Kate.Mendoza's blog

Whoa, Nelly.

Okay, I screwed up.

Went too fast, so the kids don't understand.

Now they're bored, so they cause problems, which are out of control in my 6th period.

Had a kid SNAP HIS FINGERS at me.  "Boy, I know you did not just do that!  I am not a waitress and I am not your servant.  You will not come to my detentions like Mr. Jackson tells you to and now you have the utter gall to snap your fingers at me!?"  Then I walked to the call button and buzzed the office.  Also sent a kid to the office.

Now I can't let him back in my class until his mom comes to talk with me.  That's going to be a tough showdown.

Signing off,
Profe

Crazy

I got my first, "That woman crazy!" yesterday.

Then I got my second and my third. 

I love my kids, seriously.

Seventh period, though, is going to need a hard hand.

I've had a whole lot of people drop my class because they're scared of me and/or they don't want a class as strict as mine. 

I love it.

Walkin' on Sunshine

Everytime I hear this song, just for a split second, I wonder at the audacity of a band that would name itself Katrina and the Waves.

In other news, I went to school today and worked more on my classroom.  It's finally looking like a real live classroom!

I'm so psyched for school.  I'm nervous, but it's a good nervous.  I just want to have my first day.  I feel like once it's over, I'll have a much better idea of how my class will be.

Of course, I won't, but at least I'll feel better.

Here are some pictures of my classroom as it was before.

This is much much better than it was when I first got in, but still not as good as it was when I left this morning.

Freewrite

So, I get to write what I like in this.  I shall tell you of my marvelous time at By High.  Listen my children, and you shall hear.

I did not take any pictures, as my camera had no batteries, but I shall rectify that tomorrow.

I walked into my classroom, to which the janitor, Mr. Woods, was kind enough to show me.  He was, by the way, wonderful to me and very on top of things.  He found me almost anything I asked for, and if he couldn't get it, it wasn't for lack of trying.  I think he's a bit enamored of me.

I walked into a huge pile of books and papers and desks and boards.  It was awful.  I stared at this piled junk in the corner and I felt my mother's genes kick in.  I breathed in (not too deeply, for fear of dust) and set to work clearing the stuff away.  In another hour or two I had the place set up to my specs (As Mr. Woods says) and began to sort through all of the ginormous stack of papers and notebooks that my last teacher had just left in her classroom when she cleared out.  I then began to hang posters and to decide where I want to hang maps, etc. 

I left my classroom for one reason or another and found Elizabeth Walton and Julia Keith.  Both of whom have the potential to be one of my favorite people.  We went to lunch, once I stopped thinking about my classroom and realized I was hungry.  We had sushi coupled with sarcasm and followed by a stupid amount of laugher.

Then I returned to By High, where I met Mr. Jackson.  I like him.  I really do.  I realize he might be a little too exuberent for some teachers, but I like him.  I think he's going to be a good principal to work under as long as I strive to work with him and ensure that I can keep a handle on my students.

My aunt Melissa came up after she had finished her class for the day and she looked around a bit and helped me to visualize my classroom and to decide what to put where and what procedures I would put in place.  She was fabulous, and I thank God that I have such great people helping me.  I now have a much better idea of what would be a good and what a bad system and all about procedures that I need to put in place.

We tried to get out of there about 6:30, but Mr. Jackson kept us there until about 7:15.  The man sure can talk.  I like him a lot, and my aunt said that she thinks he seems a very good principal (she's definitely seen them come and go in her time), but he could talk the legs off a donkey and leave it spinning.  All the things about which he talked had a great deal of import, though, so I appreciate it, and I appreciate him telling me about the school.

I have so many things left to do in my classroom in order to be prepared for the year, but I made some good progress and I'm very happy with my classroom.

