Hard Reset

-

 On Monday I did a hard reset with my 4A class. Actually, I did a hard reset with all my biology classes. I was initially going to wait until we returned from break, but I decided not to and to just jump in. On Monday I wrote 3 log entries, more than I've written all year, and I'm going to keep the pace up. I'm not dealing with it or letting it derail me, I'm just writing log entries. 

On Monday and Tuesday, I had some of the best biology classes I've had all year. They did what we needed to do and we talked about it so everyone got the same information and they left with a homework assignment that should be easy for them to pull off. It was good. 

I kind of realized that I have been trying to teach in a way that doesn't completely work for me. I've been trying to let them discover things on their own, but then because they took so much time doing that, we never got to debrief and discuss. So that will change going forward. I have 3 weeks of school left after Thanksgiving and the last week is finals, so really only 2 weeks. Yay!!! Not sure I could take much more. But I need to plan those out carefully. I need to get the finals altered so that they work and I need to have my lessons planned out in detail. 

The problem I'm running into is keeping track of everything. I'm getting better and creating plans and sticking to them, so that's good. I have a little template that I print out and keep in my binder that helps me keep track of the lessons. I also have taken to writing the plans on the whiteboard so that I can just glance over and see them. Since I have A/B days, I only have to change those 2 times a week and that is becoming a habit. It helps to kids to know what is going on and it helps keep me on track. I've also gotten pretty good at making copies once every week or two and keeping them in my sorter. It's not foolproof, but it is better than it was. What I need to develop a way to keep track of is the penalties the kids will get for misbehaving. I will be writing more log entries and docking citizenship points, so I need a way to track that. I have been keeping a bullet type journal for school but I don't think that is really working for me. I'm thinking of using my planner to keep track of everything, but do I want my personal stuff mixed in with school stuff? Not really. I do have a free daily planner that I could use to just for school. Hmmmm....that might work. I could leave it at school all week and make notes in it that I need to remember for grading, on classes, etc. Hmmm.....this has really got me thinking. I tried the bullet journal but that didn't really work for me. But I was bringing it home every night. What if I leave it at school and it lives on my desk. Hmmmm......I could keep trackers instead of days. No, that wouldn't work, sometimes I need to write details. I keep going back to my binder. I used that for a couple of years and it worked fairly well, I could try that again. Hmmm...some things to think about over my break here. 

Comments

Post a Comment

Popular posts from this blog

Going in too many directions????

-
Image
I'm having trouble organizing my lessons. There are a number of technology things that go with my lessons. I am trying to use Planbookplus to create my lesson plans: Which is great but has its limitations. So I thought I would keep all of my files in One Note so I could have access anywhere. That will be good but it is almost like creating lesson plans all over again. Then I have a class blog where things need to be uploaded and offered to the kids. As a result of trying all three of these things, I have completed nothing. All of them are half done and we have just completed the 2nd full week of school. I tried an external hard drive and thought that would be a good way to do it. It has proven to be more of a nightmare than a help. Ugggggggghhhhhhhhhhh!!!! What to do???? How do I organize all the electronic information I have???? How do I keep track of things and not make myself crazy??????? So that is my struggle this weekend. I am going to complete one or tw...
Read more

And so it begins.........

-
Image
We teachers returned to school on July 24th and the students returned on August 2nd. That means we had the kids 2 days last week, Wednesday and Thursday. And it went well. This year I had to revamp my classroom management system and I think I have something that will work for me. Let me explain; My first 7 years of teaching was at private schools. Even though these private schools were at the lower financial end of the spectrum and most of our students were on financial aid, they were nevertheless private school students. Classroom management was not a huge priority as these students did their work and listened and were respectful and all that stuff. So my classroom management was a little lax because it didn't need to be really strict and tough. Well, now I'm at a public school. And in spite of the fact that this is a charter school and parents have to go out of their way to send their students here, it is still a public school. Last year I handled my classroom management l...
Read more

A stroke of genius?????

-
Image
The ongoing theme of this blog has been organization. I've been teaching for 9 years, but I haven't found a way to organize my stuff that works really, really well for me. Every single year, I struggle finding things I know I have or recreating the wheel because I've forgotten I have something. So I've been working really, really hard to get organized once and for all with a system that works for me. I know that I need to have things written/printed and at my fingertips in order to make good use of them. If I have to go online and look it up it won't happen. I've played around with binders and didn't really use them after I set them up. The last 2 years I did find great success with planners. I would divide the day up into my classes - 4 each day - and jot notes on what was to happen that day. That worked great!! As long as I planned ahead. Too many days I would get to school and the planner was blank. That left me scrambling to figure out what I'm t...
Read more