End of Inservice

When our inservice schedule came in the mail in mid August, I was overjoyed to see plenty of individual/department work time scheduled. We wouldn't be bogged down with numerous meetings and trainings. This meant I could and would get a lot of work done not only readying my room for school but also getting set to teach our new curriculum.

Well, that didn't exactly happen. I was able to get my room ready. But I spent much of my time (as did everyone else in the English department) opening boxes of new textbooks, boxing up and labeling our old textbooks, finding missing materials, carting extra texts off to storage, and just getting the proper number of books - and all matter of supplement materials - to the correct teachers. That was quite a task in itself. And it couldn't really have been done earlier since the materials just came last week!

We were lucky enough that our district granted us quite a few staff development dollars to work on curriculum over the summer, and we all took advantage of this. But without the actual texts and all the supplements, we really were shooting in the dark.

So it wasn't until this weekend that I was able to sit down with everything and get some work done. That's a bit nervewracking considering the first day of class is less than 48 hours away.

Of course, we kind of came to the conclusion that this was going to be a transition year for our department. We have several seniors, and juniors as well, who are kind of caught in our curriculum transition.

In my eyes the main reasons for changing our classes were to lengthen them (no more covering American Lit in just nine weeks) and to try to get seniors more English classes their final year (before a student could conceivably take American Lit, Brit Lit, and Comp II their junior year and have no English classes their senior year. In fact, I'm thinking of one of my first semester College Comp students who pretty much did that. He took both American Lit and Brit Lit and my College Comp classes his junior year. If he didn't sign up for AP his senior year, he not only doesn't have any English classes this year, but he even got credit for one semester of freshman comp at college. So we could go really a year and a half (and maybe two years if he got College Comp, Brit Lit, and American Lit out of the way first semester of his junior year) without an English class. Now I don't think this is so terrible. If he is willing to work at it and put the time in, then fine. But I worry that he is heading off to college with next to no writing experience for quite some time. What effect will that have on him later in college?

Now some of this years seniors, who took English classes last year (say they took Brit Lit last year but not a junior or senior composition class), might only have to take a quarter of the new semester senior English class (Literature and Language 12). And they likely will get some of the same information again because we have compined literature and composition in our new classes, which is a better approach anyway.

At least we know for this first year, we will have kinks to work out. For me, I know I can rely on what I am familiar with in the texts to get through at leas this first semester - if not the entire year. But there are plenty of good things in this new curriculum and textbooks that I need to work hard to incorporate as soon as possible. And that is going to be the difficult part.

We had an afternoon of training with our textbook rep, Nate, who quickly walked us through the lesson planner and test generator software. But now his demonstration is hazy and I find myself wondering how I'm going to fit all of that in when I need it. Of course, what one has to do with new software and technology, is just play around with it and see what you can do with it. But this takes time - and that's something we don't have a lot of. And - of course - with technology and software it always seems great until their is a glitch or problem that one can't simply iron out on their own.

Despite all of the newfangled technology, textbooks, and curriculum work, teaching is still all about the students filling up those desks in my room. So a lot of this work has been done without them. Right now I have this vague idea of faces and bodies filling up the desks in my room, but until they are actually there and I can get to see their reactions and ideas, a lot of this work - no matter how much I do - is incomplete.