One thing I wanted to mention is how talking with Aunt Lissa about teaching just suddenly made things slide into place.  She talked about the need to impress upon your students that what you're doing is important, and just how important it is.  I felt so much better, suddenly.  It was like, all of a sudden, the world made sense.  I knew why I needed to stress classroom management.  What I'm doing is important, and those kids need me.  Wasting their time is unacceptable, and that goes for me and them.  I cannot give them shoddy lessons and a shoddy performance because that wastes their time.  They cannot act a fool and give me shoddy work because that wastes my time.

It was like the sunrise.  All of a sudden, I could see.  It was the dark hours before the dawn, maybe a few rays of light through the clouds, but suddenly over the horizon comes a red rubber ball.

I want to keep it bright.

Summer Training: Required

Well, the summer has come to a close.  I have had a long and satisfying day, a day in which I felt like I had so much more purpose, so much more vision for the year to come.  Going to my school yesterday and setting my classroom in place gave me so much more of a tangible thing to think about.  We've been talking all summer about "your classroom in the fall."  Now I have an actual classroom to put to that vague statement. 

I will talk more about my classroom in my freewrite blog that I have coming up, but right now I am struggling not to spin off on tangential thoughts.  I suppose the best thing to do would be to label these things good and bad and explain them. 

The Good: 

I loved getting teaching experience in.  I feel like I've missed out on so much that so many other people haven't missed out on because they have taught in one forum or another.  I think it went fast, though, my transition from Kate to Ms. Jarvis.  I like this Miss. Jarvis character, but she's not someone I would ever have become without it being necessary.  I appreciate that MTC pushed me quickly into that necessity and helped me to find my inner teacher.

The older teachers, second-years and TEAM, were all very very helpful  They seemed to genuinely want me to succeed, and to be interested in helping me as much as possible with anything they could help me with.

The group is great.  I'm so glad that I am in this program. I feel like we all have such similar experiences in the program that even though we all come from different backgrounds and cultures and regions of the country we are really close.  There is nobody in the group that I do not like.  After having been in groups like this one my entire life, I really appreciate the lack of cliqueiness and snipeyness.

The Bad: 

Everyone's thinking it.  But I'm going to say it.  I really dislike the del.ici.ous posts.  I would love to have it just if I happened to be on the online and I find a really good article that I want to share.  That's a really good way to use it, and that's a great idea.  But for the required posts, I just find myself going to education.com and skimming articles to post, because I have to post something.  I don't feel that I really read or enjoy anything and I feel like it's one more stressful thing to add to an already stressful schedule.

The Ugly:

Blog #2: Modeling

I've learned a lot from Carmen.  She is really helpful and glad to offer advice.  The most important thing I've learned, though, is to model.  She stresses over and over, that I have to model what I ask my students to do before they do it.  "MOD-EL-ING," she repeats to me, over and over.

She has the right of it.  Just as I can't do anything new without seeing an example, my students can't do anything new by just being told how to do it.  I find that my classes go so much more smoothly when I model, and I get so many less questions.  I would highly recommend it, and I plan to use it often in the year to come.

Required Blog #1: Biggest problem.

I have already talked about this, so I'm not going to go into any great detail, but my biggest problem is preparedness and acting confident in my subject.  The confidence issue should resolve itself once I'm teaching Spanish.  Preparedness is something I'll have to struggle against always, although teaching Spanish should help with that too. 

Being prepared has been a problem for me my entire life, probably because it was always so easy for me to throw something together and for it still to be better than adequate.  This is one of those things, though, where I can't do that.  What I'm doing affects so much more than just me.  I have to be prepared because those kids deserve so much more than a minimal effort.  Yes, it may be better than what they'll get with another teacher of theirs, but if it's not the best that I can do, they deserve better.  They are short-changed in so much in their lives.  They deserve better.

Independence Day

As I sit here with my family watching the Music Man after a long day of family togetherness I am so glad that I am a part of this family.  I love them so much.  We went to the Amish community today, and it was wonderful.  There was soo much rich and solid furniture that I really wanted for my new house.  I lamented my lack of money.

