Almost two weeks into the new school year, I'm finally feeling like I will be able to actually teach my students. Why is that you ask? Well, as many of my fellow secondary teachers will tell you, it seems that scheduling of students is a very imprecise science. This means that students schedules can be changed numerous times with very little warning to the student and the teacher.
On Tuesday of this past week, I received ten new students that had previously not been on my team. My fifth period class of students was changed to my 2nd and 4th period class (Language Arts and History), whereas most of my 2nd period students were changed into my 5th period class (Language Arts only). This was to accommodate our new GATE program so that I would have the GATE identified students for both Language Arts and History. I agree with the change, but it would have made so much more sense to have everything in place on the first day of school.
I thought everything was going to finally settle down, only to discover on Thursday that I was losing about 10 students to the other team. Due to a scheduling error, these students were not given P.E., which is against California's education code. Again, why wasn't this caught prior to the start of school? I do not know.
All of the students who were completely removed from their teacher's classroom will have to play catch-up,trying to pick up midstream as any information they may have missed. As we all know, when a kid comes in unsure of what to expect in class can create chaos - for themselves and their teacher.
While I'm glad that the changes occurred now instead of a month later (as happened to me two years ago), I still don't understand why the scheduling process cannot be more streamlined and less chaotic, for both the student (most importantly) and the teacher.
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3 comments:
What a nightmare! You practically have to reteach all of your policies and procedures with that many new kids. It will be nice to finally get into the groove.
All these kids with no PE were probably hoping to fly under the radar. Probably some damn secretary noticed it, and doomed them.
Oh how I can relate! We just now (2 weeks into school) got approval for another 8th grade science teacher because our science classes were so full (38-41 kids in most)-- so now it will take 2-3 weeks until we GET this teacher then a bunch of the 8th grade teachers will be moved (one hopes just across periods but you know it won't all be that easy).
And we are still getting all the new kids whose parents forgot to wake up and realize that schools in our district (as are most in California these days) started the week BEFORE Labor Day -- we we all end up reteaching class rules and procedures over again (well always really).
I really do not know why the schools can't get this together -- every year we just all have to automatically plan NOT to teach content for at least 2 weeks.
And yet we have all those standards -- one of them should be "Teachers will fill the first two weeks with meaningful material that isn't content so they can accomodate late coming and schedule-changed students."
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