The Coming School year in Numbers

Over the past two weeks, I have put in about 60 hours of intensive planning and preparation for the coming school year (and yes, most of those were spent at Tully's).

This seems to have been the magic number--over the past few days in particular, I'm feeling more and more ready for classes to start so that I can test out the revisions I've made to my curriculum; to put my plans into action.

Tonight, I couldn't help but think about some of the other numbers which the coming year represents:

This will be my...

• 10th school year at CAJ (I came halfway through the year in January 2009), which in turn means it will be my...
• 10th time to advise a community group, and my...
• 10th time to watch a Senior Talent Show, and my...
• 10th CAJ graduation, and my...
• 17th time to attend Thrift Shop at CAJ this October (my 18th time next April)

This will also be my...

• 9th full year of teaching.
• 8th year teaching 11th Grade Humanities and AP English.
• 8th time to go on the 11th Grade Wilderness Camp.
• 3rd school-year as a department chair, and member of the Research & Development Team
• 2nd full school-year after finishing my Master's.
• 4th season to co-coach debate.
• 4th full school-year as a married man.
• 1st full school-year as a daddy. 

By the end of this year, I will have taught somewhere between 450 and 500 CAJ students in the course of my career so far, and will have clocked about 5,400 hours in the classroom. 

That number is a very rough estimate, and only includes class periods.  It does not include the prep and grading I have done during the school-year, or the planning and curriculum work I have done each summer (I'm not sure how I'd even go about calculating that!).

One week from tomorrow, the students will come back to campus for book check-outs, fire-drills and class mixer games.  Summer will officially be over.  While this summer felt like it went by more quickly than usual, I can confidently and enthusiastically say I'm ready for school to start up again.

Year number ten, here we go!

Here's my tentative weekly schedule for my Humanities class.  After writing my previous blog-post, I had the brainstorm to divvy up and spread out the news circle and reading times throughout the week, favoring a more varied agenda each day compared to what I'd originally planned.