Counting Down

You'll get a vacation update soon.  I promise.  But I'm waiting on pictures from Erik and my mother-in-law before I do anything.

So instead, you get something random.

Summer vacation feels like it just started, and yet there's only 25 days of it left.  One of our secretaries at work reminded us of that:

Photo Credit: Donna Denton

I've got mixed emotions about it right now.  We're moving to a block schedule, so we'll have 4 classes every day for about 82 minutes, and be on an A Day/B Day rotation.  That's fine.  I taught that way for 6 years.  I'm a little nervous about it in that I've never been in a school that is switching over to that schedule from a 7 period day.  We ran a modified block schedule at the end of this year, and that seemed to work out pretty well, so hopefully the kids will fall into good habits quickly.

I'm teaching 3 sections of Standard English 9, one section of Honors English 9, one section of GT English 10, and one section of Freshman Seminar.  This year is going to be a year of brand new curriculum -- in every class.  So that kind of worries me.  The last curriculum switch we had for 9th grade was pretty smooth for me, but that was largely in part because I was fortunate enough to have been in the group that helped write it.  That's not the case this year.  And because of how curriculum is written, we still don't have access to it.  And I won't have access to it until the week before students start back.  I can't even do any summer planning.  Don't get me wrong -- it's been kind of nice to have a pretty much truly work-free summer.  But it's also been a little nerve-wracking.

I'm worried still about maintaining balance between work and home.  I don't feel that I did a very good job it last year.  There were many weekends when I was stuck with piles of papers to grade.  And I feel that I probably could have used some of my planning periods better.  I want to be more involved with the school, but I don't really know how right now.  I don't feel like I'm qualified to coach any sport, and I don't want to be the main advisor for a club when I've never advised a club before.  I'd rather pair up with someone who has experience with that so that I can learn from them.

And I'm trying to figure out how to re-vamp some of what I do in my classroom.  I always think I can do better with management and organization.  I want to try new things.  I want to pull in more technology.  I want to challenge my kids.  And I want to have a better relationship with them.  I don't feel like I really connected with some of my classes last year, which ended up making management a little trickier.  So I've been a Pinterest pinning freak recently.

So 25 days.

I got this.