After being a kindergarten teacher for ten years, I was a little nervous when I was "promoted" to second grade. I wasn't quite sure that I'd like it as much as I did the five and six year olds. I was happy to find out that my second graders were a lot like my k's, just a little bigger! They still like you at the end of the day, and most are eager to learn and to please their teacher.
I just finished my eleventh year in second grade, and most of my classes have been a lot of fun. Of course, some are much more challenging than others, but one on one, each student had a sweet side. There were maybe two students that I can recall as being downright mean, but we all managed to have a good time in spite of them!
One thing I like about second graders is that they can be soooo funny at times. Sometimes they don't even mean to be. For instance, one of my kids this year wrote a reading response paragraph to a book I'd read in class. He was not one of my top spellers! The topic was, "If I had a magic pot..." His paragraph went something like this: "If I had a magic poot, I wud lik it. I lik a magic poot. A magic poot is fun. A magic poot is good. I wud get in the magic poot and make two of me." The accompanying drawing was in various shades of brown, orange, black, and really did look like "poot"! Sad thing is, I was in a hurry to post the students' work on the bulletin board outside my room, and I really hadn't noticed the "poot" substitution for "pot". I noticed it about the same time as one of my fellow teachers stopped by and began to laugh as she pointed it out to me. I didn't take it down because it was a very early writing sample and it represented the best that child could do at the time. Nevertheless, it provided some comic relief on our hall for a couple of weeks.