Due to the efficiency of most of my colleagues in getting students to return Internet Permission slips, most classes were in the computer lab this week. Last week was unusual because I was not in the lab. This week has had it’s own adjustments.

The rhythm of relationships with students is a little different for me, and this being my second year in the computer lab has really brought that home. I was reading Dan Meyer’s The First Fortnight, where he discussed the process of starting over and building relationships with a new group of kids. I guess I forgot that even though high school teachers are organized around subject matter, their specialty within a given subject could cause them to see only one grade level of students.

I am in a different world. I see all the kids in my school for as long as they and I come here. This means that some of my relationships are not starting over on page one, but picking up somewhere else. That somewhere else is not always where we left off before summer vacation.

I’m not the same, and where we are at in the curriculum is not the same as where we left off in the summer. I have new ideas I want to try out, and we are on different subjects than we were. We had established a relationship that recognized the work they had done, and some trust they had earned. With the fifth and sixth graders, I’ve had to tell students that this is all starting over. So they want to go to the same activities we did last year, and I’m having to tell them, they will get more choices including those, but I have to see that they are serious an finishing work. In addition, like many high poverty schools, we have a highly transient population, and there are lots of new faces I’ve never seen. I’m having to establish myself with those students. There is some continuity. My fifth and especially sixth graders are quickly picking up the blog commenting essentials.

In many ways though the students are not the same. There is one sixth grade student in particular that seems to have had a personality transplant brought to us by Mr. Hormone. He is still basically a sweet kid and is just really talkative and easily distracted, which beats the other possibilities (moody and surly), but is shocking compared to my memories. For some of the grades making a big developmental leap we are in the tricky no-mans land between their being more mature than they were as say, kindergarteners and third graders, but still not at near the same level as the first and fourth graders were at the end of June. I’ve forgotten many of the steps along that path in some of my planning. I only blogged with fourth, fifth, and sixth graders last year. I made some horrid assumptions about the incoming fourth graders and just plunged them into both doing a task, and typing up a blog comment. They can really only do one at a time, so I’m scaling back to asking them to say hello.