Tantrums and Triumphs - contemplations, musings, reflections, imaginings and of course, opinions of a teacher in London’s East End

We have been working on report writing, so I showed my class a replay of Newsround which is a children’s news cast that comes on in between the cartoons each evening.  Keeping in line with gross topics that interest children, they had featured a report on the problem of dog poop in local neighborhoods.  We had a long chat about the features of a report and how information was gathered, but just before the kids headed back to their seats for some independent work, I just wanted to slip in a bit of grammar work.  Here was the conversation between me and S, a little by who has had difficulty with writing this year, but has put lots of effort into improving:

Shireen:  Can anybody hear the reporter using a complex sentence?

S:  Yes!  Its the one where the reporter says, “If you don’t pick up the dog poo, you will be fined £100.”

Shireen:  Awesome, S!  You have have were listening so carefully.  Now a complex sentence has to have a……

S (with enthusiasm): …a connective!!

Shireen:  Where is the connective in this sentence?

S (again with the dramatic enthusiasm):  If!!  The if is at the beginning of the sentence!

Shireen:  Fantastic!  Now because the connective is at the  beginning of the sentence, there must be a comma somewhere in the sentence, right?  Can anybody tell me where the comma is in this sentence?

S (with excitement and more enthusiasm I have ever seen in a grammar lesson):  Oh!! It comes after the poo!!!

Now, as a friend pointed out, isn’t that just a metaphor for life?  “It come after the poo.”

I love my job.  Who else gets to discuss commas after the poo and call it development in learning?

Yesterday my class and I were walking back to school after a little trip down to the river to do some sketching and I overheard two of the boys talking about school.  For their privacy, lets call them T and R.

R was telling T that he loved Art and sketching so much and that he was really enjoying school at the moment.  So that was good news.  But then T said to R that he really hated school.  So that was bad news and for a second I have to admit that I took it a little personally!

But as I though about T, I realized that I probably would hate school too if I found writing as hard as T finds it.  He is way below average in Literacy and has real difficulty handwriting.   Later on that day, I had a little chat with my friend T and he did confirm that school was tough and not very fun because writing was just such a drag for him.  I just hate it when kids feel like that and I promised him that I would do my best to help him out this year.

The story continues today when we were brainstorming ideas about to describe a meal made with garden worms (we are reading How to Eat Fried Worms, by the way).  I had got the kids a little bit hyper with all the discussion about what it would be like to eat worms and then sat down at the table with T and the rest of his group.  We had lots of fun acting out how to slurp up worms for dinner, and then they finished off writing their brainstorm of words to describe how worm curry would taste. Ten year olds love anything gross!

T was totally engaged in his work and at the end, I wrote on his work that it looked like he enjoyed his work today.  He looked up at me as I was walking away and asked if he could answer my comment to him.  Well, of course, I told him.

Later when I was marking the rest of the books, I saw what he had written next to my comment: “Yes, Shireen, I had very much fun today in writing.”

Let me tell you, those moments, as cheesy as it sounds, make it all worth it.

Stuff that has happened in the last little while:

• My classroom is beginning to look pretty, slowly and surely.  The displays are getting completed and the place is looking good at last.  (I changed rooms this year and it is taking me a while to get used to my new home!)
• Lots of my kids from last year have been by to visit and share their new school stories with me.  They still miss Year 6, but I can see them growing more and more confident in their new school.  I am glad they come back to see me - it makes me feel like I do work in school where we care for our children like family and it is not just all about ABCs.
• I saw one of my kids from my first class while I was grocery shopping near school!  Wow! She looked so grown up and guess what?  I just felt so proud that she had turned out so well, despite having me as a teacher!
• I have now moved into the Intermediate-Advanced Ashtanga Yoga class.  I had my first class today and I’d like to let you know that I came out alive! Yeah for me!
• My new teaching assistant is awesome.  He is so great with the kids and so enthusiastic about his job.  He really tries hard and even stayed late at school on Friday to help us finish our Ramadan display.  Not only that, he backed all my display boards with paper while I was out at a meeting.  What a wonderful surprise when I came back into class!  It’s like he can read my mind already A fantastic teaching assistant is God’s gift to teachers, you know.  They can be the difference between sanity and all out crazy (you know the kind of teachers I am talking about - frazzled hair, tatty cardigans, long flowery skirts and hiking boots, muttering to themselves as they walk down the street).
• I have been analyzing assessment results for Literacy throughout the school and I am not enjoying it at all.  If I wanted to play around with numbers the whole day,  I would have been an accountant!  For some strange reason, I believe that teachers would make better use of their time teaching in their classes, rather than analyzing statistics!! But, hey, that is just me!
• I bought tickets to see John Mayer for F’s birthday.  We are going tomorrow, so I am off to bed, since I think it will be a late night….

….to those people who sent encouraging comments.  It means a lot.  And when the university work and the school work all gets too much and I want to put this blog aside to get other stuff done, those comments will keep me going.

love from me.

I am beat! Not sure why.  I mean I have just had five and a half weeks holiday from work and it was only the first week back at school last week, so I really have no right to be feeling this sleepy ;-)  But I do.

