Well, I'll try to make this a nice full update of everything going on at school, since obviously that's been taking up one out of every two hours (or more) of my life lately.


I have quite small classes this year--quite small--which is going to be so so nice, I can't even tell you. Less grading, more personal attention for each student, less time spent on classroom discipline, and a generally more laid-back and fun feeling for each class. I get to spend all that saved-up time on creating better grammar lesson plans (as per my grammar workshop from this summer). I've been making these great little word cars out of colored cardstock--a different color for each part of speech. It makes the structure of phrases and clauses much more visual--for example, you can clearly see that all prepositional phrases start with prepositions (gold) and end with nouns (blue). So that's been fun.

In Geometry, we've only had about enough time to cover the algebra review sections. I can see the kids sort of looking at each other like, Is this really all there is to the awful Geometry class we've been hearing about? Just wait, darlings, proofs are coming in Chapter two.

We had the Parent Orientation last week as well. (There were a lot of late nights last week.) I have to say that parent events are sort of my least favorite part of teaching. It makes me very nervous to talk to parents. That is, I don't mind talking to them in a group--with prepared messages--but one-on-one? Yikes, I'd rather grade a whole stack of Geometry corrections. But I'm trying to combat that fear this year with lots and lots of parent contact. I've given myself a schedule (a quite ambitious one, I'll admit) of emailing or calling each parent once every three weeks. I've kept on schedule for a grand total of two weeks, which I feel is quite an accomplishment. We'll see. At least it will be better than last year, when I think I voluntarily called like maybe three parents all year.

I've been reading Coraline to the eighth-graders again this year. It's a great book to read aloud because there are so many suspenseful moments where you can break off reading and make them wait until the next day to find out what happens (Yes, I'm evil.) I'm enjoying getting to know that class. There's a few boys who are getting into a little competition of who can suck up to the teacher more. (Weird, I know.) Like, the other day, I had each table give themselves a nickname to use in class competitions, and one table named themselves "Ms. Van Essen's Fan Club." At the sight of that being written up on the board, another group hurriedly conferred and then declared themselves "The Vanessenators." I'm trying to enjoy it while it lasts because I know it will wear off all too soon.

Really, I feel like this is going to be quite a good year. I'm full of all those beginning-of-the-year resolutions like going to bed on time and swimming regularly and contacting parents and keeping great records and having a clean classroom. Well, maybe not that last one. We can't expect perfection.

Labels: teaching

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Friday, September 12, 2008