Good Ol' Fashioned Reflections

It's 2 pm and I'm sitting in my classroom, awaiting dismissal time.  The students have half days this week, and they leave loudly at noon.  I've taken down the posters from the walls, and recycled thousands of pieces of paper from filing drawers and piles around my desk.  Looking through the handouts and the student work from the beginning of the year makes me feel as strange as does sitting here in this quiet and emptying classroom.  Some of the papers are evidence of lessons and units that seem misguided now- and I can see that they have done nothing more than sit in piles for seven or eight months.  I can already feel September crowding in on me, expecting much better. 

But what an overwhelming feeling it can be: to finish one year and dust your hands of it, but to know that only two short months separate this finish line from the starting gun, and come that time you are meant to outperform your present self.  What have I learned?  What will I do differently and so be better?

I'll try and make a list.

1. Simplify.  Teach skills first as simply as possible.  Then try some big ideas.
2. Lock my books up.  Sign them out to the students.  Sign them back in.
3. Establish a clear authority immediately, even when I want to just be nice so that the kids will start the year liking me.  Remember that they need to feel safe, and that that means there needs to be expectations and consequences.  Remember that they will like me eventually, and it will be because I am fair and help them learn.
4. I don't want to keep student notebooks in my room anymore.  Students should just bring them to class every day.  Make this a graded assignment for the first month until they learn they have to do it.
5. Read every day.  And at the beginning of the year, it should be for at least twenty minutes.  Keep telling the students why it is so important.  Show them evidence.  Don't let them leave the classroom or put their headphones on or write a note. 
6. Make them hand write rough drafts before we go to the lab! Period 2 did that this year for their Kindest Thing essays and theirs were so much better than every other class'.
7. Tell them they will never be allowed to go to the bathroom during the first five minutes of class, or anytime I am teaching.  They may go during independent work, but if it starts to become a habit I will dock this privilege. 

That's all for now.  I'll get back to this.  I think it's helping. 

But now it's quitting time :)