The Teaching Life

I can get used to this Christmas Break.  In my old career, I often got two weeks off at Christmas, but this was usually a cost-cutting measure by my employer, who was simply trying to minimize the number of vacation hours on the books.  With teaching, I get paid to take these weeks off… or do I?  Technically, I get paid for “10 months,” which means that I do get paid for this Christmas break, but since I am also technically an hourly employee, I only get paid on the days I work, which is 186 days out of the year… which does not include this Christmas Break.  Still, it’s all good – I love what I do and I like the pace of the year, especially as we get into this 2^nd semester where the breaks are frequent.  Because I love what I do, I treat my job like a salaried position – working as many hours as it takes to do a good job… which currently includes every weekend, part of my Christmas Break and a lot of my summers.  Maybe in a couple of years I can simply work the hours I’m paid for, but not now!  I’m still learning how to do this teaching thing.  I’m still setting up my curriculum.  Perhaps I’ll never “coast,” as I really like the curriculum-building part.  In five days over this break, I have put together five awesome weeks of instruction (which will get me to the “ski week” break).  I’m really looking forward to teaching this stuff.

I’m absolutely cruising right now.  My juniors are on a week-long project in the library and my sophomores are watching a 3.5 hour movie (The Last Emperor) most of the week.  Life is good!  The only downside, if there is one, is that I have to walk across campus several times a day to get between my classroom and the library.  I suppose it’s good for exercise though.  The only thing I have left to do is grade the essays from my junior’s week-long project and then finals next week.  With any luck, I’ll have all the finals graded by next Saturday so I can actually enjoy my Christmas vacation (or more likely, allowing me the time to put together curriculum for the second semester, at least up to the winter break).

My observation went well.  I was rated at a pretty high level for a new teacher and  my admin person couldn’t come up with any negatives.  Her recommendations for improvements were decent, and I will endeavor to make those improvements on a lesson in January.

Woo Hoo!  Thanks to the Thanksgiving Break, I was able to finish my BTSA documentation for this semester and also the Humanities write-up.  All documents have been submitted to my superiors and now I wait for their approval.  On Monday, I get to finish my formal observation document with my Vice Principal which will bring me one step closer to a permanent teacher status.  I’m pretty sure the observation went well: I just have to get the details down and submit them.  After that, I pretty much cruise to the end of this year.  (… and then grade a bazillion tests and essays during Christmas Break).

I’m now writing because I finally have a week free – at least free of curriculum.  Just like all past years, I seem to spend 12-13 quality hours each Saturday doing curriculum.  Will it never end?  I mean, like, it’s been three years of non-stop work on Saturdays and often 4 hours on Sundays as well.  I think that so long as I keep introducing new classes or keep tweaking old classes the answer will be no – I’ll never have my weekends free.  I can now see why it takes the average teacher five years to settle in and get good at their job.  Year 4 (ish) and I’m still learning how to teach!  I have a great mentor this year who is really challenging my assumptions about teaching, which is a good thing.  I’m learning so much, but it also means that I need to change (again) what I have been doing.  And in the process of re-learning how to teach, I still have to do the BTSA (new teacher program) and this year, with a new crew leading it all, we have all new hoops to jump through.  The BTSA folks just lightened the load a bit by only having two projects this year, rather than three, but each project takes about six weeks to complete.  The paperwork alone is going to take me about 10 hours to complete.  I’ll be glad when it’s over.  Truthfully, I’m learning more from simply talking to my mentor teacher.  The BTSA program is a lot of red tape (but hey, it comes with a mentor teacher, so that’s something), but red tape that is required by the State of California if I want to keep teaching, so I do it.

