Patience, please

I'm afraid that my blog posts may give you the impression that everything is always wonderful in Miss Weaver's third grade classroom. As much as I wish I was the perfect teacher, there are many times when I struggle with impatience (among other things). So today I'm going to share a few of those with you.

My patience is tested when I have to constantly remind students to stop talking during class. However, this may be partly my fault for arranging them in groups. So I told them that next month we're going back to rows! One boy responded by saying, "I don't talk to anyone."
I said, "Yes, that's because I moved your group apart because I had to remind you every day to stop talking!"
To which another student replied, "Not every day. You didn't have to tell him on Saturday and Sunday."
"Yes, that's true," I smiled.

Sometimes I don't have patience for typical 8-year-old boy behavior. Like when I read a Did You Know devotional which said that, "A cow burps (and worse, releases gas) all day long." The sound effects and the giggling took a lot of time to quiet down.

It was hard for me to be patient today when we were reviewing science vocabulary, and I asked for examples of physical properties. About five students in a row gave answers like, "eyes," "smelling," and "sight" no matter how many times I said, "Not the senses, but the properties." I finally gave up and gave my own examples.

I was not patient when in language class I asked, "What part of a sentence do you think a subject pronoun comes in, the subject or the predicate?" and half of the class answered, "Predicate?"

And telling time is definitely a subject to test a teacher's patience! Some students have been writing times like 1:64. And then today we learned A.M. and P.M. One student's answer on the board was 10:32 P.A.

However, one simple little note like this one that I got from a student this morning make all of these frustrating moments so worth it.

And once more I resolve to be more patient tomorrow than I was today.