After 4 years out of the classroom, jumping back in is hard.
I know that teaching is hard. I have been doing it all of my adult life. I started teaching swim lesson at age 17 and have been teaching in one form or another since then. My most recent gig as a Technology Integration Specialist had me teaching teachers. A challenge in its own right. But with recent changes in my position, and because I will be starting back in the classroom this fall, I decided to apply for a summer school position. Our district partners with a local community college to offer accelerated make up courses for our students. After jumping through WAY TOO MANY hoops, I was accepted to teach 10th grade recovery.
I started planning way early, getting my Microsoft Teams set up and starting to put assignments in. I planned it all out and got it all ready. I was going to leverage all these tools I had been teaching and do Flipgrid every day and have all digital assignments and literature circles and do EduProtocols after EduProtocols, and my kids were going to be awesome and just learn!
Day one was awesome! Everyone signed into teams and saw their first assignments and got to work. We talked about literature and did some poetry, and they annotated on their devices, took notes online, and collaborated on some work in word. It was just like I imaged going back to the classroom would be, DIGITALLY AWESOME!
Holy crap, reality hit me hard day two. It was all my fault. First, I hit them all with new ways of working that most of them haven’t seen before. I overwhelmed them with tech, when they weren’t really used to using it all day. Now, they had five and a half hours of tech. Sure they did some novel work, and some poetry, but it was heavily tech-ed out. Also, every single one of these students had failed English 10, and were not very motivated to come to school for 5.5 hours with the same teacher and do something they just failed at. In my excitement to digitize their learning, I forgot to take into account their motivation and baggage they may be bringing. Big mistake, and it hit me hard about three hours in day two. Reluctant readers stopped participating in literature circles, behavior issues started popping up, and kids were just kids. I really started to question how smart jumping back into teaching with a summer school assignment was. My awesome plan had lasted 1.5 days of contact with the students.
Luckily, my twenty years of teaching has taught me how to improvise and adapt. I shifted focus and got into rotations, getting the students up and changing seats every hour. It was station rotations at a high school scale. I also gave breaks for 5 minutes every hour. Let them take out the phones, talk to friends, go out to the courtyard and just sit. It was a well needed brain break and breather. With new procedures in place, things got back on track. My students love The Fast and the Curious EduProtocol, and we use it almost every day with some vocab or poetry work. Lit circles got back on track with digital collaboration, and even my reluctant or shy students were recording daily reflections on Flipgrid. The behavior issues worked themselves out too, as I started to talk to them more, build relationships and they started to learn expectations.
Luckily, my twenty years of teaching has taught me how to improvise and adapt.
I’m now three weeks in, and while it could have been a disaster, I’m glad I did it. Some of the rust is falling off things like classroom discipline, pacing of lessons, and the all-important flexibility and improvisation. It’s like a muscle that has been too long at rest, a little flabby and inflexible, but not quite atrophied and ready to tone up, still having some muscle memory. And while heading back to the classroom in August was not my first choice, I’m starting to remember why I started teaching to begin with; to share my love of literature and to make a difference, one student at a time.
