be doing gets pushed back to Sunday, and Sunday is when I’m hit with the full anxiety of everything I’ve postponed. I typically work a solid 10 hours on Sundays, trying to get all my ducks in order for the week. I always go to bed not quite fully prepared and restless due to the things in the back of my mind I know I still need to do.

Sundays are so bad that my Saturdays are beginning to suffer. I find myself caught in the dilemma of whether I should stay up late to “postpone” Sunday morning, or whether I should go to bed early so that when Sunday morning unavoidably does come, at least I’m not sleepy.

I need a vacation; spring break can’t possibly come soon enough!

This week has been taxing, every single day. My room has been too cold to inhabit for most of the week, so I’ve been squatting in another teacher’s room during periods when she doesn’t need it. This has happened several times this year, because my room is probably the coldest room in the building (I once had my water bottle freeze in my classroom, no joke). Teaching out of another classroom is always stressful, because I don’t have access to all of my supplies, and I’m not that well-organized as it is. Nothing sucks more than needing an office referral form but not having one at your disposal.

I stayed up really late Sunday planning what I hoped would be a monster lesson. All said, I probably put about 7-8 hours of labor into it. How did it go, you ask? Let’s just say it was a learning experience. I typically take notes on everything that went well in a lesson, everything that didn’t go as planned, and what I would do to improve it. When I plan a really ambitious lesson, more usually goes awry, and Monday’s lesson was extremely ambitious. I wouldn’t say it blew up, but one thing I’ve learned is that it’s silly to plan magnum opus lessons up late the night before, without consulting with anyone.

After school Monday, I felt really fatigued. I tried to go to bed early, but did not sleep well at all. By Tuesday afternoon, I knew I was sick. Everyone told me to take a day, but at this point, I am absolutely desperate to keep things on track in the room, and because of this schedule, I simply can’t afford to take days off, unless absolutely necessary.

So, I’ve been working ill all week. At this point it’s not too bad, and I will definitely take time if I feel like I need it medically, but otherwise I need to there. The kids haven’t been making it easy. Not many feel my sense of urgency, and I have failed to effectively convey it to them. I’ve tried to take my classroom management to next level. I’m definitely sweating the small stuff. I’m demanding absolute silence during my instruction. I’m trying hard to cut the turnaround in grading time. But the kids aren’t on board. Tuesday, after having to send about 8 kids out of class at one point or another, I brought the class to a halt while I called parents from the doorway in front of the students. I did the same thing with my nightmare homeroom class yesterday. I’m giving the kids speeches till I’m blue in the face, imploring them to understand what they’re up against. Still, kids still won’t stay in their seats and quiet, and I’m being cursed at on a nearly daily basis. I’m so exhausted by the end of the day that I’m pretty much just coming home and working from my bed.

Why am I so desperate to keep things moving?

Our grade is on an A-Day/B-Day schedule with 110 minute periods. This means that I see 2 of my classes one day, then the other 2 the next day, and it alternates like that, ad infinitum. So let’s say I missed a Thursday. That means that the class I saw the previous Tuesday, I would not see again until the following Monday. By then, everything is forgotten. And let’s do some math–I see each group of kids 5 days out of every 2 weeks. This means that they get an average of 275 minutes of instruction. But we don’t have any passing periods, so you have to subtract the non-zero transition time from that, too. A lot of the schools in the city are giving the kids 90 minutes of math instruction 5 days a week, for a total of 450 instruction minutes of math a week. For this and other reasons, I’m perilously behind on pacing. By my count, I’ve got 25 instructional days with each class left, but by the curriculum pacing guide, I’ve got 44 days of material remaining. Even moving double-time, there’s almost no margin for error, assessment, or the 3 weeks of review also mentioned in the pacing guide.

So that’s where I’m at right now. I spoke with my new assistant principal for almost an hour about this dilemma, and I think she’s up for some pretty radical approaches to the problem. That’s good, because nothing conventional is going to make it happen at this point. Considering where I’m at as it is, I’m not looking forward to how this is likely going to effect me personally. But I’ve got to find the fortitude to make it happen, somehow.

It’s not all doom and gloom 🙂

I’ve got one student who has pretty much been a rockstar all year. He’s totally respectful, and almost always on task. He’s so consistent that it’s hard to imagine him any other way. On Friday, at the honors ceremony, he received an award for being on the Dean’s List. After the ceremony, his grandmother thanked me and claimed that his achievement was due to my efforts, and confided that this was the first time he’d ever made honor roll.

I don’t really take much credit for it. Most of the time, I feel like I’m actually letting down students like him who have to suffer through the chaos and my lack of experience as a teacher. But it is really good to know that good things are happening in my room too. I’ve got nothing but awe and respect for the kids who come to my room and do nothing but the right things, in the midst of so much gone wrong.

