I am counting down…days to retirement, days to the end of the fall semester (university courses), and counting down to warmer weather.
It seems that of these the count down to the end of the fall semester is the most relevant or helpful. There are only a couple of months left, but most of the grading responsibilities happen over the next few weeks. My on-site class has 45 papers/lesson plans to grade between next week and December 14th. The other course which is online has way more students and a lot of assignments to grade. On December 17th, as winter break comes, a big sigh will be had!
Counting down to warmer weather…yes, I am not a winter person. It just began to get cold with our first frost coming at the end of this week. This count-down is more nebulous. Spring break (mid-March) seems like the right aim!
Count down to the end of the school year on June 1st is the most exciting. I find that I have anxiety, which is fairly new to me. The district I work in has a lot of issues, so that may be it, but my guess is that it is the combination of online-on-site teaching. I need to enjoy my last year of teaching at an elementary school. After all, I love teaching kids, just not all the administrative stuff that goes with it…and being the oldest teacher in a school full of 20-30-somethings.
Take a leap now to 12 days of school left for me…. The powers that be in the district decided I would teach mornings at the school in which I have taught, and now drive each day to the school my kids went to when we first moved up from Florida in 2001. This all happened after the new year. I had 8 students, and now 9. A student I taught for the last few years (online) moved to my roster for the last few months of school for 2 hours 3 days a week. When people talk about how hard this pandemic has been on teachers, I still have to say the difficulty is less about the pandemic, and more about administrative people (who may have been teachers before), thinking that they are looking at the big picture, but no. When they should be including teachers in decisions, they are not. Sometimes I think it is their own ‘fake it til I make it’ mantra, but often it is their comfort of telling people what to do from afar, without considering the big picture at all.
Twelve days to finish up the year. I have alternate assessment materials to score and input, end of year progress monitoring, reports to add to cumulative files, ESYS letters to go out, EOY reports, collaborations, rooms to clean out at both schools, and young students to enjoy in the midst of it all! I do love teaching, but look forward to something completely new for my 60s!
DocKLucas 