Wednesday, July 30, 2014

Catching Up

The idea when I started this blog was that I would write every day. I haven't, obviously, but I have been getting a lot of other things done. Most of them haven't been related to work, because I'm trying to squeeze in all the life things that I don't have time for during the year, like visiting my family, helping a friend move, moving my father-in-law into our house, getting a new roof, and going to a lot of aikido classes. However, it's almost the end of July and I sat down with my calendars this morning to start getting organized for the coming month and the school year that will follow it. Here's my life right now:

By August 18th I needed to have finished:

  • Senior Seminar Semester 1 Course Map - Done
  • Senior Seminar Semester 2 Course Map - Done
  • Senior Seminar Q1 Performance Assessment - Done
  • Senior Seminar Q2 Performance Assessment - Done
  • Senior Seminar Q3 Performance Assessment
  • Senior Seminar Q4 Performance Assessment
  • Senior Seminar Q1 Unit Plans (including all daily lessons)
  • Drama I Semester 1 Course Map - Done
  • Drama I Semester 2 Course Map - Done
  • Drama I Q1 Performance Assessment - 1/2 done (maybe another hour's worth of work to go)
  • Drama I Q2 Performance Assessment - 1/3 done (2-3 hours left on this - I have to do research)
  • Drama I Q3 Performance Assessment
  • Drama I Q4 Performance Assessment
  • Drama I Q1 Unit Plans (including all daily lessons)
Some of these items I'm still having a hard time wrapping my brain around. I am hesitant to try to write my end-of-year exams because I honestly don't know what my kids are going to be like. I understand that I'm supposed to be teaching to an objective set of standards and that I should test the students on those once they've been established, but I don't want to be unrealistic in my expectations, and I would really like to know a few things like how many SPED students I'll have and what the overall grade levels of students in Drama I are. Those things affect the end game.

Also, I'm supposedly going to get feedback on everything I submit. That hasn't happened yet, and I submitted some things before school ended in June. I'm going to communicate with my administration about that, but it is possible that I'm going to end up with a major time crunch at the end as I try to make adjustments that I could have been making while I still had a lot of time to think about things.

As for today, I scanned in all the texts for the Q1 and Q2 Drama I exams, which took about 20 minutes. Then I had to format them all into GoogleDocs. That took another 20 - 30 minutes. Then I started my research for the Drama I Q2 exam, which I gave up on after about 20 minutes because I was distracted by all the pounding the roofers were doing. I took a break, and this afternoon I've spent about 20 minutes organizing my personal calendar with all the Drama-related PD that I know about, another 15 minutes registering for an unrelated PD.

The PD calendar goes something like this:
  • Aug. 11 & 12 - Student Orientation: I still haven't decided if I want to do this or not. I'll get paid, but it means giving up part of all of two days, and depending on how done I am with the to-do list, I might not be able to give up that time.
  • Aug 13 - PD for teacher-facilitators regarding teacher orientation
  • Aug 18 - EVERYTHING IS DUE!
  • Aug 20, 21, & 22 - PD at school all day
  • Aug 27, 28, & 29 - PD at school all day
  • Sept 2 - Students Return
I'm beginning to feel the crunch. Time to get back to work.

1 comment:

Cybermom said...

You must be the most organized and competent teacher I know. I really admire your work ethic and your creativity.