Moving Forward

I finished my three weeks of subbing full time pretty well. Not perfect, but not horrible. I did end up getting sick and had to take off Monday and the yesterday was a holiday and today we were supposed to head out to Mountain School but got a call saying the road was flooded over. It was quite the ordeal. So my teacher and I had to sit down this afternoon and figure out what we were going to do for tomorrow and Friday. Today we were flying on the seat of our pants. It was a lot to decide and figure out between three teachers and about 60 kids and 14 chaperones. Talk about a crazy day.

Tomorrow we're going to begin algebra with my math class, the unit I thought I was going to begin teaching and the one I taught my TWS on. This time instead of 4 Spanish speaking, lower achieving students I'll be teaching 14 English speaking (one bilingual) advanced students so it will be quite the change in the pace I take and the problems I offer, but I'm ready for it. So many times I wanted to explain what I was teaching with an "unknown" or with "x" and couldn't since these kids didn't have the background knowledge for that to work.

I also get to make a phone call to a parent tomorrow about a student's grades in reading before they go home in report cards and in conferences. He's a student that should have a B at the lowest and is currently at a D because he didn't turn in his work in Reading and in Language Arts he just didn't write enough in his report so he didn't do too well on that assignment either. I'll be asking his parents whether I should leave the grades how they are and shake him up a bit to get his work in and done more completely or to let him have a chance to redo and turn in missing work. Those practice calls from SPED helped me to think about how I'm going to approach this. He's doing well overall, but these two issues are dragging down his grades. I need to remember to introduce myself and ask how the parent will want to be referred to and then give the good news, then bad news and then I'll ask for parent input. It's time to put those practice phone calls to work in the real world.