Oh, God. I need to start planning some lessons, but instead I putter around my room and day dream, churning ideas and flipping through books and making useless notes. Today I did work with the 7th and 8th grade Humanities teacher--my counterpart in the middle school--to set up a working plan for our expedition into Immigration in Pigtown this fall. She's really awesome, and hails from New Zealand. I admire her demeanour in front of kids and the way she integrates art into her lessons. We got a lot done in 3 hours. She spent most of the last decade at Mt. Royal before coming to SBSC last year. I'll need to lean on her a lot to get through this first trimester, though she told me jokingly today that I'm the "resident expert" on Social Studies, since I'm now the sole certified teacher in that subject in the middle school. The idea that passing a standardized test in a subject area is any indication of expertise cracks me up. But there I am.
The work crew doing our rehab took down the giant burnished chrome letters which spelled "Diggs Johnson Middle School" on the side of the building today, in preparation for the new signage. I was lucky to score one of the G's for my classroom. I made a cool "Mr. G" sign with it. Of course what's "cool" to me will result in hard-core packing by the students, I'm sure.
2 comments:
I just started teaching at the college. Life is much less dread-filled at the end of the first week.
Good luck.
I miss teaching at the college level. I'd write a syllabus but never "plan" anything after. It was all about riffing on an assigned text and filling the board with ruminations. Good times. Except in business writing. That took some work.
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