Saturday, December 23, 2006

10 WEEKS LATER

I started my job with this comment: “163 students in 5 periods….! No textbook for the class…only the State standards and a modified curriculum… humm – very interesting.”

The humm…turned out to be a very pregnant, “humm”. I just finished my tenth week and I very much welcomed the Christmas break.

Ten weeks have passed as of last Friday 12-15-06. I’m not sure where to begin…it has been like a maelstrom of activity – at all levels: preparing, teaching, classroom management, equipment connectivity, floating class rooms, no place to call your own, etc. What an amazing and stressful experience… I have generated literally 100s of pages of lesson plans and exercises, corrected hundreds of papers multiplying in 10 weeks to over 2000 pages of student work… Sleep is something craved for…Of course it does not have to be that way – but I have been told it is… deal with it.

Slowly tricks are coming into play – advice from experienced maestros is slowly trickling, probably feeling sorry for the hardworking neophyte among their midst…

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