Teaching: Year 2 Reflection

Hey y'all! Welcome back to faith & flair pens. I'm super glad you're back and excited to share another post with y'all today! I wanted to take a little time to reflect and share about my 2nd year teaching. Now that it's over and I've had a little time to relax and settle into summer break, I thought now would be a good time lol. 

I do want to mention that I want to keep my space on the internet as positive as possible so I will like to focus more on the good and what I've learned. However, please know that this past school year was very difficult and stretched me further than I thought was possible. Due to the COVID-19 pandemic I taught August, September and January fully online and the rest of the months hybrid where about a third of my students were in person at school and the other two thirds were online learning form home. These situations were incredibility difficult and exhausting for me, my staff, and even my students. I had to learn how to adapt my teaching set up and roll with the punches. While hybrid I worried often for the health of my students, staff, family, and myself. But here's the beautiful thing from all of that craziness- I've seen how God's been with me, and us this whole time, and now I'm confident that if we can make it though this year, we can make it through just about anything. 

I got a new group of 6th graders this school year and I was so nervous about starting the year with a new group of kids fully online. I worried if I would be able to get to know them well enough through zoom. I worried if they would get to know me and my love for them well enough just seeing me on a computer screen. I worried that I wouldn't be able to build a good classroom community and that they wouldn't be able to become each others friends. My students came from 4 different elementary schools so they didn't all already know each other. But I'll tell y'all I has so wrong. No matter what situation we were in, the kids were excited. They loved me. They loved each other. They loved my assistants. The thing I'm most proud of this school year is the fact how close we all got as a class together. I'm so glad they will be in 7th grade with me next year! 

We also had a change in our organization this week where we divided our three self contained special education teachers at our school by subject rather than by grade level. So I taught math to all 29 kids in our self contained special education program. I loved getting to focus on teaching math and I loved getting to build relationships with more students. However, in general it was a very difficult set up for me and made the constant change of the year and the hybrid learning much more difficult. Paperwork was also a lot more complicated. However, the good news is that we will be going back to being divided by grade level again for next school year. So I'm SO excited to be teaching all 4 subjects again to my awesome group of students. 

I also really learned the value of separating myself from the work and taking breaks when I need to. I worked hard on trying to do less and less work outside of school and really using my summer break to relax. My district did a summer program for students due to the craziness of trying to learn during the pandemic and I made the decision not to teach it because I knew I just really needed a break from it all. I've been working on grad school work (I'll do an update about that soon). I'm getting more involved in my sorority- Sigma Alpha Omega- as an alumni (something else I'll do a post about soon!). I went to the beach with my family (a photo journal is on the way! lol). 

So overall, it's been a hard year but it was one where I can see growth and left me feeling pretty good for next school year (after a much needed summer break of course.) So my 2nd year teaching is over and I will start year 3 in August. That will be my last year as a "beginning teacher." Its crazy to think about because these last 2 years have gone by so fast, but I'm also looking forward to the next step in my career. 

I hope y'all enjoyed hearing about my 2nd year of teaching and I hope you come back next week for another post! Have a great day!

XOXO Faith