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.