What’s It Like to Be a Teacher for a Week?

I totally forgot I had written notes down on my phone to eventually write a post about this. I stumbled upon it again when I was thinking of ideas for the blog. This honestly was the perfect week to write about because there was a holiday, a fire drill, a full moon, and a teacher work day. So you will really get a full picture!

Here is how my morning routine usually goes: Everyday my alarm goes off at 6:00 and I tend to snooze till 6:09 then snooze again till 6:18, finally rolling out of bed by 6:30. I know, I know... why not just set it to 6:30, but I tried that and still snoozed it and then I had to rush to get ready. I guess I am just a snoozer... I usually get ready while listening to a podcast or an audio book. I usually leave the house around 7:00ish and get to work by 7:15. I start every work morning writing my morning messages that I leave on the board for the students to get their day started. Their morning message consists of their co-curr day, reflecting on their mood from the morning, and any reminders that they need for the day. I will put a code word every now and then to make sure they are reading the board (: They will come to me and whisper the code word and in return they get an eagle buck or two (our campus wide reward system). After, I check and respond to any emails that I have received and get anything needed ready for the day. By 7:40am we are at the door greeting our students. I love this time! Students get to choose a greeting (it is usually the same each day), I have a few students that made up a secret handshake with me - took me awhile to remember them all haha. Once the morning bell rings, we watch announcements and then do our morning meeting.

Monday - February 14th

My morning started off like any other day, but todays school day was a little different because we had Valentine’s Day. Yes Valentine’s Day on a Monday. This morning I greeted the students as usually, but with my hands full of chocolate. Some of my students remembered that I don’t eat chocolate, but a lot didn't so my family was going to be very happy haha. I did get some cool Harry Potter valentine socks though; I put those on immediately.

On Mondays for morning meeting, I let my students share about what they did that weekend. One of the stories from today was that the students little brother went to the kitchen grabbed a knife walked over to his brother and looked at him, laughed, set the knife down, and walked away. Half the things this kid says I never know if he is telling the truth or not haha. Then at 8:20am, we get ready to go to co-curr which is when our team has our planning time. I spent that time printing out their test for the day. And of course, being as it is a Monday and just my luck, there were no staples in the printer. So the tests needed to be hand stapled. The world was out to get me today. Luckily, my teammate was in the same boat so we tagged teamed the stapling of 78 packets.

We picked the kiddos up at 9:15am and took a bathroom break. When we return to the class, my two classes have our intervention time. This is when students get their snack, get pulled for extra support classes (dyslexia, speech, etc.), I pull students to work on skills to fill educational gaps or catch up absent students. The students who aren't getting pulled work on educational stations - usually a math, science, reading/writing, and social studies activity/assignment. Since a lot of these activities are digital, students can use their iPad. A great tool teachers have is the Classroom app where teachers can see and control students iPads from my own iPad. During todays intervention time I locked five iPads because students were on things that they were not supposed to be on. 🙂

Those students who got pulled returned to class around 10:05am and that is when my morning science and math block starts. Today the students had a writing assignment for science. Followed by reviewing for their math test by going over the review that was sent home for homework. After students asked all their questions they took the test. (Good news, the majority of my students passed!) Usually during tests I have to read to 5 or more students for accommodations. This consists of me reading and re-reading questions and answers choices. Even though the test is only 10 questions the tests usually take about an hour or so. Fourth grade problems can be complex or students just forgot what to do.

At noon we clean up to switch for them to go to their reading and writing teacher (if you don't know, I am a 4th grade math and science teacher) and I start the process all over again. Around 12:45 that’s when we break for our lunch. I had lunch duty today which is a love-hate relationship because I love to talk to the students, but it’s also a duty that feels like it goes on for-ev-er. One thing that made the duty better was I noticed a student brushing her hair with a fork 😂. After lunch, we walk the students out to recess to meet the recess teachers. Now I get to have our 30 minute lunch which in reality is about 20 or 25 minutes because we walk the students out to recess and then you cant miss an opportunity to use the bathroom and then some days I need to heat up my lunch. Today I needed to write into a students folder (he is in a special program where they use folders for communication home) because at lunch he was mocking another teacher who asked him to stop something and he continued. So, today my lunch was about 15 minutes.

