
My last post on how to cultivate student writing identities was maybe closer to a novella than a blogpost, so this week I am striving to keep it shorter and simpler.
In keeping with the theme of brevity, I want to talk about the ways that I plan to keep the work monster at bay during a year where I know that it will be lurking behind every door. Working 70 hours a week was once a part of my early teaching life, but through reading, learning from others, and experimenting in my own classroom, I eventually got it down to 40 hours a week. An admission though: Since March of 2020, I have definitively not been a 40 hour teacher.
Some of those increased hours came from the additional needs of students during a pandemic and the increased work that came from a new online learning management system (which remained even when we returned). Other hours arose out of my diminished ability to focus and increased distractibility. Add these things together and last year schoolwork found its way back into far too many of my nights and weekends.
That is why one of my main goals this year is to banish work from personal time once again. I want to banish it for my health, for the betterment of my students (I’m a better teacher when balanced), for this blog and my writing (it is not an accident that I started my blog the same summer that I finally got to 40 hours and that my posts got more intermittent as I started to work more), and most of all for my family. Here are the big pieces in my plan for doing that:
Continue reading “How I Plan to Regain My Nights and Weekends in the Upcoming School Year”