So today was my first day.

This is my obligatory first day of school photo
except that I forgot in my rush this morning
and this is after.  (If you couldn't tell already from
the stains where I spilled on myself.

It went well.  Not off-the-charts awesome like the videos they like to show us at our TFA trainings, but it went well.  I think it was a good start to what I'm sure will be a great year. 

My morning started with very little sleep.  I finally got to bed around 1am and then I just couldn't sleep because I had millions of thoughts racing through my mind.  When my alarm went off at 5 I wouldn't exactly say that I was excited to jump out of bed.

When I got to school, I had to figure out how to make copies and finish up setting up my room and getting ready for my kiddos.  This morning I had 14 kids on my roster, which was more than the 6 I had at Meet the Teacher Night last Thursday.  I ended up having 18 kids by the end of the day and I have been told that this number will most likely change.

When the students showed up, I had little half sheets of paper directing them to put their backpacks in the lockers, find their seats, and begin their questionnaires.  About 15 minutes later while I was still getting kids at the door I realized that they were all sitting there doing nothing.  Hm, that's strange.  Except it wasn't because I forgot to print out the questionnaire and thus forgot to make copies, and they therefore had nothing to do.  So all my improv training kicked in, and I had one kid pass out binder paper and asked them to write about their summers.

For the next hour or so I bored them to death even though I was trying to be fun.  The fact is that kids don't like to just sit in their desks and listen to the teacher talk.  Go figure.  So then I decided on the spot to read "Where the Wild Things Are" in Spanish.  We talked about what our own personal monsters are, the things that hold us back from sailing to success.  Students mostly listed not being good at certain subjects to playing xbox to things being difficult.  Then they had to write down excuses that hold them back, and then come up with a solution.  Once they were done each student came to the front of the class and read their monster, excuse, and solution, and then recited the following: "My name is___________.  I am intelligent and I will overcome my monsters because I don't accept excuses and I have a community that will help me.  I am sailing to success."  Then they crumpled their papers and threw them into the trash.  I called this our "excuse funeral."

We also played Ms. Arrasmith jeopardy today.  My 5th grade teacher did this and I remember loving it, so I decided to do it too.  I grabbed a bunch of random items from my room like my soccer ball, ice skates, a  picture of my family, picture of my roommates, mask from Venice, Spanish flag, etc.  I told the kids they had to pay close attention and took one item out of the bag at a time.  I explained a little about what it represented in my life and allowed the kids to ask some questions.  Then I split the class into two groups, and they had to answer questions about what I had said.  One of my kids said this was his favorite part of the day.  It felt weird to be talking so much about myself, but they loved it so whatever.

At this point they started getting pretty ready, so we went out for a recess snack break.  I had a different activity planned for when we came in, but I knew that they would get too noisy.  So instead we read a book that I grabbed randomly from the library.  Hadn't even read it before but the librarian had recommended it.  So I internally panicked when it ended up being partly about racism trying to figure out what to do about that.  Luckily there was another theme in the book about a boy being inspired by birds and taking care of an atrium.  I turned it into a writing activity where they had to write about who or what inspires or motivates them.  They actually sat in silence writing for about 15 minutes which felt like quite a success.  I read through the pieces quickly after school and there was some really good stuff.  One girl wrote about me and said, "Ms. Arrasmith makes me work hard and motivates me.  Ms. Arrasmith is nice, fun and works hard to make to us understand all of our work done."  Another student said nature inspired him.  But then there was one student whose writing I could not decipher not because of the hand-writing but because it's inventive writing like that of a preschooler with very basic letters for each of the words.  I will have my plate full for sure.

I'm exhausted now that I'm actually getting to sit down after being on my feet for literally 12 hours.  I would be stoked except for that I know that I have hours of planning to do to prepare for tomorrow.  All in all, it wasn't an awesome day, it wasn't a bad day, but it was a good day.  At some points I looked around and couldn't believe that I was the one in charge.  Who put me in charge of these 18 students?  This morning seems like so long ago.  I was so excited that when my principal happened to pop in that my students were actually doing something and very involved.  She liked my activity so that was definitely a plus.

Also I found it funny when I asked my students how to get to the basketball courts and how they're supposed to get their lunches.  Luckily they didn't seem to mind that I have no clue what I'm doing.

Random funny things that my students said today:

"Hey Ms. Arrasmith, do you know how to dougie?"

(While standing outside practicing the dismissal procedure) "Ms. Arrasmith, did you know that kangaroos lick themselves when they're hot?  That's what I have to do sometimes.  But wait, no,  don't call me a kangaroo!"

"He won't let me fight my monster.  I want to work on my writing so I can battle my monster but he won't let me!"

Ok, well that's about it.  I have a feeling tomorrow will be a little bit more difficult since the adrenaline won't be pumping as much tomorrow.