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The holidays went by rather quickly and, although I did a lot of prep work during the break I still started the term feeling a little lost. Due to situations out of my control I’ve had to have a change of class so I have picked up a new Senior class. I’m not too worried about the change and it’s a relatively small class at 18 students but it’s still a change and, like most students will tell you, they hate change. They get annoyed with me if I change the desks around and they get annoyed with me if I don’t. This does amuse me more than it should and it also gives me some valid insight to the student mindset.

Anyway – I thought I would use this post to help my organisation progress.

I have five classes:

9BYOD – This term our focus is Tumatauenga and, looking deeper, we will focus on conflict – namely human vs human, human vs nature, human vs self and human vs society. We started by reading Ray Bradbury’s short story “All Summer in One Day”. We will then look at poems from WW1 and maybe even some short stories as well.

10ENG – This is an advanced class so we are doing two things at once. We are looking at the same short story as above and the same ideas however I have adapted an Independent Novel Study that has seven activities that they must complete. I have told them that they can choose any novel that has a form of conflict in it. Once student has already asked if he could do Dr Jekyll and Mr Hyde and I am super excited to see what he does with it.

11ENA – This is my big class with 32 students. We have started looking at a semi thematic unit surrounding Conformity, Rebellion and The Teenage Condition. Carrying on from last terms film unit, where we studied Pleasantville we have dived into Catcher in the Rye. I am creating a prezi that sets up every lesson for the student and it works on them figuring out several key techniques and going through the text closely to find their own understanding. Today we focused just on Holden’s hat… This is on of my focus classes this year.

12ENG – This is my new class and, for this term, we will be studying excerpts from The Things They Carried and looking into the context of the Vietnam War and what was happening in New Zealand and the rest of the world at the same time. I’ve started them on a scrapbooking task that will take a lot of the term – they have to research the context and create a virtual study guide – they can use pinterest, prezi or, if they aren’t computer savvy, they can even make a scrapbook. While doing this they can start framing a research project, do some independent reading for personal responses, building on their general knowledge and, most importantly, learn how to write an analytical essay for the external exams.

Finally I have my 13ENI – this class is my smallest with 16 students of varying abilities. They are not sitting externals so are focusing solely on internal standards. We are finishing up our Close Scene Analysis – this is where I got them to analyse two different crime procedurals and talk about how the represent or misrepresent certain groups in society – most focused on how mental illnesses are represented in the shows. Next we will move onto Connections Across Text.

So there is my general overview for this term.

Next are my goals for this term. If you look at my colleague’s blog here you will see how inspirational her organisation is to me. My other colleague has also done a beautiful piece on goals which you should totally check out as well by clicking right here.

So goals – scary thoughts that I am putting out in the world. Okay, here goes…

Small: Time management – I’m really trying to focus on using my time wisely – in class and out of class.

Medium: Up-skilling both in my curriculum area and my technology skills area.

Large: Still working on this because there are so many that I want to focus on…

My question to you is what do you find helpful when trying to organise yourself? What goals do you have for school or for your personal life?

Peace and Pancakes

Jaime

*I know that this image is from 3 months ago – I just like it…