Wednesday, October 17, 2007

A Happy Planning Coincidence

This must be the first blog entry I've written in over three weeks.
Life's been very busy here. At the moment I'm working every evening from
Monday to Thursday as well as a French class and my staff fellowship
group once a week.

I've been constantly chasing my ideal lesson planning target of being a
whole week ahead of myself i.e. working on lesson plans for the
following week whilst teaching lessons prepared the previous week. It's
been tiring and often unenjoyable but this week I've found myself int he
very happy position of having all of my lessons planned for this current
week and being a substantial way into next week's planning. This is
through no merit of my own but by sheer coincidence as this week's
lesson have been mainly end-of-unit summaries/questions and tests,
requiring less preparation, and next week I have three fewer lessons to
teach due to the Friday being part of the mid-term break.

All the tests have now been sat and marked and I've subsequently
realised a few gaps in my teaching which is a little discouraging. I
have however been making very good progress time-wise and am ahead of
schedule in all the year groups so I can afford to take time later in
the term to fill in the gaps.

I've been making flapjack tonight whilst doing lesson prep. In the
process I realised my kitchen scales are completely useless when I
placed a 200g pack of butter on them only to read a value of 10g back.
It's a good job I weighed the sugar exactly when I bought it from the
school kitchen and the oats came in handily sized and weighted packs. I
had to guess the golden syrup but I've made it enough times before to
make a reasonable estimate I think. It feels strange talking about
'weight' in such an inexact and incorrect manner now that I'm a science
teacher, especially having just taught a unit on gravity to year 9.

Hopefully my planning will continue to go well and I'll be able to take
the whole weekend off work. I could do with some real rest and I'm not
down to perform any duties on Sunday. Even more than that I hope that
I'll be in a position in a week's time to be able to go away for
mid-term break without having to worry at all about the next week's
lessons. I still need to book accommodation for the weekend off; I think
I'll be going to the WEC guesthouse in Dakar as it's cheap and has ADSL.
I'm not a big fan of Dakar shopping so I'll probably just chill at the
guesthouse and enjoy ice cream and fast Internet access.

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