It is turning out to be a stressful school year. Our school levy failed and now they are wanting to RIF a handful of teachers and enforce a 10% pay reduction for all staff, effective in January. It breaks my heart that the levy failed and now the district seems to be falling apart. I am working harder this year than ever. On top of my usual duties as biology teacher, department chair, and building tech coordinator, I have volunteered to be part of our OLWEUS bully prevention team. It is our first year implementing this program and it has been a lot more work than I expected. I put in about 3 hours per week in extra meetings for it, and additional time planning and typing documents. I think it will be great for our school and the students, it is just a lot of extra stress. Anyways, that is my explanation for why I have not been updating my blog here. Hopefully after the holidays when we have a better picture of the future of our jobs, I will have more time and motivation to update here. I've been trying a lot of new ideas in my classroom and they are working out great. My students scored extremely well on last year's end of course exams (my biology students helped me get the highest teacher ranking in our whole school!) and I hope my students this year will follow suit. I feel really great about what I do, I just wish I had more time and support for it all, and time to share it with you all. I have posted a few lessons in my TeachersPayTeachers store, and hopefully we will get a few snow days so I have time to post some more :)
Hope everyone is having a great year! Take care.
