Scoreboards and Shower Curtains

Hello!

This is David writing on here for the first time! So you can probably expect a less intellectually stimulating post, and more of just relaying some stuff that’s happened,  but we all need a break sometimes.

It’s funny how something that seems to be such a negative experience in the moment can be looked back on fondly only after it’s finished. We finished teaching summer school on Wednesday, so now at the end of it all, you finally get to hear about my experiences.

My summer school experience was rather different from Anneke’s. At the school where I was teaching, all students were there for credit recovery—meaning that they were taking classes that they failed during the school year in order to move on to the next grade. So, you take 14 ninth graders (hopefully going into tenth) who failed classes (so many of them already face a great amount of disengagement from school), put them all together in a room in the summer when they’d rather be out with their friends or at a job making money, and you can imagine trying to get them invested in physical science is difficult. Very difficult. More so toward the beginning, I’d get back from school having taught only one 90-minute class and I’d be exhausted or sad or angry or all of the above. It was nothing like my student teaching experience. In college I had learned overarching philosophies of classroom management. It turns out that didn’t entirely prepare me for a difficult classroom to manage. Thinking that I should be more prepared to teach than my colleagues who had not studied education and obtained teacher certification like I had did not improve my confidence. Less than a week in, I went to my teaching coach and said something along the lines of, “I’m failing miserably and I don’t know what to do.”

So, he told me something I already knew, but probably needed him to tell me in order for me to really get it together and do it: I needed to focus less on all these strategies TFA had given for management and more on relationships. Things did get better. It takes time. For things to actually get good, I needed more time.

I’m going to stop there with the struggles and move onto a few highlights of summer school!

1. There was the student who put her head down in every class until I told her that she could write a scientific explanation as a rap and even perform it at the end of class that day. She worked furiously for the rest of class.

2. There was the student who started out not doing her work, and never contributing in class (she wouldn’t even respond when I’d ask her a question one-on-one). We had daily “exit tickets” (4-5 questions students had to answer at then end of class, like a short quiz) and the first few she failed terribly. It definitely wasn’t that she wasn’t smart—she was just very very quiet and would silently struggle and fail (something that can be hard to catch when you’re dealing with the more visible disruptions to learning in the classroom). It probably didn't help that, as I would discover later, other students picked on her. So every day I’d talk to her, and every day I’d tell her I knew she could do it and that I was there to help her. Our relationship grew, and by the end of the summer, she realized that I was a safe person, and my classroom was a safe place, and she not only raised her hand to ask for help in class, she even started contributing in front of the whole class! She passed with flying colors (100% on the final test), and hopefully obtained some new confidence along the way.  

3. There was the student who was probably the most difficult to deal with. No matter how many times I had to tell him to have a seat, to not leave the classroom in the middle of class, to stop snooping in the closet or drawers of the desk up front, and no matter how many times he responded with “get out of my face”, I never gave up on him. As often as I could, I would sit down and work with him one-on-one. By the end of the summer, he was still all over the place in class, but I’d have him smiling and high-fiving me when he got something when it was just us working together. He’d still say, “get out of my face”, but I think he knew I was on his side.

4. There was the student who on the last day came up to me and said, “You know, I think I’m actually going to miss you.”

5. Every single one of my students passed my class and the other two classes they took at summer school! And I could actually write a highlight about all 14 of them (but we’ll stick with four for now).

6. Summer school ended with a staff vs. student basketball game. After talking up my abilities all summer, my students were a little disappointed with how much I was exaggerating (students were the visitors, in case you couldn’t guess).

So yes, summer school was hard, and yes I am glad it's over. I was sad to leave my students though. 

Summer school is over, and now we’re looking forward to the coming school year. Sounds like I might be teaching physics and chemistry now, but I still don’t even know that for sure…

In other news, Anneke and I have moved into our new apartment! We still await a good amount of our stuff that has been in storage for the summer, but it’s starting to feel like a home. And it can’t be a home without a periodic table shower curtain.