I've Got My Big Girl Panties On, So I'll Just Deal With It

Last week I experienced several big moments in my newly-forming career in education. Tuesday night I met with my co-teacher and her husband at a sushi restaurant in downtown Milledgeville. We laughed and joked about funny quirks we had in common that had little to do with classrooms and school. We then continued our fun night at a coffee shop listening to my fiance and some others play guitar. A great time was had by all.

Wednesday morning came and I received a phone call from my principal, my boss. I was informed I was being moved to seventh grade language arts inclusion instead of the eighth grade classroom I had grown accustomed to earlier. I was a little heartbroken, but not defeated.

See, the way I look at it is I have a whole drawer in my filing cabinet dedicated to seventh grade language arts; it was the grade and subject area in which I did my student teaching. I can pull from a number of lessons and projects I have extensive experience with. I also fit well within the seventh grade family at my new school since I was there not too long ago as a student teacher. I know the principal, the staff, and most importantly the secretary; if you know the secretary, you can pretty much get anything you need because they are truly the ones who make the school run.

I'm trying to be positive and energetic about most things right now. My extensive experience with seventh grade, and this school in general, will allow me to participate in extra-curricular activities that are close to my heart, like Relay for Life and drama/theater, without overextending myself...hopefully.

I moved to Macon this past weekend, thus creating a 35 mile commute from my new home to work. This morning I listened to "Today's Middle Level Educator," a podcast put together by the National Middle School Association. One of my educator heroes, Ross Burkhardt, was the guest on an episode entitled "Building Positive Professional Relationships...and Dealing With Those Who Refused to Do So." It was a fitting subject seeing as how I'm going in to an environment where I once had a different identity and am trying to establish myself in a new light.

The best piece of advice I took away from the session was when Mr. Burkhardt said, "You cannot be what you cannot see." How can we expect the young adolescents in our lives to be respectful or to act in an appropriate way if it has never been modeled for them. It is no excuse. We are to model ways of acting for students. We are to model professional relationships to help them see how adults should handle troubling situations. We cannot expect them to absorb things through osmosis...they must be exposed to such things and be able to learn them for themselves.

I am known to the many students with which I've worked over the past few years as a goofball, if you can believe it. One of my favorite and best goofball activities is making up songs about the students or about particular events in and out of the classroom. I have a good morning song, a goodbye song, a pencil-sharpening song, a reading song, and on and on. My latest and greatest composition comes in the form of a song entitled "The Positivity Song." I sing it at the top of my lungs when I feel myself becoming impatient with students and with other camp counselors. Now, this doesn't mean I am modeling random singing for my students but it does mean that the best way to handle an annoying or irritating situation is to remain positive and take it on! This is something I have struggled with my whole life and will continue to work on, especially in my professional life.

Remember:

"It's the positivity song!

Positivity all day long!

positivity! POSItivity! POSITIVITY!!!!!!

It's the positivity song!

I make it up as I go along!

positivity! POSItivity! POSITIVITY!!!!!!

It's the positivity song!

It helps me get along!

positivity! POSItivity! POSITIVITY!!!!!!