After my afternoon students had their math time, we stopped early to switch back to our homeroom so students could pass out their valentines. The students were way too hyped and it all became a hot mess; students were pushing, rushing to get their bags, and students were yelling. All before we even got to pass out the Valentines. We stopped and had a conversation about their behavior and how we can make a change to have a successful exchanging of valentines. I made a suggestion of how they should move from table to table to make sure everyone gets a valentine. I had about five students come up to me saying 'I don’t know what happened but I have ___ left I don’t know what to do." or "I swear I brought enough but ___ didn't get one." Sorry kid, don't know what to tell ya. Then I let the kids choose one thing to eat and sent them home on a semi-sugar high.

My duty at the end of the day is to call students names for them to come out to their cars. On Mondays and Wednesdays I help out with the theater program for the musical which is super fun and reminds me of my high school days being in the theater department. Then afterwords I went back to my room to tidy it up and left the school by 5pm.

Tuesday - February 15th

Starting my morning off like any other with snoozing my alarm and was still able to make it work by 7:15am. I had some emails to answer. For morning meeting, we had our RULER lesson (Thursday explains a tad more about that). And then sent the kids off to co-curr. They have a 6 day rotation with PE being every other day. It was a day 3 so they had PE . We normally plan math on Tuesday's, but I didn’t get much of a planning period today because we had a meeting about accommodations for the STAAR test. Afterwards I had just enough time to quickly print something (and thank goodness the staples came in!), and use the restroom. I picked up the kiddos and brought them back to class where I pulled some students in small groups to work on adding and subtracting decimals.

In Science we are learning about Changes to Land so we discussed Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition. I told the students that we were going to be making a TikTok dance (not really, but just little hand motions) to help us remember the definition for Weathering, Erosion, and Deposition and that got the class PUMPED lol.

For our math block, the students finished their test from yesterday, did a pre assessment so I could see each students understanding for our measurement unit, and they did some DreamBox which is an online game based math program to help continue their growth. Some may say testing days are an easy day... sometimes they are not. I was reading the whole time for my students who have oral administration, about 12 or so kids from both classes. I practically had the test memorized from reading it several times to different students for 2 hours.

Unfortunately today I only got honestly five minutes for lunch. The kids go to lunch at 12:45 and I had a meeting at 1 o’clock, but by the time I went to the bathroom, asked the AP a question pertaining to the meeting, and wrote a little note for the person who was gonna watch my class when they got back from recess; that left me with five minutes before I had to attend the meeting. So, I really only got to eat my grape tomatoes for lunch. Around 2:45pm, my stomach was growling and I was so confused on why I was already hungry... then I remembered I didn't really have a lunch. So, I finished my lunch at 3:10 while the kids were cleaning up.

Something that brightened my day was during dismissal one of the fourth graders told me “Mrs. Hearne, you’re so beautiful. You’re my Queen.” This comment helped push me through the rest of the day, which was another late day at work. Since I missed my planning period, I didn’t get to figure out what I’m teaching for of the rest of the week. I had to go talk to a teammate after school and get all of that put together, answer a bunch of parent emails, send out an email about homework because I told them it was due Friday yet we don’t have school on Friday 🤦‍♀️, make a parent phone call, cleaned up the mess that accumulates on my desk every single day, and "graded" the kids pre-assessments so I could make groupings, which I left to do for tomorrow since it was already 5 o'clock.

Wednesday - February 15th

Today was a full moon. If you know, you know. If you don’t know, Joe "Mr. D." Dombrowski said it perfectly on his podcast, "If you are not a teacher I need you to buckle up and understand that some short of magical witchcraft happens in the sky when there is a full moon. I’m pretty sure that the hocus-pocus witches swing around town and just blow wafts of probably cocaine into these kids bedroom windows so they breathe it at night. They don’t snort it cause um they don’t know how. They breathe it and they come to school like they have just snorted five lines out of their milk money singles. That is the type of energy that kids give you at school the night after a full moon."

Even though that is probably what happens, we don’t truly know, but what all teachers do agree on is that they’re different human beings on a full moon day. With that being said, I had to write two parent communication forms for students who continually talk in my class and had been given an unbelievable amount of reminders; we had a fire drill; two out of the three bathrooms closed down leaving just the 3rd and 4th grade restrooms open for 600 or so students; we started a new unit over converting measurement; I had to have a conversation with one of my students about picking on another student on their walk home AND I made a student cry. I can’t remember why, that was the only note I left myself haha.Then I ended the day with musical rehearsals. I left at 5:10pm.

Thursday - February 16th

After starting off with my usual morning routine, we had our RULER lesson (we do one every Tuesday and Thursday). If you do not know what that is, you really should. This isn't just beneficial for students, but for every human being out there! It is a fantastic approach to social and emotional learning. You can check out the RULER Approach website and read the founder and creator's book Permission to Feel by Marc Brackett. You can read this book even if you are not an educator. I encourage you to do so!

