Two weeks left till school starts!

When I was a student, I dreaded the beginning of August, because it was The Beginning of the End of Vacation. Like many teachers, I think, I did not love being in school. (Maybe that's why I got into teaching, in part: to rectify everything I thought was wrong/bad/unpleasant/pointless/mediocre about how I was taught.) As a teacher, I look forward to it. As a mother of two under two, I look forward to it even more since being in school means I get a whole five minutes between classes to go to the bathroom BY MYSELF as well as twenty-five minutes to eat my lunch in peace. Perspective is everything.

I have a ton of reading to do, and probably won't get all of it done before school starts. I have great plans and expectations for this year, some of which will go spectacularly well, some of which will go spectacularly badly, and some of which won't happen at all. It happens every year. One of the greatest lessons I've learned from teaching is that you're endlessly tweaking and perfecting and shifting and changing what you do, no matter how experienced you are.

I do get to teach Hamlet this year, which thrills me no end. If I can swing it, I'm going to cram all the early and middle English literature into the first few weeks and spend the entire second half of the term on Shakespeare. The great perquisite of being the teacher is that I can spend more time on what I like best. I've enjoyed teaching Midsummer Night's Dream or Henry V for the past few years, but getting to teach Hamlet is total English Nerd Crack.

I really haven't disappeared (again)

Well. In news of my world, I went back to teaching and found out how little time a full-time teaching job and a full-time mothering job leave one. :-)

Especially when one is pregnant with Numero Due.

So. The first child (the girlchild) will be one in a month. The second child (a boychild this time) will be here in the next few weeks. The teaching career picks back up in August with a new course; I'm picking up a section of world literature for seniors in addition to three sections of British literature for juniors. I'm thrilled about the change, especially since I truly enjoyed the students I taught this year who will be seniors next year!

My fellow teachers and I have a few new tricks up our sleeves for next year. The nicest thing about teaching is that it's never the same thing from year to year, or at least it doesn't have to be. One thing we're implementing is a mandatory grammar test for juniors because we're all tired of correcting the same errors multiple times throughout the year. Another great change we're making is moving the junior research paper from term 3 to term 2.

I'll reserve judgment on these changes for now, but my feeling is that these changes will be positive ones for both the teachers and the students.