this upcoming school year

For the school year of 2011-2012, I've been assigned to teach kindergarten. I have mixed emotions about this assignment, so I'll have to wait and see how it plays out.

For starters, I won't have to deal with the dreaded FCAT testing that all teachers know and hate. That lack of academic pressure is very welcomed in my book. On the other hand, they're a bunch of 5 year-olds thrown together in one room, some of which have never been away from their mothers for more than a couple hours.

Towards the end of this last school year when I made a couple trips to school to start preparing for this next year, I told some other teachers that I hoped I would become nurturing magically over the summer. This will probably not happen, and is something I will need to work on. There's a balance, of course, between being nurturing and getting kids to get their work done, I just tend to weigh heavily on the side of getting kids to get their work done. The first four full years of my career I taught 5th grade at Tuttle, and now I'm going to teach kindergarten. Who knows though, maybe I'll end up loving it. Quite a few of my friends have kids who are that age and I love that age when it's a one-on-one setting; I'm just not sure about 20 of them in one room.

My mom informs me that everyone she tells that I'm going to be a kindergarten teacher responds that they think I will excel in that position. I, on the other hand, am not so sure. Those first couple weeks will be a baptism by fire to be sure. We have specials first thing in the morning. So before I've even had time to train my students on how to line up properly (which they will most likely have no idea how to do) they are expected to walk in a straight and orderly line to P.E., music, or art. That should be interesting, particularly the first couple of days.

A thought I've had in regards to many of my students being blank slates, is that I get to be the first teacher to write on those slates. What an honor, and what a responsibility that will be. Most of my students will never have experienced structure before; I've seen several kids under 5 during these summer months out at night either at Applebee's or Walmart well past 11:00 pm. It makes me wonder how many of my students will have no consistent bedtime at home and how that will effect their performance at school. How many of my students will have TV's in their bedroom and will stay up at night to watch their favorite cartoons?

There are so many unknowns with this new role. It can be stressful to think about, but at the same time compels me to prepare as much as possible over the summer. I've already read over the notes from a classroom management class that I was too late to sign up for. I have also signed up for a 4 day Kagan Institute in August to get my head back into teaching. I'm really looking forward to that professional development, I've worked with Kagan before but don't feel like I really know enough to implement it too much. Kagan is heavily based on cooperative learning, so I look forward to finding new ways on how to teach effectively.

Apparently, there is a lot of singing in kindergarten. That will be interesting, as I sound more like a dying cat when I sing than an actual human being. The nice thing about 5 year-olds, though, according to what other teachers have told me, is that they have no idea if you're a good singer or not. So while I will probably laugh at myself in my head when I'm singing aloud they will think I'm a perfectly good and normal singer.

I am looking forward to playing more educational games and having more hands-on activities with the kids. I'd like to do that more with other grades but there is so much pressure to teach to the test I haven't been able to get around to it nearly as much as I'd like to. Maybe this will help give me a strong foundation in using a hands-on approach to teaching for future years if I ever teach another grade level again. Maybe I'll fall in love with kindergarten, a guy can always hope, right?