This week was a typical last week of school. Two days of finals, a half day to end it all with the kids, and a day of checking out of school. I am not the biggest fan of the last week of school, for the most part. I hate killing time with kids because we have to be there because the kids get bored with that so quickly. I feel like I always have run out of energy and get short with my students more quickly during the last week. By the time the kids leave on the last day my mind is clouded by my frustrations of the last week of school and not the wonderful memories of the past school year. The kids are interesting though because even the ones that have hated school all year long reflect on the “good times” and don’t want to leave. That’s one thing my school does really well, we create an atmosphere of family that the kids can recognize. They are excited to leave for the next step of their educational journey, but they always look back with fond memories of their junior high days. I’m so grateful to work at the school I do with the people I do.
Yesterday we met as a leadership team to discuss changes for the upcoming school year. It is basically all the grade level leaders, department heads, administrators, and a few selected teachers meeting for a day to review policies and set new ones for the upcoming school year. Usually it’s in the middle of the summer, but this year we decided to have it really close to the end of the school year. This year we decided to change our schedule just a bit and talked a lot about welcoming new teachers onto our campus. I think this a bigger problem in teaching than most veteran teachers actually realize. I lucked out being closely linked with a couple of other coaches and had them looking out for me my first couple of years, but rookie teachers don’t always have people looking out for them. We decided to take it upon ourselves to train up the new teachers to our campus as well as reminded each other of some of the difficulties of transitioning to a new campus so we can all be aware of where the rookies may need some more support. Hopefully we’ll do a better job of welcoming these new people to our team.
I’m pretty sure we’ll be welcoming a new member to the history department this year, so I really want to make sure they feel supported and integrated well into our department. Maybe it’s just my perception, but I feel like I have a very fragmented department overall. This year I really want to try and get everyone on the same page and move forward as a department. We have some challenging personalities in the history department so it won’t be easy, but I would really like to see movement toward a cohesive group. We’ll see how this goes in the upcoming school year.