The other day at a pro-d workshop, I overheard a conversation between a beginning teacher and her friend. I have no idea what they were actually discussing about teaching, but I did catch the sentence "it will get easier in a few years once you have more experience."
And you know, as much as I'd like to believe that, I don't think it's actually true.
Take my experience so far this fall. This will be my tenth year of teaching in the public school system, and both my core classes are really nice groups of kids, so start-up should have been a breeze. But no, I feel like I've been in a wind-storm.
It might be the new classroom. I've figured out how to get around the lack of storage, but not my lack of memory. I'm still "discovering" things I tucked away last June. The constant searching, both for things I know I have but can't remember where and for new things that might be in the classroom archives (or, I should say, cupboards), is definitely slowing me down.
It might be the new subjects. Science 8 isn't new to me but it now has a mostly new curriculum - I know the material but there's a difference between understanding what osmosis is and figuring out an interesting way to help the grade 8's to understand it too.
And I'm teaching ESL for the first time and it's to gr 6/7s. Gr 6s aren't like gr 8s. They like to run around. They like the electric pencil sharpener, far too much. They like to tell on each other (this last bit is fortunate because I don't know any Korean swear words yet. This is changing though) I'm only supposed to teach vocabulary and speaking so I'm gradually learning that if we play games, or if I can make what we're doing seem like a game, then the kids will contentedly work away.
Oh, and did I mention that in late January I'll start teaching Home Economics (and that, frankly, I neither cook nor sew... To be fair, I volunteered to do this)
It might be that my schedule has changed and I'm now teaching double blocks of subjects rather than the single blocks I taught last year. And I'm rediscovering that, even if you're really short on planning time, you probably can't make a lesson for a double block by simply smushing together two of last year's single block lessons together.
It might be that I'm on a new team. And I'm one of the team leaders. And that it seems like everytime I think "Oh, this will be straightforward" I realise that the other members of my team didn't do such-and-such that way last year and have very valid reasons for having not done so. Let's rename my position so it's more accurate - it's now Team Follower.
What it all comes down to is that most of the routines I've comfortably established over the past couple of years are now out the window. Despite my weariness (which is slowly evaporating as I rebound and create new routines), this isn't a bad thing. Because I'ver heard this somewhere before (probably on Middleweb) about the idea of teaching getting easier: if you do it right, it never does.
