"It is the supreme art of the teacher to awaken joy in creative expression and knowledge." -Albert Einstein
Two weeks left of school. I am not in end-of-the-school year mode. I suppose that's a good thing because I think it's kind of keeping my kids out of it (cross my fingers!) I know I've said it before and I'll hopefully continue to say it but .... I love being a teacher. I guess I knew I would ... I've been trying to be a teacher since I was like 7. (luckily I had 6 'willing' pupils ... and look how smart they turned out! ;)) I feel pretty good about my year since it was my first year teaching but ... I'm definitely ready to try it again next year and see how much more creativity I can put into teaching. I have definitely learned why there are so many debates with teachers as far as 'teaching to the tests' go. I've struggled with that this last semester. My principals said we need to get through all the curriculum so I've been trying to do that, but because of that I feel like I am just pushing my kids from quiz to quiz and test to test without stopping to see if they really learn anything. So, to make sure they don't all fail, I give them study guides made straight from the test. I feel like that is not the kind of teacher I want to be, but I'm supposed to use the tests that come with the curriculum.... I taught adverbs this last unit and I still felt like the students struggled. It's so hard when I'm not teaching in their first language though. For example, we were reviewing for the test and the sentence was something like, "The dog got his leg caught by the fence on the nail." The directions were to find the misplaced prepositional phrase and put it in the spot that it would make sense. The correct sentence reads, "The dog got his leg caught on the nail by the fence." However, my students didn't know what a fence was or a nail which caused problems in them choosing this correct answer. AWESOME. Anyway, so I'm correcting those tests this weekend and we shall see how they do! These last couple weeks I've been a lot more creative with my teaching- as in doing dramas, projects, and mini quizzes every day. I'm not as pressured to finish things because I know I'm going to have everything done that I need to, so I'm using this time to experiment and see what really works and then maybe I can incorporate those things into more of my teaching next year.
Another thing I've noticed lately is how sixth grade affection manifests itself. It's called being annoying. :) Today I was sitting with Rachel and Tad at lunch and my girls walked by and took my keys and started walking away. I told them to give them back and they kept walking ... so then I told them if I didn't get my keys back I'd keep them in for recess on Monday and they said, OK sounds good! bye! .... baahhh. :) Tad and Rach said I should keep them in for recess but.... I knew they weren't really being mean, they were just wanting attention from their teacher cuz they like her! ;) The boys are constantly grabbing my arm and today one of my kids joked that he was going to trip me. I had a headache this week and told the kids so Mario (my class charmer) grabbed a container of marbles that I have in my classroom and shook them as loud as he could.... They love me! It really does make me laugh that that is the way they express love right now- with me, with each other, with the 8th grader that they like.... so in the midst of me being annoyed, I can pull myself out of the situation-whether it be a killer headache or my lunch break of catching up with my friends to realize that not only am I happy to be a teacher, but I think the students are happy to be MY students. It's a good feeling :)
NOTE: any blanket statements I may make about 6th graders in any of my blogs is not necessarily related to my 6th grade sister. or any of her friends. or any other 6th graders I know outside of school ;)
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