It's all over, baby blue...

I'm done. Well, sure, I need to spend a day or two having meetings and cleaning up the disaster which is my classroom, and eventually I'm going to this teacher's conference thingummie in Flor-i-da, but mostly, I'm done. I feel fairly good about the year, except for the Algebra II class.

Bleh. The Algebra II class.

My largest class by far. Twenty-something teenagers, most of whom were not fond of math to begin with, were rowdy beyond belief, and would far rather have toothpicks slowly inserted underneath their toenails than attend a maths class.

Also, I'm not a natural. It takes a rare soul to make math enjoyable; I am not such. Sure, I can break down factoring three ways from Sunday, and I know my (mathematical) shit from my (mathematical) Shineola, but the fact remains, I don't really inspire anyone to add vectors or master the dread secret of the logarithm.

For the first few weeks, I had no idea what I was doing. I let the kids do more or less whatever, and gently pleaded with them to quiet down enough so that I could teach.

Control, once lost, is hard to regain. Trust and respect, if not present from the outset, is difficult to develop. Sure, I tutored, cajoled, put three thousand examples up on the board, gave them practice problems and study guides and so forth. They had already made their minds up. Never mind the fact that they did nothing but goof off the entire fifty minutes when I (theoretically) had their attention...if they didn't understand, despite not trying to understand, it was My Fault.

Mea culpa, mea culpa, mea maxima culpa.

In a way, it was my fault. Although there was nothing I could have done about it (how could I have known how much you have to jump on them initially to get their respect? I never went to high school, y'all will recall), still, due to my lack of expertise, the few who wanted to learn did not have the ideal classroom environment to do so. I spent the rest of the year trying to rectify behavior patterns which should never have started. I should have started out barking orders and checking notebooks and drilling orders of operation. Three weeks into the year, it's far too late.

Just thinking about that class makes me want to hide under the bed.

The other classes went fairly well, though. My physics students were darling. We talked about wave-y particles and the vagaries of refrigeration. My middle school students (religion, literature) were more or less tractable. They now know the rudiments of Latin, and the difference between matter and form, and the maturation process of Johnny Tremain. I'll be teaching mostly literature classes next year. JOY. Science and literature are my secret boyfriends.

It IS all over, baby blue. I half miss my students already, the wee bastards...