Monday, February 23, 2009

The Wall Cometh

My last post outlined the things that bothered me last year but seem to be of little consequence to me this year.  One month on, are those opinions still solid or have they changed?

For the most part they're still holding true.  I'm not getting as frustrated with kids when they don't seem to absorb things as well as I think they should.  My school is fairly disciplined and it used to bother me when some kids weren't as self controlled as others; this year I'm rolling with things more easily and deal with the independent young people differently.  This is largely in part to the demographic I'm teaching this year.  A lot of my classes are made up of well meaning and very nice, yet loud and disorganised, youth.  Even though they want to do well, they don't always show it, and so gently reminding them to 'get back on the thought train' gets a laugh and about 8 more minutes of concentration before the next derailment.  

As one of my favourite authors so eloquently put it, so it goes.

And that wall of homework that I predicted would show up around week 5 or 6 is here, and indeed it came in structural-mass form.  One large pile from one class, another large pile from another, and Friday bore a pile of common tests from two of my senior classes.

I work in a shared office and sit in one corner of the long desk that wraps around the room:  my 'to mark' pile sits on the border between my work space and the next persons and currently looks an awful lot like a wall.  

But I've placed my pile there for a reason.  The co-worker who sits next to me is eerily fast about grading student work and getting it back to the kids.  I'm talking Jedi fast.  She claims that she can do this because she is a neat freak: she can't stand having clutter on her desk.  I think she's just good at what she does and have told her as much.  So I place my not-yet-but-almost-towering pile near her tidy, clean desk as a way to shame myself into getting things done more quickly.

Just another trick I've learned to help me get around the feast or famine grading cycle that seems to plague our department.  Is my trick working?  Somewhat.  I've adjusted my grading process to tackle small chunks of the pile every day.  I stay at work until I've done as much as my brain can handle, typically until around 5:30, and then I say enough is enough and bike home.  My desk isn't as clean as my co-workers when applying this method, but it's an improvement over last year.  I'm not taking papers home to grade (or have them stare at me from my bag when I'm not grading them), and I'm not worrying about paperwork when I'm at home.  After all, I'm working on other equally important things there as well.

I'm allowing one exception per week to account for busy days and personal appointments that need to happen between 3:30 and 5.  Today, for example, I needed to leave a bit early to swing by the bike shop and get my bike tuned up.  This was supposed to shave an hour out of my afternoon, so I brought home an hour's worth of papers to grade.  Easy stuff, fill in the blank sort of work.

We teachers need to be flexible with our time, routines and habits; it's the nature of what we do.  But seeing as time is finite, at least as we deal with it on our human scale, if we take time to do one thing, that time has to come from somewhere.  Gauging how to balance the needs of work and personal space isn't always easy, though.  I guess that's the educator's white whale: balance.