For those who don't know, I am "student teaching" at a middle school where I am teaching.... 8th grade math. My reaction when I found this out went like the following: math? wait, what!? MATH!!!! fuck, are you serious?! i haven't take math in 5 years and i haven't looked at 8th grade math in 10 years! i don't even KNOW 8th grade math! shit!
Once I got over that initial reaction I was able to to focus on teaching it a little more, however I have to continuously re-teach myself basic math concepts because I don't even remember how to do most of them. However, I co-teach the class with three other girls and we definitely help keep each other sane....sometimes.
When I talk to people the first thing they normally ask is "Is your training hard?" My response to this, besides telling them that a future french teacher is teaching math, is to run them through my typical day and have them answer the question for themselves. So, in that spirit....a typical workday looks like the following:
5:30 am - wake-up and get ready for the day - pretty much just drink A LOT of coffee and put on some clothes.
6:20 am - leave apartment, grab lunch at the cafeteria that I have to take with me to the middle school I teach at, and get on the bus that takes us to the school
6:40 am - the bus leaves
7:00 am - we arrive at school and have an hour and a half to prepare our room before the kids arrive
8:30 am - the kids arrive and we have an hour to practice basic math skills
9:30 - 11 am - I am in workshops teaching me how to be a teacher
11 - 12:30 - I prepare my classroom and teach an hour-long lesson on math
12:30 - 1:30 break
1:30 - 4:45 - I am in more workshops, lessons, etc. to learn how to be a teacher and lesson plan
4:45 - leave the middle school for the Georgia Tech campus
5:30 - 8 pm - one or more of the following will occur, dinner, sand volleyball, running errands, nap time
8 pm - 1 am - finalize lesson plans for the next day and work on lesson plans for the coming days
1 am - go to bed, maybe....get up and do it again
Needless to say, half way through our first week of teaching a couple of my co-workers and I decided we needed a drink. Partly because it was my friend, Anna's, birthday and partly because we needed to get off campus and away from TFA. And this is where the title of the blog comes in. One of the girls had forgotten her ID and all we had to do was tell the bartender the kind of week we had been having and he was more than happy to get her a drink!
We have also found that red bulls and sleep deprivation make teachers incredibly entertaining to 8th graders. Because as we have gotten crazier there has been more laughter in our classroom.
However, as hard and stressful as this might be I need to be serious for a second because I have finally come to realize how large the achievement gap is between students. My 8th graders do not understand negative integers (they cannot solve -9 + 2), they can sometimes plot coordinate points, even if they know the right answer they can still get it wrong on a multiple-choice test because an equation is structured wrong, and they had never heard of a number line before this summer. How have they gotten this far in school without knowing these skills? It is not that they are stupid, because they can pick up concepts, but their minds just work in a different way or they don't think things through.
That's a little bit of what I am doing. My next blog I will put a few more entertaining stories of what has been going on here, because we have had some good times :)
