[Before I do, though, in order to get a better idea where I'm coming from, you might want to check out this story I heard on the radio (internet actually) this morning about a teacher in the Parker, CO area who recently quit due to the workload.]
I mentioned earlier that the start-up workload was pretty significant here as it is everywhere. The school principals ("first program" - that is, elementary -- and middle school and the high school prinicipal are Koreans and have been less visible than I'm used to but there are western "heads of school", or directors, at each of those levels. I'm reporting to the middle school division and my director is Ben Scoville and I also teach some high school classes where the director is Malcolm Harrison. There is also a FP (first program) director David Hill who I don't have much contact with.
These guys were previously teachers themselves but as the school has grown they've taken on more responsibility and this year they don't have any direct teaching duties, just supervising us teachers. They are quite professional and have extremely high expectations of us as I've been used to in my entire teaching experience.
So the start-up work was significant but that's now behind me even though I didn't meet my own expectations for the "Assignment" (steroidal syllabus) for my classes it is what it is and we seem to be moving on. I think it's only reasonable that things improve with your experience and everyone seems to be onboard with that reality even though we pretend that we all know exactly what we're doing from the get-go.
Now that we've settled more into the daily routine I can note these differences: First of all, the schedule is just crazy here, as in, completely inconsistent. I think that's because scheduling is a tricky business to get all the different students lined up with the different teachers in the appropriate courses and they just haven't figured out how to do it here in the way I'm accustomed to, which is that a given class meets for a consistent time period throughout the week even if it isn't every day. I'll paste an image of my typical weekly schedule below, which I have to check constantly throughout the course of the day to see what class will be coming through the door next and even when my next class is since I'm nowhere near having my schedule memorized:
Each day starts at 8:00 with "House" where our house (8B) meets in my room for 10 minutes since the main house teacher for our house (Ms. Van Liew) is a music teacher and her room is not in the middle school wing and isn't as appropriate for a house meeting. I'm the "co-house" teacher which means I'm supposed to have other duties behind the scenes related to checking on student grades and progress on their projects and counseling them and communicating with parents.
After that anything could happen. Each of my courses has a code on my schedule, so I have two 8th grade science classes called "8A" and "8B" and you can see that they meet at various times throughout the week, for a total of four 50 minute sessions during a full week. My two environmental science sections are coded "ES A" and "ES B" and you can see their scheduled meeting times above as well. They meet 3 times for 75 minutes each time. Then there are several other sporadically recurring events: every Monday and Wednesday we have "co-curricular" from 2:45 to 4:00 (used to be called extra-curricular so it's coded "EC" on my calendar but since it technically takes place during the school day and they call it co-curricular in HS we've just started calling it co-curricular as well). On Mondays after school (starting tomorrow) I'll take an optional beginning Korean class with Mr. Kim, our Korean Korean teacher (a Korean teacher who teaches Korean). I've met and chatted with him a few times and he's very nice and I'm looking forward to expanding on my 6 currently known phrases ("hello", "thanks", 2 forms of "goodbye" depending on who is leaving whom, and 'yes' and 'no'.)
Tuesdays each week we have our division (middle school) meeting from 4-5 and Thursday we have our department (science) meeting during the same time period. Fridays we get out early at 3:00.
The reason all my classes show up twice on the schedule (once in my personal calendar color, the light blue, and once in their own class color) has to do with the fact that we're a highly Google-oriented shop so we're using Google Classroom (not to mention Google Docs, Sheets, Drawings, etc... Everything Google all the time!) and when we set up our classes in Google Classroom we got a calendar for them which we added all the class meetings to so the kids who are members of the class can see their schedule but I had to "invite" myself to all of them so they'd show up on my personal (blue) schedule as well so that anyone who is trying to schedule an ad-hoc meeting can know when various attendees will be available. As I said, it's all quite complicated. Luckily I have some experience with software and web tools in general and Google in particular otherwise I think I'd have thrown up my hands and quit a while ago.
I suppose I could have turned off those classroom calendars when I took the snip of my calendar to reduce confusion but I didn't think about that and I don't want to go back and do it again now or my explanation above will be for naught.
The little numbers in the various class meeting times are the numbers of the "lesson" and correspond to the "Assignment" document we had to print and hand out to students during the first class to show them everything that would happen all term long and exactly when and what would be due and how it would be scored. So "ES B 9" means environmental science section B lesson 9, for instance.
In addition to the classes, and the meetings, my schedule also shows other activities. I've already mentioned "House" each morning where we sort of check in with all the students and show some news clips and make announcements and on Friday there is a trivia contest based on the week's news clips but you don't compete by house! No no no that would be too easy! You have to compete by "Dalton Cup" team which I've mentioned previously. In the middle school there is one 5th grade house (yes middle school starts in 5th grade here), one sixth grade house, two 7th grade houses (7A and 7B) and two 8th grade houses (8A and 8B). I'm part of 8B. This has to do with the way the school is growing. When they get more than 20 kids in a single grade they break it up into subsections. That's why we have 12 students in each of the two grade 8 sections. But while each house comprises a single grade level, and there are a total of 6 of them, there are four Dalton Cup teams and those members are spread across the grade levels as a way for students to get to know students at other grade levels throughout the year. Dalton Cup teams ("Phoenix" - of which I'm a co-coach along with David Brenner, "Cheongna", "Korea", and something else I can't remember at the moment) compete throughout the year in various things like sports (we're currently doing kickball), Friday trivia - which got me started on this tangent - and maybe other things. I guess I'll find out as we go along. Long story short, I'm in the 8B house but I have students there from each of the Dalton Cup teams on the Friday trivia they're all playing for their Dalton Cup teams, not their house.
