AuburnChick's Adventures

I love the show Survivor.  In fact, I’ve blogged about it before.

I think the next season of Survivor should be Survivor, Isle of Teen-Dom…

Forget the competitions on the regular TV show.  Those don’t truly measure fortitude.

No.

Pit those contestants against a classroom of students, and they would fail mightily.

Well, let me tell you…Week 17 of teaching felt like a full season of Survivor.

It was one challenge after another.  At times, I felt victorious.  Often, I walked out of school dejected, wondering if I was going to be voted off the island.

My 11th and 12h grade classes were fine.  We finally finished discussing The Scarlet Letter.  My heart was sad for Hester Prynne. who never really found happiness but did figure out how to live with the consequences of her sin.  Dimmesdale, it was decided, was a spineless man.  Interestingly enough, my students felt sorry for Chillingsworth.

I had a bit of fun with the juniors on Friday.  Actually, it was the seniors who thought of tricking them into believing that I had given them a very difficult quiz.

What I had done, in fact, was list a bunch of questions for DISCUSSION…

Before my juniors came into the room the next period, I had changed the word “discussion” to “quiz…”

I told the class to get out a sheet of paper and start copying down the questions.

I got death glares from one of my students.

The kids were not happy.

Before they got too far in the process, I relieved their anxiety by telling the truth.

Poor kids.  heehee

Meanwhile, I had the most fabulous lessons with my sixth graders.  I pulled it from ReadWriteThink.com, and the lesson was titled “Describe That Face.”

I won’t bore you with the details, but it went really well, and the kids gave me encouraging feedback at the end of the week.

I spent the entire week reviewing nouns with my freshmen…

Although I had already tested them on this subject, I did not feel like they had gotten a good grasp on the subject.  Because I will be including nouns on this class’s final, I wanted to go over them again.  They did much better on the test on Friday.

My toughest challenge was with my tenth graders.

This class has two student in it.  This makes things challenging enough as it is.  But, we still needed to finish the unit on verbs, and oh my gosh.

Because of all of the breaks we’d had in November, it was like starting back at square one…

Every time I thought I had a handle on the material, they would ask two or three questions that would make me doubt myself, and I’d have to go back to the drawing board.

Finally, though, I had a breakthrough, and on Thursday, we had a very solid review for Friday’s test…

It was like the clouds had parted, and the sun had come shining through.

I walked out of that challenge with my head held high after having dug in the trenches for weeks and weeks.

And that was my week.

I would dare any “regular” Survivor contestant to come visit my “island” and see how they pair up against the demands of my job.

Forget dealing with rain and bugs.

They should try balancing five class preps, a family, and continuing education.

They wouldn’t last a day and would be begging Jeff to extinguish their flames.

Especially since the payout at the end of the game isn’t a million dollars.

It’s changed lives.

And so Week 17 ends.  Week 18 is right around the corner.

I am confident that the new week will bring its own set of challenges.

Am I ready?

“Survivors, begin!”

Filed under: Teaching | Tagged: Survivor, teaching |