Surprise, kids, you didn’t scare Mrs. Taylor away. I read five chapters of The Outsiders over the weekend, put together a 10-drawer craft cart to organize my papers, and I am ready to go.

I knew this would be a challenge going in. There were no big surprises. I can do this. I’ve got this.

I’ve got a range of classes. One of them is a cake walk. I have the cake walk first thing today.

While I’m not thrilled that I’ve ended up having to teach math after all (during the What I Need period), I suppose it could be worse…I’m not sure how, but…

If 80% of the 7th grade does well on the fractions quiz we just gave, we can move on to something else, perhaps language arts. But I’m not holding my breath. I had at least one perfectly capable student declare that she was just going to guess because she didn’t care, despite my very candid rationale for the quiz: “This is just to see if we need to continue to work on fractions or if we can move on to something else, maybe something more fun.”

I think I just lack confidence in this area. All of the problems I tried on the worksheet the math teacher gave me, I answered correctly.

I’m better at math than I think I am. That’s always been the case.

Anyway, on to Week 2.