thompsonblog

Wednesday, August 31, 2005

Evaluation of my Classroom Management Plan

I am now several weeks into teaching at Simmons High, and I have mades a few alterations in my classroom management plan. Before I get to that, I must say that my school seems to have a bit of a discipline problem. I'm not complaining, but to me it's abnormal to have fights almost every single day (no exaggeration). The new demerit system appears to only work to a certain extent--many students have the attitude that by October they will all reach the limit, and the administration will have to trash the whole system.
Alright, back to the assigned blog. The main change that I have made is that I rarely hold students until after class to talk about behavior. I either assign an essay, or if it's a relatively serious offense (altercations, etc.), I take the student outside immediately to discuss it one on one.
As a whole, I still like my classroom management plan. The only thing that isn't realistic for me is holding students after class (I want to connect the misbehavior with the consequence as soon as possible--plus, I might forget to hold the student after class.)
My philosophy of classroom management is still the same, in that I only discipline students when absolutely necessary. I have not yet given out any demerits, and I think it gives me more power when I eventually choose to hand them out. Also, I think my students realize that I fully intend to handle behavior problems inside my own classroom.
As far as other issues at Simmons, they finally got the moisture problem fixed in my classroom (the floors and desks constantly looked like someone had just finished mopping--kids were sliding everywhere.) Also, tomorrow we are going to be sharing our school with the hundreds of middle school students because they have no lights or water...it's going to be very crowded. Anyway, it's about bedtime now, so we'll see what the next days and months have to offer. I still love this job.

Wednesday, August 10, 2005

1st Day of School--Simmons High

Today was the first day of school. I made it! Hopefully things will get easier now. The students behaved well, and overall it was a satisfactory day. Since I have heard many stories about my school, I was prepared for pretty much anything. Things were a bit chaotic (we were in homeroom most of the day), but that was expected. My only real problem is the student-teacher ratio in classes. When we got our rosters at the end of the day, I had three 30+ classes (31, 32, and 35 students listed). But I guess that's normal at my school. (Side note--I feel sorry for Joel because one of his classes had 48 on roll). Anyway, we hope to get these issues somewhat resolved, but I'm not expecting drastic changes.
Throughout the past few days of training, I've been surprised that most of my requests for materials were met quickly. I'm still waiting on more desks ( I have 22...everybody else stands up). Well, there's more to talk about but I'll have to do it later because lesson plans are due tomorrow.