In class, things are finally humming along.  It took longer than last year because I have some pretty packed afternoon classes that have been a behavior challenge.  These afternoon classes finally settled down, mostly, at week 13.  Now I can teach.  I suspect that part of my issue is the size of my classroom: with little room to move around, the students react much quicker to every little thing, and the room itself is louder.  I also simply can’t keep certain students far enough away from each other.  Last year, I was swimming in space and it made a huge difference.  Even with a class of 36, I still didn’t feel crowded.  This year, anything over 32 feels packed.  Maybe I shouldn’t have moved after all… except I like being in civilization and near my department.  I guess there are no perfect solutions on this campus… except for class size… and maybe my choice of class subjects.  I have been blessed to have small US History class sizes.  It really makes a difference.  World History will always be packed because all sophomores are required to take it, and admin seems to only schedule World History in the afternoon.  As I bring Humanities online, perhaps I can convince them to make it in the afternoons!  I have also been asked to perhaps teach AP World History next year.  It sounds like more work – a lot of work in fact – but I would get a motivated group of students who actually want to be there, so that would be a plus.  Well… with this free weekend, I must now finish all that BTSA documentation and try to finish my Humanities proposal for next year.  The work never ends.

Well gee, the last two weeks have just flown by.  I guess that’s why I haven’t written.  I’ve been busy!  This is normal for the start of the year.  I don’t really feel like I’m in a teaching groove until October.  And like usual, students are on and off my rosters on a daily basis.  I started with 160ish kids and now I’m down to 140ish, and roughly 30 of the kids were not in my class the first day if not the first week of school.  I think (now week 3) that my rosters have finally settled.

The thing that has kept me mostly busy however is my new homework setup.  In an effort to avoid going through 8 cases of paper a year, I’m doing more things electronically in Google Classroom.  Initially, I have chosen the Crash Course video series as my supplemental materials, now homework.  This new homework system (Crash Course on EdPuzzle on Google Classroom) is awesome for the kids… or so I hope, but man is it sucking up all available time for me!  Getting the students on the system in the first place requires that they successfully get logged into Google Classroom, at which point, I can manually approve them for EdPuzzle use so they can watch the Crash Course (CC) videos.  After 2.5 weeks, I still don’t have all the students set up!  And then there’s the time to do all this: Each CC episode takes a half an hour to put into EdPuzzle, then half an hour to add questions and then 45 minutes to grade.  That’s almost two man-hours per episode and I do three to four of these a week per class (two different classes).  In other words, it’s about 14 hours minimum per week just on Crash Course material.  Good news for me is that next year, I only have to grade the material.  Also good news: most of the Crash Course episodes get shown in the first month and then it’s maybe one a week per subject after that.  This is good because I only prepared a month of lessons leading up to school this year.  I’ll have to start creating new lessons by the second week of September, generally at a pace of one week of lessons = 13 hours.

Somewhat miraculously, I’ve also managed to do quite a bit on my potential humanities class for next year, my new teacher program requirements, and back to school night, which is this week.  This doesn’t leave a lot of hours for anything else though… except for watching the Olympics.  Now that the Olympics are over, maybe I will also return to some form of normalcy.

I really don’t count the first two days of school as week one, they are rarely about class content, so I call it “Week 0.”  For me, it’s more apt.  Anyway, I had a great week zero!  I have awesome students!  Alas, I lost some students on day one that I was hoping to keep, and I just know that I’ll gain students throughout next week (who I will have to train on my rules and procedures), but these are minor things that one expects at the start of a new year.

I’m doing a lot of new stuff this year, which will no doubt consume my time, but I think the end result will be better learning for the students and better communication for the parents.  In addition to School Loop this year, I’m also starting a weekly podcast of upcoming things in both US and World History.  This is just one of the many takeaways from my “CUE Rockstar” seminar that I attended this summer.  I’m also leaning heavily on two programs that will be new to me: EdPuzzle and Screencastify.  These two programs allow me to do more with the digital content that I use in the classroom.  With EdPuzzle, I’ll be able to assign Crash Course episodes for homework with embedded questions… that I can place in Google Classroom!, rather than show them in class when I’d rather be doing discussions and the like.  To me, this is a huge win because it creates good digital content for homework, and it will also decrease the need for me to send out paper homework.  My only concern is for the few students I have who don’t have ready access to a computer at home.  I’ll need to make special arrangements with them to work in the library or in my classroom.

I’m going to be so thrilled to send these new podcasts out to my parents and students, and I’m going to have the students create the weekly content themselves.

