A roller coaster of a week.

Tomorrow is a collaborative day for the Achievement School District so that means no students tomorrow! This is a good thing because it gives me more time to work on ways to make my classroom more fun, interactive, engaging, exciting, and enjoyable (for both the scholars AND me!).
This past week was long and short. It had its moments of joy and hope where I saw the possibilities of one day... One day driving home I was singing along to the radio in my loudest voice, actually smiling! But this week also had its moments of pure frustration... After dropping my scholars off to an activity right near the end of school on a particularly hair-pulling day, I walked into a colleague's classroom and broke down. After I vented for a while, she offered to pick up my scholars from their activity for me and bring them to dismissal. When I arrived at dismissal to snag my kiddos from her, she told me she didn't find them where they were supposed to be. I immediately flew into a panic wondering where my 23 precious babies could be - I rushed  crazy-eyed around the loop that makes up the halls of our school. "Have you seen my class?" "All of them?...!" "YUP." "...Um, no..." After making a full loop of the school and not seeing them anywhere, I rushed into the dismissal area to check in with my fellow kindergarten teachers to see if they new anything about my 23 missing students. Low and behold, my students were all seating in the correct areas for dismissal. I took a huge breath. I hadn't realized until then that I had been holding my breath. One of the kindergarten teachers informed me that the Dean of Lower Academy had seen my class in the hallways (the activity instructor didn't realize I would go to him to pick up my kids and so he was trying to bring them to me...) and just took them to the proper place. This situation made it very apparent to me that even though my scholars drive me absolutely insane and bring me to my breaking point nearly every day, I really do love and care for them in a deep way.
Because I care for them, but also because they are getting under my skin with their disrespect (this will be an ongoing project for a while...), my scholars came into a mostly bare classroom on Friday of this week. I decided that until my students learn to respect our things in the classroom, they will not be allowed to use them. For example, crayons are off limits for now and will be slowly re-introduced after I had to clean up crayons strewn all across my room after repeatedly raising my voice to get them to stop chucking them across the room. And I've already had two of my letter stamps stolen so that any word that has a capital "Q" or "S" is impossible to spell using the stamps. Last week we had a whole day centered on respecting ourselves, respecting others and respecting our classroom/school but I think they need to now understand that things in the classroom are a privilege and not a right. It is challenging to be responsible for teaching my students these important life lessons but it is very necessary to their success and my sanity.
Despite the challenges of this week, it is another week under my belt and each week that I make it through gives me a little more hope that I will continue to survive.
My task now is to make sure I am truly being joyful in my interactions with my students because my attitude sets the atmosphere for my classroom. I am struggling to find the right balance between being no-nonsense and being sweet and fun but I know that if I keep trying, I will get it right. I know it's okay to make mistakes as long as I learn from them (this is something I tell my students all the time..."Ms. Rossi doesn't want you to be perfect, I just want you to try your best!") but it's scary knowing that if I don't get it right, my students can and will suffer. I just need to look at it as an extra nudge of motivation to constantly be improving and finding new ways to reach and teach my wonderful, crazy students. But then there's that tricky balance between improving my teaching/polishing my lesson plans/feeling prepared and getting enough sleep... I tend to favor the direction of getting very little sleep each night and I know that I will not be able to sustain that choice for too long before I completely burn out. My goal is to get to the point where I can at least have the option of being in bed by 10pm! One day I'll write this reflective post before Midnight on Sunday... One day... just not today.