First Day--check.

2004-12-06 at 5:13 p.m.

Teaching is not for the weak.

First day = done. I will never have another first day like this one. All my other first days won't be momentous FIRST DAY. How cool is that?

My classes are large, and the kids are squirrely, and I didn't plan as well as I'd hoped, but I still got to overhear Little Rebel Girl turn around to a friend and go, "Oh my god, she's the funniest teacher! I love her!" which made me all warm and gummy on the inside. Considering I'm losing my voice and I was apparently spitting all over a girl in the front row by fifth period (making me wonder if I'd been spitting all day and just hadn't noticed until then), I think I did pretty well. I'll really know by Friday or so, I guess.

My Algebra classes went... scarily well. I think. Good god, those kids are like monkeys or wind-up toys or something. So much energy. It's hard not to feed off that. And it went so well that, hell, I just decided to teach tomorrow's lesson plan as well. So... I need to come up with an extra day's lesson, hey!

I wanted to make note-taking one of the focusses of the classes, because so many kids just can't write anything down, and so the teacher is always their first resource, rather than their own notes, but I wasn't sure how to do it, so I'm trying a few different things. In the Geometry class, I'm collecting their notebook on each test day. I'll go through and grade them out of twenty points on having everything there. With my Algebra kids, I'm giving a quiz every other day that's stupid, but based entirely on whether they've taken notes. E.g., what was the first example yesterday? We'll see. It'll be tomorrow.

My abs hurt from coughing, but I feel much better, except for the extra energy it takes to actually speak. I'm getting everything all set up, and I feel good about everything.

I'm just scared by how much more work there is to do!!!

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