Unexpected difficulties

This week was the first week of school and I am finding myself feeling very unmotivated and uninspired with this group of young minds that I have. And not just with them, their parents are also unappreciative and don't fully comprehend the demands a class of 44 puts on a person.

I do love my job and there are those rare jewels in my class that I have identified already and I think they will be my saving grace this year. I get the feeling that I need to mourn the leaving of my children of last year in order for me to be more attached to these ones. And another reason that I feel very unattached to these ones would be because we were going to split them after baseline assessment into ability levels and each teacher would have had one ability group in the class, so now I have trained myself not to get too attached to them because otherwise we will find all sorts of excuses for them to stay which would be to their detriment in the end. But we have since found that it would be impossible to split the grade 1 classes into ability groups and I haven't had time to adjust my state of mind to be able to think of them as mine and therefore I find I'm not handling them the same as my 2010 class. And if i dare say it, I don't love them as I love the 2010 class. Jayden says I should just give it time, I will love them as I loved the others last year.

But what if I don't? Will that make me a bad teacher? Or was I just more attached last year, because it was my first year?

All of these questions will hopefully be answered within the next 10 months or so, and when they are answered or other issues arise, so too will a new blog post.

=)