Time for Work

At least I'm not alone in my summertime "procrastination." I've spoken to many an other teacher with similar stories. I have this long list of things to do for next school year and here it is near the end of July and what have I got done?

Well, actually one way I procrastinate is by working hard on tasks that I hadn't consciously planned to work on. The workaholic in me just won't let me have a real day off, so I piddle around doing odd jobs that do need to get done but were never on my list of priorities until I needed a diversion from the things that were on it. For example, it's amazing how much household chores and daily maintenance activities can pile up when you're working 10-12 hours a day during the school year. Several closets were nearly inaccessible with junk and winter clothing and boxes. My office was a wreck. Papers piled up and needed organizing, books that have long since lost any possible relevance littered the shelves and need to be gotten rid of. My computer hard drive was equally in need of organization. I had thousands of digital photographs, for example, that needed to be copied onto CDs before they disappear forever from some hard drive failure or something, and most of those photos exist in duplicate forms scattered across several directories and a couple of hard drives - so that beast needed to be tamed. I also spent a couple of days trying to figure out how to get another computer running (for one of my kids) that had a hard drive failure last year, a computer that is no longer supported by HP. These dastardly computer companies no longer ship recovery CDs with new computers and this one's out of warranty, so the only solution is to buy a new hard drive and purchase a new copy of Windows to load, and I can only imagine the problems I will run into and the hours I will be online with tech support after I spend that money for the materials. It's a real scam that I have to pay again for an operating system that I already paid for. I sent an e-mail to the HP CEO expressing my displeasure.

Of course I've also spent some time "vegging out" for lack of a better term. This past year was emotionally draining, especially the end of the year. I really needed a couple of weeks to just clear my head. Most of that time has been spent exploring some new music and adding to my mp3 collection. For the record I listen mostly to indie "fill-in-the-blank" - indie rock, pop, folk, art-rock, whatever. I've posted a few "Friday Random 10" lists if you're curious. I get a lot of information from Pitchfork. I don't always like what they like, but I can frequently tell from the reviews whether I will like a band or not. Sometimes I just put on Yahoo's LAUNCHcast "radio" and hit the next button until I hear something I like. Then I check out other music by the same group. I also mentioned in a previous post that for the first time in my career teaching I have a few students who's musical tastes overlap with mine, so I've got a lot of recommendations from them that I've just now had the time to listen to. Why is commercial radio in New York City so awful, by the way?

My actual goals for the summer are to get ready for the fall in a couple of ways. I"m looking at what was difficult last year and the year before and coming up with some strategies. Some problems that I thought were attributable to the particular school I was in before turn out to have traveled with me. For example, my students' inability to keep up with their lab reports. That turned into a nightmare again when, despite my constant repeated refrain that students MUST keep their lab reports as a "ticket" to the exam, they still came to me in May acting like they were receiving this information for the first time. And in a way they were - They never really processed what I was telling them. It's like the one or two times I've almost run a stoplight while staring right at it because my mind was pre-occupied. So I have to figure out, for my own sanity, how to deal with this requirement.

In a related item, I'm working on having lab binders prepared for students in the beginning of the year. I can't stand the constant runs to the copy machine to get worksheets done on an almost daily basis. The issue will be storage space and student access to them. I don't have the kind of students that I can depend on to carry their binders around, so I'll have to store them. I don't think it will be that much of a problem. I've got a good space for them, then it's simply a matter of establishing routines to ensure a smooth delivery and return.

I will be streamlining labs and breaking up the bigger ones to accommodate the lab schedule in my school. Many of my labs have a tendency to soak up time like a sponge, and that leads to incompletes and lack of closure and "when can I finish it" and so on. I have what I consider to be a bare minimum number of periods per week for the LE curriculum - in fact, it's a real stretch and a rush to get through the material that I want to get through, so I have to minimize inefficiency. I also have an incredibly diverse (academically) group of students in every class. I'm looking into a tiered approach to as a way of differentiating instruction, which I'll address in a separate post after I've worked out the details.

I think I'll end with that, as this is getting a bit long. I'm starting to feel the energy again and need to get to work!