It was really hard coming back to work this week after the break. There are still days I wish I had either gone to med school or just taken a year off this year. I feel like I deserved a year off too with how hard I worked through high school and college. I even reminisce of the Waffle House grill cook days, but then I remember the pay check. It's just with most other jobs, you get off work and you live your life. I'm having a hard time living my life with my wife even though school is out at 2:05 here. I don't usually leave before 6 because there's grading, calling parents, organizing papers, meetings upon meetings (most not worth the time), and I usually don't get to do much planning for the next day. I can't get any work done during my planning period, and I usually have some kind of meeting during 2 of 5 planning periods in a week. My goal at the beginning of the break was to have my next unit vision and plan and at least the next week's lessons planned out because when I get home around 7 and eat dinner, I want to go to bed. It is miserable to stay up past 9pm trying to plan your lesson for the next day when you wake up at 5am. I got the unit plan, but I enjoyed my break too much to get the all the lessons done. We'll try again this weekend. Then maybe I can have a better schedule during the week and maybe fit in a workout routine.
I do think I'm being pretty successful in my one biology class. I think most of the kids in there have the "I want" and the "I can" investment in my class. And I made a pretty fun lesson for mitosis yesterday where we all stood in a circle for the cell. Then two people got in the center to be chromosomes. Next, we replicated the chromosomes and added two other people in the center. Then we went through the phases of mitosis with a couple people on either end of the cell acting as centrioles throwing out their yarn "spindle fibers" to the chromosomes and pulling them to one end. And finally we split the cell in two with two chromosomes each. A lot of my biology kids go to a fellow TFA geometry teach after my class, and they told him that they really liked the class and had fun. And I think they learned the process pretty well too. We'll see if they did soon. My science coach was observing during that activity, which was good too. However, my Assistant Principal was evaluating me earlier during that period and we were just taking some notes, so I don't think she was too impressed. I think she hates guided notes from powerpoint. I've been doing that because I got some great resources with a lot of powerpoints and guided notes for the powerpoints. They really speed up getting the huge amount of information out that we have to cover, and my students would have to copy the whole slide if they didn't have guided notes and it takes forever for them to write. She told me that the guided notes are like a book to them and that they're just copying down the words and not internalizing it. Which I guess that may be valid, and if it was the only thing I did with them then I would agree with her. She recommended to me on several occasions to have them outline the chapter in their book before ever discussing the topic with them. I'm not sure if I have time to waste a whole class period on them making an outline from their book. But I'm starting to think she's going to see me as someone who isn't open to criticism or advice if I don't try it. I told her I would next week and see how it goes.
Let's just say for my other five physics sections that it's really difficult to teach these 9th graders physics. Especially since I'm not a very knowledgeable physics teacher. I'm teaching them waves right now with Slinkys and springs, but not many of these kids have that "I want" or "I can". There are a few kids that I think are getting a little more serious about their grade with report cards coming out on Monday. I definitely have many less failing students. I think I might have about 30-40 failing out of the 150 instead of like 70-80.
It was clearly evident how little experience and under-prepared the staff is at my school when we had our Fall Fest celebration for our freshmen. I feel kind of bad myself because I was part of the team that came up with this idea, but I was assigned to take care of kickball. I wasn't the mastermind. We had teachers on specific jobs, but it definitely wasn't thought out well enough. We planned to have it during the last bock of the day on the football field. I had my kickball and things for bases. I was ready to go. I let my students head to the football field because it would have been futile to try to keep them together with me, so I followed behind. My class was the first to show up at the field so I had them sit in the bleachers to wait for the others. There was nothing set up yet. We were planning to have an egg toss, corn hole, cake walk, kickball, football, and a dunk tank. There was no dunk tank, no eggs, no cakes. We had corn hole, a football, and of course the kickball. My class and I were sitting outside for about 10 minutes until another class came. But we still didn't start for a while. Kids were crawling up the announcing booth and jumping off. It was about to be a disaster, but we started playing football and I started the kickball game, and everything kind of got under way except the cake walk, corn hole, egg toss, or dunk tank.
Ah, it's finally the weekend.
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