Barely (self) contained insanity.

Teaching all of the subjects really exposes one’s weaknesses as a teacher and the lessons I teach by. It also allows one to find deeper hidden strengths that they are unaware of. Regardless of my status as self contained or departmentalized I have no problem from prepositions nor ending sentences them with.

I am now a self contained teacher. I am far from veteran, but I have earned my stripes. Albeit a first year self contained teacher. But regardless of my experience level, or ability level, I have completed a full 9 week grading period as a self contained teacher, and could hardly see switching back at this point. Despite my parents’ and teachers’ best efforts, I never got very good at sharing things that are important to me. And few things are more important to me than the 28 hilarious, frustrating, draining, inspiring, inexplicable, wonderful 5th graders that now wake me up virtually every night with fearful dreams that they are getting into even worse trouble, getting pregnant, getting nowhere, or even worse getting set back because of the bumbling nature of my first year teaching style. Their smiles, hopes and dreams stay with me as my conscious and sub conscious grade my daily progress and reflect in weird ways on what has been going on in my classroom. A couple weeks ago after making my first totally me based decision in weeks and going to a Ben Lee concert on a Thursday night, I dreamt I was trying to teach all of my students who were now 16 to drive trucks. They kept crashing into each other because I had taught them to use the radio before I taught them where the break was. Sometimes in retrospect Mr. B’s priorities are not where they maybe should be. But when I woke up and reflected in the shower (easy ladies…) about the dream, I realized that no one had gotten seriously hurt, and maybe music is worth a few dings and bumps. Or maybe I am as good at justifying my actions as my kids are at doing the Crank dat Soulja Boy dance. Well accept Sara and Oscar, I can justify way better than that.

For the few people that read this that aren’t fully versed in teacher lingo- self contained means that I have my kids all day accept for 50 minutes a day when they are at ancillary (music, gym, library, or computer lab).
This means I start with 20 minutes for morning math warm ups, and homework checking, then I go to science lab where I co-teach lab on Mon, Tues, Thurs, and Fri. After that we go the bathroom then have math from 9:15-10:25. This, for a few weeks was a disaster of Spears family proportions. At 10:25 I take my kids to ancillary. This is supposed to be my planning period. Hopefully soon I will use it to tutor and plan. But now I am generally running around cursing my lack of materials, going Office Space on the copier, and attending asinine meetings with various members of the staff that don’t have anything to do with me. (example one: I “got to” attend a meeting between the bus company and the police office. Generally not connected to what a homeroom teacher does. But arguably useful to know. However, HISD busses do not service my school. If I was the type of teacher that wore panties, this meeting would have had them in a bundle. However, since I do not, I was just crabby for awhile. My afternoon lesson did not have copies of the poem I wanted to look at with my kids because I had to learn about what the cops do with high schoolers that ride the bus with guns.

The hardest part of switching to self contained was not rocking at what I do. For the first 4 weeks I would generally give 5 lessons a day plus 2 different lessons at tutorials. This means that on average I would have time to plan one really good lesson, 3 decent ones, and 2 boring but decent ones, and 1 real bad lesson. Then I would have the energy to merely poorly execute them all. Every week has gotten better since then, I am becoming more efficient, I had the chance to observe at a really good school (with the same student population- My second observation was at a very rich, well funded suburban school and it was hardly useful since the students didn’t have any of the same management problems that my students have, and came in on average on grade levels with larger vocabularies… that is not saying teaching there is easy, but their management and lessons and strategies were less appropriate. I just HAVE to cover more material each year. And have to figure out ways to give students without safe homes or educated parents ways to get homework and be able to do it even though they have so much to worry about.) This school gave me lots of ideas, and slowly my students have been crawling towards progress, and slowly their teacher has been crawling towards becoming a teacher and Christmas break. Equally excited about each of them.