I have fallen behind in grading papers and entering the grades for my classes until the last minute when progress reports are given to parents. I have failed to keep up with my journal enteries for this class and have struggled to complete the assingments on time. I have not been able to enroll in schools for the military and might possibly have to miss the first four weeks in January at my teaching job because of it.
On top of all of that I have not been able to see Friends and Family and have missed several birthday parties, family fuctions and even church.
I say all of that to say that because this post is late and even though I have struggled with every one of my goals for my professional development plan I have not posted that either.
I think that the biggest challenge for me is time. I know that this is something that I may not be able to fix and I am not sure how I lost so much of it already this year.
As I look over my short term goals, I know that in order to make them happen before the end of the school year I will have to hurry to make all of the things happen and even though I would like to be able to say that I will finish alot of lesson planning over the summer, I am already getting calls for my time from both the army, the school board, my own college career, and my aunt who wants me to work in her daycare.
I also think that another big challenge is money and priority. Since I am a history teacher and the our OPI or state testing scores are based on our math and reading scores there are not alot of resources made available to me. I received my smart board due to a bond issue passing all of the history teachers were supposed to receive one, instead I received one and one other tested teacher did. Every other subject in the building has received a smart board, the only classrooms without them are the other 4 social studies teachers.
There was also an order placed for the airliners that accompany the smartboards, again math and reading teachers are the only ones who received this software.
I would like to use a live pen to demonstrate to students how to take notes because that seems to be the biggest problem that my students have. I know that in order to use this next year it is likely that I will have to purchase it with my own money much like I have purchased many of the other things that we use on a regular basis in my classroom. It seems the responsibility to improve technology has fallen to the teacher much like school supplies that the students are supposed to bring but teachers end up providing.
There are grant possibilities but the time that it takes to write a grant correctly is not something that I possess at this moment, which brings me back to the original problem that of time.
