Some Challenges...

I returned to work on October 22nd.  The first 8 days of work consisted of Julie (1 day,) my mom (2 days,) and Dave (5 days) watching Sam.  It was not too hard to leave Sam those days, knowing he was in good hands, and that he was past his 5 1/2 month mark.  However, Sam started going to St. John's CCDC (same school as Isaac) on Nov. 1.
This was much, much harder.  I guess my coping mechanism up until that day was to just try not to think about it too much.  The morning came for me to drop him off and I was sad.  I had been in multiple times since I was used to taking Isaac there 3 days a week, so that was good.  I had met the caretakers, which was also positive.  But there is just something hard about leaving your baby with strangers.  There are never more than 8 babies max, and every time I have been there, there are fewer than 6, with two teachers and an aide. The teachers are these very cute Hispanic ladies who have worked there over 15 years and very schooled in caring for babies.  One is also a nurse, and both are very sweet.  Whenever I pop in, they are each engaged with the babies, either playing with them, rocking them, feeding them, etc.  The babies always look pretty happy. He has done very well so far and the teachers report he has only been fussy a couple of times when he gets tired.  So, when it comes down to it, I know he is being well taken care of and loved.  I just have to get used to Sam not getting one on one (or two) attention.
As far as going back to work (my feelings of leaving my own kids aside,) it has been a mixed bag of emotions.  The sub who had taken my class for the first two months of school "lost" my lesson plans.  Since this blog is public, I don't want to go into a lot of details, but let's just say my room did not look at all like my classroom when I came back (which was very disconcerting and has taken me hours and hours to get back to normal,) and the things that were supposed to be taught, were not.
However, I do have a pretty cute class.   Here are my class in numbers:
23:  number of students I have
18: number of students I have who are learning English as their second language
8: number of girls in my class
15: number of boys in my class
81: percent of students in my class who came to third grade reading significantly below grade level (a handful of them are unable to identify all of their letters.)
7: number of refugees in my class
2: number of Caucasians in my class (yes folks, my classroom IS in Utah.)
1: number of students who has never set foot into a classroom until this school year.
22: number of students in my class on free lunch.
100:  percent of my students our local, state and federal government think that I can and should get on grade level by the end of the school year.
I think that sums it up.  Despite the obvious challenges I face with this class, they are a very diverse group of wonderful kids, some of them with backgrounds you couldn't even make up if you tried.  They are sweet (most of the time) and I am  happy to be working with them this year.
One policy that I had to institute right away was "no tattling."  I could not BELIEVE the insane amount of tattling that was happening when I returned, so my policy consists of teaching them the difference between a report (identifying and letting me know about bullying type situations,) and a tattle.  If they aren't sure if it's a tattle, they must write it down during free time and leave it on my desk (they get tired of writing it down and soon realize that they need to stop tattling on each other for dumb stuff.)  I've had a lot of little notes on my desk that are of this caliber, lately:

chuckle chuckle