This blog started as (and currently still is, I guess) a means to complete a credentialing course assignment. But why should it be only for that purpose? I’ve been meaning to start a blog for my life as a teacher - especially to act as electronic altars, if you will, to remind me of the miracles God has worked in my life through my teaching career, and how He has shown me even in my first year of teaching that this profession is where He has called me in my time on Earth - and claiming this Blogspot name has solidified for me that I should keep writing on this blog while I am a teacher.
What can I even say? First-year teaching is as steep a learning curve as every other teacher tells me. I lost 15 pounds in my first two weeks of teaching due to sleeping only 5 hours a night and eating one meager meal a day while trying to prepare on-the-spot and hopefully-long-term lessons for two senior English sections (AP Literature and Composition alongside Expository Reading and Writing Course), grade 150 college application essays, establish a classroom culture, continue working through and submitting assignments for my credentialing courses because I was still an intern, and attempt to get to know all my students on individual levels in October. "Why so late?" you ask? These poor students had their original teacher for all of one week, and then that teacher decided that she didn't want the job anymore and literally left the school without a word to anyone. Other teachers and my students told me about how they showed up at the door the next morning and waited for 10 minutes before campus security had to go let them in. The students had a slew of substitute teachers for three weeks before my principal hired me after only one interview (granted, I also knew three other teachers at the school, and the three of them put in very good words for me).
Suffice to say, it was a rough first semester (and I didn't even teach in September!). By Winter Break, I and another first-year teacher were commiserating together and empathizing with the teacher I replaced; what would it feel like to just walk away from something this draining and physically damaging without a word and without ever looking back? Would the freedom actually feel freeing? This other first-year teacher is probably one of the main reasons I didn't throw in the towel in January, and that's when I realized that I need other teachers as a teacher. I had a mentor teacher on paper, but he was only signed off by National as my official mentor teacher whilst really doing very little to support me (or other teachers, for that matter), and I had one really close real mentor teacher across the hall (and, by God's grace, I actually met my real mentor teacher over the summer at a conference called Better Together California before I started across the hall from him in October). But I knew that our department needed cohesion for me to thrive here, so I began to take the initiative to get to know all the other teachers in the English department by inviting them to lunches in my mentor teacher's classroom or my own and also initiating after-school hangouts for happy hour or BJ's daily specials (my family members and I are all huge BJ's Brewhouse and Restaurant fans, but I swear we don't own stock in them). Developing real friendships with teacher coworkers also made collaborating more fun and easy, and I can thankfully say that, even though my mentor teacher and the teacher with whom I commiserated after Winter Break are leaving the school and the teaching profession, respectfully, I now have other good teacher friends in the English department and other departments that I can rely on to support me through however long I am at this school.
Now that I've just completed Cycle 2 of my CalTPAs, I've also come to the conclusion that assessment-driven teaching is, in fact, what helps make good teachers. It's also just that good teachers will naturally be informally assessing their students 100% of the time. A look at students' faces in response to a question the teacher asks is an informal assessment. Students' verbal responses to the teacher's questions in class are informal assessments. What students say to one another during pair-share is informal assessment. Quick writes, journals, essays, Socratics, Philosophical Chairs, watching TED talks, the list goes on... everything is an informal assessment for the teacher to constantly gauge the level of comprehension, engagement, and learning progress in the classroom.
Also, now that I've just completed Cycle 2 of my CalTPAs, I am going to let my brain shut off from teaching technicalities and focus on the most rewarding thing about teaching: relationships with students.
Next post will have a lot of pictures and thoughts and be longer (I know, right? How can I possibly make my posts any longer? You don't even know, my friend. You don't even know) because the next post will actually be about my first-year teaching's students.
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