Ahh, September. The air is hot and the backpacks are full. Let the mania begin. As I started the school year, I quickly realized that taking the entire month of August off and coming back with only one day to prepare, which time I mostly spent in a futile fight against jet lag, put me back several days in preparation terms. But at least while all my fellow teachers were sitting in staff meetings I was paddling around a lake in Hyde Park, London. Hopefully they donated the abundance of staff meeting handouts to the recycling cause.
Since I discussed the difference between quantitative and qualitative data today, I thought I’d share some of the former with you:
185 – number of students in my five classes
38 – students in each of my AP Biology sections
36 - seats available
84 - number of students whose names I’ve learned in 3 weeks
972 - the number of paper assignments (mostly multi-page) that have been turned during the past 2 weeks. I haven’t counted the actual number of pages but I think it’s worth one medium-sized pine tree. This doesn’t include the 144 papers I’ve been able to grade.
0 – the number of TA’s I currently have
35 - minutes given for lunch (two lunches a week are devoted to help sessions)
4 - number of days I worked straight through lunch (didn’t eat my lunch until after 3:00pm – that’s why I’m so skinny!!)
27 - emails received in one day via school email. Seven of those were from teachers looking to giveaway desks, file cabinets, etc. Why are we using school email for classified ads?
5 – number of times I was asked “Didn’t you get my email?” for not completing some task I was supposed to. Most of these were within hours of the email being sent
11 – number of kids this week who, after being absent, asked “What did I miss?” despite my exhaustive measures to equip them with a calendar and have them write everything down in it
51 – hours spent in the classroom this week. This does not include the following, all of which I did this week: watched two water polo and volleyball games, worked at the scoreboard for one football game (and I graded papers in-between quarters), Back-to-School night (30min. prep time, 1.5hours with parents), and spent about 9 hours at home writing tests and creating assignments.
I plan to spend 4-5hours tomorrow (Saturday) in my classroom cleaning out the cupboards, setting up a lab for Monday, attending the Science Academy picnic on campus (to help my Kinesiology students’ presentation), making copies, creating the weekly schedule for two classes, and grading as many of those 972 papers as is humanly possible.
35 – number of hours the district will pay me for this week and every week of my career
And my triathlon club wonders where I am . . .
Brett, the Overwhelmed
