Still setting up

Today, a visit to the district's online Blackboard confirmed what I just noticed in the afternoon - that I'd been reading my schedule this year all wrong, and have a different schedule than I thought I had. I had thought the I'll teach four Honors 9th grade English classes and two of the regular track, but instead I have two Honors and four of the regular college-bound track. This doesn't mean a great deal to me personally - both are equal in challenge to teach, and I'm still getting plenty of each kind of student - but I've made the wrong number of copies now for everything, and will have to end up recycling a bunch and redoing a bunch. That sucks.

On a positive note, class sizes appear to be low. I've got something like 25-25-27-22-23-27-22 in my six classes, which, while still giving me a fairly large teaching load of about 170, gives me a low per-class average. Numbers may change a bit in the upcoming days, but I'm pretty happy about class size right now.

I'm up and down about floating. I walk by my old room, where a new teacher is setting it up with art she's getting from local museums, and feel a pang of remorse for when I was doing the same thing. She's a cool chica and is fine with me calling her a classroom thief (in fact, she invented the term for herself), and she's coming to me for advice all the time, and that helps. But seeing my old classroom fuels the negative part of me, the one who answers, "Yeah, I'm being punished for teaching here for five years" when asked about floating. I mean, it's clearly my turn to float, but I still think it sucks that anyone has to in the first place, particularly someone with six classes, two preps, 170 students, and as many extracurricular activities as me.

On the other hand, I'm sure it will help me stay better organized, and there are certainly some freedoms to not having a classroom. An older staff member who floated a few years ago, someone who always says the nicest things, told me today that she loved it. "It's going to be so nice for you, Epiph. Floating made me feel like a college professor. I would just whisk in with my materials, and then whisk on out afterwards, my job done in there for the day." This is a far cry from the helpful, but less positive, comments like "It sucks, but here's how to deal with it" advice I've gotten from other Former Floaters. This woman always says the right thing.

In other news, on first instinct, I do not much like the new P, but am staying in the mindset that I don't have to like him as long as the school is run well. And, from the sounds of it, it will be. All talk so far, but I like a lot of it, even if I dread heading to another meeting.