no, I don't mean the elections, although that is also true. I mean my school year. Officially it starts on Monday, when teachers report back for four days of meetings. That is deceptive, because for many of us our work has already begun.
But that is true every year. So how is this year different?
It will be the first time I am not coaching soccer.
It will be in the context of a presidential election (although I taught government in 2000 and 2004, so this is not totally new)
We are facing more standardization in what we must do.
My student teacher will actually report to me on Monday.
Let me offer a brief explanation of all of these.
Many people are surprised to find that teachers have to report back a full week before the students arrive. Actually, we have 4 paid workdays, Mon-Thur, which are always insufficient to accomplish the things that need to be done. That way the school system usually gets a free workday from many of us on Friday, and since our building is open Saturday, possibly a second free day.
During that first week we normally have mandatory meetings. The principal and other administrative officials will address us in an opening faculty meeting. We will have to participate in mandatory training on sexual harrassment, homeless students, financial matters, and so on. In past years many of us were required to report to system wide meetings of our curricular subject, although apparently we will avoid that this year. New books that have come into the building have to be stamped and numbered.
Most teachers have to transport the books they will issue to their students from storage rooms to their classroom. Those inside the building may have had their rooms used for summer school or workshops during the summer. Those like me in Temporaries (outside "temporary" buildings - mine has been onsite for more than a decade) were able to store our books in our rooms.
We have to be reissued our school computers, our tvs and vcrs (most still do not have DVD players), our overhead projectors, our LCD projectors for our computers.
We will have departmental meetings, where we will be given schedules of student assemblies for discipline during the first week, deadlines for submitting emergency lesson plans and goals for the year. We will receive guidelines for grading, and a schedule of departmental and faculty meetings for the year.
Out of the four days, we have not quite half of the scheduled time for working in our rooms to set them up. While that may seem sufficient, consider that for most of us there is nothing on our walls or bulletin boards, so we have to physically decorate our rooms.
And we may have a lot of copying to do
letters to parents
a syllabus and/or course outline for each class
grading policies
honor code statements
whatever student information sheets we want filled out
and so on.
Oh, yeah, and we probably need to plan our first week's lessons to get the school year off to a good start.
And almost all of us will set up seating charts, to make learning the student names easier.
Until we get our rosters, we may not know how many student desks we need in our rooms.
Until we get into our rooms, we may not know any repairs or other equipment has become necessary during the use of those rooms during the summer.
And although the schedule for student assemblies has already been prepared, as of yet we do not have it, so we do not know how it will effect our first week's instruction.
This year we have a new district-wide information system for attendance and grades. Our scheduling coordinator has been being trained in how to use it, because he is supposed to train us. That will take some of the teacher work week time. He has been kind enough to be telling us what he has been learning, which has enabled those of us who are checking our school email on a regular basis to pose some questions. As a result, some of what I have done in the past before I got back to school I cannot do, because we still do not have all the information we will need for things like grading policies, which are now being standardized system-wide. And until we can play a bit with the new software, we are not completely sure how that may impact how some of us have previously assigned grades. One thing that has been key for me in the past has been the ability to award more than 100% on an assignment. That may no longer be possible, which may require me to seriously rethink how I do several key activities.
Not doing soccer: this will be the first time since I returned to the school in 2002 that I will not be the official JV boys soccer coach and an assistant with the varsity. On the one hand that will free up a fair amount of time, starting during teacher prep week. I have agreed to to come out periodically as an extra set of eyes, in part to provide some continuity to the program. At age 62 I can no longer work 14-16 hour days during the season,not with the additional tasks I have taken on. I will miss the ongoing interaction with students I do not teach, but I will enjoy the extra time to sleep, and the greater flexibility of schedule this will give me.
I certainly will not enjoy the loss of flexibility things like more rigid attendance and grade reporting program will give. I am nervous because as with any new software I worry about the problems we may encounter. Last year we also had a new system (yeah, I know, two different systems in two years) and there were problems during the first few weeks. I am hoping this year will be less severe.
