First Week of Teaching Reflections

I am officially done with my first week of teaching. It has been a HUGE emotional roller coaster filled with late nights, earlier mornings, and more thinking/strategizing than I have ever done in my life. I would like to thank every teacher that I have ever had for all the effort they put into trying to keep each student in their class on task, challenged, and learning.

Thankfully, my students are fantastic. I teach around 12 kids everyday who could not represent a bigger variety of interests, ethnic backgrounds, ability levels, ages, and personalities. They are at summer school for diriment reasons- poor attendance or struggles in one subject area. It’s interesting because some of them really excel in math while others lack basic addition/subtraction skills.

It has been a hard week but for different reasons than I expected. The 4-5 hours of sleep/night is rough but the harder thing is realizing that I am not yet equipped to meet the discrepancy of needs. It is a bit overwhelming that these students only have 20 days to get back on track. Whether or not they move up to 7th grade and their level of preparedness is my responsibility. I just wish I could learn and become more effective faster…

PS: Again, I posted this a while after I wrote it. Expect a rundown of week 2 soon.