Oh.
My.
Gosh.
I am just now coming up for air after three hectic evenings of brain-frying lesson planning.
It started on Monday morning as soon as I got to school.
I was so immersed in my work that I barely heard the first bell ring and had to rush to the rest room for one more quick potty break before the crazy began.
Sometime between Sunday night and Monday morning, my brain had conjured up lofty goals…write lesson plans to take my students all the way through the week after Thanksgiving.
Three week’s worth, y’all.
Although I like getting plans written as units, this year has been extremely challenging with two very different preps to manage.
Throw in the random assignments that get haphazardly thrown into the mix from up above, and it’s a bit like juggling flaming monkeys.
Take, for instance, the school-wide writing prompts. I conducted writing conferences with my students. It was a messy process.
Writing that many weeks’ worth of lesson plans in such a short amount of time can seem nearly impossible.
I worked hard, y’all.
I hardly talked to people.
I had tunnel vision.
I stayed up until almost 12:30am Monday night with nearly all of my plans for my Intensive Reading classes finished.
Stations, though. If you’ve ever taught remedial reading, you know exactly what I’m referring to.
Tuesday was all about my Honors classes.
I’d had a meeting the day before with the other Health Science Academy teachers I work with, and I’d gotten an idea that I started research about when I got home from work.
But first, I stopped and voted early. Go, me!
Shout-out to God…seriously, though. He is a God of order, and He helped me find several pieces of information that slowly began to morph into a long-range plan.
It was a beautiful thing to behold, even from my own head.
I worked until almost 1am Tuesday night.
I had flashbacks to my first four years of teaching when staying up that late happened almost every night.
But…
The payoff was so worth it.
I went into work this morning exhausted but wielding four sheets of things to-do. Although I’d crossed a bunch of things off of the list the day before, the Never-Get-It-Done fiends had visited while I slept and added a passel more.
Sigh.
Such is a teacher’s life.
But wait.
I had a really good day.
Don’t ask me how, but I think that my typing hands turned bionic, because I cranked out a ton of documents in between helping my students reflect on the first nine weeks of school.
When I got home, I only had four things on my to-do list.
Glory hallelujah!
I delayed dinner and pretty much everything else, and almost five hours later had an amazing Honors English 1 unit and substitute lesson plans (I’m attending training next week) in my hands.
Don’t talk to me about the copying I have to do tomorrow. It will probably take me two days.
I do not care.
The hard work is finished. I even uploaded the assignments I created into my digital grade book.
Y’all, though. I’m a happy camper right now.
Teaching isn’t easy. You have to have stamina, and you have to be patient enough to wait for the Lord to give you ideas and help you make the pieces fit together. You also have to be persistent. I had seen references to a document that was located on a website that I did not have access to. I found the document somewhere else.
And so, I’m about to sit down with a glass of wine, cue up my DVR, and relax.
I’m relieved that I can be a fairly normal person for the next few weeks…at home anyhow. If you see me out and about, well, I can’t speak for that.
Filed under: Teaching | Tagged: lesson planning, teaching | Leave a comment »
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