The first week

I just finished my first week of teaching. I was teaching three sections of 9th grade Earth and Space Science, and two sections of 12th grade Algebra 2 (not general science like I thought I was doing initially). Friday afternoon though, we had a staff meeting and I was told that I'm going to be switched to three sections of 12th grade Physics, and three sections of 11th grade Chemistry, giving me 6 classes total. The reason for this switch is because one of the science teachers is not here yet, so there's only me and one other science teacher. Of course, I'm not thrilled about having this switch. I spent all last week doing get-to-know-you sort of activities and am just now getting down to the actual material and feeling comfortable with my students. Also, getting an extra class is never fun. But when I spoke to the principal to see if there were any other options, he basically said no, but added that once the other teacher does get here (allegedly late September but I'm not counting on anything earlier than November), I'll be switched back to the freshman science and Algebra 2.

Sooo I'm going to get a lot of practice being flexible. Like a good teacher.

The actual teaching has been going well, too. It's hard to believe that the students actually look at me and expect me to teach. I'm still getting over that a little bit. On Friday, I had a great moment though. I was going over "domain" and "range" with my honors senior class, and when I was reviewing the lesson in the last five minutes of the period, I succeeded in getting about half the class to utter an audible "ahh!" as they finally understood the concept behind the two terms. It was fantastic and made the entire week worth it.

Morgan and my food and all our belongings finally came on the boat Thursday. We took a great picture of the entire 4 months worth of food that I hope to post in the next couple weeks. The only thing that didn't show up was a big bag of rice, but I can buy that here, so no big loss. And three of our four bags of flour broke in transit, which kind of made a mess of the other things it was with, but again, I can get flour here and the one remaining bag'll be enough for my current baking needs.