What more could a teacher ask for?

Today is the last day of school and a parent sent me this e-mail:

I wanted to thank you for everything you done for my son all school year. He couldn’t have asked for a better teacher then you. You always made him feel good about himself. There are times that is hard to do. You are so very special to us.

The last day of school is so sad! :-(

School Dream

On my myspace page I often post the dreams I have, especially if they involve people I know in real life. Here is a dream I had on 3/4 that involved a few friends. Look for my crazy dream blogs here now and then.

Begin dream: I was in a high school algebra class. My principal (my boss) was teaching it. A bunch of people from high school were in this class but I specifically remember Aaron and Matt being there. Everyone in the class were adults. We were all taking notes. I was panicking because I could not remember some of this math and I did not want my principal to know. Then Aaron's older brother walked past the window and pointed and laughed at us.

A Lesson Never Learned

I have only been a teacher for a little over a year now and while I feel pretty successful there are things I still struggle with. My classroom has experienced a total schedule overhaul and now I feel like my time management strategies have been lost. This is one area where my teacher's prep program did not prepare me.

While I was in school working on my teaching degree, we had several placements in classrooms throughout the city every semester. Our professors always encouraged us to jump in and be helpful right away. Good advice. As a future teacher I was anxious to get to know the students and to find out what it was really like to be the teacher. However, now that I am flying solo in my own classroom I wish I could have seen how a teacher dealt with the students when there wasn't an extra set of hands. I think more teaching programs need to allow student teachers to spend at least a week just watching. Simply watching how a teacher manages behavior issues without any help or how she gets three kids off to gym and two kids off to art at the same time would have been helpful to see.