At the Close

This is a journal entry I asked my Juniors to write for me, and the response that I wrote to read to them.

Your Junior year is very quickly coming to an end. Next year, you'll be seniors! This is a very important period in your life. Many of you (I hope) will be thinking about college and life after high school.

Take some time to reflect on this past year at Katella, and how you've grown. What important life lessons have you learned? How have you changed?
Tell me what your goals are for your senior year and after. What colleges are you interested in? How excited are you to apply as an English major? (just kidding... maybe!)


This is my "journal" to them:

I've learned a lot about teaching this year. For example, as much as I wanted everything to go perfectly, it never will. Students will always be late, not do work, cheat, and make up excuses. Another thing I learned is that you can't make everyone care. I know these sound really negative, but for me, they're not. I, for a while, felt like I was a failure because I had students failing. But now I know that even the best teachers can't reach every student.

More importantly than all of that, I learned that I really was meant to be a teacher. Watching kids succeed, fall, struggle, and pick themselves back up again and being around to help is very fulfilling. I love challenging students. But most of all, I get to be the center of attention and talk about how much I know - which is fantastic for my ego.

My goals for next school year? Get a job, and do well in my masters program! Not much, but they're both extremely important!

Nothing to do with teaching, but...

I have started my food-blogging up again, and I am doing it here this time. Find me at http://jackie-cooks.blogspot.com.

The Final Stretch

With my personal life taking every bit of my emotion and energy out of me, I'm starting to struggle in this final stretch of time for teaching. It's difficult to care when I know I'll never see these kids again, and probably won't step foot on that campus again. I know it wouldn't be this hard if people didn't have terrible timing. But right now... How am I supposed to feel motivated to teach when it takes me 15 minutes to even motivate myself to get out of bed everyday?