Week 1: That’s a Wrap
A super nice and encouraging note from my principal awaited me on Day 1.
At exactly 4:10 p.m. CST on Friday, I celebrated an anniversary: exactly one week as a public school teacher.
Full disclosure: we have a four-day school week at Palestine-Wheatley Public Schools in Arkansas. It’s an ongoing experiment here, especially popular in smaller, rural districts.
A few lessons learned from Week 1:
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Classroom personas. Personalities abound among the hundreds of students, but interestingly, each class period manifests its own distinct “persona.” Some classes have no difficulty focusing and getting down to business. Others are distracted by so much as a stray breeze. This forces me to switch teaching styles constantly throughout an eight-period day. Some classes are a pleasure; others are a real challenge.
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AI is already oxygen. Culturally, we’re wrestling with artificial intelligence’s role in society, but 16-year-olds already view it as an absolute necessity in their daily lives. I’m not sure this genie can be put back in the bottle.
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Differentiated instruction is invisible labor. Few people in the public at large understand the bureaucratic complexities teachers face, particularly managing various learning accommodations for students integrated into a single classroom. It’s often necessary for a teacher to develop three or four different versions of a single test.