Teacher Work Days... A Blessing or a Curse?

Well the semester ended on Friday. Half way through the year already?? Really?? Seems hard to believe. When this year began, I was dreading it in many ways - mainly due to all the emphasis on the switch to the Common Core. Reflecting a bit now that it's half way over, I see that this has been one of the BEST years of my teaching career so far. Yes the first few months had a LOT of growing pains associated with them. People at school were unhappy, morale was low. But after those first few months went by, I found myself really excited at the prospect of revamping a lot of what I do in my classroom. I've had two huge transformations this year that have affected my class the most - the first was the switch to interactive notebooks for my history curriculum. The second was the complete revamping of two units for class novels (and two more revamps to go!). Yes, no one likes to willingly go through change, because not changing it easy. It's HARD WORK to change your curriculum, especially if you're 10  years in to teaching like I am. But wow, am I proud of the work I've created so far this year. I actually find myself excited for the second half of the year that lies ahead of me!

Today was a teacher work day - no kids, just a full day of work time for us. I always underestimate the amount of work I have to do on these days. I got to school at 8 and found myself still grading at 1:30. I had hoped to grade for half the day and plan for the half the day, but alas that was not meant to be. Once I finally submitted my quarter and semester grades, I only had time to plan out some new history work for this week. And I swear I did NOT dilly dally on facebook or waste time online... just so much to wade through and entering grades takes longer than some might think.

Tomorrow starts the second semester. Good luck to all of you in the same boat!

The three awkward weeks between breaks

These three weeks between Thanksgiving break and winter break always pose an interesting predicament to me. I feel both like I need to cram a bunch in to these three weeks but also as if the winter break is a barrier to anything I want to carry over to January. This quandary has proved to be challenging this year as my history planning has changed significantly from past years. My colleague and I have completely revamped our history curriculum and are using interactive notebooks this year in our classes. This, combined with more common core inclusion, means that I'm about 3 weeks behind where I was last year in the history book. And you know what? That's ok. Since we don't have the STAR history test this year, I don't feel as pressured to get through ALL of the history text. With our interactive notebooks, we're able to focus on more important aspects of what the kids are studying. What this means for my planning, however, is that I need to reach a firm stopping point by the end of next week. I don't want to be in the middle of a history chapter when break arrives and expect to pick it up after 2 weeks when we come back. Furthermore, I know from experience that the last day of school before break is its own special little monster. Hard to plan much substance for that day. So since we'll be finishing up the Outsiders next week, I plan on showing them the movie the last two days before break. Still haven't decided if I want to give them some sort of work to go along with the movie or just let them enjoy it since they have worked so hard on our Outsiders unit this year.