Trying to strike a balance: My first week

As I sit here in the living room, I cannot bring myself to do any work for school. I am trying to heed to Mandy and Erica's advice that I take one day out of the weekend for myself, where I do not do any work for school. Though I am still thinking about school, and am reflecting about school, I am technically not doing any real tangible work, so I guess, I am, to an extent, heeding to their advice. I wonder if they would agree... :)

Though there is always something that NEEDS to be done in the classroom, I realized, after staying up till 2 in the morning on that first day of school doing thing that I needed to do but that were not time sensitive, and seeing how tired I was for the second day of school, I saw that I could not keep up this pace, leaving school at around 6:00, having a half hour drive, eating and then getting to work on things that needed to be done, not necessarily for the next day, but just to make things pretty.

What is weighing most heavily in my mind is how to ensure that 4 of our students do not demand all of our attention all of the time while providing all of our students, where ever they may be academically, whether they be on the autism spectrum, or have behavior issues the best education that they are entitled to and that I know we can provide. But part of me is scared that we may not be able to accomplish this...

We have a boy who I will call Doug, he is so mean and defiant and I was asking my mother, how can a child so young be so malacious? Picking on other children, getting in their faces and not listening to anything either me or my co teacher say?

We have another boy who I will call Joe. Joe has had a very hard young life, he is living with other family because he was taken away from his parents, because of how badly they mistreated him. He can be as difiant as Doug is and though I know he can be a very sweet child, he can be malacious as well.

Our autistic boy, who I will call Omar, does not have a lot of language and sometimes I am unsure as to wheter he understands me or not. But Omar seems to have taken an instant likeing to Joe. Of all the children in our classroom it is Joe with whom he has tried to connect with, but Joe and Doug as well, seem to be very jeolous of any attention that me or my coteacher might pay on Omar when we ware not dealing with either of them. They are constantly trying to see what we are doing with Omar, even if it means they will get in trouble because they are not listening to the teacher who is leading intruction, and I feel that after we have spent time working with Omar, trying to get him to participate in our class and talking to him, both Joe and Doug seek Omar out and start to pick on him.

I really do not understand this behavior, because, both Dough and Joe are our priority, we constantly spend time with them trying to get them to do the class work we set the other children with and we always meet with Omar last because he is not constantly bothering anyone or interfering with instruction while distracting other children.

My heart breaks everytime I see Omar interacting with these two boys. I will try my best to protect Omar as much as I can but I want to make sure that I am a good teacher to all my students as well, protecting all of them and making sure that we have a safe and caring learning enviornment.