Full Immersion: My Worst Week Teaching!

October 1st was when I needed to start full immersion. I was becoming the full time teacher, doing 80-100% of the planning, prepping, lessons, behaviour management, marking, and everything to do with SFU. My SA did not need to be in the room when I was teaching, in fact he was encouraged to leave so that I could get the full experience.
My first week was a nightmare. I was underprepared for the amount of work that was required, my lessons were not prepped enough, my formal observations all went bad, and I did not have behaviour management under control. That week, I considered quitting.
On the Wednesday of that week my SA had to go to a morning meeting, so there needed to be a TOC in the class as the official person in charge, but I was still running the room. She could see clearly that I did not have the class under control. She told me that all of my SA's strategies that I had adopted were not working and I needed to figure it out. I was embarrassed. Also, it was a wake-up call that I needed to get into gear and figure things out. Luckily for me, two nice things happened that week that kept me going.

1) October 4th was World Teacher's Day (never heard of it) and our administrators came to our classes to give us coffee, treats, and a cute little towel cupcake.

2) Coquitlam had a non-instructional Day on the 5th. This gave me an opportunity to clear my head and to observe a different school in Burnaby (more on that in the next post).

I am so glad that I pushed through because the weeks after that one were amazing.

Towel Cupcake!

My Desk was so messy that week!