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.

I Love My Job

I am experiencing a new adventure this year. I am co-teaching a third grade class that has an enormous number of students who have been identified for special education services. Yeah, it is exactly how it sounds.

Yesterday, in class, one of my students put his arm behind his head, pulled his sleeve up, and began sniffing and (possibly) licking his armpit. I was trying to teach about rounding numbers to the 1,000s place. Do you have any idea how hard it is to teach on rounding when there is a student licking his own armpit?

I have another student who became very upset at transition time. He was standing in the room, sobbing. The reason he was so upset was because he had a handful of rocks wrapped up in a paper towel. Every time he would try to pick up his book box to leave the room, he would drop some of his rocks. "How can I carry my cubby when my hands are full of rocks? I can't pick up my cubby because I have to hold on to these rocks! I'm not going to be able to leave school!"

Another student was singing "What You Gonna Do With That Big Fat Butt?" in the lunch room. My student with autism told on him and he started to cry.

There is a little boy in my class who can only read 6 words per minute. He stumbles over the simplest sight words. When he was given a reading passage as a part of his PALS testing, he looked at the passage (with the very large print and few words on the page) and said to the teacher, "Are you kidding me? This is a joke, right?" I gave him a story that I wrote using some site word phrases and his response was, "I'll read this, but your story doesn't make any sense."

I also have a student who is extremely sensitive to noise. I gave her a set of headphones to wear because I thought it might cut down on the amount of noise she can hear. Unfortunately, I have created a monster. Now, she wants to wear the headphones all the time and the headphones have to be "plugged in." Oh, and now all the other students want to wear headphones as well. It is like a Daft Punk concert in our hallway.

I love my job.

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.

Five For Friday - A Bunch of School Crafts, Comics, and Bow Ties

Another week has come and gone which means it is time for another Five For Friday. As always, I am linking up with Doodle Bugs Teaching. Be sure to swing by there to see what some other awesome teacher-bloggers have been up to this week.

I think the fact that school is just around the corner has caused me to get a bit "crafty." I have a confession to make, however. I hate doing crafts and making projects. I shared this information with my wife and her response was, "And why are you an elementary school teacher?" That being said, I made a few things this week to get me ready for the upcoming school year. First off, I made some pencil cans. I took some old fruit cans and wrapped them in duck tape. I think I got the idea on Pinterest or somewhere like that. Here are the originals and the final product.

The second product I made was a multiplication math fact center. Again, I think I saw this on Pinterest (I really need to write these things down), so if this was your idea, I apologize for not being able to give appropriate credit. Anyway, the activity involves using an egg carton to create math facts. Inside the egg carton, I wrote the numbers 1-12. I put some duck tape across the openings and painted the tops and bottom. The students will put two markers inside the carton and shake it. After opening the egg carton, the student will multiply the two factors together. Here are the pictures I took:

Another thing that I worked on this week was finishing up some bow ties. I wear bow ties every day to school and a few months ago, I started sewing my own. I'm still learning to make them look good and some are better than others.

I'm probably the only one who cares about this, but about a week ago, I was able to get a month's subscription to Marvel Unlimited, an online comic book collection. I've spent a bunch of time going back and reading old Marvel Comics, especially a set of stories called "Planet Hulk" and the old Frank Miller Daredevil comics. Some of you may recognize the name Frank Miller as the director of the movie Sin City. I've never seen it, but I hear it's good.

The last thing is that this is the beginning of my last week of summer vacation. It is shaping up to be a busy one, beginning with a doctor's appointment. This appointment was rescheduled from an appointment I was supposed to have in April. My wife has been bugging me to go to the doctor for a check-up, especially now that we have five kids. I am very excited about the beginning of the school year. Each new year is a new adventure and I am ready to get this one started.

Thanks for checking in from another week. I hope you all ready for the fun to start. Those kids are coming soon, if they aren't with you already.

How To Have a Miserable School Year

Update:  The 2013-2014 school year was so much better than previous years.  I had a new team and a new co-teacher.  I also made certain that I had a better attitude about things and it made a whole world of difference.  Here's hoping and praying that next year (with more changes on the horizon) will be just as good.

Last year was a terrible year. I was unhappy and I made sure everyone knew it. There were a lot of things that I wish I could change about last year, but that is in the past. This year, however, I have decided to have a better year. There are, as usual, things that are beyond my control about the school year. Everyone has those. But instead of focusing on the things we can't change, we need to take charge of the things that are ours to take care of. With that in mind, here are three ways to guarantee you will have a miserable school year.
Continue to Focus on Things You Cannot Change. - Every teacher faces struggles in their classroom. Every teacher has challenging students and difficult parents. Some teachers have the privilege of working with special education students or with students who are so new to the country that they don't even know what the bathroom is in English. That doesn't mean you can use those challenges as an excuse for poor performance or a lack of planning. As teachers we have to take the class we are given and do our very best to teach those students the content and how to become the best human beings they can.
Make Excuses Based on Time Constraints. - There is never enough time in the day. We all have to go to meetings, then go to more meetings, and we have to end the day with more meetings. The lessons we planned will ALWAYS take more time than we have to give them. You will be absolutely miserable if you can't get past the fact that time is short and students take a long time to do EVERYTHING. There is nothing I would love more than to get to the end of a unit, knowing that I had a ton of extra time. That's just not the case and making excuses about why I can't everything done because of data meetings, team meetings, and home responsibilities will make sure I have a terrible year.
Refuse to Try Anything New. - Everyone has their favorite assignments and projects. We tend to get a bit possessive of the way we teach and it is hard for us to deviate from the norm. That doesn't mean that we shouldn't try something new. We need to be willing to "roll with the punches" and try something new, not just because it is new, but because it might have a better result than that worksheet you've been doing every October since you made the switch from mimeograph to Xerox. And, yes, I used to teach with a woman who had her boxes. She had a September box, October box, etc. If it wasn't in the box, she didn't teach it. Needless to say, she spent a lot of time complaining any time something new was introduced. Don't be that lady.
There you are. Follow those three steps and I guarantee you will have a terrible, horrible, no good, very bad school year. Promise.

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.

One Week Until I Go Back to School

A new school year is just around the corner. Teachers in my county report back to their schools on Wednesday, August 21. I will admit that the summer has flown by this year. My family did have a rather eventful summer, which may explain why time has gone by so quickly.

Here are just a few of the things that I did this summer:

• In June, my wife and I took our four boys to Walt Disney World. We decided to rent a vehicle and drive to Florida because the airfare was way too expensive for a family our size. That was a crazy drive (down and back!). However, everyone had a wonderful time and the boys are still talking about the trip. We can't wait to make another sometime.
• I taught 3rd grade summer school this year in Leesburg, VA. I had a class of 12 students and we worked on Reading and Math skills for four weeks. We spent a lot of time learning basic math facts and answering comprehension questions.
• I started working on some projects for the coming school year. To this point, I've made a few projects for students in my class to use. There is a site that I discovered called Teachers Pay Teachers, where I can post the projects to share with other teachers. If you are interested in checking out my projects (or the great stuff that other teachers have posted), please visit Teachers Pay Teachers.

with a new team and new students, I'm sure that the new year will be full of new adventures. There is a possibility that I am switching content areas (from math/science to language arts/social studies), so other new ideas are on the way.

P.S. I apologize for the blandness of the new blog. Construction is underway.