Do you ever get that feeling that everyone else is doing these awesome things in their classroom and your students are lucky to walk out of your room not having dropped back a couple of years?

 

Yup, right there with you right now.  Not entirely sure either, but I’ve just not felt good about much of anything that I’ve planned about doing for the upcoming year.  I’ve taught sixth grade before, but in the three years that I’ve been a fifth grade teacher, sixth grade has become much different with push from the Common Core.  That’s got me nervous about what I can be doing with sixth graders this year, that and the fact I know sixth grade is on loan to me this year.  The teacher, my former teaching partner, who would be the sixth grade teacher will be our administrator for a year and will return to sixth grade next year.  Not that fifth grade is bad, not in the least, just not confident at all right now.

Plus, as I’m in class, I’m listening to all the awesome things other fifth grade teachers are doing in their own classrooms, and it just makes me wonder what in the world I’m doing??  True, our elementary teachers have very little control over our schedule and that our science and social studies times were moved to spots in the schedule where they were the first cut, but still, am I doing things well?

And to top it off, I’m listening to some educational technology podcasts and there are so many things that I’m not familiar with that!  While I feel we do good things, is this enough to prepare my students for middle school and beyond?  True, I can’t know everything, but why not?? 🙂

Yes, I’ll climb out of this funk, but sometimes you just look at your own teaching and think “really”.  I guess that what keeps me going in this profession, that fact that I want to do better and I’m not ever satisfied with the results of anything I do.

Still, it would be nice not to go through this! 🙂