Another month gone by

-

 I'm just so over school that I can't seem to be bothered. I am done with this group of kids. I'm tired of fighting with parents and students about grades. I'm just done. 

I have been looking forward to next year and I do think that I'm going to switch things up some. I'm really looking at the Patterns curriculum for chemistry. It's a modeling type, in that they discover things before we put names to them. But it also seems to be much more fully formed. They have anchor phenomena, end of unit projects, tests, quizzes, etc. It just seems more fully developed then the modeling curriculum. The modeling seems to have been developed a few years ago and then just left. They do have a sequence and an outline but there are a lot of things missing and I'm not sure I want to work that hard anymore. I think it's time to just follow a curriculum and be done with it. Also, with all the things they have in place, it would be much, much easier to use the notebooks. I really like the notebooks and I want to give them another solid shot. But I need to have them all planned out for the year. And I mean all planned out. I cannot plan out a couple of units and then hope to catch up during the year, that won't work. I need to have the whole thing planned out and ready to roll. But with the Patterns curriculum, I could because they have everything laid out for me. 

That means my summer will be devoted to getting this all set up. Also, reviewing  the curriculum and making sure that I understand it well enough to teach it. I can do that, I just need to put in the time and the effort. I'm thinking I'll divide my summer up into planning for next year and working on my business. 

Alright, I'm done. It's Sunday morning and I don't want to think about school right now. 


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