This morning, I met with the other accelerated English teacher, Mrs. E., to plan for next week. The students are reading The Secret Life of Bees, and it will probably take us forever at the rate we are going. We debated over how many chapters we could feasible ask the student to read next week, and we decided to hold our schedule tight. I distinctly remember Mrs. E saying, "We cannot push back reading chapters 6-7 into the following week or it will be Thanksgiving before we're done!" Okay, so we decided that students could indeed read those two chapters by the end of Friday. The following week we planned to do a writing assignment that would take us a few days from the book, so that was why we really wanted to get a good chunk out of the book before we put it down for a few days.
After we finished planning, we talked about the staff development day we have coming up next Friday. Both of us are on the professional development committee, and since our first meeting was just a few days ago, and our first PD day is in a week, and during this PD we teachers will be conducting our own trainings, we are kind of scrambling to get things in place. I was unable to find some information that was integral for our plans, so we talked about what we could do and then we decided to try to call a meeting today.
As crazy as it was, I e-mailed everyone with the information I could find with some suggestions and asked if anyone could meet today after school for a bit. Super crazy is really the idea considering it was noon before I could get it out. (You know those days when it takes four hours to construct an e-mail?) Miracle of all miracles--there were four out of six of who did show up after school, so we spent a little under an hour getting things shaped up better.
About 20 minutes after the meeting broke up, I was setting my boards for Monday, writing the homework due dates for the week, when it hit me what idiots Mrs. E. and I were.
Our time spent debating whether to go on with our novel and how to juggle our classrooms to make it happen was all pretty pointless because there is no school for students on Friday--staff development day! DUH! I've forgotten about staff development days before and planned for students to be there, but this is serious silliness considering I'm part of the planning committee for the day!
And to think how I get so irritated with my students don't make connections to the things they learn. Well, I'm not in much better shape. I cannot even make connections of things I'm creating. I think it's pretty evident that I have a one-track mind. Or I'm going crazy. You choose.
1 comment:
You mean I'm not the only one who forgets Friday is a SDD? (or is it STD?) I keep thinking I have 4 teaching days this week (tomorrow is guest speaker) and I really have but three. BTW what short stories do you teach your accelerated students? I teach 9th grade honors as well as 9th grade English...
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