The experience sort of pushed to forefront a thought I’ve been having – how useful is all my speech? No doubt, teachers maintain their classroom environment and communicate most directly through speech, but much of what I’ve been learning and attempting to implement over the last few years is an environment in which students generate much of the input in class. I was catching up on a colleague’s blog (Steve Dembo, an educational techology pro) and read a post about busywork and read several cross-posts on the subject of schools considering dropping homework altogether. I started wondering how much of what we say in the classroom is busytalk? I guess being voiceless for one day made me realize how important my students’ voices are and how easy it can be at times to neglect them.

Brett

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