Nevertheless, I love Kentucky.  Despite the fact that my family is violently opposed to Obama and they talk about it often (my extended family doesn't know that I support him) I love being with them and I feel most comfortable with them. 

My trip up here was fraught with peril.  I lost myself a number of times and found myself stopping to ask suspicious-looking people for directions.  Also, my debit card was left in my house in HS, so I couldn't stop for gas in most places.  Criss-crossing through northern Mississippi, I came upon Byhalia by chance.  As I continued down the road, I turned into a parking lot in order to turn around and hit 78.  Imagine my surprise as before me rose Byhalia High School!

I didn't stop in, but nevertheless I was glad to see it.

An empty church parking lot in Tennessee provided the perfect place to pull in and take a nap for about an hour.

I lost myself the whole way, but it was much easier after the nap.

Reluctant Discipline?

I don't think I'll be a bit reluctant about it by the time I've gotten through my first week.  I will probably be thirsting to discipline my kids.

I'm really just kidding, I hope that I will not be the scary teacher at the school.  Rubenstein is right about that.  I'm working hard to figure out who I am as a teacher as quickly as I can.  I don't think my kids next year deserve to get a teacher who still has to figure herself out.  It seems that my kids next year will get gypped because they will be getting a teacher so green.

I was really grateful for his driving home (again) the points about consistency and not arguing.  I know that i have problems with both of those things.  I am the damn teacher.  I don't have to justify anything to my kids, respect and love them as I will.  They deserve my best, but that does not mean that they deserve an explanation for the consequences that I give them.  I have to get the phrase "If you want to talk about it, talk to me after class," into my head.

Consistency has always been a problem of mine.  I'm too passionate (at least, when I get enough sleep, I'm passionate) about too many things to be very consistent in anything.  ADD has something to do with that as well.  My friend Matt actually told me in November, when I found out that I had gotten into MTC, that consistency would be my main problem.  It irks me to know how right he was.  I think my best plan will be to do as Tabitha suggests and start to form a curriculum map, so that I have something to stick to, a plan.

I really appreciated its pushing the rules once again and explaining what situations arose from not having strictly enforced rules in place.  Not the teacher being strict, but the rules being strict.  I can never hear this enough, because it's really hard to reconcile the two in my mind. 

When he talks about students needing structure in their lives, I find myself nodding my head along.  Until I realize that I am an idiot sitting in a coffee shop nodding my head along to a book with everyone around me giving me slant-wise amused glances.

I have always felt the need for sure structure in my life.  I am too loose in my own spirit to be able to stand for looseness in classes.  I had to learn to discipline myself during the last few years, but I am not that way naturally.  As I once told a history professor when I was begging for guidelines on a paper, "I'm really bad with vague."

I have said this to a number of people, and I find that in general they disagree.  I was happy to hear someone that was finally validating that opinion.

Video killed the radio star

Good lord.  I always hated watching myself on video acting, too, but this is so much worse.  There are no scripts for this and I have not had months of rehearsal to prepare myself for this role.  I've had nine 50 minute sessions of rehearsal and that just doesn't cut it.

If I had been sitting there in that lesson, I would have gone to sleep for sure.  At least let my eyes drift closed for a while.  Granted, it was a revising essays session, so they definitely had plenty to do, it was just that watching the video was so boring!

What I noticed: Since I wasn't teaching for more than 7 minutes, it was hard to really tell what was wrong with it.  I did notice that Ann was right and that I repeat myself too often in giving directions.  But seriously, I do it in the hopes that one or two of the kids will understand it better the second time.  Doesn't work, usually, but I am the eternal optimist.

I noticed also that J is ridiculously defiant.  Toward the end of the class, zi (the neutral pronoun, because I really don't want everyone to know who I'm talking about) got up and got out of zu's desk to walk to another student's desk while my back was turned helping another student.  J has impeccable timing, too.  I turned my back just before zi got up and just before I turned back, zi sat down. 

Also what I noticed: My butt is even bigger than I thought it was.