Working woes

Ugh. That's all I can say about my second week back at work. This was the first week that the kids had to be back. Stress was the word of the week in my world.

This year there are a lot of new things that have to be implemented in our school. The whole school has chosen a new reading program for all of the regular kids. By regular I mean not special education or those not proficient in English. The second big change this year, that actually should be affecting every school in the state because there are some new law imposed by the state, is that those kids who are mainly Spanish speakers should be receiving 4 hours of English instruction.

I start the day with one class that is all Spanish speakers but they scored at the Intermediate level of the English proficiency test that I gave them last year. They are all 7th graders and I only have about 10 of them. They can all speak English pretty well and should be able to pass the test by the end of the year and no longer need the 4 hours. They only stay with me for one hour and then they go to other teachers for reading and writing. I'm pretty comfortable with what I'm doing with them. We'll be doing a lot of practice speaking in English and maybe some writing.

Now comes the stress...

Next I have a class of students that score Pre-emergent and Emergent on the test. These are the kids that speak little to no English. I knew I was going to have this class I just didn't know that there would be so few of them. I had 4 kids on my roster. I have those kids for 4 hours straight. You might think oh how easy to only have that many, but that's a lot of time to fill when they can't talk back. Only 2 showed up on Monday and the rest of the week there were 3. It turns out that one of the girls is too high for that class so she will be moved out.

Another reason it was so difficult with them all week was that I was also supposed to be receiving new materials to teach them with. Well piece by piece it has been coming in, but I haven't had the time to go through it and make plans with it and I still don't have all of it yet. Luckily the kids were very understanding, bored, but understanding. We spent a lot of time playing with puzzles and word board games I got from another teacher last week. I also have a smart board in my room and they like playing with that. It's amazing how long 4 hours can seem when you have nothing to do and 3 kids wanting you to tell them what to do.

Then in 6th grade they are dealing with an overcrowding problem. There are some classes that have 37-40 kids!!! So a meeting was called on Thursday after school to discuss possible solutions to this problem. I think we've decided that I can take some of the Basic level ELL kids in my 4 hour block. I would really like this for a couple reasons. One, I would be getting about 10-14 more kids. Two, I would get to take them to their elective classes during that time so I wouldn't have them all 4 hours every day. The only big change is that my prep would move to 2nd period instead of 6th. I really like having that last hour of the day as my prep right now.

Ok, so the solution was given but now we have to wait another week before any of these changes are made because we have a 10 day drop rule for any of the kids that are on the rosters but they have never actually come to school. We want to have accurate numbers before the big change so that's why we're waiting. Now I have 5 more days with 2 or 3 kids for 4 hours. I'm going to try to find some big project or something that will take a lot of time that we can do next week. I feel so bad for them and it's torture for me.