Getting Back in the Swing (Sabbatical’s really over)

Six weeks in, and I’m back in the swing.

I could write “it feels like I never left” but that wouldn’t be true. I’m calmer, feel better. Leave aside that I’ve studied a lot and seen a lot, been to a lot of cool places, made new friends… And I have continued life without an alarm clock. I hope to never use one again.

But the first couple of weeks – and I’m not asking for sympathy, since I deserve none – I was tired each evening by 7, sometimes earlier. I can write a lesson, and manage a classroom, all that good stuff, but physically I was a first year teacher all over again.

But here I am, finishing up my first “interim reports,” giving my second round of tests (in the courses where I test, more about that another time), collecting my first rounds of projects… Back in the swing.

This week three classes solved “How many three digit numbers are there?” (one class found six ways to count them) and “In a 73 player single elimination tournament, how many matches are played?” and wrote up their process.

Another class, that’s been getting a quickly paced diet of algebra review (trinomial factoring with two and three digit coefficients, adding, subtracting, multiplying, and dividing algebraic fractions, polynomial long division) oohed and aahed when they learned that for  they could divide straight across.

And my seniors, they completed a four equations, four unknowns project, and turned in mostly clean, well-annotated work, and then had what I thought was a really good talk about keeping the stress level down during the next few months of college applications.

The only thing missing now is blogging…