Failure

Our classroom is a disaster. We have no time before class after class or in between class to clean up and it started the year quite messy. The day of my first extended observation I had my notes all ready to go on the overhead until right before class started and I realized they were gone. I asked the other members of my collaborative for help in desperation but they had to leave and I was left with a pile of disorganzied loose leaf rough draft stuff to lead the class for two hours.

It went okay at first, but about the time that the program director Tim walked in to join my Corp Member Advisor Joey we go to the aprt where we were suppoesd to do a tracing activity. My collaborative member had left the tracing paper at home and had forgotten to cut up the sheets of paper. I froze, not knowing what to do, and moved on to the next part. Unfortunetely this involved problems from the book which I no longer knew, so as the two observers watched I looked through a pile of paper while the kids got out of control in the classroom waiting for me.
I felt like such a failure on so many levels that day. My disicpline was crappy, I can't assert authority, my lesson was a mess, my timing was off, everything went wrong.
Later in my debriefing when Joey went over what I'd done that day I cried for ten minutes about how bad I was. I've really never failed this much in my life before. I feel set up for failure in a way. I learned today that this Corps is the first to teach in teh first week of training. I had three days of training before walking into a crazy high school classroom with summer school kids who'd already failed the class at all different levels and no sense of personal dicipline. Seriously, and I've probably said this before, this is the hardest thing I've ever done in my life.
It's the first thing that I've just been terrible at making mistakes all of the time. Thinking about dicipline, attendance, all of the kids who skip school, come in late, overhead projectors, white board markers that don't work, everything is just crazy. One day one of my student's boyfriends came to tell me that his baby with his girlfriend was in the hospital having heart problems and that she would miss class because of it. As he told me about his baby being on the verge of death I missed taking role on everyone walking by and got off to a bad start. How can I pay attention to 30 students some of them brand new when someone is telling me about their baby being sick. I don't even know what it is like to have kids and my student's have kids. I can't believe it. I'm responsible enough to take care of them but definitely don't feel like I could take care of a baby. It's crazy.