Until the podcasts make it to iTunes, you can find them here:

Click on “Episodes” and you’ll be able to listen to the US History podcast or the World History podcast.

Now that I’m back from my summer vacation in Seattle, it’s time once again to go back to school officially.  New teachers like me have to go back two days early.  It was nice that the new BTSA (new teacher program) person told us second year folks to go to our classrooms to work rather than spend another orientation day in the district office.  This allowed me to put the final touches on my classroom and finally unpack all those boxes from the move.  This took two days.  I also cleaned all the desks, which was no small task.  I now feel very accomplished and I absolutely love my room.  The wood pieces to block the chairs from hitting the walls came out great and they fit wonderfully (it’s too bad that our cleaning crew has already launched my chairs against the walls a few times since I’ve been gone – I had to do a bit of repair work.  Grrr.).  I also bought a life-sized David Tennant (Dr. Who – the 10th doctor) stand up picture that looks great in the room and it will really work once the Tardis (His “Police Box” space ship) gets painted on the door.

My T.A. desk is a bit more crowded this year because I installed a computer at the desk.  In part, this is so the T.A. can grade the electronic assignments which will be much more plentiful this year, but it’s also so I can record grades.  I have discovered that my own desk is a terrible place to shuffle papers and enter grades (it’s too small!), but the T.A. table is great for this purpose.

In sort of a funny note, my “next door neighbor” in E4 (Brett) dropped by late yesterday after his first year teacher orientation at the District Office and the first words out of his mouth were: “whoa, <explicative>, that is one busy room – I hope you don’t have to move anytime soon.”  Ya, me too!  I had been promised that I would be in this room for at least two years, but things change and our admin recently did.  Moving would make me VERY sad because I spent approximately half of my summer vacation building this place up.  It’s not something I want to do very often, if ever again.

In other news, former Vice Principal Hilary Brittan is getting married today!  I wish her all the best in her marriage and in her new job as a principal at a middle school.

Yesterday and this morning, I worked with wood.  My goal is to line my room with 4×4 pieces of wood so the rolling chairs won’t hit the walls (or my map or posters).  When I got these pressure-treated pieces of wood, they were brown, but that brown came off in your hands.  This would not do, so I washed the wood, sanded it down and applied a nice dark stain.  I may have cut the pieces to size a little too soon because sawdust stuck to the not-quite-dry stain.  Oh well, it’s not too bad.  This morning, after a day of drying, I added red felt to the front and back so the walls and chairs won’t get damaged by the wood.  The wood looks simply spectacular.  When school starts this year, I’ll bring the wood in, along with a large Turkish rug, to complete my room.  About that same time, Max will paint my door.

Obviously, I got into teaching so I could have my summers off.

This is SO FAR from the truth for most teachers.  Already, I have attended a three day seminar, put a very solid two weeks into moving and setting up my classroom, I’ve put a week into researching a future Humanities class, and I’m about to spend the next two weeks building up my U.S. History class, since I haven’t taught this class in a year.  I’ll also spend a week looking at new software and applications I can use in the classroom.  All of this for NO PAY.  Would any of you do this for your jobs?  I think not, and yet this the kind of stuff that is expected for teachers.  Fortunately, this kind of “off books” work is normal for me because I come from a salaried Semiconductor background where they work you your waking hours because you’re salaried, so it doesn’t matter how much or how long you work; you get paid the same.  This is also true for teachers, and yet we actually get paid for six hours a day, five days a week, 10 months a year.  This of course is far less pay than what my actual working hours entail.  Two years ago, I was working 16 hour days, six days a week.  Last year, I was down to 12.5 hours a day, six days a week, and this coming year, I hope to get that average down to 10 hours a day, six days a week.

And then there’s summer.  Last year, I took a month off to go travel (which was actually work-related since it dealt with World History), but the other five weeks “off” were spent setting up a new classroom and building up curriculum.  This year, I’m only taking three weeks off, so it will be six working weeks.  The thing I like best about summers now is that I get to wear shorts when I work and my work schedule is more flexible (no bell schedule).  Strangely enough, I do miss having the kids around.

