It’s Been A While

So, as excited as I am to be on this classroom adventure my frequency of posting is not what I thought it would be.  The reason?  My schedule.  I teach at a year-round school with four tracks of classes.  My K-2 students are on a 7-day rotation and my 3-5 are on a 6-day rotation.  The last time I taught elementary school I saw my classes on a regular schedule of once per week.  This schedule I have now is insane!  We started in July and now, in February, due to assemblies, field trips, workdays, track outs and snow days, there are some classes that I have only seen 9 TIMES!  9 times from July to February, it’s hard to believe.  I’ve even been subbing for myself during my track out weeks (I am an 11-month employee so there are certain weeks that I am required to track out) and I still can’t beat the system.

It is a bit frustrating to say the least.  I see blog posts and tweets about what great things teachers are doing with their students and how advanced they are in their lessons and I used to get really upset but now, I realize that I cannot compare myself to a teacher who has seen their classes two to three times more often than I have seen mine.  So, the posts about our projects will be coming, but not as often as I would have liked.

This has truly been a learning experience and my days are never boring.  A typical few days for me looks like this.

So, projects that I thought I would finish in a couple lessons end up taking several weeks (or months) to complete and that’s pending that the kiddos don’t have their own track out in the middle of the unit.  We have four months left in this school year and I feel like I have barely started.

I’m working on the idea that my teaching will not end in June and start again in July, it will be continuous throughout the student’s time at this school.  There are units that I will repeat, for example, I cover the earth and the universe lessons in 1st grade but, for the most part, I will just continue working with the students and improving their technology skills and knowledge over a 6-year timeline rather than worrying about what happens from year to year.  This is a new concept for me and it will probably be one 6 year cycle before I can really say how it works.  I guess you gotta have goals.  🙂