Today was the first day back at work for me. With the new book materials, new classes, new schedule, and new students, I expected it to be a lot more difficult than it actually was. Instead of great fear and loathing, I was on easy street again, since we went out of our way to pick good books for our classes once again. The only problem is, of course, knowing what to do when lacking a syllabus, any sort of directions, or knowing what you should be doing in each class.
The only thing I was handed today was a schedule of classes, a book list, and a set of homework guidelines. My director mad a speech before we started classes to explain the situation with the previous classes last month. She said that while the students were very happy with their books and homework, the mothers were not. It seems that students were finishing their homework too early, and the mothers wanted much, much more. At least an hour per class for each teacher. Figure some of our kids are in school for five to six hours a week, and that’s a substantial amount of work to be assigned. Our homework guidelines bordered on the sadistic, but our director admitted that other schools were doing more work than we were. We must shrink the homework gap!
Everything else was supposed to be left to me. We are sharing multiple books across multiple teachers in multiple classes through the day. I went into classes as the first teacher twice today, which means that I had to give the students books, as well as start the lessons. Since I was first, I was setting the pace. I was careful not to go too far. I was only told what to do in two of my three classes. In the third, no one told me how much I was supposed to be doing. I started the first lesson like usual and went on to assign homework.
Only after I had finished the lesson was I told that all the other teachers would be using the book as well, and that they had divided the book up into sections. Even though I was the first teacher, I only wasn’t assigned the first section of the book. Since they didn’t tell me what the sections were before I went into class, I was teaching the wrong stuff! The next teacher had to shift all their work around because the head teacher forgot to tell me what I was supposed to be doing. I actually had to go back into class and assign more homework too, since I didn’t torture the students enough.
Other than that slight debacle, the classes were very easy to teach, and I had new students to interact with and meet. For the first day of classes, it was relatively painless.
