I'm like Lola, in that I never get to stop running.

I sure have not been posting much since coming back from winter break. I've just been swamped - although I have way fewer kids (just over half the number I had before), I now have twice the planning to do. Since we do workshop-style, for the most part that's not a big deal because of lot of my actual teaching is done in individual conferences, but I still have twice as many focus lessons to plan as I did before and I need twice as many resources to get through a class period, and it all just takes some time.

Also with the schedule change have come some personal changes. I was the leader of my core beforehand, doing agendas for our weekly meetings and tracking down information we needed for things; we no longer have cores, so that's no longer a responsibility. So me being me, I'm all, "Oh! Sweet! Got tonnnnnnnns of extra time now! SURE, I can take over the leadership of a school-wide team, 'cause that only meets once a month instead of once a week!"

Which is technically true, but with that also comes joining our school-wide leadership team, and that adds additional responsibilities, including things like a five-hour-long meeting once a month. Yep - FIVE. Suddenly I have less extra time. Go figure.

I also recently planned a grade-level-wide field trip, including the pre-field trip lesson, the post-field trip wrap-up (all told, about an hour and a half of material) and the lessons that the non-field trip attenders would do while we were gone (which had to fill about four and a half hours of time).

This week alone, between that and checking and organizing permission slips and haranguing the kids who hadn't brought theirs and going to the library to get twelve picture books on the topic to help build background knowledge and and and and and, I spent about 10 hours on that. Outside of my, y'know, actual job. But it was an awesome field trip (though a few minor bus glitches which I will know how to deal with for next time): the kids both learned a ton and really enjoyed it. And in the end, only about 20 kids (out of 250) didn't go, and 10 of those couldn't, due to suspensions or illness or family emergencies. So that rocked.

Overall, everything is busy, but good. And since it's always busy, the good part is the only thing that changes, and I'm glad it's on an upswing right now.