ever have one of those days?

Most of the time I love my job, but every once in a while, there is a situation that really makes me wonder about my sanity.  This year has been really rough with a new teaching situation.  I am not specially trained to deal with special education students and all their special needs, yet I was given a special ed class to teach.  Not asked, not prepared, just given this class and then the special ed teacher that is supposed to be working with me got sick and has only been there 2 days.  I've had 9 different subs at the beginning of the year and after much complaining on my part, there is finally a qualified sub in for the rest of the year.

I've done the best I can with everything I could find myself by reading books, internet articles and talking to anyone and everyone who would listen to me.  I've tried to modify the curriculum to meet the diverse needs of these students.  The most crazy part about this class is there are 12 special ed students, 11 honors students and 8 regular ed students.  Quite the combination for a high school science class.  I think anyone who is a teacher would agree this class might challenge the best teacher.  At first, I took it as a compliment that the administration thought I was the best teacher to give me such a challenge, now I'm not so sure.

I think I need to remind myself to focus on the positive things that have happened this year, rather than the little setbacks.  These past couple of days I've had one difficult student who has really made life difficult for me and it's taken my focus off all of the positive changes I've seen in some of the other students.  Sometimes that's hard to do, but my focus today will be the 11 other special ed students who are successful.

And the 149 students who actually like my class :)