All Tricks, No Tweets: Looking Back at The School Year

At this time of year, I often the tweets from my classes as a way of summarizing the school year. However, I gradually realized that the way I was using Twitter was not effective and my classes and I stopped tweeting mid-year.

So I need another way to look back at the 2013-2014 school year and reflect. As the second week of summer break ends, I have the distance to look back and evaluate this year.

My daughter left for Africa just as the school year was starting. I was anxious and excited for her. Until she returned, I was not aware how those feelings weighed on me like thirty extra pounds.

It was hot when school started, and the heat didn’t leave. My three Freshman English classes (yes, three of them – that is probably a stressor, too) were in two different classrooms. One of these was so hot we started meeting in an air-conditioned science lab instead.

In early September, Chromebooks came to my classes! I had to figure out how to integrate them into our learning. The kids and I tried various strategies. It was clear that planning for Chromebooks took much more time. It took more than a month to discover approaches that worked. Although I spent the year adjusting and refining our use of Chromebooks, the first quarter was by far the most difficult.

In October, my daughter called at 6am to tell me there had been a terrorist attack at the shopping mall less than two kilometers from her apartment. That was when I started getting less sleep. Fortunately, that gave me more time to do the additional planning that Chromebooks required.

It was around that time that the behavioral issues in my last period class became problematic. One student would sabotage other students’ performances. Some students held it together all day long and, by last period, had no glue left. I had some very young and some very needy students. It was a less-than-perfect storm. I created some strong management structures to help them focus.

There were wonderful movements and it did get easier. The Chromebooks are very positive additions to the classroom. My classes were filled with great kids! Our wonderful teacher from the Czech Republic was a fantastic addition to our narrow Deerfield world.  My daughter came back to the states. We established a Chromebook routine.

Winter came, and we had more snow days than ever before. Earlier we were too hot. Now were too cold and there was a ton of snow. The schedule became a challenge when we missed a day, part of a day, or had to put a day back into the schedule!

Spring is always stressful, but it was more so this year. As kids register, courses fill or are dropped, and teachers receive their assignments. The quality of a year is strongly influenced by these decisions. The overall process was more painful and problematic than it has ever been in my twenty-eight years in the district. There were meetings upon meetings. Jobs were cut and then some reinstated. Courses were cut and some were brought back and some were combined. When I asked if we could get an outline of the process and the criteria by which these decisions were made, I was told it was not possible. No wonder our district is currently in turmoil.

Now it is summer, and I look toward next year. This cyclical process is one of the wonderful things about being a teacher. I get to try again. I get to expand on my successes and have another chance at my challenges. I do school planning in little bites each day. I spent an hour or so scheduling, reading, and of course, reflecting on how to make next year better.

Next year will be better. Next year is almost always better. And knowing about the bumps and bright spots from this year gives me even more tools to make 2014-2015, my twenty-ninth year at Deerfield High School, the best year yet.