Busy and exhausting week

I had two days of school this week. We are on block scheduling so I met three of my classes on Thursday (one block was for planning) and two of my classes on Friday (the other two blocks on Friday were a duty and a common planning block with my freshman team members). We alternate days - Red and White Days. My honors classes are going to be fine. I have no major concerns with those kids. There are a few of kids that I question whether or not they should be in an Honors class but for the most part, they are pretty good kids. My college prep classes are a bit more of a concern. Two of the college preps, I have a SPED teacher and ELL teacher in the room with me because I have thirty kids in each of those classes. I need heavy support in those classes. Spanish is the prominent language for the ELL kids. I wanted diversity so I definitely got it! Overall, the kids are really nice. I haven't smiled a lot. I need to show them that I have the control of the classroom. I can always ease up in my classroom discipline. You can't go the other way - it's good to be tough now!

I've been trying to stay late and get my classroom somewhat organized and ready for the school year. I was told to not get to comfortable because after the holidays in December, all the freshman teams are being moved out to the modular classrooms (which are a nicer set-up). My current classroom has no windows, chalkboards instead of whiteboards, and the air quality is pretty stifling. I've already mentioned in a previous post that the technology is pretty much non-existent in this school. My previous school was die hard into technology so I feel like I've gone back in time about ten years. Email isn't even encouraged at this school so everything that is given to us is in paper format. It's such a waste of time and trees. Also, I have no LCD projector for my PowerPoints. I tried pricing them out but the cheapest I can find is one for $699! Way too much money for me to spend. I've been using my laptop (which still works). I bought it when I was working at Timberlane since they had no computers for teachers. I pretty much stopped using the laptop once I got to Newburyport.

Here are a few pictures of what my room looks like at this point:

I don't like my desks in rows (unless for testing) so I tend to change the desks quite a bit. Currently, they are in a semi-circle for discussions. I had to squish thirty desks in to a small space so I could have enough desks for all my classes.

This is my area -desk, personal stuff, filing cabinet, etc.

I currently have 120 students on my classload. The numbers may change a bit the next week - either up or down. I'm hoping down! That's a lot of correcting to get done! I haven't had this high of classload since my Timberlane days. I guess I got spoiled at my last teaching job! :-)

I just wanted to check in - as mentioned before, I will not have a ton of time this first month to blog so I thought I would just give a quick post to let everyone know that I'm surviving the school year so far.