Ugh, I feel like a student again. It was almost exactly 2 years ago that I was in almost this exact situation, spending 12 hours at the library several days in a row working on my capstone project, the dreaded Teacher Work Sample. Well, this time it's not my TWS, but I'm here, spending the day at the library (public) trying to get stuff done. My big project right now is trying to get my portfolio ready for my JPAS. I forget what that stands for, but basically my principal will pop in unannounced a couple times one week to observe me and then within a few days she'll conduct an interview to check and see how I'm doing with the unobservable stuff, you know, like lesson planning and assessing. Well, my school is piloting a new form of this observation and it's super duper in depth. We have to have textual and physical/pictural evidence for thirteen different indicators. Doesn't sound that bad, does it? Well, each indicator has several different parts to it, and yesterday I was at school for about 7 hours and got like 2 indicators done, maybe. And I promise that I didn't get distracted playing Candy Crush Saga or reading House of Hades. Ugh. The good thing is that it'll really only be this first time that it's a real killer. We get "JPAS-ed" twice a year, once in the fall, then again in the winter/spring. It happens twice a year for the first three years of teaching while you're a "provisional" teacher and then it only happens every 2 or 3 years or something after that, I'm not sure, I'll worry about it when I get to that point. For now I just know that I need to be worrying about it twice a year for the next 3 years. But this first time I'll get everything kind of figured out and get the foundation of it all done, and next semester I'll just have to tweak and add stuff.
Part of me really likes feeling like a student again, and then another part of me is like, "What the heck? I have a degree! I should not have to be doing this much work like when I was a student!" And then I remember...I'm a teacher. When I signed up for this job I signed up to be both a teacher and a student forever. But, that's part of why I found it appealing. I love learning. I love doing. I love helping.
Well, congrats if you made it through this boring post. It was mostly just for me to have a quick brain break before getting back to work. Don't worry though, there will be many more posts about my professional life. Hopefully not boring ones though. Hopefully lots of funny ones. And maybe sometimes I'll let you step inside my classroom and see exactly what we do in 6th grade. It's pretty great.
P.S. Currently getting obsessed with American Authors. They've got some catchy tunes.
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