Back to School: What goes into preparing a classroom for the first day of school?

TWIN FALLS, Idaho (KMVT/KSVT) — Sarah Bender has been teaching math for 10 years, but this will be her first at O’Leary Middle School in Twin Falls, and she is already at school this week getting ready.

“A big part of it is definitely learning the curriculum, what am I going to be teaching, what strategies will I be using?” said Sarah Bender, an 8th grade math teacher.

But after that, a big goal for Bender is to create a culture in her classroom that promotes respect for each other and also a love of math.

“My goal is for the kids to enjoy math, I get a lot of students who come in and their like well I don’t want to be in here, I hate math so good luck trying to teach it to me, and my goal is for kids to find at least one thing, hopefully more, but at least one thing during the year that they’re like I loved this and I get it and they get excited about it,” said Bender.

One of the ways she tries to do that is with the classroom decorations, she has collected these decorations throughout her years as a teacher.

“I like to incorporate a lot of color, I have a colorful math alphabet that I’m putting up on the wall, and colorful circles showing kids hey this is how you use math in everyday life, cause that’s one of the most common complaints that I get, when am I ever going to sue this, why do I need to learn this, I’m not going to use this, so it’s teaching kids, yes you will,” said Bender.

She says in her experience the decorations directly correlate to the feeling and culture of the classroom, and she is excited to meet all her students on Wednesday.

“Build the classroom culture, have students learn how to respect each other, they should know it by Middle School, however anyone who knows middle schoolers knows that sometimes they forget and a lot of middle school teaching is teaching students how to be human,” said Bender.

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