Chef_Troy's Journal

Reflections on week eight of student teaching
Week eight. Hooo boy, week eight. I feel like my apple userpic should have a worm in it.

The week started out fine... instruction is going smoothly and I'm confident in my teaching ability. Then, on Thursday, things sort of went off the rails a bit.

I have a couple of students - both girls - in my homeroom group whose behavior is coming to be a real problem. They have no interest in paying attention; they're always talking and giggling, disrupting class. Actually, during the actual instruction blocks they're okay, it's during reading-intervention time and other moments when my attention is on one small group or another that they get really bad. The worse of the two suffers from a chronic attack of the unfairs - whenever I say anything to her about her behavior, she wants to draw me into a big discussion on why I'm "picking on her" when (insert name of student here) is doing something he/she shouldn't (usually something quite minor that isn't disrupting anyone). I already separated these two, who used to be sitting next to each other, and put them on opposite sides of the room, but it didn't help much. Still working on the problem.

On Thursday, one of the sixth-grade teachers (who is in her third trimester of a pregnancy with stress-related complications) didn't show up for work; it turned out she was in the hospital. My supervising teacher took over that teacher's homeroom and left me in charge of ours.

When the kids came back from their art class, my two problem girls and a couple of their friends were incensed over having been called an admittedly offensive name by one of the boys. They were stirred up over it and kept getting back into loud arguments with said boy. I'd get everyone quieted down and then one side or the other would mutter something and it would all start up again. It didn't help that we were two days from spring break and everyone was all riled up.

So between the missing teacher resulting in my having no backup, the spring break factor, and the outrage over the namecalling incident (which I didn't witness), the two girls were absolutely unbearable. I'm afraid I quite lost my temper at the ringleader; I felt like a failure for letting her push my buttons like that. I finally sent one of them into the hallway for the rest of the period and as soon as I did, things were immediately better. The next day, however, the conditions were the same and I had the same problem, and I was already rattled from the first time so I didn't handle it any better. Sigh.

That day, I went to see the principal to ask for advice about what I should try next. I had been reluctant to involve him because, in a sense, I'm in the middle of a job interview and I guess I wanted to look like I could handle anything without help. Stupid, I know. It's a character flaw of mine that I'm very reluctant to ask for help even when I need it; I'm working on it but I guess I'm not there yet. Anyway, he gave me some suggestions that I'm going to try.

One thing that made me feel a LITTLE better was sitting for a while after class with my supervising teacher and the third sixth-grade teacher and having them both say "Thank god you were there, Mr. Smith - if we'd had to go through these two days with a sub in one class, it would have been a catastrophe."

I HOPE things are better next week when we return; the spring-break factor will no longer be an issue, at least, and the other teacher may well be back. If not, though, I'm going to make darned sure that those girls NEVER get under my skin again - losing my temper made a bad situation far worse, and I can't fail the students like that anymore.

At any rate, as bad as those two days were, it's not like I went home thinking I didn't want to or couldn't do this job. Two bad days out of eight weeks isn't so bad.