Settling In

I had breakfast this morning with the head cross-country coach, and a former assistant whom I ran against (and knew) in high school. Our meet this morning was cancelled due to the constant rain we have experienced the past 24 hours.  But we still met for breakfast.  Anyways, the former assistant is a first year teacher and we were talking shop.  I mentioned a few lessons in the classroom that I was learning the hard way.  And he said, "You learn really quickly what works and what doesn't work."  It is a somewhat obvious statement, but it rang really true for me.  Sometimes in the business world, it would take a while before it became noticeable for what wasn't working.  One of the issues I have is the bathroom pass.  This is something that I didn't really spend as much time thinking about as I should have.  Both of my cooperating teachers have a pretty strict stance on giving out the pass.  At first, I was a lot more sympathetic towards the students who "needed" to use it.  I also think that attitude had a lot to do with my concern for how much the kids liked me (which I'll address in my next post).  So now that I have completely taken over the classes for a few weeks now, I have started shifting the procedures to be a little more in line with my views.  So the bathroom pass has been issued a lot more than the first few days.  However, I have also noticed that most, if not all, students who ask to use the pass are abusing their right and are taking advantage of me.  I now see why my cooperating teachers have the (what I formerly believed to be) strict view on bathroom passes.  During my last class on Friday, a student came up to me and asked if he could use the bathroom.  I told him that he has gone pretty much every day this week.  I continued on about how I can't go if I need to in the middle of class and how he needs to work it out better.  I am going to continue rejecting students going forward and letting them know that they have lost the privelidge of using the bathroom, at least until things improve on that front.  We'll see how it turns out.