End of Quarter

It is SUPER easy to get behind in grading. You really want to have grades available to your students every Monday or something, but every interruption is a detractor from that task. You comfort yourself by saying that it's enough just to stay afloat. Let me describe my rationalization process:

I've always been told that the first year of teaching is the hardest, and I have no trouble believing it. I'm not trailblazing new courses or anything, but most of my assets and resources are self-made. I'm making all my reading quizzes, study guides, directions sheets, tests, miscellaneous worksheets... and it's not as if I absolutely HAVE to. I have resources, but it's practically as if I have TOO MANY resources. I hit kind of a saturation point: with a few resources, I'll read all of them. With a ton of resources, I won't bother to read any and instead create my own. It's great to be very hands-on, and it teaches me a lot about creating and evaluating resources, but the effect is that it multiplies the time I need to prep anything.

Right now I've only got two preps, which is nice. I've got about 130 students, which is no joke, but it could be worse. The sheer amount of papers I get per week is stifling. Additionally, I do theatre tech four days a week, I have a bi-weekly New Teacher Cohort meeting, various before-and-after school meetings, assemblies, I get observed three times per year, and since absenteeism is so common, I'm constantly catching up with or anticipating absences. Stuff drags along all the time.

A recent mistake I made was I allowed a student to read an alternate book instead of the required reading because that student was repeating the course. It almost doubled the material I had to prepare for that course, and I simply won't do it again this year. If a student or family has a moral/religious problem with a text, that's one thing, but for repeating students I think I'm going to draw the line.

The job is a lot of work, but most days I like going to my job. That's why I was initially interested in teaching, besides the joy of learning and my fascination with the content. I think I'd be more natural as a Math teacher, but it's fun to have that constant, secret joy that I'm impersonating someone else and nobody seems to notice. So far I'm not disillusioned.

-Matt