Looking back, I can see how riding on this high took me through the first few weeks of school. Didn’t matter that I really didn’t know what I was doing, or that my summer training in no way reflected the situation I now found myself in. I was excited and flying high. I’d figure out whatever needed to be figured out and somehow, it would all eventually get better.
A few weeks in, maybe just three or four of them to be exact, I started to feel completely and utterly overwhelmed. I loved my kids. Loved, loved, loved my kids. But trying to find time to plan effectively for them day after day after day was increasingly seeming like an impossible task that I had no idea how I’d make it through. The first week out, I got an entire week of lesson plans done, had each class covered, and felt great. That kind of victory hasn’t happened since. I’m struggling at this point to figure out what in the heck I’m going to do with four separate groups (and grades) of kids for an hour that’s actually meaningful and will help them learn, versus just throwing something together that will actually ‘cover’ a total of sixty minutes until they leave and the next class comes in.
Sometimes it’s because in all of my planning and good intentions, I remember to bring home tons and tons of stuff from my classroom to help me with planning over the weekend, but manage to leave the very curriculum books that I specifically need to design the week’s instruction around… Really?? Augh. The best laid plans… Other times, it’s because I don’t get the weekly email about upcoming grade-level topics and lesson plans from the gen ed teachers until Sunday morning… even Sunday evening, sometimes. REALLY??? And I have to find a way to put together a very effective, very meaningful week’s worth of lesson plans for this grade’s class in how many hours?? Tomorrow starts a new day… a new week… and I’m so, so unprepared for it. I absolutely hate feeling like I’m flubbing with time – just doing ‘fillers’ with the kids until the dismissal bell rings at 3 and I’m ‘free’ for the day, but on weeks like this, that’s exactly what it feels like, and let me tell you – it sucks.
AND THEN… I try to keep myself organized (as much as I can with all this craziness going on around me, anyway) and write out all (alllllllllllllllll) the things that have to be done, and check them off as I complete them, and looking at the end result just makes my head spin. My first week, my To-Do lists were like, one page. Regular-sized writing and all, everything I had to get done basically fit on that one page and I found that I was crossing out completed tasks with some very comforting sense of regularity. Then the emails started coming. I open my school email during the first week of school and I have like, maybe 4 messages. Come week two, I’m at about 20+ A DAY. And each one of them is from someone new that I don’t know, telling me that I’ve got to complete some paper or training or whatever that I knew nothing about previously, and that was nowhere on my existing, already two-paged To-Do list. Literally, I get to the point where I don’t even want to check my school email during this time, because the demands that I find in there are just soooo overwhelming in addition to everything else that I already have to find a way to do. This is C.R.A.Z.Y. !!!!!
By weeks three and four, I had a To-Do list of a solid three pages, with even more things to be done written in the margins and on any other tiny spot of unused white space there might have been… and worse yet, NO CROSS OUT MARKS. Oh, my goodness…. Talk about feeling like you’re treading water??? At this point, I feel like I’m doing all I can, doing all I know how to do, and I can hardly keep my head above water. I’m getting up early and staying up late trying to get these things completed. I’m working all day with the kids and the moment I get home, instead of spending quality time with my family, I’m emptying out the never-ending contents of my massive teacher bags and trying to get stuff done – planning, online workshops, etc… and before I know it, it’s way past time to go to bed so I can get up and do the same thing all over again, tomorrow. When the weekend finally does come, I’m spending every single day of it pouring over planning materials, trying to work schedules and group divisions and reading levels, and it flies by so fast that I barely even realize how little time I’ve spent with my family in the interim. I look up and it’s already Sunday night, already time to get ready for a fresh week of this new dance that’s consuming my life, and I can barely remember even feeling like I ever had a ‘weekend off’ to begin with. Most times, honestly, I feel like I’m drowning in the river of stuff that has to be done (in ADDITION to teaching my kids daily), and I just don’t know if I’ll make it through this with any semblance of sanity. Mmm Hmmm… This must be what they’re talking about when they mention the Survival Stage.
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