The weekend I needed

It turns out, this may just be the weekend I needed. Last night I watched Theater Camp (it was fine, not much to it, but I laughed a bit) and went to bed too late. This morning I got five loads of laundry done, along with my regular weekend chores (sweeping and vacuuming, shaking out the rugs, actually cleaning the counters, etc). The house now feels more manageable. I’ve already scored three of the four assessments my classes took last week. My son and I had some really great QT while my daughter was at her grandparents’ house. We watched two episodes of Ahsoka (I love it!) and played Small World (a complicated, but fun table top game).

I only had both kids together for a few hours today, during which they played the new Dungeons and Dragons mod on Minecraft. It’s actually really cool, a narrative game that plays a lot like actual D&D. But the mod is pretty new and it kept crashing on them, so they only played for about an hour. Then my inlaws picked up my son so he won’t have to wake up at 6:30am to come to the swim meet tomorrow.

Tonight my daughter and I are going to watch a couple episodes of Twin Peaks and then head to bed early. She’s finally feeling nervous and stressed about the meet, so I don’t think she’ll want to hang out long. Which is for the best, because I really need to catch up on some sleep tonight.

Right now I’m on the elliptical and tomorrow I’ll do strength training, so even though I didn’t get to go to the dojo or run this weekend, I am getting my workouts in.

I’ve been thinking more about why this week was so rough at work. I think it was a couple things, the main one being all the new students. I don’t really understand why we’re getting so many new students over a month into the school year, but we are and it sucks. (We didn’t even get them all at the same time! Two started Monday and three started Wednesday. Why?! )I run a tight ship and my students know how to follow procedures by now, so I expect to move quickly from one activity to another. With new students EVERYTHING takes longer. And three of them don’t speak any English, so really I should be giving them English language development stuff. Which I don’t really have anymore because I haven’t taught that class since before the classroom move. Luckily my student teacher has been helping them a lot, but it’s still requiring a ton of my time.

{It seems like one of them should not be in a general education classroom – he will require intensive special education supports – so my guess he will not stay in my class. If he does stay he’ll be taking my class without English language development, because he has no reading or writing skill in Spanish, despite that being his first language. He can’t even say the numbers 1-10 in Spanish unless he’s naming them in order. If I point to one, he doesn’t know what it’s called. My student teacher has been spending a lot of time with him, and is really surprised with where he’s at. There is clearly a lot going on with him.}

Speaking of my student teacher, she is amazing but she is also leeching my prep time in ways I cannot handle. On Friday I needed to get a ton of stuff done, because I didn’t have a prep on Thursday and had to rush out immediately after school, but we spent the whole period talking about her upcoming solo teaching days. I know I’ll eventually get some of this time back, but right now it’s just slipping away from me and I am really struggling with how behind I get and how stressed I feel.

We also took assessments this week. My assessments require a lot of teacher leading, especially at the beginning of the year, so it’s not like I just got to work while they all took their tests. We won’t have assessments in my three 1A classes again until November, so that is good. Also, our next unit is a little less intense, as far as me leading lessons entirely in Spanish, so I think October will generally be less stressful than September.

I’m also not adding anything new to my plate. I just read about an activity that I think would be really fun and effective, but I’m not going to implement it this year. I did write myself a note to check it out again next fall, but right now I just can’t add anything that requires more prep. The only reason I’m surviving right now is I have everything I need ready to go. I’ve done so much prepping over the last two years to make this program great, and now I get to reap the rewards of all that work.

And of course my classes are big, and I’m learning to mange the extra work that comes with extra students. The good news is I can still run my program well, I just need to streamline some aspects of it. The free reading program is my biggest worry with such big classes, but that doesn’t start in earnest until the new year, so I have some time to figure out what to do to make it more manageable with such big numbers.

So after 24 hours to decompress and think more about it, I think work feels unmanageable less because of the big classes and more because of the new students and the student teacher. But honestly she is helping so much with the new students it’s probably a wash right now with time saved vs lost. Maybe, by the time the new students know what to do, and she is teaching more, I’ll feel a lot better. Then I can spend some of that extra time retooling my free reading program so it works with 130 students. It’s only 20 more than last year. I think I can do it. (I really love my free reading program and would hate to jettison it completely. It’s probably the part of my program I’m most proud of.)