A Weekend Full of Thoughts
I should be writing lesson plans. Instead I am surfing blogs. I love getting the comments on my blog and I want more of them. So, in an effort to increase the traffic to my blog I have joined quite a few traffic sites. In order to gain more traffic, I have to surf through other member blogs. Some of them I have found really interesting, others I wish I had never run across. Either way it has been an interesting afternoon. Unfortunately, I have responsibilities that extend beyond my seven hours in the classroom every day. Honestly, my day has never ended when the bell rang at 3:00.There are usually papers to grade, parents to call, lesson plans to write, pencils to sharpen, emails to respond to. Sigh. I have never worked a 40 hour week, yet I work far more than 40 hours a week. Can somebody please pay me overtime??
This weekend I have lesson plans to write. The principal at my school has decided that she is going to be more strict and review the teacher lesson plans on a quarterly basis. She is asking for all lesson plans to include daily objectives, to what standards we are teaching, what materials we will need to successfully complete the lesson, an itenerary for the lesson, and an end of lesson assessment. I'm ok with all of those components because I use them all in my lesson plans. For five years I have used a very detailed lesson plan form and I have had other teachers balk at how much work goes into each lesson.
In the end, I ended up with the upper hand. I can pop out one of my "overly difficult" lesson plans in about two minutes. I have trained most of the other teachers at my school on how to use this lesson plan, and they are taking ten to fifteen minutes per lesson. Practice makes perfect. After five years I am quite good at this format. So while the rest of the staff is scrambling to complete the detailed lesson plans for the first quarter, all I have to do is plug in the dates.
But that is only for my science classes.
This year my principal is asking all of us to write the same detailed lessons for our reading classes. Most of us have treated our reading classes as a joke since I have been at this school. It's a forty minute class that feels like it lasts for three days each. I have been drawing blanks for three years on how to teach this class, so this year I am going with a very scripted program that takes all the work out of having to plan for this class. This scripted program is my sanity's godsend this year. There is a light at the end of the SSR tunnel, and it's name is Soar to Success.
So I guess I shouldn't feel that bad about surfing blogs.
Oh, on a more personal note. And I swore I was going to leave my personal life out of this blog. I have a personal diary blog. I don't need to add my personal crap to this one. HOWEVER, like with any other career, my profession has a HUGE impact on my life. There is never a time when my "teacher hat" will not be on my head. I can run into my students at the mall or at the movies, and I will always be their teacher. I don't get to leave my job at my job site. I will be the teacher forever.
Moving on, this morning I was supposed to go to a training at school. The principal swears up and down it is a voluntary training, but she never really means it. So I got stuck. My oldest daughter had her first football game today, and my youngest had her gymnastics exhibition. Of course these are all at the same time. It's a typical parent conundrum, but add in the job training and I felt like I should just go stick my head in the sand all day and attend none of these functions. What would you have done?
I ended up at the gymnastics exhibition. The kid is three. Can you imagine something more precious than a three year old doing a balance beam dash? Yeah, me either.
Work will just have to deal with being my WEEKDAY activity. I have to give some of my time to my children.
Now, if only I could figure out how to spend some time with my husband and fix whatever it is that is killing the intimacy between the two of us.
posted by lobo5747 @ 3:15 PM
5 Comments:
Hey K, you commented in my blog a little while ago, about NCLB. I'm glad you wrote what you did, it gave me time to think before responding to the other comment, where the person talked about the voucher system. I think that schools are flawed right now, and giving families the freedom to pull their kids and taxes out of the school system isn't going to fix it.
Well that's awesome that you're in Albuquerque, since I'm in Las Cruces. We're both, um, enjoying Richardson's new three tier system and all the "joys" that go with it. I loved your blog, I'll link to it.
I enjoyed visting your blog. I think you should have a mix of work and personal tid bits. speaking for myself, its the blogs that give a bit of everything that I enjoy reading.
Mike
I also teach middle school- we don't start until the day after labor day. I'm not looking forward to going back at all!
My district doesn't have a strict policy regarding lessons plans- thank god!
Enjoy your week :-)
Just came to your site by way of
BE.It' interesting reading about
your frustrations as a school teacher.
Like you, I would like more traffic. Doesn't everyone ?
I have started a campaign for
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sure hope you do, please come on
over and let us know....
Have you joined Technorati?
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