As some of you may have noticed, I haven't posted here very often of late. There are two reasons for this.
The first is my new job. I am the new AP Chemistry and Honors Chemistry teacher at a suburban high school here in Salt Lake City. Having grown up with a teacher (my Mom) in the house, I always knew that being a teacher was hard work. I had no idea how hard, though, until the past three weeks. It's been a struggle to stay ahead of it all. I have one AP class with 19 students, and five Honors classes with between 32 and 41 students each. It's amazing how much paperwork that number of students can generate! Even now, I have something like 160 tests I need to grade before 7:30 tomorrow morning, so that I can hand them back and review them with the students. I'm beginning to understand why teachers get three months off every year: they do a full year's worth of work (and put in a full year's worth of hours) between late August and early June.
J. Michael Straczynski, the creator of
Babylon 5, talks about an idea that he borrowed from Robert A. Heinlein for the show. If you're trapped high in a burning building, he says, you have two options: you can stay and burn, or you can jump out a window. If you stay, you're doomed. If you jump, you get an extra three or four seconds to figure out what to do next.
That's what my first three weeks of teaching have felt like. Everyone at my school has been extremely supportive, though. They've all given me the same advice: once you make it through your first year, things get exponentially easier. Just focus on getting things done for the first year; you can revise your strategies and make things prettier after that.
The second thing that's been keeping me away is my own schooling. My most recent term comes to an end at the end of this month, so I'm up against a deadline. I've still got several little projects to complete. Familiar story, I know. Additionally, I'm now attending a new teachers' seminar every Thursday night after school for three hours. So along with all the homework I have to grade, I still have an abundance of homework I have to do myself.
I expect that both of these situations will clear up a little in a few weeks. My term will be done (along with all the work belonging thereto), and I'll be a little bit more caught up with my high school kids. I might even have moved into the 'planning ahead' stage by then. We'll see.
Until then, however, you probably won't see any new posts here.
