After 12 years of regular school (K-12), 4 years of college (UCSD), 2 years of post-college (CSUF), and 5 years of teaching, it is now time for 24th grade.
And like any other first day of school, it came with a bit of anxiety. For some reason though this year, I was able to get a decent amount of sleep, and not toss and turn in the process.
Still, it’s always a shift transitioning into a new teaching environment, and so it was a mystery what kind of students I would receive. That being said, I was as ready as I could possibly be in preparation for my students, in terms of the lessons planned. When I am teaching, my personality is quite different. Whereas I’m much less strict and assertive in real life, you have to be somewhat in order to properly manage a classroom. And thus, John Tran and Mr. Tran are dramatically different persons.
So how did it go? It was a bit overwhelming and surprising. My legs need to get used to standing around for long hours again, and I need to continue to do a nice balancing act of being stern and being friendly. This year, I will try some new approaches and refrain from being overly sarcastic, which has gotten me in trouble in the past. I still plan to embed humor when appropriate though to create a friendlier classroom environment.
That being said, that doesn’t change the first day activity which I have now done for the last 4 years, where I have students write letters in response to ones I wrote to them. I intend to write them all back by next week.
Today, I started off strict in most of my classes. Tomorrow, I will begin letting small elements of my personality out. I hope by the end of the week, I’ll have a better picture of which students to suck up to in order to win them over and have a smoothly flowing class for the rest of the year.
As for my advisory this year (UCSD), they were very excited about receiving their Pokemon assignments for the year, and learning how to gain XP points in order to gain prizes. They’re going to be a fun bunch, and I hope I can motivate them to achieve all their goals this year.
Needless to say teaching is ultimately super draining and tiring, but in the end it will be very rewarding. My first set of students are set to graduate from high school in Las Vegas this year, and I hope to be able to see them all grown up.
