New School Year Angst

[Veronica]

Random craziness deleted

Teaching - the job of producing a quality product from a mixture of unknown materials.

[Crankin]

I missed your rant. Now I want to know.

[malkin]

Random craziness deleted

Teaching - the job of producing a quality product from a mixture of unknown materials.

lol!
love this quote!

I'm really looking forward to this year. Last year was my first year back in the school district after 10 years at a private school. This year, I plan to be less confused.

[azfiddle]

Good luck Veronica. I am already through with 2 weeks in the classroom in our modified calendar district.
I love your quote.

PS on an unrelated note, my Ruby is named Veronica Speedwell- after the dark blue wildflower (common name Speedwell, latin name, genus Veronica). I think my new Surly is going to be called Betty...

[Veronica]

I'm stressing because I've been assigned a 4/5 combo this year. We're adopting new math and ELA curriculum, neither of which do I have all of yet. Oh, and that's FOUR new curriculums for me. I just got my student list and I have 3 resource students, 2 ELL, one known crazy who was suppose to move, and two new kids from private school. One new kid is a year younger than everyone else in his grade. The other new kid is from a charter school that lost its charter because they weren't up to snuff. Every kid who has come back to our school from this charter has had major issues, academic and behavior. "Everyone" says that combos are suppose to have independent workers so that you can in theory cover both curriculums. Yeah, right. That's 20% of my class that I don't think will be independent. And I'm tired of the pithy response of "You're a great teacher, you can handle it." Frankly, I just want to reply, "F@ck you." to that. "What can you do that will really help me?"

I've already decided that I'm going to use a lot of my own stuff for ELA. I just don't want to be floundering with new curriculum. The new Common Core standards are pretty close for 4th and 5th grade in ELA and I've put a lot of time in to prepping for novels that I've used in the past, aligning them to the new standards since we've known they were coming. Math is going to require two lessons a day. The differences are huge for the two grade levels. You can pretty kiss Science and Social Studies good bye.

So, my original post was an even more b!tchy rant about what I'm looking forward to. I've now moved on to, "How do I make the best of this?" and screw any state testing. The students will be as prepared as I can get them with the time and materials I have. I feel like the district has set up these kids to not perform well by refusing to give us another teacher.

I looked up my name in the dictionary in like 3rd grade. I've always liked that I'm a pretty blue flower.

Veronica

[Catrin]

I did see the original post, and I think you are handling it all very well! You are now in the "making lemonade" stage, and to my way of thinking, that is when we are the most creative. Good luck!

[azfiddle]

Veronica,
You do have a pretty full plate. Good luck with the challenges this year- they are not trivial at all.