My first week as a ...

The only constant is change.

I have just spent my first week at work. My job at the school, the reason I was hired, is to train the teachers here in best practice. I have my Reading Power, 6+1, PBL, Mind-Up (just to name a few) resources in my office, ready to share what I use in my class and what we find are good strategies to deliver our curriculum. 

That’s my job… but not yet.

This past week (and for the next two), I have been employed as the headmistress/deputy head/ acting head/ acting deputy head of the school. I have neither been told my role nor told if the role will continue all year but because the Headmistress left at the end of July and the Deputy Headmistress is away until September 10^th, the role of administrator has fallen on me.

I met with the deputy head before she left to get an outline of what she needed me to do. Information for the staff meeting, expectations for the schemes, topic outlines, lesson plans, homework, novel study, classroom decorations, timetabling…

OMG! I don’t know how these teachers survive.

I have a 3” binder full of schemes for term 1. The term schemes are pages long for each subject. They have to divide the term into the number of lessons they will teach (50 for English for example) and then make a chart outlining each lesson, the objective, the activity and the resources used. They do this for English (50 lessons), Math (50), Science (20), Geography (10), History (10), and Citizenship (10). There are specialist teachers for PE, Art, Music and French who do this for each grade.

The progress of the schemes this week was hampered by 2 days without power and one day without ink in the printer. Not to mention that some don’t even know what the curriculum is because their assignment has been changed (randomly as far as I can tell) and they don’t have hard copies of their Learning Outcomes. I have one teacher who has asked me to find out what her geography curriculum is for the year. No small feat!

Topic outlines are a one page (thank goodness) document that basically states what the big topics are for each subject. These get sent home to parents.

Lesson plans are TWO PAGES per lesson. They are kept in a book and each Friday the book is collected to see if the lesson plans are all there and detailed. Each plan ends with a reflection of what went well and what needs to be changed for next lesson. Imagine having to write those each day for each lesson and then imagine being the poor teacher who is assigned the role of looking at all the lesson plan books after work each Friday.

That same teacher is also assigned the job of approving homework. Each teacher has to plan his or her homework for the week, write it and hand it in on Friday for the following week. It gets approved then photocopied for the students. At the staff meeting, we talked about homework (and how I don’t give any!) They face the same issues as we do: students don’t do it, a parent does it, they copy from one another, and they write the answers as the homework is being corrected. I suggested giving less homework this term. They are all quite excited about that. We’ll see if that becomes a reality.

Ah, novel study. I thought they needed one novel per term but I found out at the staff meeting that they actually need two: one for the class and one for book week (theme: Books are Bridges, Sail Away - hmmm.) They have maybe 50 novels to choose from. The Headmistress loved Roald Dahl and the classics so most of the books available are those. The grade 6 teacher came to ask me if I thought her students would prefer Animal Farm, A Tale of Two Cities, or George’s Marvellous Medicine.   Several of her students are ESL. I suggested George. The grade 5 teacher is doing Gulliver’s Travels. Grade 4 is The Enormous Crocodile. The other grades have not made their selection. Teachers have one copy of the book for the whole class.

For book week, we have decided that they should select Adventure books to go with the theme. Again, the books have not been selected, there is only one copy, and each Friday the students will have a project to do over the weekend to go with the novel that they don’t have. If they don’t do their project work, they miss art/pe/music but the teacher is the one who keeps them to complete their work.

As for timetabling, I spent Friday chasing the high school music teacher to make sure that the primary students would have access to the music room which is shared between the two schools. Our music teacher told me that last year there were primary classes that were at the same time as the high school and so those students never had access to the music room or any of the instruments (secondary is most important and takes priority over primary.) The French teacher still doesn’t know her schedule for the high school so she can’t book her primary students. The computer teacher wants nothing to do with the primary kids and refused to come to the staff meeting. Each time the primary secretary called him, he hung up as soon as he knew it was her. I have given him the 3 and 4 year olds at 8am followed by the 5 year olds at 8:40! Don’t mess with me!!!

Once the deputy head is back, I am not sure what my title will be. I am hoping just “trainer” as I was supposed to be but maybe if I was headmistress, I could affect some instructional change. I have told the primary teachers that I will be their advocate for the year. Four classes don’t have SMART boards (so why am I training them on its use?) One class has a board but no pens because they were taken for repair about 6 months ago. If the power goes out, they have no generator but the high school does. There are maybe 200 books for the children but none in the class and no text books. They have only one copy of novels for study. There are no manipulatives and no supplies for Science. The kindergarten teacher came and asked me to get toys for her class. They want a garden. They have to ask for each item they need (like a pen or a piece of construction paper) and then sign a book to say that they took it. There are students with special needs but no support teacher.

And this school has so much more than the government schools here that I visit to volunteer.

Students start on Wednesday. It is going to be an interesting year!