This has been about the second full week that I've been in charge of my 8th period honor's class. I'm working on an "Identity" unit with them which will culminate with a multi-genre project about their life. This week they reflected on specific occasions within their life when they went out of their way for someone, read a short story entitled "On the Bridge" by Todd Strasser, and began thinking of identity as an ever changing thing. As a class, they described a variety of different things that go into defining someone's identity and began analyzing drawings of people to describe what that person's identity might be. We originally looked at a colorful picture of a woman playing a cello. The discussion that we were able to hold in class about this woman was astounding. My students took their thoughts to an entirely different level than what I had originally expected and analyzed everything in the image down to the way the shadows shown across her face.
I'm finding that my time management this year is still off. Last year when teaching my unit, I learned to adjust my lessons to make everything fit into 50 minutes. I could plan out everything I needed to do and make it all work easily. This year my PDS changed their schedule to now have 45 minute classes, and I feel like I'm not able to get anything accomplished. I have had to push back lesson plans on multiple occasions to finish things from the day before and sometimes from even two days before. I know I'll get adjusted to the shorter classes eventually, but for right now it's frustrating to have a bunch of different things I want to get accomplished and not have enough time to do them in.
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