The Stresses of Teaching

Today's teaching time was not very successful. This morning the school had an assembly that lasted for two hours and then the students went to their school-wide groups (called Factions) and learned about the rules for tomorrow's Faction Carnival. Needless to say, by the time we got to the educational part of the day, the student's were not very eager to participate. Helen began her lesson of reviewing multiplication facts 2, 5, and 10. She gave instructions for the students to complete a number chart by coloring all of the multiples of 2 a certain color, 5 a certain color, and 10 a certain color. Then, the once the students completed that, they were to answer word problems in their math notebook. As the class began working, I pulled a chair up next to the table of students who tend to not stay on task. This table is made up of four boys and one girl. All of these kids are either struggling learners (mild cases), have ADD/HD, or are just the class clowns... some have a combination of all of these. Anyway, I was helping this table try to understand the rules for reading multiplication word problems and show them similarities in the answers to some of the 2, 5, and 10 multiples. AND OMG, they were everywhere - literally and physically! One of them was underneath the table when I would turn to help another student, another was making his classmate cry, the crier was yelling at the troublemaker, the class clown was just causing distractions, and the other was actually on task, but was bothered by all of the other four. This group took all of my energy to get focused! I used every trick in the book.. from using fun manipulatives to threatening them to miss out on their Faction Carnival tomorrow. They were still drawing a blank to questions I was asking and could have cared less what was coming out of my mouth. I don't know if it was the accent that they didn't understand or the language or if it was just their personalities kicking into full swing, but it wore me out! After the lunch bell FINALLY rang, my teacher had a great laugh at the situation I had just dealt with. In all honesty, it was funny, but worried me for my future lessons.