#TeacherLife

Celebrating the moments in education

A brief look into my teaching style and all the nonsense, joy, and hilarity of teachers. Here’s how others would describe me as a teacher:

Teacher Pride Points:

1. About half of the students that I’ve written up (often multiple times) regularly stop by my room for hugs/to eat lunch/give me updates on their home life and/or love life drama
2. An admin once popped into my class to observe a lesson because he “was in a bad mood” and my lessons “cheer him up because he knows they’re always good”
3. I’m regularly selected to make curriculum decisions for World Language in my district
4. Most of my students refer to me as Profa, Prof, or even Mom.

Common student comments about my class:

• “Relevant”
• “It’s fun to learn with music videos”
• “Teaches with love”
• “Well-planned”
• “Hard-worker”

Common student complaints about my class:

• “She makes us do stuff”
• “Why are the movies always in Spanish?”
• “Cluttered”
• “The board is a mess”
• “What do you mean I can’t use Google Translate?”
• “You’re too energetic for 1st period”
• “Your swear jar is unfair”

Fellow teachers run to me for:

1. Ideas for games and songs
2. Fun speaking activities
3. Building relationships with students
4. How to use more proficiency and less grammar

Pssst….Have you ever wished the transition to proficiency were easier to do? Grab the FREE toolkit here to learn the framework for updating your practice to comprehensible input – without all the overwhelm – and prepare for the challenges ahead. 

Teachers run away from me for:

1. Calm and quiet activities
2. Organizing their teacher desk
3. A gleaming classroom where everything is easy to find (nope, not ever have I achieved this)
4. Planning two weeks ahead of time (I change my lesson plans probably every 5 minutes…the idea fairy is real)

Strangest Thing Ever Brought to My Classroom:

Pet bunny. Wait wait…the snake.

Hilarious and/or Difficult Teacher Struggle Moments:

1. Having a student with a violent BIP my first year and not knowing how to support him & his classmates
2. After a mysterious projector outage in the same class period for a whole week, a student finally fessed up that someone in the class had stolen an extra remote and kept turning it on/off when I wasn’t looking at him-to the delight of my Spanish 1s. (You got me this time, Bueller.)
3. Accidentally saying “Oh, hell no!” to a room of mischievous 8th graders in French 1B during student teaching, and spending the whole afternoon sobbing about it to my cooperating teacher.
4. Making the mistake of trying to draw countries free-hand on the smartboard. The outcry of giggles from my French 1s made it very clear that it did NOT look like the Iberian peninsula.
5. Trying to get 30 teenagers to do stuff they don’t want to-every class period, day in, day out. Sometimes rockin’ it, and mostly tumbling through the hilarities of teaching high-schoolers.

Teaching is an adventure-I hope it brought you some joy to see my #TeacherLife. My challenge to you now is to share yours! What are your teacher pride points, teacher struggles, student comments and complaints? What do people say about your class? Share below!

I’ll see you in the trenches.

Sincerely,

Devon @ La Libre Language Learning

P.S. If you liked this post, you may also like this:
Top 10 Professional Development Tools to Make You a Better World Language Teacher Tomorrow

P.P.S. Have you ever wished the transition to proficiency were easier to do? Grab the FREE toolkit here or below to learn the framework for updating your practice to comprehensible input – without all the overwhelm – and prepare for the challenges ahead.