The Angst of the First Week

The first week of school is in the books, and we survived! It is always, "the best of times and the worst of times," (DIckens) trying to break in that new group of kids...especially those who are first-year high schoolers. As I reflect on the past week, there were so many emotions I went through: excitement, fear, anger, stress, and all-the-while I was, most importantly, trying to build relationships with the students.

When it comes to building rapport with students, there is such a narrow tight wire in between making them love your class and making sure there are boundaries. If you start off the year too soft, your classes are sure to be chaotic and chocked full of behavior problems. It you start off too hard, there is a chance you are building a wall between you and the students. As hard as I try, it is always difficult to find a happy medium.

To help ease the kids in gently, but at the same time, establish norms and procedures, I started my classes with group stations that were created by the Literary Maven on Teacher Pay Teachers. I must say that the stations were a nice, low-key start to the school year. It helped to take the pressure off of both me and the students since there were no expectations for either lecturing or students sharing out during some sort of icebreaker. It was also a great way for the them to get to know either other while working in small groups. This is definitely a lesson that I plan to repeat next year.

On the second day, we jumped into our technology orientation and setup, and this proved to be pretty hectic. I always forget how hard it is for students to log in for the first time, find their email accounts, and join Google Classroom. To add to the confusion, I decided to go ahead and have them set up ePortfolios in Weebly, so that we may add to those throughout the school year. This portion of the lesson proved to be like drinking through a fire hose. Even though I tried to take them through step-by-step, some caught on quicker than others, and everyone was at different stages in the process at any given time. Suffice to say, I ended up answering many of the same questions over and over again. I'm not sure how I could have made it any easier, but I am happy to say that I looked through some of their pages over the weekend, and I am seeing pretty good results in most cases. The struggle was not in vain.

All-in-all, the first week was a success, and after sleeping most of the weekend, I am ready to head back to the trenches in the morning. I will never understand how a job this difficult and stressful is one that I would never dream of parting with, but it is. I don't see the passion I feel for education leaving me any time soon.

Here are some first week highlights for those who are interested: