I love teaching English, except when I don't.

I never planned to be an English teacher. When I started my degree I was planning on science or phys. ed. Then the Georgia's state DOE changed the structure of things and PE was no longer an option so my advisor looked at my transcript and said I already had enough course work for a social studies concentration.

O.k. Social studies it is! But I still planned on teaching science.

After searching searching searching all summer, I was hired to teach social studies at LMS in 2002. But the thing was that every teacher on each team also split a subject because of numbers. At this time, English and reading were separate subjects.

The summer after my first year when the principal called me to ask if I wanted to teach science I panicked. I was SO looking forward to getting into that second year groove where I had already taught the subject so that I would actually be GOOD at it instead of having to learn it right before I was teaching it. So he also offered me reading. That was the subject my team had been splitting. Since I had taught it, I jumped on that one!

The funny thing was, when I went to take the English/Language Arts Praxis, I scored higher on that test than I did on either of the ones I actually STUDIED in college. I LOVE reading, so all this stuff just came naturally to me.

The third year in, our school put English and reading back together in a course that they called Language Arts. So I was again learning some things before teaching them. (I didn't use to know what a pronoun was. And prepositions? Forget about it!! Don't worry. I'm an expert on that now!)

Move forward a couple of years and our county decides we need to really hit the writing hard in middle school. So I'm learning all this stuff again.

Like reading, I have really enjoyed TEACHING the kids to write. Narrative (telling a story) is especially fun since I really enjoy seeing the creative things my kids can come up with. I was surprised just how much I have enjoyed teaching expository (informational) writing. It is way more straight forward that narrative. Persuasive? Eh. 6th graders don't really know how to come up with convincing arguments, so I can take or leave that one.

But what I could REALLY do without? The part that makes me want to poke my eyes out? Grading. I sit here before 88 expository essays and a stack of grading rubrics and I need to get busy! Which is probably why I am blogging. Grading and passing back papers are my least favorite part of teaching, but I especially loathe grading the writing. . .

English. . .

Yesterday I wanted to write a sentence that contained the word "led." Something to the effect of "This led me to believe" or something like that.

I blame it on being the Friday following the first FULL week I've worked in over three years because I just kept staring and staring at that word thinking it didn't look right.

I tried "lead" but that obviously was the present tense of the word I was trying to say, as in, "Where you lead, I will follow." So I figured I had the right spelling of the word I was trying to write.

Suddenly, I was left trying to think of the spelling for the stuff in your pencil. "Lead" right?

What the heck. See! This is why my students struggle with this language!

Not slacking for the sake of slacking!

This poor blog has gotten lost in what has been a furor of studying!

At the end of last school year, I was asked to come back into the classroom full time. This wasn't the first time I was asked, but it WAS the first time I didn't say "no" right away. I said, "I won't say 'no' until I've prayed about it." (Why did this never occur to me before?!) And then that day, Jeff came home with news of a 4% salary cut in his department. (We've made less and less from them every year since Jude was born due to different cuts.) Right then, I figured that God was providing an immediate response to those prayers.

As I was leaving the classroom, a new intervention process was rolling out for kids who struggle academically. I never had to bother learning about it since I was leaving. So now I am working on consuming as much information on the topic of the RTI (Response to Intervention) process.

Exactly one month from today, my first class in three years will walk in the door for the first day of school. I am going back into almost the same position I left. The only exception is, in addition to gifted and high regular classes, I will have one class that has RTI and special ed. inclusion students. This is sort of uncharted territory for me. (Thus all the studying!) I've had kids who needed remediation, and I spent the last year working half time providing targeted interventions for children like this one on one and in small groups.

I'm a little anxious about the idea of a whole classroom full of them, though. Because let's face it. My county doesn't get it that when you try to do these things, even with co-inclusion teachers in the same classroom together, you can't fill those classes to maximum legal capacity. I am confident I can make this successful with a class that is appropriately sized. Maybe 18 - 20 kids max. But all the RTI/inclusion classes I worked with last year had 24+

So we'll see how it goes. In the mean time, I have GOT to stop neglecting my blog!