Real Teachers Learn: Survival

I survived the first week of school. It was excellent. It was also very loooooong. It started with a half day on Tuesday and then full days the rest of the week. By Wednesday afternoon I was done with getting to know you activities and "about our classroom" information. Done. I want the meat and potatoes to begin! Give me something to TEACH. My class is a bit squirrelly, so we need to get down to business.

I've already started handing bits and pieces of instruction time over to our student teacher. Miss M is great in the classroom and I'm thrilled to have her until October. That being said, it is so weird to have her teaching something and me just sit there, especially at the beginning of the year. I feel like the laziest teacher ever while I sit around checking pretests and she's teaching my class or picking them up from specials.

Ok. It's Saturday morning; coffee in hand. First things first. Pictures of my classroom before the students got in there and touched things. Here you go.

Walking into our classroom.

Back of the room- computer area.

In l.o.v.e. with these frames- this is how I display birthdays all year.

Science material organization.

Reading Rockstars sticker charts.

Super Writing! 6+1 Traits

This is what I fondly refer to as "the bean".

Behind the bean is where I organized all those brand new math manipulatives!

You know what I just realized? I didn't take a picture of front of the classroom. You know...where I do my whole group instruction. The rug area. The SMARTboard. My reading area. My desk. I'll have to get those put back together and presentable for a later viewing. Whoopsies! Another post will be coming...

So let me tell you how the first week of school went. Not the part with the kids, because that was uneventful overall. Just the rest of my job.

Our wireless internet is down, so I have no internet on my brand new laptop.

They installed a new printer in my room in the middle of class on the first day of school.

Our network is down, so I can't print anyways.

With the network down, I also can't get to any of my files on the network, which is....all of my files.

My printer at home ran one copy and told me it was out of red ink so it won't print anything at all.

You know what I did this summer? I scanned in all of my papers and made digital copies and recycled the paper ones. Soooo that's awesome. I'm not complaining...it's just very...inconvenient.

My SMARTboard isn't working correctly. It's all squiggly so I can't write on it.

The student computers in the back of the room won't log on with any of our passwords.

I've already had a meeting with the counselor and vice principal.

The new principal came to just hang out in my room twice in the four days we were in school. Twice. Is that a good sign? Bad sign? Not a sign?

It is my understanding that none of these things will be fixed for next week, so I am heading to Office Max to pick up some ink for my home printer ASAP! Back to School night is Wednesday and I have nothing put together yet (panic).

We also had a bat. A. Bat. Luckily I never saw it, but I heard it was flying around over the weekend when I was there. Then the kindergarten teacher found it in her sink the day before school started. She almost picked it up before she knew what it was! EWWWWW. Here she wiping her room down with bleach:

Better her than me. She doesn't feel the same way.

Finally the first day of school came. Here are a few of my lovely teacher friends after our first day was over. That's me in the middle with what appears to be an electric colored skirt.

My mom used to always make cookies for us on the first day of school. I had no energy to do that after our half day of school, and my mom doesn't live in town so she didn't have them ready for me. I decided to throw together a batch of cookies for our end of the week on Friday.

I would say these are arguably the best cookies ever. They are Chocolate & White Chip and Toffee cookies and they are the only cookies I can successfully make consistently.