As one of eight (nine if you count the principal) new staff members in the building, I had an extra meeting the first week of the school. I sat next to the new school counselor. My new school has a full time school counselor! That is exciting enough, as I have never worked in a building where this was true. But she also has two years of experience working for social services and two years building a positive culture back into a school where students had been told there were "no rules". She has a solid plan for how to help social emotional learning in the building, and is going to be teaching an advisory class once a week to every middle schooler. This is an amazing amount of support that I've never had on the social emotional side of working with kids. I like to think I've done more than okay with it on my own, but I can't wait to see what's possible with all of the above in place.
Before and after the meetings scheduled for last week I put together my new space, and tried to get to know a few of my new colleagues. I am proud of my new space and how it came together, although I am a little concerned that I might walk in tomorrow morning to find literary device posters or positive character trait adjectives all over the floor... Both of which needed re-affixing over the past week. I finally started using larger than what I thought were necessary strips of gaff tape.
Ah gaff tape... I had forgotten how amazingly useful gaff tape is. I used the stuff regularly back in college when I worked for the university's theatre department. It holds beautifully and comes off clean, with no residue. In theatre it's used to hold down cables for the duration of a show. When the wrong tape is used, say duct tape, coiling the cables during the strike, is annoyingly sticky. When one of my new co-workers told me we have to use gaff tape on the painted walls so the paint won't peel off, it was an epiphany. Really, why on earth had I never thought to use it in my classroom before now? But I digress...
I came home on Friday and made a list of everything I needed to accomplish this weekend. I tackled the syllabi first. I needed three - one for sixth grade ELA, one for eight grade ELA, and one for eighth grade history.
Several threads about syllabi had come through the teacher groups I've joined on Facebook, so I did a search, and quickly found links to editable infographic syllabi. Since I'm new to this role, and didn't have a model of what previous teachers have handed out, I decided less is more. I also know that no one really wants to read paragraphs and paragraphs of information about my classes; the best I can hope for is a solid skim from students or parents who know they *should* read it, but get distracted from reading it closely. Infographic seemed like the best format. I started editing one of the versions I had downloaded from Teacher Pay Teachers, but wasn't totally happy with a quote that was not editable: "If you want to learn no one can stop you, if you don't want to try no one can help you." The words were in quotation marks, but not attributed to anyone, and I didn't want one of the first impressions I was giving students and parents to include the words "no one can help you." The negative connotation I felt upon reading it was not something I wanted to pass on. I didn't like the pictures as well on the second one I downloaded. Noticing both of the downloads were created in PowerPoint, I started playing around and discovered it was easy and fun to create my own infographic syllabus. I spent more time than necessary tweaking my syllabi, but I loved every minute of it, and get a little thrill of excitement looking at the printed copies I have ready to handout. I have also saved them as .pdf files for uploading to the school's website when I get access.
I was so proud of my first syllabus that I posted a .pdf of it to one of my teacher groups on Facebook and immediately got requests from teachers wanting to buy an editable version. It was still quite difficult to edit, as the pictures were not static, and I promised them I would look into fixing it up for others to edit sometime after school started. But I was having so much fun playing around with my syllabi that I took the time to figure out how to make all the pictures one background image, and posted it to TpT for $.95. Supposedly I can do one better, and make the pictures part of a "master slide" so they can't accidentally be deleted, but I haven't figured that part out yet... so I'll have to upload a revision when I get that done, because people have already started to purchase it.
I'm as ready as I can be without going into school to do the three things I want to do there before the kids walk in: put student names on planners, label the turn in slots with numbers, and write up the first question on the chalkboard in the back with my nifty new chalkboard markers.
This is when the nervous energy kicks in for me. I'm ready, but there's still time to do more! That's why I'm blogging this morning. Maybe I'll find time to write a poem or two later today. "'Twas the Night Before the Start of School" could become a poem title, right?
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