On another note, I’ve been reading through a fantastic series the Baltimore Sun has done profiling our CEO of schools, Dr. Andrés Alonso. I haven’t finished it yet, but from what I’ve read so far, it provides an great and truthful look at Dr. Alonso, the school system, and what his vision is for it. When I’m done reading, I’ll be sure to post my thoughts on it. It can be found here. I think he’s doing great things, but I, like many people, definitely have my reservations on some of his approaches.

Lastly, the countdown continues–5 full, 5-day weeks until spring break. I appreciate all the support I’ve been receiving. It’s going to help me keep my stamina up for this long stretch!

I got most of my NWEA test scores back, and the results are not what I hoped. I really felt like some of my kids had gained a lot of ground, but the numbers don’t back it up. On average, kids who took the test in the Fall and the Spring lost one point on the performance scale. The biggest gains were seen in the special ed pull-out class, which I don’t teach.

I just mailed off the second batch of scores, so hopefully it won’t make the situation worse. But I’m not too optimistic, because most of the tests in the batch were from students who are chronically absent or were delayed because they carelessly messed up their bubbling somehow.

So much for TFA’s big goal of 2 years’ progress in one…right now, it seems as though I’ll be lucky to see progress at the end of the year, period.

I can’t afford to spend time feeling discouraged though. I’m trying to teach my butt off to catch up with the district pace. Right now, we’re several weeks behind, due partially to the fact that we’re working with only slightly more than 1/2 the instructional time of most schools.

I just wanted to make sure to update my journal to announce that I am, in fact, still hanging in there. After my awful Tuesday, things did perk up during the remainder of the week. These next 7 weeks are going to be intense. Just one day off between now and Spring break, and the majority of my grad school coursework is also crammed into the same time period.

I finally broke down at school today.

The weirdest part about it was that it wasn’t my worst day at school. It was a fairly bad half of a day. I worked my butt off to reach those kids and try to get them to take ownership over their education, and in my afternoon class, they fired back hard. It has been a number of weeks since it’s been so bad in my room, but compared to the typical day in the Fall, it wasn’t really all that bad. Kids cursed at each other across the room. I got little to no respect when I tried to speak. I had to break up a fight between to students who were horsing around. The same old “you don’t teach us anything” accusations. Today, it wore me down though.

I was fine when I sent the class on to their next hour, exasperated with their behavior. I was fine when my Hopkins supervisor debriefed me with a look on her face that seemed to say, “I don’t know what I can do for this kid”. I was fine when one of my students told me I needed to take control of my classroom and have the kids in the class before clean up their mess behind them. I was fine when half the kids I held for detention walked out. I was fine when the last kid to leave called me a faggot under his breath as he left the door.

I might have been fine if I had the chance to spend an hour to myself to cool down, but we had a team meeting after school that I had to go to. I left the meeting to get some papers, but had to detour to my room, because I knew I was about to lose it, and when I got to my room, I just bawled. To make a long story short, I pulled it together, but when I went downstairs to try and continue my duties, I ended up breaking down again, but this time in front of students, staff, faculty and administration.

I’m kind of humiliated, but on the other hand, kind of not. I mean, I’m not freakin’ Superman. I guess it all eventually adds up, even if it takes 6 months. I hate being vulnerable, and I hate being a charity case. But everyone’s been very supportive and given that what happened happened, it makes it easier to deal with.

I think what made this day different from any of dozens of bad days last Fall, is that I’ve really tried to reach out to individual students, and the more I connect with them, the less I can keep my guard up. I’ve probably had 20 or more individual conferences with students just these last 2 days, and although I don’t usually take misbehavior personally, when I reach out to a student, it does hurt to have it thrown back in my face. It’s a lot easier to take it on the chin when you keep your distance.

A tiny part of me says take a day, but the rest of me says forget about it. A day off wouldn’t make my problem disappear. I’d have to go back to school eventually, so it might as well be tomorrow…

As I alluded to in my last entry, I’m really starting to pick up on major changes in some of my students.

One girl started the year barely attending school at all. When she was present, she could barely keep her mouth shut. She showed little-to-no effort in her work. Then she started showing up consistently, and being a consistent thorn in my side. I had to throw her out of most tests and quizzes for disruption. Most days, she didn’t do a lick of work, and she was really dragging down one of my best students, who idolized her for being the class clown. Then I started dedicating part of my walk-around time to really working with her one-on-one. As it turned out, she was way more capable than she was letting on. I think like a lot of my students, she lacked confidence and would rather not try and fail than try, fail, and look stupid. I complimented her for doing better work. As the semester went along, I tried to devote some time to getting her started on her work. By the end of the semester, things hadn’t turned around completely, but she was doing some of her classwork, attempting to take test and quizzes, and refraining from disrupting class most of the time.

