First Day of School

Today was my first day teaching second grade. So far I enjoy it much more than kindergarten. The kids came in, did what I asked them to do, and used all of the materials properly. Well...OK, some of them did hook some foam 10-frames together  to pretend they were guns, but they stopped as soon as I shook my head at them and said, "no". They also knew how to walk in the hallways and didn't fight once over the rocking chairs in the reading center. Last year I had to ban the usage of special chairs because the kindergartners fought over them constantly.

Meanwhile, my old kindergarten team across the hall was dealing with biting, throwing books and chairs, nearly wetting their pants because they were afraid to use the bathroom, and emotional breakdowns. And that was just the teachers. Haha! Just kidding! :-) I definitely don't miss those days.

The day wasn't perfect of course; I don't think any first day ever is. We have block/specials first thing in the morning this year and when it was time to leave the classroom I only had SIX students! I found a few more of them teary-eyed in a crowd in the hall because they didn't know who their teacher was or where to go. I think by the time that confusion was sorted out, I had picked up an additional five or six kids and lost about 15 minutes of my planning period. While I was trying to take care of all of the things I had planned to do during my planning period, one student at a time trickled into my classroom, which meant I had to walk each student individually to P.E. So much for getting anything accomplished! :-/

I also operated without a computer and smartboard for the entire day. We have a new tech guy this year and so far he hasn't managed to fix any of my (or my ex-kindergarten team's) problems. Today he tried to tell me that the reason I couldn't log into the temporary computer I was using was because I needed to change my password. Huh?! I just changed it last week. Plus, the computer message kept saying it wasn't connected to the network. Why do I have a temporary computer, you ask? My regular one got a trojan virus. Don't ask me how; I just logged in one morning last week, left it alone while I worked on my room, and came back to a message about the virus being isolated. But he told me it was still safe to use since it had been isolated; so I continued to use it.On Saturday when I went in to do some final classroom prep, I couldn't even get past the logging in phase before it would just shut down on me. Maybe it wasn't so safe to use after all. I'm kind of scared about how the rest of the year will go, technologically speaking.

Finally, there was some end of day confusion, with about half of my class not having a "how to go home" on file. It was sorted out with about 10 minutes to spare. Whew, that was close! During the confusion, another student showed up at my door. She had been in the wrong class all day long. I'm not sure how she managed that since I taught her sister last year for kindergarten. Surely she knew the other teacher didn't look like me. Maybe she just didn't know who she had been assigned to. Do every teacher and your child(ren) a favor and, whenever possible, make sure they know their new teacher's name before sending them off to their first day of school. Knowing their own name is also very helpful. Yes, there were kids today who didn't know their names. Thankfully they weren't in my class.

But other than the little hiccups of the first day of school, I think it all went very well. I better have a working computer tomorrow though or there's going to be a tech guy going down.