So the first week is under my belt and I have not only survived – I’ve loved every minute! No one ever told me that 7th graders are hilarious.  They get my jokes. They like my cheers.  They thank me for making the room look pretty.  If I ask them to sing, they do it.  If I ask them to shake their heads when we go into the madman phase of writing (brainstorming) they do it.  They like to get points for their teams, even though they don’t know if they are getting rewarded for it or not.  They give each other sparkles when someone says something profound or hard to say out loud.

I know that I was not this agreeable when I was in 7th grade.  I know this because it is the only time in my life that my Mother hit me.  We were stopped at a traffic light outside my junior high (back in the Stone Age) and I must have mouthed off just one time too many and she backhanded me across the face.  It made an impression. Forty years and counting and I still remember it vividly.  I wish I could remember what I said!  I don’t know who was more stunned afterwards but we both burst into tears.

Surprises this last week – too many to count.  The people at my new school and really kind and welcoming.  Both my grade level team and my English team are open and helpful.  (We are only allowed one ink cartridge for our printers for the whole year but nothing is perfect, right?)  There does not seem to be a hierarchy here which I’ve seen at many other schools.  Everyone seems to get along really well. 

Here’s what was not a surprise.  We did goal-setting the past 2 days.  The kids had to decide if they wanted to work on fluency, comprehension, or author’s craft (reading like a writer). The vast majority of my 120 students (including 3 sections of Honors and 2 sections of Inclusion) wanted to work on ‘reading better out loud’.  This has been the case for as long as I have been asking my students to choose goals.  How they sound to others and to themselves matters.  They want to be the reader that delivers.  They don’t want to be the reader where everyone groans when the teacher calls on him to read aloud.  And that’s OK. That’s as good a starting place as any to build readers.