I have kind of an announcement tonight, even though it isn’t exactly a state secret at this point. I found out about a month ago that after a year of teaching third grade, which followed eighteen years of teaching fifth grade, I’ve been reassigned to teach fourth grade starting next year.
Even though I use the word “reassigned,” this change wasn’t an out-of-nowhere surprise that my principal dropped on me one day. As it happens, the entire third grade team I teach with is staying intact and moving up to fourth grade together. We were even the ones to bring up the idea with our principal (though I suspect she may have already been thinking along the same lines before we mentioned it). It was an idea our team had casually discussed at lunch a few times as early as this past September when the current school year had barely started; even though we were just coming together as a team, we were already fully aware of how much potential we had to do some great things. As we looked into the future and saw how likely it was that only three classes of second graders would be moving up to third the following year, we knew the best way to stay together was to loop.
For those of you not up on your educational jargon, “looping” is the term for when teachers follow their students up to the next grade. Sometimes it’s done on an individual basis, but sometimes, like with us, the whole grade level is involved. There are a lot of reasons for looping that all come back to giving both the teachers and the students the advantage of established relationships, and being able to start the work of the school year right away instead of spending the first month or two in a more tentative phase as we all get to know each other. Because we’re looping, our students will already have a comfort level with us and know on the first day of school what our expectations are for them, and we’ll be much more familiar with the personalities and abilities of our students than we typically would be. Open House will be less of an awkward meet and greet, and more of a chance to check in after a few months apart. I was talking to a friend after school tonight who had looped with her students last year. I said that the upcoming end of the school year didn’t really feel like an end to me but more like a long vacation was about to start, since we’re all going to pick up right where we left off in the fall. She said she’d felt the same way a year ago.
So what all of this means is that I get to spend another year working with one of my favorite classes, and I'll be able to take advantage of the natural progression between 3rd and 4th grade in my teaching, and, as important as any other point, I’ll still be working with my same teaching partner and my same grade level team. The one potential downside to looping would be that sometimes personalities just don’t mesh well, and spending a second year together could be challenging for both the teacher and the student. As teachers, we just deal with that. But for the students, our principal is giving our third grade families the chance to have their child switch over to the other set of teaching partners if they feel it would be a better match. I hope that doesn’t happen too much, though. The class I have this year has been such a great mix of personalities to work with, I hope it stays as intact as possible and we’ll be able to carry the dynamic we’ve had this year into the next one.
The thing about all of this that surprises me the most is how easily and willing I am to roll with these particular changes. After nearly two decades, I was pretty entrenched in fifth grade. If someone had told me about all of these new things happening before they started, I would have been a bit apprehensive. But I’ve learned through all of this that who I’m working with is a lot more important to me than how old the kids are. Which isn’t to say I’m ever going to be courting the chance to teach younger than third grade or to switch to the language arts side of the teaching dyad. But when it comes to the age of (intermediate) kids I work with, I think I’m more flexible about that than I would have expected to be.
And knowing I’ll be taking the same kids who have provided me with so many moments of 3rd Grade Zen and seeing what they’ll come up with as 4th Grade Zen? That’s a lot to look forward to.
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