Countdown to Day One

Summer’s over and it’s time to admit something truly awful: I did nothing to prepare for this school year. Nothing in reading (at least nothing I could read with the students), nothing in research (or, at least nothing that seems as though it would relate to teaching 8th grade English), nothing in paperwork preparation (except for the one summer class I attended or the fact that I directed the summer school program this year), and nothing that would allow me to actually be “ready” when the kids walk through the new doors at this new school, which happens tomorrow.

Tomorrow our 6th grade classes attend for half a day, and during that time I’ll be at the high school to welcome last year’s students to a new environment. I’ll return to the new school to help the 6th graders find their way around our maze of halls and to help them open their lockers. I’ll shoo them home at noon, and that’s when the real get-down-to-business preparation begins.

Forgive me.

It’s not as though I meant this to happen, but that I found my summer so absolutely booked with other duties and plans that time slipped on by, as it is wont, and now I have one day to prepare myself (and others) for the coming year.

A few things are new:

• I have a prep period!

I didn’t think I was going to get one. Didn’t have one last year, and I found that pretty difficult. I finally got into my groove somewhere around the midyear point, but now that I will have an extra hour in the day, I think I might actually be able to sit back for a few moments and find ways to make my the materials in my classes flow together in a sequence that provides information and depth; lessons that will resonate with the students and offer meaning.

• I have a team teacher

We met FTE and were allowed to hire a few extra teachers for overflow, and now I have a sidekick. Thank god it’s a guy I already know, but he’s been given a difficult job. He’s the overflow teacher for myself and the 7th grade English teacher, and his job is to teach what we teach in the same manner and at the same time. Problem is — and this is a large one, for him — the 7th grade teacher and myself are laissez faire, at best. Not “lazy,” but we allow for openings in our curriculum. If discussion leads toward a new insight, we make like Robert Frost and walk into the bramble. If an assignment doesn’t immediately work, we fix it (often drastically). When we plan, we plan days in advance, but those plans might change and new units might supplant them in the morning on the drive to school.

This makes things very difficult for this team teacher, and I haven’t even brought up the fact that he’s also going to team-teach two of his classes with the Special Education teacher, because all of her 8th grade and 7th grade students have been moved into his overflow classes.

He’s also teaching a computer class on top of all this. Granted, he’s not a new teacher — he taught English several years ago, and computer classes after that, but he’s taken the past two years to find other employment, and is returning after meeting his monetary obligations through that other job.

But he did mention to me today that he’s frightened, and I don’t blame him one bit.

For me, this means I need to truly buckle down and look at my own planning and my own lessons to provide thorough assistance for him. It’s only fair, as his taking over two of my classes allows me to have a prep period (and even his taking over those classes leaves a few of my numbers pretty high: one class is 38 students).

What’s next?

Well, tomorrow I get my shit together, and make things new all over again. I do want to reinvent the wheel. I don’t want to be the teacher I was last year; I want to be the teacher I was the two years prior to that. I have the excitement right here, in my pocket, on this table, in the room, in my car, in my eyes…I want the preparation to go along with it, and that’s what I’m doing tomorrow.