This weeks word was “ defeated”. On Tuesday, the students thought of a time when they were feeling discouraged and hopeless about something that they were once excited about, or a time when they experienced a setback and didn’t want to try again. We explored what caused those feelings, how it made them feel in their body and face, and the kinds of thoughts that were going through their head. Today they listened to a read aloud called, Emmanuel's Dream: The True Story of Emmanuel Ofosu Yeboah by Laurie Ann Thompson. In the book, Emmanuel feels defeated because he wants to be a cyclist, but was born with a deformed leg. We used the RULER acronym to discuss the feeling word. The students truly do a great job with identifying the feeling and can break down RULER in deep conversations with their classmates.

Thursday's are our team meetings to talk about anything important for our team or school year, so we do that during our planning time. Our intervention time ran smoothly. In our math block, we were taking our Checkpoint which consists of 5 questions focused on the 5 different TEKS that 4th graders struggle with the most. With each checkpoint we give them new questions that fall under the 5 TEKS we are targeting. We use this as a data point to see how students are growing each month. At one point I was reading to 8 students spread all out on the carpet. There are students who are in dyslexia and students who have oral accommodations outside of dyslexia. I practically had the questions memorized like I was giving a performance about a math test.

Afterwards, we started our new unit. The students really enjoyed it! That is always a great feeling when the students tell you they had fun. We talked about different objects in the world that students could use to relate a unit of measurement to for example: a baseball bat is about 1 yard and a license plate is about 1 foot. Taking that knowledge of all the relative measurement, they did a sort on different measurement scenarios. The students always enjoy working together to sort things into categories. When students were working in their groups while I was working with my small groups, one student started talking about dating. Apparently that was much more important than what we were working on haha. But that is honestly what happens, students break into small groups and you hope that they stay on task. Some do, some clearly do not...

At lunch today, a student told me that another student said they "wanted to hurt [her] family". I asked the student if that was true and he swore he didn't say that. So I had her explain what happened. She said "Well he said 'dada da da dadadad da' and in unicorn that means 'I want to hurt your family'"... I was baffled and tried my best not to laugh. I basically said listen... we don't know that is what he really said. I asked him if he spoke unicorn and he does not. So, I told her no more interpreting what others are saying because it may not be unicorn...

The rest of the day ran smoothly and all the kids survived, so it was a successful day. On Thursday's we have staff meetings which ended around 4:45pm and I quickly bounced. This was the earliest I had left all week!

Friday - February 17th

Today was a teacher work day which means sleeping in and catching up! However, as a teacher, we all know that when we cross one thing off our list we add three more. I did feel that I accomplished a good amount or at least what I wanted to accomplish that day.

We have accommodations folders that we have to fill out each week. I have 21 folders. I needed to make a new seating chart because my chatty classes have been driving me bonkers. I wish I kept track of how long it took to make a seating chart, but it was at least 30 minutes. I have 54 students total - my homeroom, my afternoon science class, and my afternoon math class. I had to strategically place kids where I knew they would least likely talk. Probably wasn’t the best use of my time, but in the long haul it was worth it because I’ve had less behavior problems.

Since we didn't have students today, we took the time today to break from work and have a nice lunch together…we don’t get to do that often! We ate DeVivo Bros. Eatery in Keller. You definitely need to eat here. I have never had a bad meal there.

When we returned back to work, we were able to collaborate together as a team to figure out a more efficient and effective way to help kids follow expectations in the cafeteria and at recess. Then I made sure I had pictures for the yearbook where every student was accounted for. I answered emails. Got work for students who need extra practice and I got some papers graded. It was a successful work day and I left at my contracted hour, 3:45pm!

I know that was a lot, but if you made it to the end, congratulations! 🎉 Teaching is one of the most challenging jobs I have ever had, but it is also the most rewarding. This year has been unbelievably difficult, so much so I wanted to quit. Luckily, as I am writing this, the year has gotten better and I think I can do another year. I definitely don't do this job for the money or the work load. I 100% do it for the relationships I make with these kids. I wish that was the main focus of my job, but unfortunately that isn't the case. But, I show up for my kids and I make sure their emotional and social needs are met first. Those needs need to be taken care of before they can even consider learning anything from me academically. I am blessed to work on a campus where that is valued and I am surrounded by teachers who share that same teaching philosophy.