Too much at once?

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 I'm really excited about the new school year. After the last year and a half, I'm really looking forward to the return to some sort of normal. I get to teach 2 classes that I'm passionate about, chemistry and biology, and it's just looking to be a great year. I was telling a fellow teacher the other day, it feels like my first year teaching but this time I know what I'm doing. 

Having said all that, I can't help but think that I'm trying to do too much at one time. In fact, as I type this I realize that I am and that I need to just slow my role. Let's examine it a little bit. I am working on flipping my classes. Now this sounds like a rather daunting task but in honesty, when looking through the modeling curriculum I will be using for both of my classes, there is not a whole lot of lecturing that goes on so there really isn't that many videos that I will need to make. So it's really not a daunting as it first sounded. I am taking an online course and one thing that I really, really like about it is that is it helping me get organized for the year. I was determined this summer to have everything organized for the year so that I wasn't floundering like I have in the past and this flipping course is helping me do that, so yay!!!

Today I was watching a video on grading and it got me to thinking about the grades I give in my class. I know that some of them are inflated and nonsense, but I didn't really see anyway around that. One of the modelers using a form of standard based grading and I was thinking maybe I could do that too. And that's when I realized that I might be taking on too much and I honestly think I am. I don't really know much at all about standards based grading and there would be a steep learning curve to get it going and I don't want to spend the rest of my summer doing that. So I'm thinking that I will work on it during the year, maybe look at the grading as I go through the curriculum and see how I can adjust and adapt it to standards based. Also, I want to talk with my principal and get her views on it and make sure that it is okay to do that. Because the way our grading is set up I would have to convert some like 'needs work' or 'advanced' to a number/letter and that has to be carefully worked out before I make any effort to try it. I do think it would be a good project for me to work on over the year and maybe do it in the 2022-2023 school year. This summer I'm going to focus on organization and flipping. I do not have to solve all the worlds problems in one day. 

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