Anyway, we went to the “Last Night of the Proms” on Saturday night.  For those of you who don’t know (the Canadians), the Proms are a series of classical music concerts sponsored by the BBC.  They are a big thing in London and the last night is something kind of like Canada Day where everyone gets quite excited about being British and there are fireworks and things.  Oh, and also a concert with a variety of performers as well as the classical music.  Check out this link…  We went to see the performance earlier in the summer with Nitin Sawhney.  Amazing experience!

http://www.bbc.co.uk/proms/2007/abouttheproms/

Although the actual concert takes place in the Royal Albert Hall, the BBC puts up a big screen in Hyde Park so that all the people who can’t afford to go the RAH, can still watch the concert, along with a few other famous faces performing at the park that do not perform at the hall.

How fun, we thought, let’s take a picnic, meet some friends and go down and see the big screen.  Now after reading the website quite thoroughly, we headed down to Hyde Park.  In case you haven’t been there Hyde Park is HUGE and as much as we tried, we just couldn’t find the big screen.  Even the ushers and doormen at the RAH had no idea where this big screen was!  Finally, just as I was about to throw a larger than average tantrum, due to the ridiculous evening we were having, a posh man in a very fancy hat overheard my very distinctive voice (those of you who know…) and suggested that the screen maybe near Marble Arch.  Aghhh!  We of course were at the other side of the park!

So hopping happily into a back cab, now that we knew where we were supposed to be, we headed to The Last Night of the Proms.  Finally!  To our amazement, even though the event is supposed to be this great celebration of Britishness, it was £23 to get in and they had barricaded the screen behind big green boards.  The cool people were inside and the poor people (us!) were stuck outside!

No matter.  We laid out our picnic with the other people without tickets and enjoyed the evening anyway…the music was loud enough for all to share it.  We munched our olives, crackers and cheese and sipped our wine…and even though we weren’t with the cool people with £23 tickets, we were with friends and all the other people who loved the music and the Proms enough to bring picnic food and candles and the very important thermos flasks of hot chocolate and sit out in the cold on the wrong side of the barriers just to enjoy the atmosphere and a glimpse of the big screen.

At the end of the day, after the searching for the big screen all over the park, lugging our picnic with us, and sitting freezing cold (because we didn’t bring enough sweaters), I think it was worth it after all.

Off to bed….week 2 of school begins tomorrow…

I always get excited for the first day at school til I remember that I have to teach a real class, not the imaginary angels that are in my head! First week has been a bit crazy - organising my class, sorting out work books for the children, scrambling to get my plans completed and meeting my new teaching assistant, not to mention meeting twenty nine unique little personalities that will make up my Year 5 class this year.

I met my new class on Tuesday and honestly, they are lovely children, its just that all of a sudden, I realise that while it is exciting to get to turn over a new leaf each autumn, it is also tiring to start a new routine each year. Each teacher has their own quirky little ways and each year our new children have to learn those ways so that we can all live in peace and harmony for the rest of the year

This is the moment when I also realise that I miss my old class from last year. They were set in their routine, they knew my sense of humour, they knew how to make me laugh, they knew all my many moods and how to avoid the bad ones, and best of all, I knew them inside and out. I know that I will soon fall in love with my new kiddies, that they will soon know all my quirks and I will know theirs….but I still feel a little lonesome for my old guys.

Every year I think that this will be the year when I don’t get attached to the kids and every year I always do…it just takes me a while, that’s all.

So, I have refused to join Facebook, I barely check my email and writing back to emails is a huge challenge for me, I had to be convinced to used Internet banking and until recently, I didn’t have my own on line photo account….but here I am starting a blog!

F has a blog and it’s really good. Reading it has made me see and understand sides of him that I wouldn’t have done before, or it has started a discussion between us (well, a heated debate, usually!). At any rate, it is a cool idea. I have another blog, that I wrote for the kids in my class last year, as a way to get them reading and sharing ideas. It totally worked….they didn’t even know they were reading and it made them feel special knowing that I was writing a journal on-line just for them.

But this blog is for me, not the kids in my class.  This is now my fifth year of teaching and the second year of the Masters in Children’s Literature that I am taking part time and my third year of managing Literacy at my school. I am super busy, but I want to give this a go.

Teaching in London has been a great experience for me…it hasn’t always been good and I found it so hard at first, but I love what I do, and not a lot of people can say that about their jobs.  I am tired all the time, but everyday is different and children are so strange, funny, sometimes annoying, fascinating and interesting, that I never, ever get bored.  Even better than that, the school I have been teaching at for the last four years is an awesome school where I have learned so much about how to teach from the people that I work with and it is here that I am becoming the teacher that I want to be.

School starts tomorrow and I have that lovely, butterflies in my tummy feeling about this year.  I have been teaching Year 6 for the last two years (cramming for the SATs that schools are judged on in this country).  Although I do love Year 6,  I am happy to be finally teaching in a year group where I do not have to prep children for exams and where I can be a real teacher….

…and to celebrate, I am off to buy a lava lamp for my reading corner!