Having friends at work is nice, especially when you spend 10+ hours a day there. Being a new teacher is hard, and it's so easy to become isolated as you try to figure it all out and navigate your way through the paperwork and administrative technicalities and special reports and...the list goes on.
This week has been one of those where I am left wondering if a) I'm doing any of this stuff right and b) if I've just become a master of pretending that I know what I'm doing and letting people mistake it as being a "good teacher." Taking over for the ELA class as our regular teacher spends time with her new baby has been interesting, and I've discovered that I actually have more fun (at least for now) teaching ELA than I do teaching Social Studies. But I miss my sleep..and my free time..but most of all, my ability to leave with everything done for the day by 5:00. Today was the first day I felt like I could do this, but it could just be the fact that I got enough sleep last night (sleep is such a magical, mythical thing these days).
I stopped by the room of the teacher that I'll be co-coaching with for Girls on the Run to ask if she was going to this weekend's orientation and we started chatting about this and that and I ended up hanging out in her classroom for probably 45 minutes! As it turns out, she is also a first-year teacher and also feels like she has no idea what is going on! Not to say that either of us not perfectly good, capable teachers...but like I said, your first year is bloody hard! So, it's refreshing to meet other newbies and bask in/bitch about your trials and tribulations (and those stupid, stupid standardized tests)!
This post is dedicated to new teachers everywhere. Keep your head up, folks...because as it turns out, most everyone is also pretending to have it all together!
PS- the post title is a reference to this meme..in case you were questioning my grammar ;-)
1 comment:
You're doing a bang up job Ms. Ali! It's good to read that you're bonding and ranting with other newbies. Keep your head above water and on the pillow as much as possible. You're molding our youth and that is trial by fire, small flame thrower wielding children.
Post a Comment