I’m quickly approaching the two month mark at my first teaching job and I’ve barely said anything about it here. The fact of the matter is I’ve been distracted with, you know, 1) preparing for teaching, 2) actual teaching, 3) my other job in social media for Diplomat Specialty Pharmacy (and I am not about to resist a shameless plug– Facebook / Twitter / Blog), 4) eating, breathing, and sleeping. But I know I ought to get something down about the experience, because I’ll never have another first year of teaching again.
Do I like teaching? Yes. It’s classroom managing that I’m not as fond of, probably because when I walked in on my first day I had absolutely no idea how to actually do it, had never actually really had to handle it in my student teaching experience and during my time teaching extracurricular summer camp music, and had completely underestimated the value of it. It was never really discussed in the online PLN, either, nor at grad school, though I’d had my fill of conversation everywhere about philosophy, practice, ideas for lessons, ways to integrate technology into the classroom, etc. It’s not that it’s other people’s jobs to watch out for me. It just completely slipped my mind and it was never truly made important to me.
(I’m wondering, too, while I write this, why we don’t talk about classroom management. Is it the new Fight Club?)
Reflecting back on my own time as a middle schooler, it didn’t really seem as though classroom management came into play then. Of course, though, that just means that my teachers’ strategies and plans for organization and effective classroom routines were just that — effective.
Now that I am the teacher, instead of the student, I realize now that I should have thought about more than just what I would teach during my summer planning for this year. I needed a consistent, clear, and organized strategy for my classroom in order to begin to work, from day one, to get my students to a place where they could work with me on all of the things I want to teach. Structure is in place, but it’s been more like something that’s grown organically over September and October rather than laid out neatly in place at the start of the school year.
Of course, there are really great experiences I’m having for the first time, like when I see the students understanding whole, half, quarter, and eighth notes and holding up their dictations to me on the Doodle Buddy app on their iPads. Those moments where I hear improvements in only half an hour’s worth of time. They’re learning, just like I’m learning. And really, even if I had prepared more in terms of clear classroom structure and organization, I still would have felt like a fish out of water during my first days of school as a teacher. My goal is to make every day better than the days that came before it, and even if that doesn’t happen, to keep that same goal constant in my mind as I prepare for the next day.