HEATHER
MIGDON
Diary #1
No
Time To Feel Sorry
for Myself or My Kids
Everyone told me not to smile until December — that students try to take advantage of teachers who appear too "nice" — especially if they are first year teachers like me. So around the middle of December, just when I thought it would be okay to loosen up a little bit, I got a letter from the District of Columbia Public Schools that I was being transferred to an understaffed school in southeast DC. And instead of teaching fourth grade, I would be teaching sixth graders. Oh yes, and I would be given only one day to clear out my room and take over my new class. (See background article.)
Since then, I have been teaching 21 sixth graders at an overcrowded school in the heart of the poorest section of the District. We have too few desks, and not half the number of textbooks we need. There appears to be no room in the school for my students, or so says the principal, so I was assigned the school auditorium. My students are frustrated and fearful that I will leave them, for I am already the fourth person to teach them this year. But I don't have time to feel sorry for myself or my students. The school year is half over, so I have only a precious few months to get my kids ready for seventh grade. I've had to invest my class in the realization that we have to maximize every second of every day in order to finish the year prepared to go to junior high. So far we've agreed to forego the semi-daily class bathroom breaks that can easily eat up 30 to 45 minutes of the school day. We've made progress already. The same students who only a matter of weeks ago told me that they were "ghetto" and could not live up to my high expectations of them, now arrive at school with a sense of urgency to start the day. While they were at first skeptical of and obviously unaccustomed to writing without a teacher-prescribed topic, they now fill pages of their writing notebooks with important stories from their lives. Indeed, the silver lining in the cloud of being transferred is that I now have the freedom to implement daily reading workshops and writing workshops. After assessing my students' lackluster skills in reading comprehension and writing, I know that the workshops will enable them to refine skills that worksheets and basal readers simply cannot provide. I'm anxious to witness their evolution as readers and writers. I'm also anxious to share reflections of my successes and failures. I hope my stories are as enlightening to you as my students are to me.
