Tuesday August 7, 2012

So now I've had two days of "work." We've had meetings in the morning and afternoon and my evenings have been spent trying to get my classroom set up. To fill everyone in on what I'm doing exactly, I'm teaching pre-k 4 (pre-school for the four year olds) and I'm the writing instructor for the elementary school. Originally, I was supposed to be the writing instructor for the whole school, but the director said the girl who did it last year was horribly overwhelmed so now the language arts high school teacher does writing for high school and middle school.

So... reasons why they need a writing teacher: the kids are bad at writing, like really bad. At the beginning of last year our students took the ERB writing tests, they scored in the 20th percentile, at the end of last year they were at the 40th percentile, we're trying to bring it up. The high school writing teacher and myself are the ERB test coordinators, so we have to plan and administer these tests and inform all the other teachers to help the students prepare for them. From the sound of things I will have my work cut out for me. I'll be running around with 4 year olds for four hours in the morning, then going to teach and run this writing program in the afternoons.

Currently, I'm in my classroom (because my house still does not have functioning internet and now the tv is down too). I've been trying to get everything set up which is pretty challenging, its hard to organize such a small room, and I'm trying to get all the spiders out of it too. Heres some before/after pictures:

This was my craft closest shortly after I opened it. (I had already kinda emptied off the first two shelves)

This was my organizational abilities with it a couple hours later

Before classroom

Before classroom

Kinda half way through... 

So, it's taking a while to get stuff done, I'm going to be here late pretty much every night, but thats okay since I now have no internet or tv at my house. I also found out I have a new student from India, so I'll now have 7 students instead of 6.