The last week (or two) have been hectic. Any educator knows that no matter how organized, prepared and equipped you are, the end of a marking period is always met with the chaos of collecting last-minute turn-ins, late night grading and hours pouring over comments on report cards. The last two years have added in the workload of gathering materials for kids headed to quarantine and collecting and catching up those returning from weeks of virtual learning (which, even at its best is far from the instruction they receive in school).
In addition, the end of a marking period also necessitates the beginning of a new one and is more often the case that I feel it should be, that means generating, finding, collecting, copying and planning for lessons and materials for the upcoming weeks. As we continue our shift to standards-based grading, this means the added work of creating assessments to support our standards in addition to modifying the lessons used to teach them.
Which is a long way of saying I’m exhausted.
Today, the day before Thanksgiving, I have been at school since 7am to work on my lengthy to-do list. My colleague urged me not to come in, to just “take the time” for myself, but there’s no way. I was awake until late last night with ideas and plans running through my head. So far, in the four hours I’ve been at school, I have finished entering grades and comments for one of my two classes. I had hoped to only stay for the morning, but I haven’t even begun to prepare my lessons for next week.
And while I can appreciate the importance of reporting student progress and providing meaningful comments for guardians, I really want to get to my lesson planning. It feels, lately, like that’s what I have the least amount of time for, despite it being the most meaningful work I should be doing. I would love to set aside all other priorities and just focus on creating engaging, purposeful, differentiated lessons, but if I can’t assess student learning then I can’t adapt my instruction to meet the needs of my learners. And so, I need to spend significant time working on those assessments.
Sigh. It’s the role of an educator, I know, and while I don’t want to be completely removed from the process, nor do I want someone so far removed from the classroom to decide for me what I will assess and how, I do wish I could free up some of this energy and time for the things that I really need to be focused on. I recently contacted a literacy coach for some support as my team moves forward into our next set of essential standards and she responded with several resources I could consider and use to guide me. It’s all helpful, but it doesn’t diminish the work load on my part in getting the assessments done.
And, to boot, we are continually assured that all of these assessments and standards will be “in flux” and “evolving” which, again, I can appreciate, but does little to motivate me to put significant work into supporting these chosen standards with engaging lessons and materials if they are perhaps, likely to change.
The struggle is real, as they say. And today, a day when I should be at worst raking leaves and at best playing cards and eating an early helping of pie, I am at school, putting everything I have into my profession. Maybe, just maybe, if I keep my nose to the grindstone, by late this afternoon I will actually get into designing some of the lessons that are playing about in my head. We can only hope.
Teaching at 3am 