A lil bumpy

My teaching intuition is as sharp as its going to be for the time being. I like to do a few demos in front of the class, but they seem to fall short of something exciting. I get the ones who are starting to annoy me involved. That just ends up keeping them hyper when they are back in their seat. I need something to get them to pipe down when they are supposed to. As soon as I know how a simple detention is followed through, I'll be fine. Surprisingly for a mixed culture, I am getting the same problem from various groups. I get complaints that they are thinking too much. That makes me happy whether that is good or bad for me in the end. If it is the ones who really want to give me trouble during their class, then my job is going along smoothly.
My planning is etchy, I know the major concepts I want to get across for the week, and then it breaks down when its showtime. Hopefully as the weeks progress, my planning goes exactly how it should. The good news is that my bag of tricks is still full, and the planning vs showtime difference works in my favor since I am breaking stuff down more for my students rather than jumping from one major concept to the next.

First couple of days

Alright, I taught 2 full days, then had 2 snow days to end the week, then had monday off for MLK. This job is awesome! Everyone returned tuesday a little out of control. One because of the extended weekend, and also a pep rally for the girls basketball team. I was surprised in some of the students behavior, but had a better day today. It was a regular teaching day that I do not have any complaints about. I hope its like this for the rest of the days to follow. I plan only a little bit into the future for the class, and it might haunt me if I do not plan at least a week or two into the future, but thats what I hope to accomplish on the weekends. When I am not teaching, I am trying to spend as much time as possible getting the lecture room and labs organized. This will be a while, but the students are telling me it looks so much nicer than before. My systems have been improving, and now I need to grade. More later.

I HAVE A JOB!!!

I just completed my first full day as a science instructor.
It is the middle of the school year, the second week of the new semester, and I interview at a school for an immediate science position.  At the end of the interview, the job was straight up offered to me.  How lucky can this get?
The school is close to home, really close to where I student taught. No worries, its a private school. The catch is that it is all girls, so let's re-state those worries. The teenage thinking, adolescent changing, long-term grudging type of school, and I am their science teacher. I have 3 Physical Science Courses, 1 Chemistry, and 1 Physics class. I am more concerned about the chemistry course because my background is not that strong, it barely exists.
I am fortunate to have nice classroom size for my classes, I average about 18 students per class.

My workspace is pretty amazing, and pretty messy. "Show me a clean lab station, and I will show you where no work is being done." They need to stop working for a couple days so I can organize. I have a lecture room that connects to a chem lab, and in the other direction a physics lab.  It will take forever to get everything situated the way I want it, a few of the ways I picked up in student teaching.

I tried to make it a point of how I wanted the class to be managed.  The day of the interview I met some of the students in a couple of my classes, and they were just a little out of control, today being the introductory first day, I made sure that is not to happen.  Tomorrow will be their first of many normal days in the classroom.  My goal is to achieve a balanced diet of routine between lecture, activity, book work, and something else im missing?  Someone help me out.  So far so good, I just need time for organizing, including the content so I know what I am talking about.  Nothing should be complicated after this semester.

Now What?

Ok, that chapter of my life is over, the unpaid chapter we could call it. Consider this the preface to a new chapter, if that is possible in a literature sense. Its the last friday of winter break for the school systems and I wont be going into a new school to teach on monday. What are my options? I can substitute wherever for the next couple of months. Why not? I am not tied down anywhere, and I can get a peek into different schools. I can join some tutoring group for a little while to make some small change, or go into the private sector and work in some industry not knowing what I would be doing.  Who knows?