Tag: school

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Another Semester Down…

I’ve completed 3 semesters in my teaching career now.  Four, if you count the summer class I taught last year.  At any rate, I’m starting to feel more like a pro that’s been doing this for awhile.

This semester, I taught my regular stable of Fall classes: Anatomy & Physiology (A&P) I, A&P II and Principles of A&P.  These are courses I’ll be teaching every Fall, unless we need to shift things around due to the number of students heading in.  This coming Spring, I’ll teach A&P I again in a double-size class.  I’ll also teach A&P II, which is normally a Fall-only class, but because of scheduling conflicts this past semester, we’re going to offer it again.  The newbie will be Environmental Science, which I’ve never taught but am looking forward to.  It’ll be a bit more discussion-based than what I’ve taught thus far, allowing a bit more flexibility in how I approach the material.

The main reason I write this, however, is because I feel like I’m finally getting things down into “well-oiled machine” mode.  I didn’t feel nearly as stressed out this Fall with getting my final grades completed and turned in.  I think I had my three classes turned in before most of the rest of the department did.  This is likely due to the consistency between last year and this year, where the grades for most of the exams were nearly identical (within 0.1% of last year’s averages).  There were some differences (the Final didn’t go as well this time…), but for the most part, everything this semester went very similarly to last semester, making it a bit easier to chart out the course of the past few months, knowing how things would ultimately end up.

Now, I’m off for another 3 weeks before school starts up again in mid-January.  I’ll have Meg home with me for 2 weeks while she’s off from Kindergarten, so that’s something of a change from last year.  Calvin will hang out with us for a few days in there as well, but he’ll be back full-time around when Meg goes back, leaving me with a little prep time by myself for the upcoming semester.  Effectively, I’ve got most of my semester plotted out already (because they’re classes I’ve not only taught before, but just taught this past semester), but Environmental Science is a wild card that should mix things up a bit.  I’d like to try and set it up with a series of “debates” that the students carry out (for example, “pros” and “cons” of the most recent international climate agreement), but as I haven’t actually taught the class before and that’s an activity the other professors who teach it aren’t doing, I figure I should get my feet wet before trying something like that.

Still, I’m looking forward to trying something new.  Before then, I’ve got some Christmas Break to enjoy!

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First Day Of School

DSC_0297So almost a year ago, we started looking into applying for the magnet school program here in St. Louis.  As the St. Louis Public School System isn’t exactly the best in the area (they just achieved state accreditation again, after 5 years without it), we were wary of considering that option for Meg’s education, but the magnet schools are accredited individually and all feed in to each other: once you get into one of them, you stay in the system, and your siblings are grand-fathered in.  Once you turn 3, you can enter into a lottery for a limited number of slots at various schools across the city.

To be honest, the whole process was a bit difficult to navigate, as the web sites for each school are separate from one another, each with their own procedures, etc.  Still, Brooke took care of the application to the magnet program and we entered Meg in the lottery.  She ended up getting in on the first try, getting one of 24 spots at her school, Mullanphy Investigative Learning Center.  This school is located near the St. Louis Botanical Gardens, which is about 10-15 min from our house, and halfway between our house and Washington University, where I work.  It also happens to be a “science-oriented” school, so believe you me, I’m all for it.

Anyway, Meg has been pretty apprehensive about this.  For the past few weeks, she’s had trouble being left at her old school in the mornings, as she could tell things were changing pretty soon.  She liked her old daycare quite a bit and had friends there, so it’s understandable that, even at age 3, she’d be pretty worried about starting in a new place with new people.  Still, we continued to bring it up so she’d be constantly reminded the change was coming.  We went and met her new teachers last week twice, so she was at least introduced to these new people she’d be seeing every day.

Monday was still pretty difficult, though.  To be fair, after I left her there, everything was fine and her teachers said she did a great job, raising her hand to ask questions, laying on her mat at nap time, etc.  But the act of actually leaving her there was the most difficult part.  Let’s just say there was a good deal of screaming and hyperventilating to deal with that morning.  The past few days, things have improved somewhat, though there are still quite a few tears as I leave in the mornings.  I’ve gotten a bit better about breaking away quickly, rather than lingering too long, allowing her to keep me there.  After a few weeks, I’m sure things will get better, but for now, it’s still pretty tough.

At the very least, I hope this school ends up making life easier once we get to Kindergarten.  This way, it won’t be nearly as much of a shift for her, as she’s essentially attending elementary school now, two years early (the preschool is housed in the elementary school, though the different age groups are separated for lunch time, recess, etc.).  She’s getting used to the routine, the set times for activities, the different subjects, and most of all, the yearly change in teachers and classmates.  She’d been at the same daycare with many of the same teachers and the same kids since we moved here, so while there was obviously some turn-over, much of the experience remained the same.  This new school will be much more like “the real thing,” so hopefully that helps her transition even better each year.

But it’s hard to watch how quickly she’s growing up!  In some ways, I don’t think my 3-year-old should be wearing a school uniform, wearing a backpack, and taking her lunch to school already.

I guess I’d better get used to that, too.  🙂