Starting to See the Bigger Picture!

Today I feel like the pieces are actually starting to come together and I am beginning to see the big picture when it comes to teaching middle school! Up until it clicked today, I have felt like I have been floundering in the seventh grade for the past 3 weeks! My mentor has been amazingly supportive and helpful which is the only thing that has kept me from emailing my supervisor and begging her to place me back in the second grade. I just felt that I wasn't connecting with my seventh grader. No matter what I did, the kids were not buying in, they were far from impressed, and they just were not excited about what we were learning. So in an attempt to capture their interest, I rewrote my entire unit, threw out all my planning and the unit project I was excited about, and went back to the drawing board. I wanted to create something they would be excited for! Then after spending countless hours fine tuning my unit, they still seemed unimpressed. SoI decided I would just go ahead with it. However, the work didn't seem like it was getting done, there were a million excuses, many of them weren't putting in any effort, and most students couldn't tell you what they had to do. It was so frustrating. I couldn't figure out why my students were so disconnected from what I was doing.

Then today, it all made sense. When I'm up at the front of the class, they are tuning me out. Even when I called their attention they would go back to what they were doing. It sounds simple, but I didn't recognize this as a problem before even with my mentor helping to clue me into this problem. I thought, well some kids have to be fiddling in order to pay attention. However, today I realized that almost no one was listening. So I made them all put down what was in their hands, repeat information back to me, and I walked them through step-by-step. The results...a much more engaged and attentive class. My mentor and I talked about this later. He was telling another teacher that I have all it takes to teach middle school I just have to learn to bring down the hammer and today I did just that! I want my seventh graders to be successful and in order to do that I have to come down on them a little to show them that I am serious. Now that I have begun to slowly put the pieces together I feel like the next week is going to be good!