Tomorrow is the last day of school for our small charter school. It will be the final day of my twenty-eighth or twenty-ninth year as a teacher. (I can't recall recall; I don't really care to count them.) It is the end of my least stressful school year in recent memory. It is the first time in eighteen years that I've not worried about how my students will do on the state year-end test that is ostensibly to measure student mastery but is in fact an awkward and inaccurate measure of teacher effectiveness. It is the end of my first year of teaching primarily sixth graders. And it is the end of my first year teaching a new subject. Each of these firsts impact me differently.
For all the years I taught English, pacing was of utmost importance. The state gave me a list of topics that my students would be tested on at the end of the year; the district gave me a pacing guide that was to dictated the order and duration I taught each topic; I had my own classroom experience that often conflicted with the district pacing guide; and I had 180 days with the students. Add to this (or rather, subtract from that last element) all the testing days we had for worthless benchmark tests, even more useless common formative assessments (CFAs -- educators love acronyms), equally futile common summative assessments (CSAs, as one might guess), PSATs (actually useful for the students), and a handful of other required assessments, and it's easy to see why any unit that needed more than my planned time became an instant stressor. That time had to come from somewhere: more time on topic x means less time on topic y, which could easily affect the results of the ever-important end of year test. This year, though, if I felt we needed more time for a given topic, I simply added more time. No stress; no worries; no issues. Having that freedom was more liberating than I'd imagined.
The previous eighteen years of my teaching career were in an eighth-grade classroom. I knew eighth graders as well as I knew anything. I knew their likely behavior, their maturity, their level of abstract thinking, their enthusiasm (or rather, their lack thereof as often as not). Moving into a position in which two thirds of my students were sixth graders was initially stressful, but I soon realized that sixth graders are the best middle school group to teach. They are so very funky, silly, energetic, and excited that every day seems a dance more than a drudge.
Finally, teaching an entirely new course with only a very skeletal curriculum was a daunting prospect when I first accepted the position. What could I not teach?
In all, a great year that leaves me excited about next year instead of dreading it.
