Teacher Work Day

Today, LPS had no school for a teacher in-service. Last Friday ended the semester, and the district gives teachers a work day to get caught up on grading. I thought that today would seem long and boring, but in fact, my day was quite full.

The administrators made breakfast for us first thing in the morning. The pancakes were delicious and were a great way to start the day! At breakfast, I ran into Marti (Christensen) Blecha, a girl I knew from my home town. She is also student teaching at Lux with the Speech-Language pathologist. That run-in was certainly unexpected!

After breakfast, we headed to an ordering meeting. My teacher and I sat down with the other 6th grade Language Arts teachers to order supplies for next year. I like office supplies, and I thought this meeting would be fun, but it was actually kind of stressful! My role was typing in item numbers on the Office Depot website and trying to find the cheapest price for the supplies the teachers needed. I learned a lot about working with limited financial resources from this meeting!

After that meeting, we headed up to the media center to do some planning with the media specialist. For the next eight weeks, my sixth graders will be working on research projects. In addition, they will be learning things like writing thesis statements, writing good paragraphs, using main ideas and supporting details, making citations, and Internet reliability. It was very tricky to make lesson plans for the next eight weeks, but it needed to be done in order to reserve the computer labs for the times we needed! I learned that reserving computers is a scheduling nightmare, and must be done very far in advance. I equate teachers signing up for computers to soccer moms on Black Friday; they elbow and shove until they get what they want, and it is kind of nuts!

After the lunch break, I spent most of my time grading theme tests and entering scores into the computer. I am actually really enjoying grading because it is giving me a better idea of the variety of abilities of my students. Also, I feel like I can kind of get to know them through their writing. The stack of papers to grade easily grows very high! I'm excited for students to come back to school tomorrow, but that stack of papers that is yet to be graded seems daunting! I have a feeling that this weekend might be the first time that I bring work home with me!