Organizing
Your Day as a New Teacher
Rebecca Hollander
When I think back to my first year of teaching, I remember being
totally overwhelmed at the sheer amount of information I was supposed
to remember! Someone once told me that teachers need to be
able to make at least one hundred decisions every class –
I don’t believe that; I think it’s more like two hundred. The
decisions they were talking about, of course, had to do with teaching
and students, not with the topic of this paper: organization. Those
decisions had to be taken care of before I entered the classroom. The
hardest thing for me to do was to organize myself and my time so
that I knew what was going on in every class. I had come from
student teaching one group of students four times a week, to teaching
six groups of students 3-4 times a week. I was teaching two
preps (7th & 8th grade) and no class was ever going at the same
speed.
What was I to do? At first, I started organizing myself the
way my mentor teacher did…one sheet of paper per day subdivided
into periods. In every box, I placed a different lesson. I
knew what I was supposed to (in the ideal world where all students
are the same), but I found that my classes went at completely different
speeds, so I would do one thing with one class and forget to do
it with another. I was constantly asking… “What
did we do yesterday?” I am sure my students thought I
was in the advanced stages of senility!
I had the “brilliant” idea of writing down what happened
in each class so that I could refer back to it before encountering
the students. My margins started looking a bit ragged, plus
I was killing so many trees! I checked around with my colleagues
to see how they organized their time: some used a plan-book, some
a calendar for each class, some used a number system (lessons 1-36,
one a day). I chose what I liked and slowly, found my own system
(a plan-book, combined with lesson number system and notes). This
system works for me, but then again, I’m overly enthusiastic
about organization!
I figured out what I was doing, but then I wasn’t sure how
to keep everything organized. Where did I take attendance? Where
should I store the students’ work? How was I to keep
everything separate? Again I checked around and looked at what
other teachers were doing. I remembered back to student teaching
and I worked through it. I wound up with a system of individual
class file folders, with attendance attached. This system has
helped me to know who, where, and what I am teaching. In addition,
it has allowed me to keep classes portable in a school where we
all share classrooms.
My organization process has evolved over time, but what I have
found is that the more I checked around with other people, the better
I felt about what I was doing. I could take ideas from my fellow
teachers and at the same time, get feedback on what I was doing. I
still come up with new ideas every year and some day, I hope to
perfect my craft (the organization part of it anyway). What
I have found is that the less I had to think about organizing, the
more I could begin thinking about teaching and the better my day/
life.
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