Career Change: Exhausted and Going Broke, But...

My classroom - although I've
since reconfigured this set up!

...having more fun than I could ever imagine!  I've been absolutely slammed with work over the past few days, but I thought I'd do a quick summary of how it's going so far.

Over the past couple of days, I have spent nearly $500 in getting my classroom prepared! OY! I might add that's $500 that I can ill afford, but seriously, I needed stuff!! I want my kids to walk into a well-organized and fun classroom on Monday.  Wait...what?  Did I just say Monday?  <shriek>  Okay, now that's out of my system for the moment, I'll give you a brief summary of the past few days.

It's mostly been sessions with all sorts of staff from the Lawrence Public School who told us about who we see for what services.  Tonight, there was a Freshman orientation and I got to meet a couple of my new students.  Lovely, lovely kids. There have been lots and lots of meetings with the 2 other new English teachers (1 is a fellow TFA-er (Chris) and 1 is not a TFA-er (Cheryl) and both are AMAZING people that I'm thrilled to be working with).  We're trying to meld our minds together on ideas for the new year.  We're all freaking out a little bit because we don't have a curriculum from the district yet.  <shriek>  Okay, I may continue to shriek every few minutes.  Now I'm lucky that my predecessor left a prodigious amount of books in my room (see the photo below), but Chris and Cheryl are crazed because they have almost no books.  Books have been ordered by our administration but these things take time.  I've been a little behind the 8-ball simply because I have to rush to get a lot of clerical things done, like a drug screening test, reference checks, paperwork, etc., all while trying to set up my classroom. Tomorrow, we've got a faculty meeting, some more professional development and continuing to set up my classroom.

Ah, see the beautiful
books.

This weekend, in addition to having to drag myself into Boston on Saturday for TFA-related (useless) professional development, I have to create 4 different syllabi for my classes and come up with a week's worth of lesson plans for those classes.  Plus, I have to read the teacher's manual which I think is probably as long as the Bible - I'll find that out tomorrow.  So basically my weekend is already a washout.  But you want to know something, I am extraordinarily happy.  Weird, huh?

Oh, and one other thing, it's official - all of my classes are the honors classes!  1 Freshman, 1 Junior and 2 Senior classes and all honors. <shakes my head>  I don't know what I did right over the past year to have this unbelievable treasure dropped in my lap, but I will take the very rare gift that I have received and run with it.  Okay, time to get back to work... or perhaps, I might just go get some much needed sleep. I haven't been sleeping much over the past few days because of my mind spinning from everything I need to complete before the start of the new school year on Monday.  <shriek>