New teacher diaries

My teaching career is not yet “very long,” but I have honed some particular skills during my years in the classroom. Spotting plagiarism is one of them. I assigned my high school Spanish students the following project: Choose one holiday from a list of celebrations in Spanish-speaking countries and write a three-page research paper, including a picture.

Few things are better than a fresh start. To come at something with new eyes, new lessons learned and a chance to do things differently than before — it’s reinvigorating. And teachers get one every September: a chance to reimagine everything, from how you teach to how you decorate your classroom.

Despite the great social and academic gains my students have made this year, they still wound up bruised and battered by the end of day three of testing. Several faces looked back at me from the tiny desks, big pencils in small hands, silently pleading for some kind of assistance in completing the tests’ tasks.

Test prep in my 3rd-grade class has been extremely stressful. First of all, I’ve never taught “test prep” before, least of all to kids who have never taken “THE TEST” before. I’m convinced my co-teacher and I don’t know what we’re doing and if the children do poorly, it will be our fault for not adequately preparing them.

A few weeks ago, I was struck with some inspiration before the kids arrived one morning and decided to create a “mystery envelope” to add some intrigue to my elementary special education classroom. After its debut, I hung it near our calendar as a reminder that “you never know what’s inside the mystery envelope!” and as a somewhat passive message that good things come to those who earn them.

I work in the heart of Flushing, which boasts a large and growing Chinese population. I want my students to feel welcome to share their traditions with the class, and a great way to facilitate this was to plan the biggest Chinese New Year party I could.

In my first two years as a teacher, I worked with upper-grade general education classes. This year, I’m in a different world in two ways: I’m teaching primary grades and mine is a special education class.

In my first year of teaching a self-contained special education class of 1st- and 2nd-graders, I’ve been facing my share of challenges. Donald, a bespectacled boy of 7, is one of them.

One of the greatest things about teaching in a big city like New York is that there are resources everywhere you turn. Some of them are great, some of them are so-so and some turn out to be terrible. But there is no shortage of opportunities for learning outside the classroom.