That's a heck of a lot of new. Year 17 of my teaching career is going to be in a completely new type of teaching environment for me. I'm switching from a traditional public high school with 1700 students to a small arts conservatory which has about 250 kids in a mostly residential setting. That's a big difference.
I'm over the moon about the kids, the classes I get to teach, the small class sizes, the kids, working with friends, the kids, working with my husband, and the kids. I knew all that going in but the unexpectedly nice thing about this transition is a complete blank slate, the chance to start over from ground zero. Completely empty email inbox. No preconceptions. Completely new spaces to shape however I'd like. I'm moving to much smaller space(s) so I ended up downsizing a ton. I got to play Santa Claus back in June and give away a ton of stuff.
I don't officially start until Tuesday but I've been moving things in this week and starting to get things set up as much as possible before the crazy starts. If you've met me or seen my classroom in person you know that I am not the most organized human in the world. I subscribe to the organizing by piles system. My desk generally looks like a school supply tornado passed through. I eventually reach the point where I have to exert some control over my life and I go on a cleaning spree to beat back the chaos for awhile. But it all comes creeping back.
But I've got this clean slate... so I'm going to try and hang on to it for awhile.
I read a great book this summer, Adam Savage's "Every Tool's a Hammer". I had picked it up when it came out and saved it for my end of the school year fun read. I loved Mythbusters and I was expecting to just enjoy it as a light book - I certainly wasn't expecting it to turn into PD. But it kinda did.
In the book, Adam talks about the self-organizing techniques that he uses when working on projects in his shop. None of them are earth shattering but they made an impression on me and I instantly saw how they could be applied to a teacher's life.
The big one for me was from the chapter, "Checkboxes", where he talks about his list making and how he adapted and developed it from his boss at Industrial Light and Magic.(As a Star Wars fan, that's a good enough endorsement for me!) It starts with a brain dump of everything that you need to complete for a project and then breaks each of those down into the small steps you need for each component. He also uses colored in boxes to show progress: empty- nothing's done yet, halfway colored in - progress has been made, completely colored in - it's done. You get two benefits: instantly seeing where you are on a project and not obliterating what those steps were by crossing them out on a list. Super helpful if you're going to have to repeat the process down the road, like at the beginning of a new school year. I've flirted with bullet journaling so this wasn't that big a jump for me but it definitely helped. Instead of having 3 or 4 separate lists I turned mine into one big massive to-do list of doom. It's daunting but since each checkbox's task is relatively small, it will hopefully snowball as I go.
With two new preps (well, one is new and it's been a hot minute since I taught the other) and onboarding at a new school to complete, I'm juggling a lot. This is what it looks like for me right now. Once I got it all down on paper I felt relieved. I can't forget something - it's all written down. It's excessively big but I wanted to be able to see it from my desk and this works for me.
I decided to be realistic and add this one to the end:
At least I know I'll be able to check those off. :)
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