The Road to Hell

I feel like half of my posts are "hi, I'm back from an unexpected hiatus!" This year has been more challenging than I anticipated, for a number of reasons. (See the 'continue' link if you really want to know about them.)

First of all, we've had extra paperwork. We had to give a pre-test and then fill out a spreadsheet with students' scores. Then we had to go into an online database, find their scores from the previous end-of-year exam, and then predict whether we thought the student would pass or fail the end-of-year exam for this course based on those two scores. It was kind of nerve-wracking because we hadn't given that pre-test before so it's not really correlated well (by which I mean NOT AT ALL) with either of the the post-tests.

So that was incredibly stressful. Then I've also had a bunch of doctor's appointments to go to. Speaking of which, I need to call them to let them know I can't come today. But I haven't had a moment free from class, and they'll be closed while I'm at lunch. I'm fortunate that I've been able to schedule my appointments in the afternoon, so that I don't have to miss class (just planning) but even so it's getting to be a bit of a challenge, missing that much planning time.

Then we've had more department meetings this year than we've ever had before. Each month we have at least four - one with just the teachers in our grade level (so I go to two of those, since I teach both sophomores and seniors), then one with the grade-level teachers and the department head and an assistant principal (so I go to two of those as well), then one with the whole department and our graduation coaches, then one with just the department. Today we've also got an administrative meeting during planning about setting up medical insurance for next calendar year.

As a result, I haven't had NEARLY as much planning time as I thought I would this year. And I had so much that I wanted to do that I haven't been able to, because I've been struggling just to get through what I need to do. But I should be at the end of my doctor appointments, and I shouldn't have to do any more extra testing until the next term starts. Here's hoping!