so far so good

so, after a lot of stress and freaking out over the last few days, my first day back at school is going well, so far. I'm about 40% done with my teaching. my first period class, which is good but also intense, went really well. i decided that i'm going to use the textbook and corresponding reader pretty intensively. this chapter deals with theme, and has stories and writing about Anne Frank and the Holocaust, the Japanese internment in the west during World War II, and Martin Luther King's "I have a dream" speech. interesting stuff to the kids, which i know a lot about.

so my kids actually sat and read and worked silently for 20 minutes on this fable in their workbooks. i think that this is what most teachers do. kids have to do more work on their own, more independent work--i just have to get them started on it first, which i did. we talked a little bit about the setting and the title and possible subjects for the story, and then they started reading. i guess it's okay to lean on the textbook more than i usually do. some of the textbook reading *does* suck, though, so it's not totally illogical that i sometimes abandon it altogether. i think that the kids like having a really concrete task in front of them, too. they seemed pretty positive and to feel accomplished and successful today, which was great to see.

nobody got bored enough to try to play an april fool's joke on me during class, either. i'm sure that will come later. but it was great to start the morning off really calm! yay for breaks and yay for me!