First of all, our school district got a new electronic system for everything. Attendance. Scheduling. Gradebook. PTO. Payroll. All that jazz. The best part about it, though? No one knows how to use it. Seriously. I wish I was joking. They've held "trainings" for the new system, but the "trainers" know just as little about the program as the rest of us because sat through "trainings" where they were taught nothing of significance.
Besides that, students have been in and out of my class for the past week while add/drop happens. Yep. I teach at a high school, but we still have add/drop as though it were a college. I've never seen so many kids complain about their schedule before becoming a teacher. I mean, when I was a student, I never in a million years thought, "Hmm, I don't like this teacher, let me switch." Or, "Hey, I need to change my schedule so I can eat with my boyfriend, or else I will die." I never knew I had the option of changing my schedule when I was in high school. Maybe, once we've all learned this new system, we can get scheduling done way early in the summer, send schedules out to students 2 weeks before school starts, and tell them they have the remainder of summer to fix whatever they don't like about their schedules. If they don't make the effort over summer to change things, then it wasn't that important to them to begin with.
I know. Wishful thinking....
But, the kicker to all of this is that I've been assigned a new course/prep. Not at the end of last school year. Not in the middle of summer. Not the week before school starts. But a week after school starts. Yep. And to top it off, its an AP course. In a content area I've never taught before!
Of all the social studies class, World has always been my least favorite. Probably because I had crappy World History teachers growing up, and I just never learned to love it. I've been spoiled these past 5 years with having nothing but US History. I'm going from teaching about 500 years of history to over 5000!
So, if you can imagine, when I found out Tuesday that all of this was happening, I entered into panic mode. My department head started looking up online resources for me, and the other teacher who teaches WHAP on campus gave me all of his files/resources. So I've had help. I seriously don't even want to think about what it would be like without their help. But it's still overwhelming. I feel like I'm a first-year teacher all over again....
But, you know what? I can do this.
I meet my little sophomores this morning. I hope they're up for the challenge too!
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