Thursday, August 11, 2005
Planning for next year
I've been focused this week on preparing for school. I signed the contract Monday and received some of the textbooks. Now I've taken out boxes of papers from my closet to clean up and sort. I've created new files for this coming year, and I'm going through the old papers to see what's useful. In most schools, there are set curriculum guides, scopes and sequences, which teachers use for planning courses. Our school only provides textbooks and class titles. It gives us a lot of freedom, especially in English. But it also adds confusion because students may never come across certain concepts. I think this used to happen with poetry in high school. The curriculum was too focused on novels, particularly 19th century British novels. Revision skills, which are not the most fun to teach, were also neglected. So I've started out by visualizing and planning for the abilities I want to see in my students by the end of the year. Then I’ll use the textbooks and other materials to design the course. I’m excited that all my students this year will be 15-17 year olds. I liked teaching English 9, but frosh boys can be extremely immature. Also, this means I can use material that’s a little higher in terms of reading level. What’s worrying is that the kids are going to have eight classes every single day. That’s a little insane, in my humble opinion. Students need more than a skimming of various subject areas, and they can’t be expected to master eight separate concepts from eight instructors every single day. In terms of homework this is also going to create a problem. Generally, I’d expect students to study around thirty minutes for my course on a given evening. But how will they be expected to do this for eight courses? I don’t have solutions, but I’m considering giving very little homework for the writing and grammar course. For the other courses, that’s going to be much more difficult. I’m going to predict now that our students will suffer from cognitive overload. I know the kids I’ll be teaching, since I taught next year’s juniors and seniors Frosh English. They’re very hard working but they tend to focus on end of term grades to measure their success. Lastly, I’ve always had anxiety dreams in the past before the start of the school year. Not this year. I feel very confident. I’d say I’m taking it less seriously, but I’m really planning it out much more thoroughly than I have in the past. Instead of being a worry freak, hopefully I’ll be able to make more of a difference this year, inshaAllah. ¶ 8/11/2005 11:43:00 AM
I've been focused this week on preparing for school. I signed the contract Monday and received some of the textbooks. Now I've taken out boxes of papers from my closet to clean up and sort. I've created new files for this coming year, and I'm going through the old papers to see what's useful. In most schools, there are set curriculum guides, scopes and sequences, which teachers use for planning courses. Our school only provides textbooks and class titles. It gives us a lot of freedom, especially in English. But it also adds confusion because students may never come across certain concepts. I think this used to happen with poetry in high school. The curriculum was too focused on novels, particularly 19th century British novels. Revision skills, which are not the most fun to teach, were also neglected. So I've started out by visualizing and planning for the abilities I want to see in my students by the end of the year. Then I’ll use the textbooks and other materials to design the course. I’m excited that all my students this year will be 15-17 year olds. I liked teaching English 9, but frosh boys can be extremely immature. Also, this means I can use material that’s a little higher in terms of reading level. What’s worrying is that the kids are going to have eight classes every single day. That’s a little insane, in my humble opinion. Students need more than a skimming of various subject areas, and they can’t be expected to master eight separate concepts from eight instructors every single day. In terms of homework this is also going to create a problem. Generally, I’d expect students to study around thirty minutes for my course on a given evening. But how will they be expected to do this for eight courses? I don’t have solutions, but I’m considering giving very little homework for the writing and grammar course. For the other courses, that’s going to be much more difficult. I’m going to predict now that our students will suffer from cognitive overload. I know the kids I’ll be teaching, since I taught next year’s juniors and seniors Frosh English. They’re very hard working but they tend to focus on end of term grades to measure their success. Lastly, I’ve always had anxiety dreams in the past before the start of the school year. Not this year. I feel very confident. I’d say I’m taking it less seriously, but I’m really planning it out much more thoroughly than I have in the past. Instead of being a worry freak, hopefully I’ll be able to make more of a difference this year, inshaAllah. ¶ 8/11/2005 11:43:00 AM