It's Just One Of Those Weeks

You know what I'm talking about…those weeks where absolutely nothing goes right? Well thanks to Angela over at The Daily Alphabet, I'm attempting to be positive with this week's What I Did Right This Week!

For grad school this week, a rough draft of my 12-article review and synthesis paper is due. Ask me if I've read any of those 12 articles, I dare you.

HOWEVER, this week, and by this week I mean today, I got an email literally 10 minutes before school started saying that teachers from a nearby elementary school were going to pop in during our reading intervention class and observe our program and our classrooms, my class of crazy and energetic first graders being their first stop. Naturally, my first instinct was to panic…first year teacher, youngest in the school, barely 2 months into the mere 30 minute block they give us for intervention class… 

Then they came. And by they, I mean 10 big people (in comparison to my teeny first graders in their teeny chairs), staring and listening and pointing and commenting about my teeny room. Then one big person spoke, and the other 9 big people gathered over by my progress tracking board (a.k.a. the wall of stickers to measure how my students are doing in class) to look at the stickers and my chart of what each sticker means.

Tracker board, complete with students' hands that they decorated during week 1

Sticker color/progress monitoring key

Class ended, the kiddos went to recess, and my support staff and I sat in silence, honestly a little caught off guard by the whirlwind of whispers that had just passed through the room.  At lunch, hours after the 10 big people from the elementary up the road had left, my intervention coach approached me to say how impressed the visiting teachers were with my set-up, my agenda, the program I was running, and my tracker board.  She then said how much she enjoyed telling them that I was a first year teacher and the looks of astonishment and intrigue on the faces of the visiting staff. 

So, what did I do right this week? Apparently, a lot more than I thought I did.