One of the bizzare things about being teacher is that you quickly start marking out your life in relation to the school year. Some days I may have no idea the date is but I will always be able to tell you what week of the term it is. Teachers don’t talk in dates or even months, they talk in terms or weeks everything in my life revolves around the school schedule.
Oddly I find this set up vastly superior to being an office drone where the days just kind stretched out endlessly with the same routine with no end in sight. At my school at least, there always seems to be something coming up: an event, a competition, a performance. It makes the year pass quickly, far too quickly really for my liking, because I find myself right now wondering to myself how did it get to the be the end of term.
If my first term was characterized by an utter panic of ‘ZOMG what am I going to teach these children I’ve been entrusted to educate,’ this term I’ve made a 180. I felt like I had so much I wanted to do and only got around to doing a fraction of the things I wanted to get done. To be sure there were a lot of interruptions this term, some of which were planned others not so much.
Yet somehow I’ve made it through the halfway mark of the year. This week in particular has been draining simply because I didn’t have enough gas in the tank. As always when my energy levels seem to wane, I find classroom management actually becomes easier.
I hadn’t realized how exhausted I was until I came home at 6pm on Friday and pretty much passed out until lunchtime the next day. I’ve had a number of teachers tell me that the first year out is the hardest and teaching gets easier once you’ve managed to get that first year or two. I’m not sure if this because you know what to expect in subsequent years or because you build up more stamina to get through the craziness that is school term.
Nevertheless, the end of the term is a good time for reflection and more importantly rejuvenation. So here are some goals to get me through the next half of the year.
- Try and get to the gym far more frequently than I have done in the first half of the year (not hard at this point)
- Stay from school more on the weekends.
- Modify my maths programme to have a daily 5 type activity.
- See more of Wellington than the CBD and the suburb I teach in.
- Build a bottle bivvy.
- Blog more regularly than I do.
- Make better use of classroom space.
That should keep me plenty busy for the next few months. What plans do you have for the rest of your teaching year?
Teaching the Teacher 