I love teacher workdays. Especially when I don't have to go to some sort of professional development. I get 8 uninterrupted hours alone in my classroom to get caught up on my ever-growing pile of work.
Today was a teacher workday. Our school was a ghost town. Pretty much everyone in my building was at one of those professional development workshops, so my building was really quiet! One of my neighboring teachers was there, but we both had plenty to work on, so we didn't waste each other's time with a lot of chit chatting. And half the people in my department (as odd as it sounds, I somehow ended up as the only social studies teacher in the math building; our department is a little spread out across the back part of our campus; we don't have a designated building like most of the other departments do) were also gone.
I showed up at school a little before 8 a.m. and by 11 a.m., this is what my desk looked like:
The pile of papers on the right is what I had graded in the first 3 hours of the day. I'll let you guess what the pile on the left is... Yep, that's the pile that I still needed to grade. But that's not entirely accurate either. You see, I have this little black bag...
I use this bag to transport papers and notebooks back and forth between my classroom and the apartment. Luckily it wasn't that bad when I looked inside of it. Only the loose-leaf stuff had to be graded. So this is a more accurate depiction of what my day was going to consist of.
I left campus around noon to grab a quick drive-thru lunch and pick up a few items that we needed from Wal-Mart. By 2:30, this was how my pile was looking.
And that's pretty much how it stayed until it was time to leave. By 2:30, I was sick of grading papers. I was sick of correcting mistakes. I was sick of sitting hunched over at a desk. For the last hour of the day I straightened things up around my room and started getting some things in order for next week.
When I look at the pile on the right, I feel like I made a ton of progress today. But when I look at the pile on the left, I get discourage and realized I didn't make enough progress. My AP course is kicking my butt again this year. But the kiddos are testing in 2 weeks and school is over in less than a month, so this chaos will be ending soon. I'm starting to see the light at the end of the tunnel... looking forward to a relaxing summer.
Oh, wow, that's a lot of paper! I'm actually looking for a social studies teaching job for next school year. I'm super excited, but I know something like that pile will hit me eventually ; ) Any pointers for the application process?
ReplyDeleteI applied at a lot of schools across the state, and the one consistent thing is that they all wanted you to apply online. You couldn't go into the schools themselves and apply in person. What worked for me was networking. By knowing someone who worked in the district, they put in a good word for me which helped me get an interview - the job wasn't guaranteed of course, but at least it got my foot in the door. If it's hard to network, inject as much personality into your cover letter while still being professional; every online application allowed me to upload a copy of my resume and my cover letter. Hope this helps! Good luck on the job hunt! :)
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