I talk a lot about the "daily grind" and how I hate going to work some days. But that's probably not a true portrait of me or my job.The girl in the center is Molly, she is not an RSP student, she is my TA. And she won the Partnership Spelling Bee - and my students in 4th period were pretty excited for her. I had taken them to see "Akelah and the Bee" so I think they thought that she was living the Hollywood dream or something. (The boy just in front of me is my other TA - and he's an active member of the ward too. Molly's parents are members, but they are not active.)
Some days I do not like my job - or at least I don't like going to work. But most of the time I feel, as Beverly at SMCNS so aptly put it, "It's work worth doing."
I see progress. I see kids get excited about something I teach them. I see growth and development. I see maturity inching its way in to a child's demeanor. I see genuine expressions of fondness and caring. I see what praise can do for a child who hasn't had much of it. I see lives change.
(I won't mention some of the other things I see - that would be for another post. I want to emphasize the positive!!)
And every day we have 20 minutes of SSR - Sustained Silent Reading - right after lunch. I would have thought that I'd died and gone to heaven if they'd told us we had to read for 20 minutes every day at school. (What I mostly did was hide my book inside the textbook so I could read during boring lectures!) Reading every day like that in the middle of the day is very rejuvenating for me.
It really could be a lot worse!!
But it's hard to make sub plans to be gone for a day or two. And then when you get back, it takes another couple of days to sort out what happened while you were gone.
So I complain!
6 comments:
Yes, truly work worth doing.
I also would have loved being told I had to read!
I did the same thing, reading in class, only I just sat in the back and did it. Perhaps that can explain my 2.5 gpa in high school. That and having too good a time to really worry about it!
Isn't it weird how now days the kids get to read all the time. All my kids take their books from home to read in class everyday during reading time.
I think your flash is still messed up, and that's why your pictures are blurry. Might want to get that looked at.
And I have a lot of pride for spelling bee winners.
I loved SSR. Favorite part of the day hands down. Sometimes I brought from home whatever book I was reading, but more often I selected a book from the teacher's shelf and that was exciting for me--usually something fascinating like My Teacher Is an Alien or There's a Boy in the Girl's Bathroom. I think we had SSR from elementary school all through high school. The only thing I didn't like was keeping a reading log. I found that idiotic.
You and countless other kids think keeping the log is "idiotic" and they don't do it - which is "idiotic" because district policy says it's 20% of your Language Arts grade!!
I assume you kept your up as per instructions. I have the hardest time getting my students to do it.
I did, I guess, because I usually got As in English. Although I got a B- in sophomore English class one quarter in high school--and it was largely because I hadn't always turned in our daily journal where you have to answer a question like "If you could be any piece of fruit, what would you be? Why?" or whatever. I hated those. But if I could have written about whatever I wanted, I probably wouldn't have hated them so much.
A lot of times I fudged a little on the reading log stuff. I figured that didn't count as cheating, because I didn't do it on purpose--usually just forgot--and I made educated guesses about what/how many pages I had actually read.
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