This week has been rough. In fact, rough does not even begin to cover it.
I've got weird sinus congestion going on, it has been rainy all week, the dog pooped all over the house Tuesday, my voice gave out mid-week, the custodians ruined the new rug I bought for my classroom less than 24 hours after I brought it to school, and all of my planning time this week was eaten up by meetings. Not even so much as a lunch break was had all week.
As I'm sure you can imagine, by Thursday afternoon I was 100% done with having to effectively function as an adult and less than enthusiastic about conferences.
Don't get me wrong, I love my students and their parents are (for the most part) as engaged and concerned for their kids' education as any teacher could hope for. I just was not in the mood to have those necessarily in-depth discussions this week. Especially not via a translator. Especially not after I had already worked a full day.
I did participate in conferences though and, believe it or not, I am grateful I had that time.
More than 30% of my parents showed up which is a bit of a record for me, and every single one of them told me thank you. Every. single. one. They thanked me for giving my time, for putting forth extra effort to help their child, for being encouraging, for making their child excited about school. They thanked me. One mother told me she thought I was amazing for being able to give each child so much care and attention when I had so many of them in class at one time.
It made my year.
No, seriously, I think those comments will be the thing that gets me through the rest of this year.
Also, I am looking for some way to learn Spanish. If anyone has any recommendations for how to go about doing that, please let me know. This round of conferences really drove home for me the fact that I need to be more accessible for these parents. They need to be able to call the school to talk to me and know I will be able to understand them.
No comments:
Post a Comment