Planning

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Home : 2002 : July : 26

Planning
By Amanda K

I would like to begin by saying that I am sending my best wishes for your father's help.

I agree with Shannon that you are going to be just fine. I think that we tend to worry more when we are in stressful situations...
I know that I do... and sometimes this worrying turns out to be unnecessary. Goodness knows that I've been there... and everything turned out just fine.
The first year of teaching is tough on everyone, because everything is so new and you feel pressured to do your best. I doubt very much whether this coming year is going to be like last year. In the first year, you have to spend a

lot of time getting used to the texbooks, preparing extra worksheets, tests, etc. Since you are teaching the same grade level and had the smarts to save the worksheets and tests that you created last year, you will feel much more familiar with what's going on.

I went into my second year of teaching with the same fears that you have, but I quickly found that since I already knew the textbooks and I had a better idea of what was going on, I had to do much less work than I did my first year. I actually didn't look at the textbook all summer because we bought a house and, well, life happened (although I did bring the book home over the summer). When I got back to schoool, I found that, even without planning over the summer as I had intended to do, I knew what was going on and was very well prepared for the year.

You can consider that first year to be preparation for the second year. As you go through the year, you will remember the triumphs you had and the mistakes you made from the previous year, and you will use these experiences to help you throughout the year. Your experiences from the first year will help you probably even more than a whole summer of planning will.

So, get some much-deserved rest in your evenings, and don't worry too much about school. Sometimes I find that if I just spend as little as one hour thinking about what I want to do that first day of school, or even that first week of school, I can put my mind at ease and enjoy my time off. You might be able to find the time to do the same, but you will be fine even if you don't do this. Remember, summer is for rest and those teacher work days before school are for work.