"Hope is a Thing with Feathers..."

This is my third year of teaching 7th and 8th grade Language Arts, but I am definitely finding myself in a very new teaching environment. During my previous two years of teaching, I taught in a rural Wisconsin public school which had demographics more like inner city Milwaukee. Here in Colorado, I find myself teaching the same age students at a college preparatory charter school. This school environment and structure is quite unfamiliar to me and has caused me to completely reform my "old" teaching habits to create new ones.
Consequently, though I am in my third year of teaching, my hopes this year are quite similar to those of a brand new teacher. I am hoping to refine my classroom management strategies to best accommodate the learning styles and needs of my students. I hope to increase my parent communication, not only through phone calls and emails but also through the school website and my classroom blog. Finally, I hope to create a middle school Language Arts program and curriculum which challenges my high-achieving students, differentiates according to student abilities, and peaks student interests.
In the end, however, I just hope to move from barely surviving to, quite simply, thriving.