Back with the Sweathogs

Sorry for the several days of silence.  I've officially returned to school.  The budget cutbacks caused a lot of reshuffling at our site and there was a lot to do in very little time.

Here are the big changes from last year...

1)  I'm only teaching two classes now:  World History and US History.  No more math or science this year.  

2)  Fewer returning students than in previous years.  I have about 65% new students which is a little unusual.

These two changes have made for a challenging start to the year.  I was told on Friday that I'd be teaching World History and was given a book at the end of the day.  Students came yesterday and I had to be ready to start.  It's hard to begin a year with no prep time, different books, and a new subject.

But on the plus side, I've got new technology for the first time ever.  Although I've been teaching at the same school for the past 12 years, this year I now for the first time have:

1)  Teacher Editions for my textbooks!

2)  An overhead projector!

In the past I always had to solve problems on my own.  This year, they gave us surplus replacement texts and they came with the Teacher Edition.  Wahoo!  And for the past 12 years I've been doing most of my illustrations freehand on a chalk or whiteboard.  No more, I just received an overhead projector!  No more drawing maps from memory with my back to the students - my poor geography students in past years had to suffer through my less than perfect renderings of our globe.  Not today!  Now I'm not teaching math right now, but I cannot express to you how nice an overhead projector would have been at that time.  It's really hard to keep quickly drawing coordinate planes on the board and then trying not to mess them up too much when illustrating graphs.

Certainly busy, but I'd put this year in my top three "best starts to the school year!"