I feel so guilty, sometimes, about not being good at teaching yet. It feels like I’m working on it, and getting better, but I’m really not good at it right now.
I moved to first grade this week, and it’s been better than second grade was. Part of it, of course, is the size of the class – I have 18 students now, not 29, and the aid who is teaching alongside me is wonderful – not that the other CM who I was teaching with last week wasn’t wonderful, but that was a temporary setup – we planned to split that class.
I don’t know where the line is between normal first year teacher problems and me just being awful at all of this. I’ve spent some time this week teaching procedures, but I’m annoyed by how long and boring it feels – I’m not sure how many times is too many to run over our centers transition, or how specific I should be about what I want that transition to look like. We rehearsed our lining up procedures too. We can get in a line in about a minute and a half, but I’ve been trying to get it under a minute. There are one or two kids who refuse to get in line and are ruining everyone else’s procedure practice. Tomorrow, I’m hoping to practice our center rotation and the transition from the carpet to tables – it feels like that’s a time when kids end up wandering around the room and being close to someone they shouldn’t be close to.
Dismissal is kind of a mess right now, and I think fixing that is going to be a big goal for next week.
I’ve been working on class culture – I’ve boiled everything down to two keywords, kindness and teamwork, and I’m working on building an understanding of that in my class. I’ve been giving out stickers when I see my students showing kindness and teamwork, and I have noticed more of it. It’s funny – my students are showing kindness in a way that feels authentic but a little disjointed. It’s sweet, though. One of my students asked me if kindness was the same as nice.
I don’t know how long I can realistically expect first graders to sit still and be quiet, and how I can plan lesson plans that work with that. My students are really into centers, so I’m going to do my best to make more time for that and make a point of getting to it every day.
I feel like I should be apologizing to my students for being so bad at teaching. My students deserve a teacher who’s so much better than me, but because of circumstances way beyond their control, they’re left with me.