Week 1: Down

I have officially survived my first week of real teaching. Survived is the most appropriate word I can think of to use here. Unlike in my student teaching, I'm not ahead w/ lesson plans by any stretch of imagination. On the contrary, I still don't know what I'm doing on Monday in my 9th grade classes. Though this is quite stressfull, it's the best I can do, seeing as I've been thrown in mid-year and had no advance warning of what to prepare to teach.

This week has been hard: really hard. I definatly have done the "I don't think I can do this" thing, along with the "I'm so stressed I'm physically sick" thing. To give you an idea, this past Tuesday was the first time in memory that I was actually glad/relieved to go to the U and wanted to be there instead of teaching. As the week has progressed, both of those feelings have subsided somewhat. I'm starting to get the flow of things, I think the students are starting to get the hang of me and my style, and I'm not dead (which is a big plus).

I've been staying at school working until about 7pm and then come home and figure out what's going on. For some reason I plan better at home; maybe because it's familiar and comfortable. But that makes things more complicated as I have to transfer computer files and do last minute preperations the morning of.

All I have to do is get thru one more week like that and then I get 3 days off for mid-winter break. That break is hopefully going to give me the time I need both to survive and to begin to get ahead as far as lesson planning goes, but we shall see.