I have had student teachers before. I already know my intern, because she was in our building 3 days a week as a long-term sub last Spring when one of our teachers was on extended absence because of health. Thus she has familiarity with the building and the school culture, and physically knows her way around the site - we are a large sprawling complex, and last year had over 2,800 students, so that people new to the building have a learning curve. he previous time with us means less pressure in those areas.
But this is new, and something I have wanted for quite some time. In the past we had our interns visiting us on day a week in the Fall, usually not beginning until around the third week or so of school. Thus they had no experience of the madness of the beginning of school. Issues like how one physically set up a classroom and why, how one got the students into their seats on the first day, how to handle establishment of class procedures and discipline, distribution of books and collection of paperwork, ll of these were things student teachers had not experienced in their training and thus easily overwhelmed them when they first got their own classrooms. University of Maryland, for whom we are a professional development school, has agreed that their students need to experience the beginning of the school year, so that my intern will be with me beginning Monday. Of course, that means I cannot simply be what my wife calls 'small boy tornado" who can multitask and do a lot of things simultaneously without having to explain - after all, this will be my 10th year in this building. Instead, for the experience to be of value for her, I have to give my intern the opportunity to think of how she would go about it and why, then explain what I am doing and why. If I am going to be of the greatest value to her, She needs to begin to explore what would work for her, and not merely copy what I do.
And today and tomorrow I need to get myself organized here at home. I brought home some furniture and room decorations which will be packed into my car tomorrow evening. I will try to get things like my emergency lesson plans and my professional goals done so that I can copy them, but I also need to plan how I have my intern go through the process of doing both for herself - that needs to be part of her experience.
I will have to readjust the way I go through the material in order to use the occasion of an election in which many students will have a great deal of interest as a regular part of the instructional process.
I have two members of Congress who have agreed to come out and address my students after the election - I will need as quickly as possible to reserve the media center for several different occasions to have some scheduling flexibility, and then contact their offices to lock down dates.
And there are two additional differences this year: I have one firm and one tentative commitment to write about education and my life as a teacher. That will require me to allow time at the end of every day to debrief myself, to reflect and record on that day, and some additional time to rework that material into something publishable. The tentative agreement is the possibility of doing a book, and I will have to clear the time to do a book proposal, which includes actually writing a chapter. The discipline required is something quite different than what I am doing now, or what has been my pattern for much of my blogging here. I see it as a real opportunity to help a wider audience understand the reality of teaching and of education beyond the rhetoric that has politically dominated discussions about our schools. And it is something that, like my blogging on education, I can only do while in the continuing context of teaching adolescents.
The other, firm commitment? I will write several pieces during the course of one month for something that will be of high visibility: these cannot be my normal rambling posts as I do here: for one thing, they will have a limit of 1,000 words or so. They will require multiple iterations and revisions. That will give me practice at the kind of discipline necessary to do a book. It will also require a commitment of time and energy.
This year is different. There are changes to the way my school year begins. I have shed some responsibilities and assumed others, both within and without the context of my school and classroom.
It is also different because I am different. It is not just that I am a year older, and thus one year closer to the end of my teaching career. It is not only that I will have nw students and thus new opportunities to explore what teaching means, and how together we can explore the content of my two preps (different course preparations). It is beyond the neew and somewhat less flexible environment that things like the new software impose upon us.
It is different because in some important ways our politics is different, so how I include the campaign in my course of necessity must change to reflect that.
And most of all, it is different because I begin this year knowing I am a teacher, that I plan to remain in the classroom as long as I can - I may in the future changes schools, districts, subject matter, or ages taught. But I will remain a teacher. Last year I was exploring other opportunities, a process that grew during the school year, and which became very intense during the summer now concluding. All that is now set aside. That means my focus is different. I will still be reflective in what I do - I cannot teach any other way. I am likely to be less distracted by trying to consider how I could use my time and energy in ways outside of classroom teaching: now I know that all else I do flows from my interactions with young people in the classroom, and that I need that in order to give voice to the issues that really concern me.
Last year I was exploring who I was, who I would be. This year I am still exploring, but only in the context of knowing who I am.
I am a teacher. That was true last year, and it is more true as this school year approaches.
Peace.