2nd period - prep
3rd period - Immigration (team taught with the language arts teacher)
4th period - Online learning
5th period - World Geography

1st thing.  I need to clean my desk and organize/file my papers left from last trimester.  This needs to be done soon... like in April.

This is looking to be a bear of a trimester.  Team teaching a class with Lisa, our language arts teacher, will cut down on the hours I spend writing curriculum, but that is balanced with a rather huge class that has potential to be a bit unruly.  Unless they bump me up to 1.0 fte, I don't think I'll be all that interested in team teaching next year.

Online learning is about the same as last trimester, but with mostly new students.  Some of them have yet to realize that even though they don't have work they need to turn in every day that if they don't make some progress every day that they will find at the end of the trimester that they spent a ton of time in class for no credit.

World Geography.... I was looking forward to this class, but it is looking to be my most headache-inducing class for the tri.  I've got about 20 students enrolled, but I don't think I've had more than about 10 in class on any given day.  You would think that that would make for a nice intimate classroom, but that class of 10 is turning out to be as much of a handful as my more difficult classes of 20+ in Geography last tri.  Maybe a third of the students are interested/capable of putting in some effort and doing a good job.  The other two thirds simply don't give a damn and could make it difficult for everybody else.  We'll see.  The progress we've made so far has been pretty pathetic.  I'm going to need to figure out something to jumpstart that class.

I also started volunteering with the distance crew of the track team today.  This, I think, may be what saves the day for me on a regular basis.  I'll probably only be at practice about three days each week, but getting out and running with (normal) students can only be a good thing I think.  I'm not getting paid at all since all the assistant positions are filled, but having a trimester's worth of volunteering with one of the sports teams will look good on my resume and probably make it more likely that I'd get hired as an assistant in the future.

Tonight I am fighting off the urge to hit the sack early (speed work on the track is really tiring) since I am having my third classroom observation tomorrow and I'm not quite finished with prep for that class.  I also need to finish putting things together for the rest of the week for Geography.  No late night, please.  We'll see.

Simple pleasure - that good tired feeling in my legs
Peace