29 More Days of Institute

I thought backwards planning would better suit my blog label (and yes, that is a TFA frequently used term). Tonight I'm finally going to bed early, at 10pm. I shouldn't. I spent too much time just relaxing at dinner, almost 1.5 hours. It was nice to just finally sit down, joke around a little with some new friends, and not think. Tomorrow I need to practice my lesson plans for the beginning of next week and I need to find paragraphs that my students will actually use. Maybe I could get up early to do it, but getting up earlier than my 5:20am bedtime seems counter-productive. At this point, I just need to sleep though.

The last two days have been horrible. On Tuesday afternoon, they told us we'd have to turn in a (draft) unit plan for the next four weeks of summer school by Wed at 7:30am. We had a list of about 50 objectives to pick & choose from, trying to narrow them down to around 10 to actually teach in our lessons, and I felt like I didn't have as much support or guidance as I would have liked or would have been most helpful. But a partner & I busted something out, crashed around 11:30pm, just to rise again at 5:30am. It might not sound like that little of sleep but it sure feels like it. By this morning, I was a walking zombie going down to breakfast, fighting through a small cafeteria with nearly 700 others who are also rushing to try to eat. And then yesterday, after an entire afternoon & evening on our lesson plan (in between shoveling a quick dinner down and some evening workshops that we had to attend), we realized that our unit plan actually kind of sucked, and with the help of the Literacy Specialist (who we hadn't worked with before because she was at a different site school), we came up with a better vision for our unit, one focused around personal narrative (YEH!! Something I know about!!). But we still had a ton of work to do to "unpack the objectives," meaning breaking them down into more manageable chunks and figuring out, say, "what do students need to know to be able to find the main idea in a paragraph?"
Determine the main idea(s) of a text
• Define what a paragraph is
• Explain that every paragraph have a central idea
• Good readers can define that a main idea is the central message and can identify the main idea in a text
• Good readers can distinguish between a main idea and supporting evidence

We were supposed to already have moved onto the drafts our lesson plans for Tues & Wed (Monday we're giving a diagnostic to determine what our students know), so we turned in only rough lesson plans this morning, and still have more work to do on our unit plan. Ugh. Then more work today to figure out our classroom rules, procedures, investment plan (how we will engage our students and invest them in our course goals), etc.

Yesterday, a totally CRAZY day, looked something like this:
5:20am Get up
6:00am Go down to breakfast & pick up lunch
6:32am Bus leaves for the middle school (Preview reading for lecture on the bus)
7:00am Bus arrives, sign in, report to our advisory room
7:00am-4:00pm Instruction, Lectures, Practice time to work on lesson plans (with 10 min "transition time" which means walk across the school from one room to another and maybe have time to pee & get more water or coffee -- Thankfully they have coffee!!)
4:00-4:30/4:45pm Bus back to Univ of Houston (and some work on the bus)
5:00-5:15pm Change out of painful shoes and dress clothes, 10 min power nap
5:15-5:45pm Fight through the food line and shovel food down throat
5:45-7:00pm Meet with advisory
7-10:00pm Meet with group to re-do unit plan & finish lesson plans
10-11:00pm Finish lesson plans, print, bed

Anyhow, I'm going into the weekend hoping that this gets better. I do and don't think that this resembles the life of teaching. This weekend: test prep for the certification test next weekend, lesson plans, practicing for day one of teaching, etc. Wish me energy, optimism, and brilliance, cause I'm running low.