Your Job Is To Protect the Students

I was scrolling through my Facebook newsfeed when I came across this status from Jon Acuff.

Yesterday on my flight, a 13 year old boy who was traveling alone sat next to me. Before we took off he lowered the tray table in front of him, put his head in his arms and started sobbing. Big tears covered the tray as he wept in his seat.

I asked him, "Are you alright buddy?" He told me he had spent 3 months with his mother for the summer and was flying back to another state to live with his dad.

Sometimes the frequency of divorce makes us forget the heartache of it. It's such an ordinary thing these days that we tend to rush right by the extraordinary pain it causes.

As an adult, I have had friends that have dealt with divorce. Sadly, it seems like an almost daily occurrence when my wife tells me that a friend of hers is going through a divorce. It is heartbreaking to know that a relationship that was supposed to last forever is coming to an end.

The even sadder reality is that this is an all-too-common occurrence in our classrooms. There are children who deal with the heartbreak and devastation of a divorce on a daily basis. Sometimes, Mom and Dad get along great after the divorce and sometimes it is nasty between them. Regardless, there is pain for the children. I am thankful that my parents are still together. It was a bit dicey at times, but they are still together.

We think we were hired to teach children and that is true. More importantly, we were hired to protect the students, to keep them safe, and to help them understand the world around them. It is pretty scary being an adult; it is even scarier being a kid. Love your students, make sure they know you are a safe harbor in their chaotic world, and teach them to love and protect each other. That is your job, the most important job you have when you enter the school building each day.

Your job is protect to the students.

Back to School - Day 1

Yesterday was my first day back in the building. I have been doing some training, but hadn't been in my classroom yet. I don't have a lot of exciting things to report, so I thought I would share some of the things that I did today.

First, I had to reorganize the furniture in my classroom. When I arrived this morning, all of the furniture was on the opposite side of the room from where it needed to be. Additionally, all of the desks had been taken out of the room so that the floor could be waxed. Needless to say, I had a bunch of moving around to do.

Here are a few pictures of what the room looks like at this point:

Obviously, I still have a lot of work left to do.

In addition to moving furniture, I also got a little bit crafty. I am going to have 23 students this year and my co-teacher will have 24. I soon realized that I didn't order any name tags in my school order and I didn't have enough left over from previous years. What was a teacher to do? I pulled out my laptop and put my Teachers Pay Teachers skills to work. Here are my new name tags for this year. My students will have blue and my partner's students will be in red.

Another thing I made was a cover for my students' binders. It is pretty simple, but I think it makes the point.

Finally, we will be sending out our placement letters to our students on Friday. Our principal asked that we put together a personal letter to the students to introduce ourselves. Here is the letter that I made to send out. To be honest, the idea is not original with me. I got the idea from Pinterest.

So, that was my day. How was your day at school? Please share your thoughts in the comments.

Student Teaching - What's the Worst That Could Happen?

Everyone has memories of their student teaching experience. Some are good, some are bad. While my student teaching semester was one marked by the worst kind of tragedy (my classroom experienced the death of a student), my "worst" experience happened on the very first day of "Full Responsibility."

For those of you not familiar with that term, "Full Responsibility" is the week where a student teacher is completely in charge of the classroom. My supervising teacher handed me the roll book and walked to the back of the room, where he picked up a novel and started to drink coffee.

When students are coming into the classroom, the best word to describe this is chaos, pure, unadulterated chaos. Even the most organized and managed classrooms experience this chaos every single morning. As I was standing there greeting the students and collecting notes, one of the girls came up to me in a bit of a panic.

"Mr. Pearson, I don't know what happened. I just looked down and noticed that my skirt was covered in blood and I don't know where it came from!"

Did I mention that I was teaching 6th grade? Yeah, that should set some context for this story.

I didn't really know what to say, so I looked back to my supervising teacher. He shrugged, took a sip of his coffee, and turned the page in his book. Great.

The poor girl looked like she was about to cry, so I did the only thing I could think to do: I sent her to the nurse. "Quick, here's a pass. Go to the nurse. She'll take care of it."

The girl left and I was able to get the day going without any further catastrophes. About an hour later, the girl returned to class wearing a new skirt. A little later in the day, I asked her if everything was okay, secretly hoping she wouldn't share too many details of what had been going on.

Oh yeah, everything's fine. There was a kid on the playground this morning who cut his leg open. I guess he brushed up against me and that is where the blood came from. I had to wait in the nurse while my mom brought me a change of clothes. No big deal."

No big deal for her. It certainly threw a wrench in my plans for the day. And, fortunately, that was the most traumatic (for me, anyway) thing I had to deal with during my student teaching. Interestingly enough, my student teaching experience is not at all what my actual teaching experience has been, but I guess that is the case with most teachers.

What memories of student teaching, good or bad, do you have?

The First Day of School

Yesterday was the first day of school. I don't need to go into all the details of what that entailed because I'm pretty sure that if you are reading this, your first day was fairly similar to mine. Meet the students, go over procedures, answer a million questions about when is lunch and when do we go to recess, etc. One thing that stuck out from today, however, was a beautiful little gift one of my students brought me. Here is a picture of it:

To be honest, I'm not even sure if she know how special it was to me. Here's the back story: When she and her family came to visit at Open House, I was teasing her little brother about needing to have a joke every time he came to see me or wanted to come into the classroom. He just laughed and walked away, not really understanding what I was doing. It would appear that my student took me seriously, so she went home to find and download some jokes to share with me and the class today.

I don't normally get all teacher-mushy, but this definitely made me smile. It was a good first day.