Well, here we go: a new blog for a new classroom (third year in a row!), a new Principal, and a new subject or two (U.S. History and prep for an upcoming Humanities class in 2017).  Good thing I like change.  I suppose I could have stayed in my classroom from last year, but “the portables” are where they tend to stick the new teachers and it is definitely far from civilization.  I opted to move to civilization and close to my peers, even though it means moving into a classroom that is 30% smaller.  I will miss the abundant space I had last year, but I look forward to staying in the same classroom for at least a few years.  I also got “rolling chairs,” which I have desired for a while.  They make for a more flexible room arrangement, but since this room is small, I don’t know if we’ll be able to move around too much.  It’s a great experiment if nothing else.  I think I’ll like the seats though, and I hope the kids will too.

Step one for me was moving out of one classroom and into another.  I packed the old classroom up during the week leading to finals.  At first the kids didn’t notice, but then posters started to come down.  By Finals, the old room was bare and the kids really didn’t like that, but they were excited that I was moving to civilization.

I had packed in such a way that I could easily transport everything to the new classroom in just a few van loads.  It was also fortunate that I could keep everything in my classroom until the new room was ready.  There was no rush.

On the last day of school, chairs were moved around the campus.  I had asked for rolling chairs, and there was a teacher who didn’t want hers.  The classroom I was moving into had random chairs that the other didn’t want, but the classroom next to mine (currently unoccupied) had a uniform style of chair that she did want.  The three locations were on three corners of the campus.  The swap between the three classrooms was massive.

I did have to wait for the current teacher of my new classroom to move out.  And since I was in no hurry, she had ample time to do what she needed to do.  She left behind a drawer full of colored pencils and another drawer full of white board markers.  Thanks!  She also had a complete Mac and printer setup scheduled for pickup, but I grabbed it so my future TA could do more than just grade papers.

When she was out, I did a thorough cleaning of the place and then I planned how to decorate this new space.  My first obstacle to overcome was the fact that three walls had a big conduit strip running around the wall, one wall was mostly book shelves and my most major wall had a white board on it that I never intended to use.  The result was that my walls were not flat and I had three walls of posters from my last classroom.  The biggest of which was a 8’ x 11’ map of the world.  That map needed to be flat, so I went to the store and bought supplies to make a massive wooden frame that I could fit around the conduit and whiteboard.  It was quite the custom job and I had all my major power tools on site to do it.  It was an installation.  The whiteboard was also magnetic, so I covered the remaining part not hidden by the wooden frame with a nice cloth and bought magnetic pins.  I couldn’t do anything about the bookshelf.  It was installed and carpet had been cut around it.  Removing it meant a hole in the carpet.  I’ll just have more books in the classroom and maybe an attractive art display (?).  My posters were an issue because most were 36” and the space above and below the bulletin boards was only 33”.  In order to hide the conduit (and the electrical outlets that I didn’t want kids plugging cell phones into), I extended either bulletin board frames or posters or both over the top so they would be hidden.  The only outlets that remained in the classroom were for my computer, the TA’s computer and the chromecart, whenever it was in my classroom.  Perfect!

I also had some unique issues like cement walls and cloth areas to put up my posters.  Not everything wanted to use a stick pin and not everything wanted to use tape.  I had to do a combination of both and also use gluetack.  My chosen tape was “gaffer tape” which is industrial strength double stick tape usually used for carpet installation.  This mostly worked, but it was sometimes too sticky and other times not sticky enough.  We’ll see how long into the year some of the installation lasts.

Finally, I was worried that these mobile chairs would smash into posters and my wall map, so I have every intention of installing a wooden border along the carpet that will prevent the chairs from reaching the walls (the cleaning crew has already tested my posters and map by ramming chairs into them during carpet cleaning.  I am not happy about this at all!  I’ve already had to do some repairs.).  I have already bought the wood, but I’ll wait until the first teacher days to install it because the cleaning crew might still clean the carpets.

Oh ya, I’ve also contracted Max to paint my door.  He’ll do that during the teacher days right before school starts.  On day one, I should have a freakin’ awesome classroom.