Today was not my favorite day as a teacher. One of my brightest students doesn't like writing and tried to convince me that he wouldn't need it for the rest of his life and that he already knew how to do it. This only led to a series of several minutes of conversing where I told him I didn't care if he didn't like it, he needed to do it. Also that it was too bad, he had to do writing. I told him he could do all of the writing tests right now and if he could get 100% on them I wouldn't make him write for the rest of the year. He wasn't willing to take that option. I told him if we needed to we would call his Mom just for him to retort that I couldn't because she was in Hawaii. Sigh...I made him come and sit in another teachers classroom while he finished the writing he refused to do (because he just kept talking and disturbing the other kids in our class). He then refused to go in their classroom causing a big scene in front of this other teachers class. Mr Rigby (the other teacher) finally had to yell at him to go and sit down. Then he finally moved. I was very grateful to this other teacher, but then the Principle reminded me that sending him to this other teacher takes power from me as a teacher and now I would appear weak to this student. (yeah, thanks for making me feel better in this time of frustration). He finally started to get his writing done, he had to stay in from lunch to finish. I asked him what he was going to do tomorrow...before he could say anything I rephrased and said "This will not happen tomorrow" and he said "OK".
Later I met with the Principle with a routine goal setting meeting where she said that during Math Walk-Through's (where the principle and members of the district watch you teach math) that they could tell the myself and another new teacher were novice and they wanted us to watch the other experienced teachers. This was a little bit of a self-esteem blow... sigh.
I was a little discouraged and felt like I needed to make some changes in my classroom and was pretty firm with a couple of the kids after that and really tried to take control and make sure the kids knew who the boss was. I made one kid who is ALWAYS talking cry when I made him get a pin down twice, the most you can get.
I need to just take charge, make sure to move around the room a lot and keep all of the kids on task and working well. I need to stay on my feet and always wear comfy shoes. How do I keep a noisy class under wraps. I need to stay on top of them and make sure that I nip every comment and conversation in the bud. I need to have engaging and good lessons. Focus on the positive reinforcement. I need to move quickly around the room making sure that students don't have a chance to deviate from the lesson. I need to get a promithian board or an interwrite pad.
