Has it Really Been a Year?!

I haven't logged into this blog in quite awhile so today I decided to come back and check it out. My last post was from July 2018!? The absence can be explained in one word... this year has been a CHALLENGE.

I entered year number 9 excited for new things. I had been accepted into my administration internship and was going to be teaching 5th grade again (although with a little twist, instead of being self-contained all the teachers taught their own reading and social studies, then I taught my homeroom math, then we switched and I taught my partner teacher's homeroom math). It has been the weirdest set up I've ever seen.

So while I was adjusting to that schedule, I also found out about another twist. 3 weeks before we headed back to school, our principal was promoted to another job and we had another person take over as principal. This proved to be a very big challenge because not only was this new person a completely different type of leader (which isn't necessarily a bad thing), but I was supposed to be doing my internship with my principal that was leaving. So now I had to ask this person that I didn't know, who was taking over a very large school 3 weeks before the teachers arrived back to work, if she would be my mentor. Luckily she said yes and I did learn a lot, but it was challenging at times because I was still learning about her as a person, principal, mentor, boss.

Now normally I don't complain about my classes because every class I have taught has had their own challenges, but this year has been by far the most challenging. As mentioned, this was year 9, I felt like I should know what I was doing, but this group of kids made me go back to the drawing board for almost everything. My classroom management that has worked for years, nope had to try something new. Tried the new excited ways to teach math learned last summer from the Mathematical Mindset books, didn't work. Went back to my old methods of teaching math, didn't work. I found I was having to reinvent how I taught almost every single thing. Again, this isn't necessarily a bad thing, but it was being done during a year where I was also trying to complete an internship and my mind and body were being stretched very thin.

As this school year wraps up I finally am feeling like my mind is catching up to my body. It is the end of May and I finally am no longer bringing work home to be graded from being so far behind. I am having fun teaching again and looking forward to completing year 9. I honestly have no idea what I am going to be doing next, but I do know that I am looking forward to year 10 and a whole new set of challenges because life would be boring if it was all easy!

Stay tuned for some new and exciting things I have tried in my classroom this year. I finally have the time and mind to get this blog back up and running.