The first 9 weeks of the school year has come and gone, and so has week 1 of my two-week intersession break. I spent my first week off doing lots of personal things – finally unpacking from the honeymoon and wedding, lots of band (including percussion tech stuff for my husband’s band and playing in Alumni Band for University of Illinois’ Homecoming), and end-of-garden tasks. Now, in this second week I am able to focus on being ready for 2nd Quarter at school. But first, I’ll reflect on how 1st Quarter went:
I feel like this year is just going ok so far. It’s the first year that one of the classes I’m teaching is the same as last year, so that should have made things a bit easier. I also was really happy with how the beginning of the year last year went, so I did pretty much the same stuff this year. It was really nice to be able to see my past work from my blog post! Even with what I thought would have made this year start off easier, I feel like I still wasn’t quite ready for the year to start. I had to move to a new room this year but wasn’t really able to do the moving until I got back from my honeymoon, which was only a week before the school year started. Not trying to make excuses, but the timing of everything didn’t really help me get off on the right foot for the beginning of the school year.
Nevertheless, it was a good start, just like last year. I also learned how to use Airdrop to quickly show the class photos and use photos from class, Adobe Spark for collages, and the Photos app to blur faces. These have all made sharing things from class way easier.
The rest of the quarter has felt a lot like same old same old. I feel like the students are learning and haven’t felt like there are complaints or anything, but I just feel like I am not doing enough. I was supposed to be less busy this year (since I’m not doing nearly as much as last year), but I’ve felt like I’m playing catch up all the time. For example, this is the first year I haven’t called every family on my roster to introduce myself. But I’ve been praised still for my Weekly Summaries, Parent Survey, and Unit Newsletters to communicate with families that get emails. I haven’t done enough activities – lots of notes and regular worksheet practice. But I’ve still done some.
Next quarter will be better. I’m ready to try some new things and get back into the swing of things, as well. I’m also ready to get back to blogging, now that I’m not as busy 🙂
Aux neuf prochaine semaines!
