Holidays Over! 10-4

Today is done. Worked from 8:30 until 6:45 today, with a half hour lunch. Luckily I did get a lot of my adminstrative stuff done: attendence sheets, daybook pages typed/printed, class and personal schedules printed and distributed to admin, evaluation of all of my homeroom students from their official files, and also some exercises photocopied, oh and actually I created my basic template for each student's report card and saved them on the school server so they are ready for first term marks!

I realise it does not sound like I did much looking at that list, but it sure felt like I was productive! Usually I take lots of "social breaks" helping other teachers out, building project ideas, answering questions about computers, etc., but today I stayed very focussed.

Well, so far this blog is awfully boring. Let me think about what I can talk about that is more interesting. Well, I will tell you about my new homeroom class.

The North has always struggled greatly with producing graduates. The kindergarten classes typically have around 20-28 students in them. However since I have been here in GR (George River), the largest number of graduates I have seen in a single year is 5. (1 year from the last 3 years had no graduates) Those are similar statistics as other Northern schools are seeing. I have tried to think about what we can do as a school to help improve those statistics, and realised that we needed to spend more of our school resources in the Secondary Sector.

One of the struggles of a small school is that our financial allocation is for ALL levels and the board gives each school a little bit of flexibility with how to divide those allocations. Unfortunately, the secondary sector over the past few years has received the raw end of the deal- receiving no special education teacher, and with extremely large multi-level classes, for quite a few years in a row. (I guess the secondary teachers never spoke up very much as often they were fairly new teachers) That didn't stop me, and last year I started to use my power of persuasion to convince the principal and vice-principal of the importance of creating smaller homeroom group in the secondary sector so that each student could receive more attention and hopefully that would help a greater number of them to succeed and go further with their education. (especially as dropouts are quite common at the Secondary 2 and 3 levels)

I believe in this theory a lot and wanted to see it work very badly, so I decided to take on the homeroom gropu of many of the students who have failed repeatedly, have major behavioural problems and typically VERY poor attendence. Normally most of these students would bottom out in Secondary 2, which would become a very large group and the new/younger students would get very distracted and learn bad habits/attitudes from the older students. We wanted to free up the Secondary 2 gropu so the younger students could hopefully maintain their good attitudes about learning and their positive learning behaviours.

I know most of the students in my new homeroom and hope that my style will continue to keep them on my side. to help these students out we have actually given them a slightly less academic program- so instead of them taking 5 academic courses, we will offer them 4 academic courses and a work placement in the community. Hopefully for the students who are really not cut out for school, they will at least learn about some different jobs in town and will maybe have some doors opened up to them.

I am both excited and a bit nervous about this class. I will be teaching their Math, English and Personal/Social Development (PSD), and although I have lots of great ideas, I know that these students are often very moody, overtired and sometimes high. (hate to be so blunt) Some of them have quit school last year from April to the end of the year. I guess the next few weeks will tell. I plan on entering class with full optimism, as I always do and focus on building up their self-esteem and belief in their abilities... we'll see what comes a a result.