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I've survived the first week of school!

I should probably knock on wood as I still have one period left : )

This week has been great. I have had to be strict already, though, so classroom management really does start immediately. You have to be ready to be consistent and lay down your expectations from the very beginning.

Time has been an issue. A wiser teacher than I shared this with me. There are problems and there are issues. Problems have solutions. Issues don't. Time is an issue that will never be solved. We prepared a calendar that we were sure would be just fine. We thought we would be able to get through everything, but we ended up spending almost the entire class period reviewing. We spent the first 10 minutes doing Bell Ringers and checking homework. Then we spend 5 or 10 minutes going over the Bell Ringer questions. Then we spent the next probably 20 minutes going over homework problems. Is there a better way I could have handled the time spent checking homework today? I feel very strongly that I needed to spend all the time that I did on the Bell Ringers based on the content I'm expecting my kids to master and the previous amount of time we've spent doing . In the end, I would rather have them learn a lot well, and be missing a couple specific lessons here and there rather than flying through everything with them feeling frustrated.

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