2nd year update: No time to play

So I'm well into my 2nd year of teaching and have actually been ignoring this blog and focusing my efforts on building my class websites. I created two wordpress blogs for my World History and AP Human Geography classes. They have been time consuming to say the least, yet really fun to create and tweek. My favorite part is that students have their own accounts and can actually contribute posts to the class blog, which, in all honesty, I'm still trying to figure out how to best utilize. The best part is when we go to the computer lab to do research, I can have the instructions, links, and resources available there for students so they just get right to work, and I have to walk around and make sure they are looking at the right sites.

This year has been very different, yet equally challenging as my first year. On one side, teaching World History for the second time has been a lot of fun as I have a much clearer sense of what I'm doing, talking about, and where we are going as a class. It also helps that we have great freshman this year. They just seem so much calmer than last year, though I think my improved classroom management might also have something to do with it. I took 2 days at the beginning of the year to review all of the policies and procedures, and it really paid off in holding students responsible. Still, I've noticed that in the last month they are starting to test the policies and I've had to make phone calls and dish out detentions, which I do using a staples receipt book so I get a hard copy of their detention notice. When they come I mark it off. If they don't come by the date I set it is a phone call home.

AP HUG has been awesome and impossible. If I could choose any class to teach it would be that. But there is just so much content to learn and then try to teach I've really been struggling to create a coherent curriculum, especially in lieu of the fact that there kind of isn't one. There are the AP HUG points that students are tested on, but no so much any advice as to how to teach them. We did get nice new Rubenstein textbooks that are mostly effective at delivering content. I really look forward to learning as much this year so that I can put it towards next year.

Other than that I am pretty much neck deep in the daily grind of planning, grading, revising, venting, copying, explaining, and then some relaxing and sleeping.