I can name a whole bunch of other students who have shown similar turnarounds. Most of them no longer act like they hate being there. Although I’m happy with the direction of these students, unfortunately, many of them are still going to fail their first semester of Algebra I. I hope that it’s not going to be too discouraging, but they need to understand that you can’t piss away most of a semester, put in average effort, and still pass the class. They’re starting to learn how to work, but they’re going to need to learn just how hard that work needs to be to succeed. The HSA test at the end of the year is going to show them no mercy, and neither will I. So the challenge for me this new semester is figuring out how to take these from walking in the right direction to sprinting.

I’m slightly excited about next week. My student are going to take the NWEA, a standardized exam for measuring overall math abilities. They took the test for the first time this past Fall, and it indicated that I’m teaching students ranging in math ability from 2nd grade, all the way to 10+. The 9th grade average performance is on-par with the average American student halfway through 5th grade. The Algebra I HSA is a tough test. Needless to say, it’s almost audacious to expect that all 100 of my students will grow enough pass. However, if I can push them to make more than a year’s worth of growth in math, at least they are on track to catch up with their peers.

The big goal for my class is to grow an average of 2 years in math ability. A tiny handful of my kids have already maxed out the scale, and a couple are on the low end and probably haven’t moved much, but I think there’s a big chunk of kids in the middle who will hopefully show some major gains. I’m looking forward to (hopefully) seeing some good numbers on academic growth for the 1st semester.

I haven’t been doing such a good job lately of keeping this journal up to date, but I see that people are still checking in, so an update is in order.

Most of my days since coming back haven’t been too eventful. I think my biggest problem lately is that I’m struggling to attain the level of respect I should be receiving from my students. I’ve been hammering on them. My homeroom class has been the toughest to deal with. They’re still super snotty, but I think I’m making some progress. I’ve had to make a whole bunch of phone calls, punish the entire class as a group, and be extremely vigilant. It’s been hard, but I hope it will start paying dividends. They need the biggest kick in the butt. My interim assessment scores show that all my classes are performing dismally. But my homeroom significantly lags the other three. I’m hoping that when/if I can finally break them, we can start moving them forward. I am excited that Ms. Cleveland, our most experienced teacher and our best at relating to the students, will teach them every day, because she will hopefully have a big impact in getting them into shape.

One thing I’m concerned about coming up is that a large number of my students are missing very major assignments (i.e. tests and quizzes). I’ve gone out of my way to post due dates and past due notices for make ups, and still, most of missing assignments are still outstanding. It’s so frustrating. On one hand, I do not want to baby these kids. They need to learn to take care of their own responsibilities, and learn that there are major consequences if they don’t. On the other hand, some of these kids are already on the verge of being lost.

Another thing that is a major concern to me is the ebb and flow of individual students. It’s amazing how far some kids have come over the year. I can think of several kids who started the year off severely behind, completely unmotivated, and/or totally unmanageable and have turned their acts around. But there are a handful of kids who have moved in the opposite direction. I can think of three, all in my homeroom, who started off way ahead but have really been crashing and burning for the past couple of months. They are supposed to be three of our best, and right now, everybody is at a loss as to what to do with them. I talk to each of their parents just about weekly, to little effect. We’re all busting our butts to get them to stop throwing their lives away, but at this point it’s on them. First semester is about done, and they’re going to have to lay in the bed they’ve made for themselves.

On the bright side, January is glorious: winter break, two weeks of school, 2 days off for MLKJ Day and Inauguration, exams this week, and then professional development days next week. Supposedly, I’ll be paying dearly in February and March. Days off will be fewer and far between, Hopkins will be back in session, and HSA’s will be becoming more and more urgent. I’m enjoying the slower pace, but also trying to buckle down as best I can.

Coming back from break was harder than I thought it would be. Having almost 2 weeks off was fantastic, but it almost felt too long. By the end of the break, I was starting to feel tired of being aimless. I was looking forward to having structure again.

But as soon as my alarm went off, reality set in again. The first day was a struggle. Strangely enough, nothing went horribly wrong that day; I was just not into to it. I had planned on coming back with enthusiasm, but that morning, it was tough to muster the energy to interact with my students. It was one of those days when I just didn’t like any part of my job. A full day of butting heads with students and dealing with dozens of manifestations of social problems was a lot to handle after such a break from responsibility. I came home exhausted and slept most of the evening away.

Fortunately, after some long conversations, I cheered up considerably. I realized that maybe it was too much to expect that I’d set right back in the groove where I’d left off before break, and that maybe I’m not abnormally bad at or ill-suited for teaching.

These last couple days have gone much better, at least in terms of my feelings internally. And although my classroom is far from the well-oiled machine I’d like it to be, I really do feel more comfortable in my role. My lessons are going way better lately, and my ability to assert my authority is definitely coming along. It’s still hard as heck and exhausting, but I’m not feeling so dismal anymore.