Week 4: Lots to Learn

This week our school visitor, Eric Landwehr, was here from St. Lucia. He spent half a day in each classroom, observing and looking for ways we could all improve the instruction in our classrooms. He is certainly a wealth of information!

So this week Miss Rosenbaum learned...
-Be prepared, because things run more smoothly and management is so much easier when you know the plan. (Ok, so I already knew that, but a spelling lesson underscored the fact.)
-Go with the flow, because you can't be prepared for everything. Don't stress, everything will work out eventually.
-Don't let students get by with, "I don't know" as their answer. You can give them cues, use a classmate to supply the answer for the student to repeat, or you can give them the answer to repeat back to you.
-Pick your battles. You can't win every time, and some issues are more important than others. Again, don't stress.
-Make sure you know what you are getting into when your 2nd grader's older sister says she wants to send food for a birthday party. You just might end up with 2 trays of sandwiches, a cake, a tub of ice cream, 2 kinds of chips, 2 kinds of juice, bubblegum, 2 kinds of cups, 2 kinds of plates, 2 kinds of napkins, and plastic spoons. And you will be so busy at lunch time trying to serve everything that you will be forced to sneak cheese sandwiches from one of the trays for sustenance.
-Taking snack away as a consequence for not following directions (work without talking for the next 5 minutes or we will not have snack today) really makes an impact... I only had 12 students crying for half an hour. May not have been the best idea I had, but it let the kids know that I mean what I say and will not hesitate to carry out the consequences I put forth.
-When I am weak, He is strong! I have been reading Isaiah (following the daily readings from Meditations) and God seems to speak even louder and clearer when I am feeling bombarded by everything around me. What a great God we have!
-I could keep going, but you get the idea. Many of my professors have told me that a teacher is always a student and never done learning. The hard part is finding the balance between work and play, time for the classroom and work and time for yourself. You never find the perfect balance, but we do have a Lord who was perfect for us. It's only my first year of teaching... some days the balance comes easily; some days the balance is painfully out of whack. But God is good! All the time!