"Lab" is supposed to be a central element of "The Dalton Plan" but while we talk about it here it get preempted by just about everything. Theoretically it's a half hour period (12:20-12:50) following lunch when all the teachers are in their classrooms and students can go around essentially getting tutoring from whomever they want. But during this term (and term 3 and 4) when we'll be doing Dalton Cup activities those will take place during lab time so in effect there won't be lab on Tuesdays and Thursdays without special advance planning (and we all know how likely that is!). Add in the fact that I have a mutant schedule on Wednesdays when I have a HS class just before lunch (running over into the MS lunch period) and therefore no time for lab, and now my lunch detention duty (alternates between supervising lunch detention and supervising recreating kids - who haven't elected to go to lab - in the gym or outside on the field) has been switched from Thurs to Fri, and my only actual availability for lab most weeks is on Monday.
(Note that there is no actual detention duty on Fridays since detention doesn't happen on Fridays for some reason - I think I was told the reason and promptly forgot it along with a slew other other things I was told that day - which is fine with me because lunch detention is the most boring duty as it consists of monitoring kids sitting in desks in a classroom to make sure they aren't doing anything or making any noise - not that watching kids running around doing stuff and making noise in a gym is any more exciting)
Let's see, what have I missed? Oh yes, "JP" stands for "Junior Project" which is some class all the kids are signed up for having to do with the fact that we're supposed to be a highly "project based" school so kids are supposed to be doing projects in all their classes (I'm calling my labs my projects to get out of that additional requirement) and thankfully I'm not a primary resource for the Junior Project project so I'm just supposed to be available at those times and so far I haven't had to do anything but I've probably just jinxed myself now and I'm expecting the stuff to hit the fan next week regarding JP. Eventually they're all supposed to upload all their projects to the internet to create their own digital portfolios.
So the days are long, but most have had plenty of free time so far. Tuesdays are my most highly scheduled as you can see from the calendar. The hardest thing to adjust to is the inconsistent nature of the schedule. True, every week is the same, but every day is different. Look at class "ES B" for example. They're the green color on my calendar. They meet first thing on Monday (after House), after lunch on Tuesday, and mid-morning on Thursday. It keeps me guessing.
There's another thing I forgot to mention: at the end of each Tue and Thur is something called SSR (for "Silent Sustained Reading"). Apparently our kids are supposed to be very strong in math (according to our MAP - "measures of academic progress" - testing: the local version of PARCC) though you can't tell it from my 8th graders who don't seem to know how to write the equation of a line of best fit from their scatter-plots judging by their first labs I've just finished grading and weak in reading, so we're supposed to try to get them to read more and this SSR 20 minutes at the end of each Tue, Thur is when they do that, using an online site called Newsela (News: ELA - get it? ELA stands for English Language Acquisition). EINWA (Education Is Nothing Without Acronyms). Again I digress. They do SSR back in their house rooms (so my room for 8B) and I haven't bothered to put it on my schedule since it's one of the relative constants.
We're a 1-1 Chromebook shop for our kids and have just finished handing out all the Chromebooks to them. They're stored in a special locker in my room where they can be plugged in for charging because the kids aren't supposed to take them out of the building. So that's another routine: each morning now all my house kids are supposed to come in and get their assigned Chromebook out of the charging locker and get their case which has the same number on it from one of the cabinets in my science lab and keep those with them and return them at the end of the day and plug them back in for charging.
Bottom Line: there are a lot of moving parts to this operation. I haven't decided yet if that's a good thing or a bad thing. I think all the individual initiatives have merit and the attempts at consistency make sense (oh yeah, all MS students are supposed to have the same binders for each class, color-coded for the subject - science is green! - and we're supposed to do binder-checks to make sure they're being used correctly) but it's a bit overwhelming. And combined with the freakishly inconsistent schedule I feel like it takes a very mature, organized computer genius to even meet the minimum requirements to begin trying to be a teacher here. Luckily, I'm that relatively mature, extremely organized, highly-experienced software user who happens to also be masochistic enough to continue trying to be a teacher (for now). Maybe that's why I got an offer!
And while I have 2 new preps and theoretically a longer official work day (although I just realized we were supposed to be at DSA every day -- except Friday -- until at least 3:20 for tutoring, and some days we had meetings until 4:00 maybe I'm wrong about that) I have plenty of "planning time" during most days (so far) but the BIG DIFFERENCE is having a total of 33 students currently (12 in each of my 8th grade science classes and two section of HS environmental science - one with 3 students and one with 5. That makes a HUGE difference in the amount of time I spend grading and makes classes much more relaxed from a classroom management standpoint.
Signing off now in preparation for another week of labor and wishing all my peeps back in the States a fine Labor(less) Day! -- Chris
P.S. I just remembered (in setting my alarm for tomorrow morning and realizing I didn't have to set it at all because it's constantly set for 6:30 a.m. now, whereas there was only one day a week I could set it that late in previous years, and that was only if Max and I weren't doing "Einstein's Fridays") that my 2 minute walking commute this year is a huge stress-reducer as well, just FYI. I haven't had it this good since my commute was downstairs to my living room during the early days of DataNet. But that came with its own attendant stresses.
