Getting organized

So, having finished my first full week of unemployment, I'm feelin pretty good. Not the least because I am getting organized!! I expected to have a hard situtation made worse because I'd be down and depressed in response to it. I don't mean that I wanted to be depressed, just that I expected it. 

What helped hugely to get me on a good footing was the friend who spent nearly three hours last Sunday tackling my storage unit with me. I had accumulated so much stuff in my classroom (same problem I have at home, but that's another project I hope to begin managing this summer - a way of making unemployment work for me!). With fifteen or so hours to clear out the room and organize it for the custodians and for next year's teacher, there was little chance to sort-as-I-went, which I had hoped to do. Plus, the longer I was at school, the mroe sad and angry I felt. I came home very depressed on the last day of school, having spent a couple of hours in very hot weather, beginning to pack up. Realized that night that I needed to get out as quickly as possible.

With that in mind, and with limited hours to access the school anyway, the best I could manage was to load my stuff into bags and boxes and transport it to the storage unit for later sorting. In the process of moving, I did throw out and give away half dozen trash bags full of stuff, but took a ton more with me. As a result of this process, I had a storage unit so full I couldn't step inside the door. This was going to make it hard to begin the work of sorting and organizing all the stuff I had stored there. Along came my friend, someone who doesn't suffer from procrastination and disorganization. Her first reaction was to look at the unit and declare, "There's plenty of room in there!" and to dive in. At her direction, we emptied everything out of the unit in order to pack it back in more effectively - leaving a path in the center to allow for access. Wow! What a difference. In the process, my friend directed me to do at least a little sorting as we went, and she did some herself. To my delight, we were able to accomplish the goal she set. I didn't throw out much that first day, but we managed to organize what was there in a way that allows me to get at the stuff without assistance. (Does that make any sense ?) Altogether an empowering experience. I'm deeply grateful to my friend for her help.

More organizing updates to follow....

A little salt in the wound...

OK, as if it wasn't hard enough being non-renewed, it was a huge job to take apart my classroom and move all my stuff. So we've been in this tropical band of heat and humidity, and school isn't air-conditioned. It took me three days after the last day of school to pack my stuff and get it moved into my storage unit. (The "temporary" storage unit that I rented last Spring as an incentive to try and clean out my overloaded cellar. $122/month for a 5x8 space, but it's clean and dry.) I'm thankful I had the storage unit, because it's now pretty full-up. The house is beyond cluttered to chaotic. I don't know what I'd have done if I needed to move things here. I started tutoring a neighbor's son today. Funny thing is, she thinks I'm doing something so helpful for her/them, but I think I got way more out of today than he did. Working with him gave me a focus other than being unemployed. I also got to experience teaching in its simplest and purest form, working one-to-one with a willing student. I'm working on the procrastinating thing, too. Not trying to be a world-beater, just trying to do things one at a time.

Getting organized starts with keeping track of things I have to do.

Part of making sense of my first year involves learning how to get organized. I've been Googling on this, and reading other teacher blogs about organization. One interesting blog talked a lot about this system GTD, which I'd never heard of. I followed a couple of hyperlinks from that blog to learn what GTD was. One of the links was a review from Business Week magazine, which included an excerpt from the book GTD, or, Getting Things Done. Herewith an excerpt of the excerpt, and some ensuing thoughts.

Excerpt from David Allen’s Getting Things Done (GTD):

• First of all, if it's on your mind, your mind isn't clear. Anything you consider unfinished in any way must be captured in a trusted system outside your mind, or what I call a collection bucket, that you know you'll come back to regularly and sort through.
• Second, you must clarify exactly what your commitment is and decide what you have to do, if anything, to make progress toward fulfilling it.
• Third, once you've decided on all the actions you need to take, you must keep reminders of them organized in a system you review regularly.
  

Interestingly, one of the big problems I had this year had to do with what Allen calls "the collection bucket". There was so much incoming stimulation, all of it new, from daily attendance to specials and SpEd support scheduling to information about those stupid “leadership teams” that the principal valued so much. In addition, there were curriculum materials, lots of planning stuff, and completed student work to review, assess, and file or return. (This latter one I never got ahold of, and seldom reviewed any work the children completed other than the formal monthly Math tests and the quarterly Writing prompts.) Then there were classroom management papers: current class lists, bus lists, Emergency information to update. Holy ***, it was overwhelming! 

I needed a reliable collection bucket, started out with my planning book as a central place for everything—kept a current list in it, and tucked essential papers in there too. When I lost the book a month or so into school, I was in a panic. Found it a couple of weeks later, but in the meantime had diversified into multiple collection buckets - a folder here, a clipboard there - and never really got it back together right through the end of school, the it here being a central place where I kept track of everything for which I was responsible. Without a reliable collection bucket, I knew I was on shaky ground. But the volume of incoming stimulation was so strong, I never felt able to get out from under it and create some kind of solid base from which to work.

This is one of the areas where, perhaps, having had a mentor would have made a big difference. As it is, I have a couple of thoughts: One is that I’ll never have a year so overwhelming. Now, I’m familiar with the range of what is expected and comfortable with many of the tasks. Secondly, in the absence of a mentor’s guidance with this, I have the opportunity to learn the hard way. As long I don’t give up, the hard way offers the greatest potential for discovery and problem solving. If I have a job in the fall, I have to have a central tracking system, even if it's not the most elegant system. I have to use one place, consistently, to track what needs doing.

Lookin for work, again....

Wish I found this website earlier this year!!! So many great posts and posters. Lots of deep thought about the profession and a lot of laughs, too. I can see I'll be spending a lot of time on the site this summer. I'll need the encouragement while I look for a new teaching job!

Tryin to make sense of my first year

So, just finished what I can only describe as a hellish first year teaching in a big urban school system. Had twenty-one second grade students. Loved em all. Didn't succeed in teaching them very much. Couple with severe behavior problems, couple more with mental health issues, another four with substantial learning difficulties. Considered a regular classroom, staffed with one regular ed teacher: me. [Support was 6 kids on Edplans who went out 3 times a week for 50 minutes to SpEd room.] Didn't manage to establish much in the way of classroom routines. Spent the year with a lot of noise and movement. Principal canned me. Looking for another teaching job now, want to stay with city system. Feel a little bit like I'm trying to get the number of the bus that hit me; trying to make sense of the year. Figure out what went wrong, what I can do differently next year. Was it me? Was it the kids? Was it bad admin? (Change that, I know it was bad admin.) Lot of uncertainty. Should I take a kindergarten class if I get an offer? Should I even try to do this again next year?