Today has been a long day.  I missed an alarm, dashed to school, checked my email, and I found a note about an unobserved observation from my assistant principal, and another message saying that I needed to meet with him.  This means that I got a Needs Improvement for my observation.  Comments on the observation included some that were valid – I had absolutely forgotten to put up my agenda, but others that were not.  And those are the ones that are hurting my feelings, that are making me wonder why I teach.  Apparently I was “relying worksheets” and the kids weren’t learning a thing.

Those worksheets are not just any old worksheets.  They’re from a packet I bought off TpT for Gatsby, and they’re common core aligned, and they’re awesome. And, he chose to observe me during the last week of the quarter as I was asking the students to finish any odds and ends lingering from the worksheets so that I could grade them.  Of course my WHOLE lesson wasn’t just this packet and me saying, “Here, do this. No I won’t help you.”

Here’s my truth, and thus the the problem.  I first knew that I wanted to teach as a first grader, no joke.  So, that means I was approximately SEVEN when I knew this was what I wanted to do.  I cannot brush off criticism because this is all I’ve ever wanted.  Instead it winds up feeling, to quote my students, like this guy is “coming at my life”.