Don't be afraid to ask for help, Part II

Now we're in advisory. Yesterday, I had asked my house leader to sit-in my advisory because I felt things get a little out of hand. I wanted him to observe and give me some feedback. Worrying about advisory has made me a little stressed. These students are used to not doing anything during advisory. This is because in middle school, advisory wasn't as structured. They didn't receive a letter grade and, according to the students, the teachers let them do whatever they want. Well high school is very different and some of them still don't realize it. I try to follow the house plan as much as possible. Tuesday is the teacher day. I get to teach what I want to them. Wednesdays and Thursdays are tutorial days. These are their days to do work from other classes. Fridays are fun days. Currently, we are engaged in a kickball tournament. Next week, my advisory gets to play.

So today was a tutorial day. The reason I asked my house leader to sit-in was to give me some feedback on what I can do differently with these students. Surprisingly, advisory went a lot better than I was expecting. Either they are starting to get it, or the fact that the house leader was in the room casued them to be more hospitable. Today I had some students from my math classes come in for help, so I helped them. After advisory, I let them go for lunch.

When I met with my house leader afterwards, he said I am doing just fine. In fact, he saw things in my class going a lot better than what he has seen in other classes. This feedback was such a relief to me. It also caused me to wonder if I am setting too high standards for my students. But now I have something to compare the following days with.

After lunch is the last period of the day; Period 7. This is my MET class. MET stands for Math, English, Technology. It is a remedial class for the students to fortify their skills. The students are in four groups and rotate around the classes every 5 weeks. As you may have guessed, I am the math teacher. So this is my 2nd group of students. By the way, these are 8th graders. That's what makes me both a middle school and high school teacher. This class is pretty chill. All we do is tutorials. I help them with their work. When they finish their work, they are free to play on the computers and I am free to do some of my work.

Today, however, I did something I wish I hadn't done. I received some disheartening news in an email and caused me to because a little upset. I ended up lashing out on a student because I was reading the email and a student was trying to tell me about his day. First of all, let me say I am really really ashamed for what I did. I brought something in from my personal life, showed that it affected my emotically, and took it out on a student. Now let me say that he half-deserved it. The instructions were clear: take out some work and work on it, if you don't have work, take out a book and read it, if you don't have a book, play one of the math games. He was just sitting there doing nothing. At the end of the period, I brought them back inside, told them they that they did a great job today, asked them to put up their chairs and let them go about 5 minutes early.

Oh but wait, the day isn't over yet. We have parent teacher conferences, remember? I had to really remind myself after forgetting about the conferences on Monday. Oh, by the way, other teachers, thanks for calling me and reminding me. J/K. Most of them didn't show up anyways. Anyways, today's conferences went pretty well. Informing the parents of their child's progress is really important because most of the time, the students don't tell their parents how they are doing. The parents don't find out until progress reports are mailed out. Then the wonder why their child isn't doing so well. Thus, parent-teacher conferences. Plus, it's a good chance for me to practice my Spanish. Overall, they went pretty well. It was my first set of conferences. At first I didn't know what I was getting to. Now that I got a couple out of the way, I feel confident about stepping into the next set of conferences.

Lastly, I want to briefly talk about class tonight (I'm talking about grad school class). In class we learned that asking for help from veteran teachers is important. That was the very thing I asked of my house teacher yesterday; help. It's comforting to know that I have made some connections between what we're learning in the Education Studies program and my actual teaching practices.