Whew!

Yesterday was a good day. Don't know what today will be, but yesterday was a good day. My two good classes were behind a day due to various assemblies, fire drills, and such, and so they finished their notes over the writing process.

My other three classes - the ones that did not get to do the "Walk a Mile in My Shoes" activity, were finished or finished early during the class period, so I came up with the motivation to watch a movie and then write about themselves. I chose Freedom Writers, and, boy, did I get some reactions. I have only seen two so far, and they made me want to just sit down and cry. So many of these kids are coming from horrible backgrounds. I want to help them so badly. My goal of finding motivation to make these kids want to write has just skyrocketed. I really feel like it can be an outlet for them, as well as a means to make better lives for themselves when they leave here. I'm also not sure I don't want to save this activity until the second week next year, maybe Friday after a quiz. It seemed to make a difference having had them a little while before they opened up completely.

One other thing I did was to try a different discipline approach. I realized that when I got on to some kids, the problems simply got worse, and I do not want to get in a power struggle with any of them. Also, it is not fair to the other 23 kids in the class for me to spend the majority of my time trying to calm the other 2 or 3 or 5 down rather than providing instruction. Therefore, I simply ignored the ones who weren't doing what I asked and went around to each group individually, asking questions, seeing how they were doing, etc. It actually worked in 2 of my 3 rowdy classes. I will probably still send out a friendly email to parents this weekend and call a few next week, but at least it was a step.

Now, we shall see how today goes.