It's a been a while: Challenges

Unfortunately, I have not been as on top of this blog as I would have liked.
June was not a very easy month for me, and I spent much of the time being tired or frustrated.
But for a couple of weeks now, things have been looking up.

Let me tell you first what I hoped or expected my experience to be:
I expected (and hoped) (and looked forward to):
-to pull one or two children out into the hall and spend time reading with them or working on the alphabet
-to be working somewhere that looked kind of like a regular elementary school with regular school hours
-for the children to be significantly below age-level for reading and language and to find it difficult to motivate them or help them understand. This was probably what I expected to be the hardest.
-to be able to communicate well with my teacher and get to know a lot about her
-to have a lot of fun times playing outside or playing in centers with the kids

Well, want to know something funny?
Not a single one of my expectations came true.
I was expecting this to be hard--but I was not expecting to feel
            frustrated
                                useless
     displaced
                       or undermined by the adults


The school is actually:
-structured a little more like a daycare
-constantly understaffed
-most of my time and energy went into helping maintain classroom control, going to and from the bathroom, getting ready for lunch, eating lunch, cleaning up after lunch, etc
-I was never really sure what my teacher really needed me to do and never felt that she wanted me there
-any opportunity for one-on-one time with the kids usually resulted in me feeling that I had intruded into the teacher's plans
-sometimes my teacher would leave the classroom or wouldn't show up for a few hours--expecting the kids to sit silently on the carpet waiting for her to return (let me tell you what, this does NOT work for four year olds), or leaving them in the charge of an adult who either didn't care to maintain a lot of control or didn't how to
-which often meant that me, being proactive, would jump in and try to maintain control--often with great results as far as the kids went, but isolating the adults
-I find the classroom management style VERY different from what I consider appropriate--and I spent WAY too many days/weeks trying to prove to the adults that I could do it their way in order to gain their respect. Big mistake.


So that was my first month. As I said, things have begun to look up--but that's for a different post.