Into the Strenuous Briefness

My life is dominated by the academic calendar. Tomorrow is my first official day back at school for inservice. The first day of the new year! The wonderful thing about teaching is that you guaranteed a chance to start over every fall. Resolutions:

1) Be fully prepped one week in advance. I’m on track to have all my copies made for the first two weeks of school. I already have gifted versions of my entire first quarter’s labs written and copied for students. STEm fair is basically planned and copied too. So there is no reason I can’t stay prepped a week ahead this year.

2) Keep a calendar. For real. I’ve already been diligent about using Google calendar for first quarter stuff, and a hard copy planner. If I can manage to keep just one of these going for the year, I’ll be happy.

3) Work out three times a week. This is on hold until my foot gets fixed. But I was able to do this pretty consistently for the entire second semester last year, so I feel good about it.

4) On weeknights, no more than an hour of schoolwork at home three times a week. My plan is to schedule my week out in advance so I can give myself two weeknights completely off.

5) Write unit tests before the unit starts. I’m hoping that since I have last year’s tests as a guide I can stay on top of this one. The biology curriculum hasn’t changed, so my assessments are still good, content-wise. There are revisions to made, and I need to differentiate what I have for on-level kids, but I’m not starting from scratch.

6) Plan meals! I’m hoping this will prevent me from eating as much fast food as last year, and save money on groceries by reducing my grocery store runs to once a week. And since I’m still cooking vegetarian at home my meals require a little extra planning than they did last year.

7) Keep making my PA friends a priority. It’s important to me that I still see people in either Philly or Pittsburgh once a month. I did this pretty well last year and it really did wonders for my mental health.

8) Enjoy Baltimore. There’s so much in this city I have yet to explore. I’d really like it to feel like home here.

9) Implement a reliable organization system for my Knowles portfolio and for my administrative observations/artifacts. I did not do a great job with this last year, and eventually the new teacher evaluations will show up in my school, so I may as well get good at this now.

10) Maintain a sense of joy in my classroom. Ultimately, I went into teaching because I take great joy in learning and in facilitating learning. Teaching science allows me to spend every day taking joy in the natural world and sharing that joy with other humans. It’s so easy to get bogged down by other stuff and forget to take joy in my work, in the kids, in the science. Wondrous stuff goes down in our classrooms every day. It’s important.