after the boys of summer are gone

So, summer school is over. How does that feel, one might ask. I still have yet to decide. It will be nice to get a little more sleep. As draining as TEAM may be, it’s not an hour away by school bus. I’ll miss the kids, for sure. I thought I would miss the dude the most - RK, who would always give me a hard time but understood what I was saying and could really help explain it to the other kids; WA, the class clown, who told me “there ain’t no mode” and who drew hearts around his own name on his quizzes and homework; and RR, who liked the crease in my pants. But I think I’ll miss the girls just as much.
Especially BM. When she stands next to me, she comes up about to my waist, her glasses are two big and she’s got a million freckles. Sometimes she struggled with the material, and had a very cute way of putting her head in her hands and saying “Mr (blank), I just don’t get it” or “Mr. (blank), this is hard.” But for me, the best parts of summer school came when she understood things, finally. It was much more rewarding than when RK did well, or WA, because she really understood it. One day, I gave the whole class a pop quiz since they were too loud outside. After I had graded them, I handed them back to everyone but BM, because she had earned a 100. I told her I couldn’t give her back her quiz. Her eyes filled with fear, and she said “What did I scored, Mr. (blank)?” I just told her she’d have to go look on the wall of fame, where I’d hung it. The way she walked back to her desk afterwards made my day.
She was a tough kid too, a really tough kid. She cried one day, during class, because she didn’t understand something. I knew she was crying, all the kids knew, but I hadn’t an idea what to do about it, so I changed my tone a little, didn’t call on her for a minute, until I was sure it was something she would understand. She answered me, and we kept on going, and she ended up understanding it in the end.
So, I’ll miss all the kids. I won’t miss the structure of the summer school, and the botched attempts at power sharing between four teachers in one classroom. At least I won’t have to deal with that when I have a classroom of my own. It’s a system that seems designed to cause conflict between teachers, even teachers who really like and respect each other, because it is really hard to avoid stepping on other people’s toes. I certainly stepped on some toes, and some of mine were stepped on, and it’s frustrating. I’m not sure how it could be done better next year, although I’ve been thinking about it a lot. Getting rid of the 2nd 2nd year in the class might help, because their role was pretty vague and undefined. The class would have run at least as smoothly without them, and they would have had a bit more of a summer break as well, which I’m sure they would have enjoyed. It was, however, nice to have them around for the summer, outside the classroom, because they all have a lot of experiences I can certainly learn from. But in the classroom, they were not necessary, and maybe detrimental.
The fact that so many of our kids (3 or 4 out of 8) failed was really depressing (see my thoughts about that in the second entry about assessment). That was really a downer.

Aside from summer school ending, I am really looking forward to TEAM. Not to writing 3 and 5 day lesson plans, but to learning how to teach math. I feel like I have some ideas about how to teach, but none really about how to teach math, especially high school math, since I’ve been working with 7th graders all summer. Plus, I’ve heard that the woman who teaches the class for math teachers is amazing and wonderful. So I can’t wait for that.