Summer Work

1:55

Hellooo!  I’m here!  I know I completely dropped the ball on this blog, but I am now picking it back up.  There are three main reasons.

1)  I am going to keep a log of the hours I spend doing school work for a year.  I am inspired by Charles Ripley, the 2,000 hours guy.  He is logging all the hours he spends doing school-related stuff, and he figures it will be well over the 2,000 hours of a 40-hour-per-week worker.  So what the heck.  Today is the first Monday of summer vacation.  NOT including writing this blog post, I did 1 hour and 55 minutes worth of work today.  That’s the number at the top of the post – not what time I wrote or posted this entry.

I worked on my objectives for my instructional units, I started planning out the calendar for the 2011-2012 school year, and I participated in an online planning session with a group of physics teacher bloggers for a summer workshop we are putting together for ourselves.  It feels really good to have worked on this stuff already.  I really hope to keep up the momentum and start the year with a well-thought-out plan, rather than starting with a hastily thrown-together plan as sometimes happens.

2) I truly do plan to spend the summer planning, at least in between trips and events and stuff.  I hope this blog will be a place where I can work out some ideas and get some feedback from other teachers.  I plan to ask questions.  I hope some of you can answer.

3) In 2011-2012 there will be some big differences in my daily job.  I’m going to be teaching double my usual number of AP students, for example.  I’m going to have to work out some labs where we just don’t have enough equipment, so that half the class does one lab and half does a different lab, and then they switch.  That will be challenging.  I’ll be able to report on how well that works out.  Interestingly, in my class of over 20 AP students for next year, there are only 2 girls signed up.  This past year I had ZERO girls, and the year before that I had six girls and six boys.  I do not know why the numbers are so screwy.

Also, I am going from teaching three sections of our “conceptual” level physics 1 class to three sections of our “honors” level physics 1 class.  Those aren’t the names we use, but we have three levels of first-year physics and I will be teaching our highest level for the first time in nine years.  That will be interesting.  Especially since I plan to implement standards-based grading (SBG) with them.

So, I hope you will read what I have to say and give advice.  I know I’ve been at this for 18.5 years now, but I figure I can always learn something new!