Finishing

I reckon many teachers are now planning for next September.

Me, I have been working on planning for many weeks because I will be starting at a new school and teaching new courses.  In essence, it is my first year.

Since I will be teaching in a small town, with a small English population, I will be teaching many high school subjects.  For the most part, I think the subjects will be pretty straight-forward.  For example, Math and History follow a relatively rigidly predefined paths.

English, though, has got me hopping.  The quest to prepare a year plan for English has been a learning experience for me.  Along my journey, I have picked up ideas, tried some of them for a while, then abandoned them.  I have tried organizing the curriculum on websites and mindmaps.  I never finished.  It used to bother me when I started a project, then did not complete it.  It does not bother me much anymore.  At my age, I cannot concern myself with completing unfruitful tasks.  Time is too precious.  I wrote previously that the classroom is a laboratory where you have to allow yourself and your students to experiment and to make mistakes.  Well, life is the same.  We try things; if they don’t work, then we move on.  Everything has a beginning; not everything has an ending.  Maybe we never finish anything.

Photo by Jasmic