Drum Roll...The New Job Has Begun!

Today was my first day teaching on my own and it went well! Last week I had to attend a training so I could hit the ground running with the ESL standards that Virginia is now implementing as of this year. I met my ESL mentor who I think will be fantastic because she seems knowledgable and organized yet cool and collected, which seem like important attributes to have with all the paperwork and responsibility we're given.

Thursday I met the remainder of my elementary students and played a cut throat game of Scrabble with my new 7th grade students (it was the other teacher's last day with them so we had some fun).

Friday was a teacher workday, so I headed into school knowing there was a lot to be done. We had a two hour faculty meeting where one highlight was how Virginia Beach will be trying to avoid laying off teachers at all cost next year, which is great news because even though positions are going to be cut the district is going to do everything in its power to keep current teachers teaching somewhere in the dirstrict by moving them around. The only down side to this is that there will be less new hires next year. At least it sounds like we won't have to fear being laid off, which is good news in this crazy economy. It just makes me that much more thankful that I WAS able to get a job this school year because next year could have turned out to be even harder to find an openning than this year already was. Then, I was introduced to the school's French teacher and we proceeded to have a conversation IN FRENCH, which was fun even though I was a little rusty.

At the end of the day, there was a teacher of the year ceremony and I started to feel like a member of my new school's staff. I spent the rest of the afternoon organizing my classroom and looking through numerous materials which you can imagine are broad since I'll be teaching kindergarten-8th grade. I was at school till about 7:30 cleaning and organizing and I guess I made some headway because when the night custodian came in she said the room was cleaner than she had seen in six years because I had gotten rid of a lot of boxes and reorganized where things were being stored. I'll post pictures of my new room when I get done with the more decorative elements of the room like the bulletin board. After leaving sub plans for Monday morning since I was going to be at another training, it was home for the weekend.

Today started with another training on the new LEP standards with the company of our administrators and then it was back to school to teach away the afternoon. My students' first assignment was a personal narrative telling their new ESL teacher about themselves. It should be a good initital assessment of their langauge to get our year together off to a start. Wish me Luck!

2 comments:

Heath and Thais said...

Yea! I'm so excited for you. Good luck, good luck, good luck.

Anonymous said...

Yay! How exciting!

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