Am I the only one who finds Tuesdays to be more tiring that Mondays? On Mondays you’ve stored up some rest from the weekend. Tuesday is the day you really feel the weight of waking up early and getting your ass out of bed before dawn.
I teach three different classes this year, all of them Spanish. I teach one class, Spanish 1A, three different times. I teach the other two classes, Spanish 1B and Spanish Exploratory, once each. The Spanish 1A and 1B classes have some similarities – I teach both of them with a mixture of language comprehension days and language learning days. The language comprehension days are generally more energy intensive for me; on those days I have to guide the class through an activity speaking almost entirely in Spanish. The language learning days are usually less energy intensive; after we learn or review a grammar topic, they will spend some time practicing it on their own.
I try to schedule my weeks so that I’m not doing comprehensible input in both 1A and 1B on the same day. This week, I moved the comprehensible input day for 1A to Monday so that I didn’t have four periods of comprehensible input to teach on Tuesday. This ended up working out rather well, except today I expected it to be an easier day, since my three 1A classes were mostly working on a little art project, and I only had to really be on for my 1B class, but it didn’t feel that easy, and I was frustrated because my expectations didn’t match my experience.
I find this happens a lot, especially at school. I’ll think I’ve planned myself an easier day, almost a recovery day after a more intense set of lessons, only to find that I’m more tired after the supposedly easier day. I think part of why this happens is that I try to cram a bunch of prep into the student work time on recovery days (like today I scored yesterday’s work while the kids worked on today’s assignment). Doing double duty during part of each class period is obviously not actually providing time for recovery. The other issue is that I am not realistic about how much teaching actually has to happen on these days. I still have to explain the assignment, organize the resources they are going to use, answer questions, manage behavior, and oversee clean up. When they don’t finish as quickly as I think they will, I need to scratch the “when you’re done” assignment I had planned, but I also have to come up with something else because 10 minutes is still a lot of time for a middle schooler to kill in Spanish class (but not enough time to do my original “when you’re done” assignment). These are also the days when students have the opportunity to come up and ask about work they need to make up, or can’t find, or aren’t sure about. I end up being “on” a lot more than I expect to be, and sometimes it’s more exhausting than trying to engage them with language they can understand all day.
I think the afternoons can be similar. It’s exhausting to get my ass to the dojo and participate in a martial arts class, so I expect it to be. But it can also be exhausting to find a 30-45 minute stretch to exercise without throwing off the kids’ schedules. The problem is, I DON’T expect it to be. Today I had all afternoon to work out, but I really struggled to get started because my lower back has been hurting and today it was pretty bad. I knew the strength training video I had planned was a bad idea, but didn’t know what else to do. It took me a long time to find a yoga video I thought would probably work, and once I got started I was so glad I was doing it, but getting on the mat was tough.
All this to say, I need to take these realities into consideration when I’m thinking about what is working and what isn’t. If the days I plan as recovery days are just as tiring as the days I expect will wear me out, I can’t really count them as recovery days. Which means I need to find other ways to recover. I guess what I need to figure out is what actually does feel like a light day – a day that fills me up instead of depletes me. Then I have to figure out how to reliably duplicate that kind of day. Or maybe it’s combinations of days that will eventually feel manageable. I hope time tracking will help me to figure it all out.
It’s late now, and I’m tired. I also have some more work to do. So here is my time tracking. Happy Tuesday.
I agree some days seem like they would be tiring but are actually energizing, other days are more tiring than you might predict. Figuring out how that works for you would be helpful to keep yourself from getting worn out. Mostly I just want to comment because I use blooket too with high schoolers and they are way more into it than I would have thought!
Right?! My kids LOVE Blooket. I just learned how to assign some games as “HW” so they can play them whenever they want and some are playing games SO MANY TIMES. It’s pretty awesome.
How absolutely wonderful that you are analyzing what makes teaching days harder or more ‘recovery’ and why your expectations are and are not right. Same goes about the videos/exercising times. Then putting the ‘reminders’ where you see them as you do your lesson planning/or home exercise or whatever helps.
Like keeping a physical running list of free places to go and enjoy in SF so when you have time you already have choices to look at and do not become stagnant and in a rut. (Gary Kamiya’s Cool Grey City of Love is excellent resource and I hear his Spirits of San Francisco is also.)
Hope Wednesday was good and wishing you well for the rest of the week.
Still impressed by your diligence in tracking time!