My First Day

Omg wow. 
HA. I just have to let a huge laugh right now just thinking about my first day as an English teacher. For those of you who don't know, this is my first year as an English teacher and it has been... overwhelming to say the least. I have lately gotten myself to together enough that I am really starting to enjoy where I am and what I am doing and I feel like I am starting to make a difference not just in the students' English skills, but in their every day lives too. 

My first day was so weird. You know when you go to school for teaching they don't actually teach you how to teach? Did you know that? No? Well, they don't. They just give you the job (hopefully SOMEBODY gives you a job) and throw you in a room with a list of names on a roll and say "Good luck!" My first day was actually the school's fourth day because I was hired late. Don't get me wrong, I'm not complaining. I was so excited to finally get offered a position after ten zillion dead end interviews that I jumped at the position. I didn't even think about the fact that I had absolutely zip prepared for these kids (I worked a full time job as an ophthalmic technician and personal scribe to a doctor so I was pretty busy already) and this was going to be a disaster. And it was. My first class was my fifth block class: 22 students. That's a lot compared to my other classes: 10, 8, 9, 7,11. I decided to go over rules and procedures first and see where that led me. Did I mention I'm a terrible judge of time? I am. I thought handing out my syllabus and going over my rules and procedures would for sure last about, oh say 75 minutes? Right? Wrong. It took about 15 minutes. The class was 90 minutes long so here I am with 22 rowdy eighth graders looking at me like a pack of pit-bulls that just found a stray cat in an alley. So, I decided to play the 2 truths 1 lie game. I thought that would be fun. They didn't think that would be fun. In fact, they decided to talk to each other while we were supposed to be playing this game (I had to literally force them to talk to me) and they got so loud that the principal walked in to quiet them down. 

I could have died!

Here I am, my first day on the job, and the principal is already coming into my classroom to quiet down my kids, on my FIRST BLOCK!!! ugh. This day couldn't get over fast enough. Needless to say, it went by terribly slow. I didn't get lunch because although my planning period was third block, I had to meet with my instructional specialist and my mentor for almost the entire time, plus we had lunch duty for the lunch room. That night, I looked up at the ceiling as I laid in bed and I thought, I've made a huge mistake. Will it ever get better?

It did.