I have been fighting tooth and nail to get this kid to serve his detentions. He has football practice after school and a shaky home life, and had it in his head from Day 1 that detention wasn’t for him.   The first detention he skipped, I went through all the standard consequences. He was…

I need you to imagine an angry, angry sixth grade boy. He’s having a hard time adjusting to middle school, he keeps getting in trouble in his classes, and he’s just gotten scolded in PE. He isn’t able to control his anger and storms away, yelling. I find him sitting in a staircase, yelling “This…

I am feeling isolated. I feel entirely alone in the bubble that is my job and I hate it.   There is a huge chunk of student life that I’m just in charge of. It’s my business what we do and how it gets done, which is an incredible amount of freedom but also means…

If there’s one thing that irritates me about first-year teachers, it’s when they start the year thinking they’ll make everything look easy. That by just working a little harder and wanting it a little more, they’ll succeed where the rest of us failed. That by refusing to acknowledge that enormous challenges might stand in the…

One of the best, best, best things about this year is seeing my first class of 5th graders become 7th graders. They all are so tall now! They stride around campus, clapping each other on the back and hurriedly tucking in their shirt as a teacher passes by. Whenever they see me, they smile and…

I chased a child yesterday. His dad dropped him off late to school, and the kid decided that entering the building wasn’t really his thing. He just kept going. By the time a teacher got me down there, he was cutting through a park a couple blocks away.   I wish I had the rest…

School started, and I’ve never been so relieved. It sounds all wrong, but hundreds of children entering the building was a breath of fresh air compared to preparing for hundreds of children to enter the building.   In the week leading up to the first day, I worked pretty much nonstop. I put in 13-hour…

Last year’s test scores are back. Mine are good. In-the-media good. Everyone’s-congratulating-me good. Biggest-relief-of-my-life good.   It’s especially exciting because I stressed out for so much of last year over how to teach math. Everyone around me was giving me advice that effectively amounted to teaching to the test. I didn’t want to ignore the…

In retrospect I wish I would have stuck to just one leaf design and done a bigger variety of colors (red, orange, yellow, and green), but whatever. It’s the meaning that counts.  

The first day of school. I got to school at 6:45, which is amazing to me in comparison with previous years and considering the fact that I had been in PA Friday-Sunday. I was excited. I wasn’t truly nervous. The students were so quiet. As always, I WAY overplanned, at least for homeroom. I got…