I am someone who generally stays busy. I like it that way, I get bored if I don’t have much to do, and there are a lot of things that I want to do. I’m teaching full time, and I’m doing my master’s in Elementary Education. As a TFA Graduate Fellow, I’m also pursuing Creative Writing Club, which I organize and lead once every week. I’m also training for a half marathon in February. That sounds like a lot of things going on, but I’ve been able to hold it all down so far this school year.
I have strong time management skills, which I learned in college. For my first two years of college, I was studying design and my program required a lot of work outside of classes. I got used to spending most of my time working on schoolwork. I managed to do fine in school, but had little life outside of school. When I transferred to Western Michigan University, I immediately picked up more work, because my classwork required less time outside of class. I worked at least two jobs the entire time I attended WMU, and I worked three jobs in my last year of college, during which I also completed my honors thesis.
I don’t say this to brag – I would have been much happier during college if I had worked less and devoted more time to things that make me happy.
Right now, I often take work home with me – grading, entering merits and demerits, and calling parents are the tasks that I’m frequently doing at home. I sometimes stay late after school as well. In December, I experimented with coming to school an hour early to prepare everything for the day, which helped, but I ended up spending eleven hours at school every day, which is unsustainable for me.
The best change I can make is making the best use of my time during the school day, so that I’m minimizing the work I take home.
This means getting the most out of every second of my planning time. I have two planning periods – 10:40 – 11:12, and 1:45 – 2:35. In the first semester, I spent my first planning period getting coffee, eating lunch, talking with other teachers, and sometimes grading exit tickets from my first class. The conversations with other teachers were important – talking with my co-teacher about the things that went well in the lesson we were teaching in the previous block. I spent the second planning period checking in with students who earned a referral, and having conversations I needed to have with administrators, then working on grading or planning my lesson for the next day.
Here are the shifts I’m going to experiment with in January.
First, I will plan out my lessons further in advance. In the first half of the year, we had numerous curriculum changes, and we were often planning the night before we were teaching a lesson. This is ineffective as both an instructional planning strategy and in a time management strategy. This semester, I will plan out the following week of lessons before I leave school on Friday, which will give me more time to make my teacher copies and have more effective planning for each lesson.
Second, I will prioritize working on grading exit tickets and creating my teacher copy for the next day during my planning period. It’s reasonable for me to complete my first class of exit tickets during my first planning period, while still having time to get a cup of coffee and eat my lunch. In my second planning period, I should have time to complete my second class of exit tickets, then create my teacher copy for the next day. If I’m done with both of those tasks, I will enter merits and demerits. I will enter my merits and demerits, and call parents right after I get off dismissal duty, and I’m setting a goal: Leaving work by 4:45 every day. If I need to call some parents from home, that’s okay, but that should be the only thing that I’m taking home with me.