Boomerang

        Last week I had a day that should only happen in movies it was was so bad. First, I received some feedback from an observation in my classroom and discussed why I was so frustrated with my classroom set up. The phone call ended with me crying because after all the reaching out I had done to colleagues and admin I could not see a light at the end of the tunnel for me or my students. Every suggestion I made was shot down. Then I went to the Kids in Need station where they refused to let me shop with my co-teacher because my registration hadn't gone through. The manager finally let me walk around and then found me talking with my co-teacher about some poster board and told me "you'r not registered to shop, good-bye..." The icing on the cake was an email I received that dropped me into the "depths of despair", as Anne of Green Gables would say it. One of my administrators told me I wasn't coming from a place of love or understanding towards my students which was causing my instructional delivery to be negative and overwhelming. I was told to "be nicer". I cried for most of the night and contemplated for the 1000th time quitting my job.
        This week the same administrator that had been quick to give so much feedback came into my classroom to teach a lesson. She had beautiful anchor charts, assigned talking partners, and a clearly well planned lesson (not so unlike several of mine). However, my challenges quickly became her challenges. She struggled to get them all on the carpet from their desks and played the game of putting out behavioral fires while attempting to teach a lesson on teamwork.( La'Mya stop banging the pipe...Jaden come sit on the carpet. Why are you so upset right now? Carlos I need your hands folded and legs folded, you may not lay on the floor.) There were 6 adults in the room (superintendent, director of teacher development,director of curriculum and instruction, principal, me and my co-teacher and still very little learning was happening. There was a small part of me that wanted to say... "I told you so," but I refrained. She informed me that day that she now understood why my co-teacher and I were both so frustrated and overwhelmed. As my co-teacher and I prepped for parent teacher conferences we discovered that 16 of our students are below grade level in math and reading and at least 10 of them need an individual behavior contracts. I still feel like my room is a circus, but the productive thing that came out of this chaos was an achievable action plan to attack the biggest problems that our classroom is facing, a lack of respect for themselves and others.
        At the end of the day today each student had to share with the class how they would make our family a better place. Antonio told me he was going to be respectful to his neighbors and stop moving his desk away from them. Mikal told me he was going to stop disrupting the class with tantrums. Melissa said she wasn't going to play in the bathrooms anymore. I am looking forward to a time when all these promises start coming to fruition.