A Rough Day at the Office

Today was a rough day at the office. I had a student hysterically bawling for most of the end of the day because he wasn't going to make his day, a student tell me about how her high school "best friends" (family friends) beat up her younger brother by throwing basketballs at his head, pushing or hitting him as hard as they can, or making him stand against a wall and throwing a baseball at him, and I had my math lesson totally bomb. YES!

Days like today can be viewed as one of two ways: completely discouraging or huge learning experiences. I choose the latter.

The crying student really tugs at your heart strings and those protective instincts for a child, while at the same time your brain is recalling all of the outright naughty and poor choices the student has made throughout the day.

The student who disclosed the abuse information was valuable to learn how to accept that information, how to report information, and what procedures to go through to do so. I never thought that a student could be so indifferent about such horrible things to her brother (she just said, "Sometimes I'm on his side and has to protect him. But most of the time I am on their side because he annoys us."). Things like this really affect me mentally. On one hand I am incredibly sad for the young boy who is enduring such horrible things and my student who is being raised in an environment where these actions are acceptable and most likely encouraged. On the other hand, I am outraged that parents could know about these actions and do nothing to stop them (She has told her parents many times and their either laugh it off or claim it's not happening). That is their job as parents, to protect their children! That idea absolutely disgusts me, no questions.

My math lesson was a huge learning lesson for my teaching. That lesson was one where I gave a lot of warnings without following through and the students quickly caught onto that. Soon students were not following my directions and things slowly fell apart. Me, being in the still fairly naive state I am in, didn't notice the full spectrum of how the problem had escalated to before it was slightly beyond repair for the time I had. Additionally, I am not as skilled as a seasoned teacher at thinking of "spur of the moment" fixes to these problems, so I just continued to plow though. Even after this lesson though I realize a lot more about myself as a teacher and understand that while I am fairly confident and comfortable with teaching, I still have a lot of professional growth to step into as the year continues to progress.

Although it was a rough day, and an exhausting one (mentally more than anything) to boot, it was a valuable day to have. It showed me where my weaknesses are, where I can focus more of my attention, and that I can succeed in this profession and the more practice I have now, the better off I will be as I take on my own classroom.