After watching my favorite fifth grade teacher very closely the last few weeks, I've gotten a very good idea of how I want my classroom to look and run. Between her and the TpT ideas, I'm ready to go! Randy also gave me a book on how an effective teacher starts the school year. I will be taking very good notes. I want to be ready to go in the fall. I want to know exactly what I can tell a principal about how I imagine my classroom being.
Today while my students were reading the assignment during Reading Groups and finding character traits of the two boys in the story, I drew one of them from the cover of the book. I copied it, yes, but I didn't trace it. I was really impressed with how it turned out, so I wanted to share it with you :) I put it in one of my polka dot frames again :) Why not? This is The Polka Dot Notebook!
As I have already stated, I am pretty happy with myself. He also embodies how I often feel from day to day. Maybe that's why we connected, me and lil Peter Hatcher. It's so easy to get discouraged doing this job, especially when I feel under-appreciated and inadequate. There's a lot that drags me down on a daily basis. I try to look on the bright side, but the bright side isn't always looking on me.
I have begun to accumulate a lot of good ideas that I would love to implement in a classroom, and I have an ongoing project of collecting research articles and notes from books I've studied this year into one notebook. I'm still trying to figure out how I want it to be organized in the end, so it basically looks like a giant rough draft. But I love to learn, and I want to keep track of my learning. I love being a student too. I guess this is a good thing because I'm being piled up with a lot of books.
This led me to pick up an inspirational book from Randy's collection that I am hoping with help me stay inspired to teach, and help me remember why I'm here and what my purpose is. The very first thing I learned was in the first chapter. I learned about BEEP. Focusing on BEEP at the beginning of every day can change my outlook from the start. My attitude will effect my success and my effectiveness. I was so inspired in fact, that I created this poster to pin up in my room to remind me every day before I leave the house to keep things in check. I wanted to share this with you as well:
Ruby's was interesting last night. We're training another hostess so there were four of us to start with and then he sent Jeff home super early, and he wasn't even supposed to be cut first. it was so messed up. Then, he whittled it down to just me by 8:15 and I was there til 10:30. We had this huge party come in who had reserved half of our bar area. The lady who called a few weeks ago caused us pain about it. She said there was going to be up to 25 people. That is not a definite number! And we weren't allowed to set the tables end to end around the restaurant because then "the people on either side of the table won't be able to talk to each other"....are you serious?? Then, it gets even better. Because this all came after we told her we didn't have a party room. So she decides to make her own. She reserved the bar for 25 people. We reserved all our booths and the big round table and had it all set up for 25 people. They all start showing up 25 minutes early. Fortunately, it wasn't a busy night and we were able to accommodate. But then, remember, they had only reserved half of our tables. The other ones were up for grabs. There was a party of three that wanted to sit at one of the tables, so they did. Then, not 25, but 35 people from this Newcomers Club decide to show up. So they just take our last two tables, push them together, and seat themselves. When the poor people who were surrounded by these idiots left, they took their table too! To top it all off, no one sat down for about an hour. They all just wandered around like we were some cocktail party hosts and ordered drinks from the bar and socialized. Our bar is set up by seats at the bar. They can't open an unlimited number of tabs. So these 35+ people were inconveniencing everyone. No one could sit in the bar on a Friday night because of them, they were loud and obnoxious, giving everyone a headache, and I couldn't hear to take to-go orders when I answered the phone. I felt like I was shouting. It was awful! Then, as the icing on the cake, after this party had slowed everything down since we didn't have enough free tables to cut at the pace we usually do, the manager cut the busser when we had five dirty tables in the dining room, and then shortly after, the Newcomer's Club bails and leaves a HUGE mess behind them. The cocktail servers were peeved that they had to clean up the mess and still tip out to a busser. So I told them not to worry about it. I cleaned the whole thing and set it all up again. I tackled the tables in the dining room too, removing all the dirty dishes and asked the server whose tables they were if he could please just wipe them down and put silverware on them. After I had finished the bar, he'd done nothing. Absolutely NOTHING! So I wiped the tables down , asked him to put silverware on them and finished up the rest of my job as well as a side job from the manager and still, there was no silverware on the tables. If tables aren't ready and available, no one gets cut. What the heck could possibly be keeping him from doing a thirty second job? So I did that too. Then, one of the cocktail servers came to me and told me that she had told the manger to make sure any tip out for bussing after the busser was cut goes directly to me. She said it only seems fair with all the work I did. So by 10:30, an hour after I would usually leave, I was finally able to go home.
I then came home and did all the dishes here at home. Because they were piling up since there was nowhere to put dirty dishes because my roommates did not put their clean and dried ones away. So I had to do all that too and finish all their dishes. It took me half an hour to do it all. I was simultaneously making Kal his Pizza Rolls and by the time I got them back to him, they were not oven hot anymore, but at least edible. He didn't mind. He's a boy, and they were food. When I went back to clean up the Pizza Roll mess, and he realized where I'd gone, he made me go back to my room and change into sweats, since I hadn't even taken the time to do that yet, and washed everything up for me. What a sweetheart. Then, I woke up early this morning to go to Bible Study with Michalski, but then when I texted her and asked if she was going to come pick me up, she said we weren't meeting because four of the girls weren't going to be able to make it. I need to get in on that email loop I guess. Ah well.
I was already up, so I made some coffee, did some reading, and now I'm typing this up. If I were a teacher teacher, I would probably be in my classroom doing work and making lesson plans for next week. As it is, I just follow what everyone else plans on Saturdays. Ha! I'm ahead of myself in planning for Reading Groups, so I really have nothing to do for school. Hopefully I'll get some rest today then since it's only 10:30 and I don't have to work until six. I even have Sunday off of work, which is very unusual. I got next Sunday off too, which has never happened. So that will be nice.
Well, I'm going to do some more reading and relaxing. TTFN!
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