Tuesday 7 September 2004

New Job at RDHS

Tomorrow I start my new job. I'm the grade 9 and 10 English teacher at a little rural school. I will be in charge of molding young minds. (as an English teacher, I know the difference between "molding young minds" and "molding, young minds"). 
   There are any number of silly things I could on my first day. I don't think I will do most of them. I'm supposed to be both achieving trust, and also setting a precedent for how hard I'm going to be to "get past" for the whole semester when it comes to shirking work. 
    I'm starting with an introduction exercise where everyone needs to grab a partner they don't know and "interview" them to get an info page. Then they need to write up an introduction for the person, and present it to the class, thereby introducing that person, sharing their knowledge and showing their writing, speaking and summarizing abilities. I will collect their written summaries to have a sample of their writing ability the first day. 
    My first period class is an MSIP (kind of Canadian study hall) and my job is to make sure they do work they've been given by their other teachers each day. The first day, there will be no work. That's why I will need to occupy them for the whole period. My other two classes need me to assign them some MSIP work for tomorrow, so I will ask them to write for 15 minutes on what we're going to be studying first ("Heroes" in the one case, and "Artistic Writing" (speeches, lyrics, poetry) in the other.) That's the plan. Let's see what goes wrong.

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