Back to School Night and more

When I was in school, I never imagined that teachers would pray for Friday as much or more so than their students. This job can now be classified as monotonous, and while I have so many plans in my mind of how to mix things up each week, the knots in my back and the cankersores in my mouth and even the lack of sleep prevent these ideas from making it into successful lesson plan form. I realize that sooner or later my kids will get sick of using the overhead. Unfortunately I am out of my quarter's-worth of paper, so making handouts seems an unlikely alternative; as it is right now, my roommate steals a ream of paper each day from his Oakland middle school to provide for me and my Richmond high school.

On the bright side, I would say that my classes are going well. Okay, fine - Geometry is going well. Okay, fine - 4th period Geometry is going well. It seems like the rest of the classes are finally starting to come around and realize that I'm not planning on lowering my standards at all. I've been actually giving them second chances all the time to improve their grades; I'm trying to eliminate any excuses they have for not learning or not getting good grades, because I know a lot of these kids are dealing with serious issues that you or I have never experienced, let alone at that age. In the end, it is making more work for myself, but I can live with that.

It's also a little easier to do this for your students when you have felt the satisfaction of depositing your first real job paycheck. For those 24 hours before most of the money got spent on basic living expenses, my bank account felt pretty good. Definitely more than I have had to my name in years.

Despite this, there is apparently no strike planned, which begs the question of what all of our older teachers with spouses and children will do when January 2010 rolls around and they experience a 23% pay cut for all the money they now must spend on health benefits. On the one hand, I am relieved that I don't have to go through the stress of a union strike just yet, but on the other hand I was kind of banking on the strike happening and spent the whole last week daydreaming about what I would do on my "time off." Maybe I should take a personal day soon anyway. My students have actually been saying that I am their only teacher that hasn't had a sub yet.

On an unrelated note, Thursday was an interesting day. We had our first real lockdown, which surprisingly did not feel dramatic or scary at all - for myself or my students. I don't think I'm phased by the safety issues at home in Oakland or at school in Richmond, because it sounds worse than it really is. Plus, those issues rarely show their face at school. Anyway, I had one of the assistant principals knock on my door during the lockdown, providing me the biggest moral dilemma so far at school. After an angry conversation through the locked door and opening the door to her demands that she let a student in, I gave her a piece of my mind about how it is completely unacceptable for her to knock on a teacher's door during a lockdown. She said she did not know we were in lockdown. The assistant principal. School disorganization at its finest. Oh yeah - and all this happened while I was getting observed by my program director.

This whirlwind day was capped with Back to School Night, where I met about 40 of my students' parents. The students came too with their parents, which usually turned out to be for translation reasons; about half of the parents spoke very little English, and I was not about to try my three years of Spanish from high school. Unfortunately the 40 families that attended on Thursday were not the ones that I would have preferred. Ideally, I could have talked in person with parents of my problem kids or parents of kids that are seriously failing because of truancy or just being multiple years behind in math. However, these are the parents who did not or could not show up. Still, I was impressed at the total trust placed in me and other teachers by these parents - considering the obvious fact that I am merely months out of college and four years out of high school myself. It was just strange how for every parent that I shook hands with, I felt the responsibility and power in determining exactly how the parent-child relationship would go for the rest of the night, and possibly the rest of the month. This realization truly struck me when Cristian's mother looked at me in shock when I explained to her that her son had only attended Algebra three times in the last six weeks. But now adding these parent relationships is only putting more on my plate. Like I said: I need a strike!