My Life :)

“Happiness is not something ready made. It comes from your own actions.”

 - Dalai Lama XIV

Hey guys, so I know it's been a while. Honestly, I think it's because my life is finally starting to settle down. I'm starting to think of everything less as a new adventure and more as a part of my home and normal life. This is good! Still, it means that I have only fairly boring things to talk about. So, that's what you get today. 

I am feeling very content today. I woke up within the respectable time frame of five minutes after my usual alarm and a glutenous thirteen hours, I made myself an omelette and a chai tea, and sat out in the 81° degree sunshine and read a new book I downloaded from the library. After breakfast I started cleaning the house and making my lesson plan for today. 

I'm currently a week ahead on my lessons and I have the next four weeks skeletoned out. This makes me feel very good because I have a lot less pressure on my shoulders, as well as the luxury of not having to stay late at the school just getting ready for the next day. Now, staying late feels more like a choice than a chore.  

The reason I am telling you all of this is because I just wanted to let you know that I am happy. I have my bad days. I have really bad days. I also have really, super, totally awesome days as well. Well, today and yesterday (Friday) have been two of those awesome days and tomorrow (Sunday) is looking to be even more awesome. 

So yesterday (Friday), was basically a totally awesome day because of Stanford. That class used to be the hardest cohort to manage because of the blinding personality and energy of many of the students in the cohort. You might be saying, "But Mrs. Brown, don't you want personality and energy?" Why yes, I do and because I have finally managed to harness that energy, (using incentives, class jobs, stress balls, and fidgets as aids) they are actually the hardest working and most productive cohort I have. I still have some behavior management issues with them, but they give me quite a bit back. 

Most of the behavior management issues I get from them happen after lunch. I call that cohort, "After Lunch Stanford" just because of how stressful they tend to be when they are excited for the school day to end. I only see After Lunch Stanford on Fridays (meaning they are even MORE excited for school to be over so they can begin their weekend) which makes for a "thank God it's over" send off to the weekend.

Anyway, this week we were discussing figurative language and to end the week I had the students doing a gallery walk around the room where they looked at different poems and had to identify the piece of figurative language in that poem (metaphor, simile, personification, or hyperbole). Well, I knew this was going to be a little crazy, so I had initially planned to break it up into two days and keep them moving in groups at timed intervals with their voices at whispers. Well, they hadn't gotten to finish the first half on the previous day and I didn't want to stretch out the assignment for three whole days so I decided to take a chance and have Stanford move freely and do all of the poems in one day. I knew this would be tough... I knew I might just be overwhelmed and we'd have to go to a third day anyway... but they were brilliant! Their voices were calm, they walked to each poster, most of them were able to visit all of the poems. Not only all of this though.... they were excited about it and really got a good handle on figurative language! In other words, it worked with After Lunch Stanford! 

After school I stayed extra late to finish with a four week skeleton for the next four weeks of class. While this takes a long time, I feel really accomplished after doing it... it just feels good - knowing where I'm going. So, I got home feeling extremely accomplished and happy. 

The only sad part about my tale is that I've got Yale first thing on Monday and they are the hardest cohort now, not for energy and personality, but because about half of the students in that cohort are IEP and the other half is ruled by a couple of maliciously poor behaved students. I say maliciously because there is a difference between a 6th grader who can't control his behavior or doesn't know it's wrong and, therefore cannot choose to behave, and a 6th grader who does know his behavior is wrong and chooses when or when not to behave based on how much money his mom will reward him at the end of the day for not getting into any trouble (true story). Yale will not be able to enjoy that freedom because it's not structured enough for them. So, it's just going to be a long and arduous, drawn out process... and they're going to be behind the other classes. It's unfortunate and frustrating.