7 Down, 23 to Go!

Well, heck. I've been teaching for 7 years. That's the longest I've ever been anywhere--longer than any grade school or secondary school or college or job. That's nearly a quarter of my life that I've spent at this school teaching. Kind of crazy.

Well, anyway. I haven't got hardly any energy, so there will be very few pictures in this school year wrap up. But, here are the highlights...

• I mentored the new shop teacher. It was...a failure. The guy decided to go into teaching for the summers off. He had zero interest in actually teaching (or at least, he discovered that he absolutely hated it). The middle school mentality plus the tremendous workload of someone in a Tech & Eng position (which I can relate to and sympathize with) was too much for him. So now we're looking for another shop teacher, and not having great luck so far.
• I didn't have murder feelings for any of my 7th graders this year! I had tons of those last year--we had a rough bunch of kids. The bad news is, those demon-like 7th graders from last year were 8th graders this year, and a bunch of them were in my Tech class. In the same class. Together. Man, that was a rough semester. My 7th graders were angels though, and I had a lot of fun teaching them.
• So, year 2 with the 3D printer. I worked really hard on a new, cool unit for my 8th graders in Tech, and I ended up creating a hydraulic robot kit that they could put together in teams. We then had Robot Arm Olympics and had races to see who could pick up 4 ping pong balls and drop them in a hole the fastest. That MOSTLY went pretty well. The robot design is blatantly ripped off this Pitsco design--I recreated the entire thing in my CAD program and then 3D printed the parts in many colors. I managed to make 12 robots, which turned out to be 2-3 kids per robot. The robots move up/down, in/out, they rotate, and the little grabber arm opens and closes. They're fairly popular with the students. I also made a scaled down version of just the grabber arm so the kids could put something together and take home. That was less successful, but I'm working on it.

• And speaking of 3D Printing, my students continue to make pretty cool stuff. Most of them end up tracing a picture on the Internet and turning it into a keychain, but I always have a couple originals. And impressive copies. And batarangs. Holy crap, 9th grade boys are obsessed with batarangs!!!

• We finally had a moderately successful pull toy parade in my Engineering class! I only had 11 students, so maybe that was part of it. But the pull toys didn't fall apart every five steps, and we made it through quite a few classrooms. One of the students put a bluetooth speaker on his pull toy and blasted Rocky music from his phone for most of the parade. It was pretty awesome! I asked my kids how embarrassed they were on a scale of 1 to 10, and I got answers everywhere from -4 to 19.
• For the 1st time in 6 years, I did NOT have ANYTHING to do with the party-planning committee. :) Instead, I designed invitations for the 9th grade awards assembly in May (a task way more within my skill set). The original was pretty underwhelming, and I think mine is way better:

• I finally FINALLY beat the enrollment games. It took 6 years, but I finally made promotional videos to play over the morning announcements in the weeks leading up to registration. I made 2--one for Tech, and one for Engineering. Those videos got the students' attention, and I'm teaching mostly electives next year. On top of that, I decided to teach a class called Exploring Computer Science for the 9th graders at the last second. I got on the morning announcements for like 30 seconds to tell the 8th graders about the class (and also told my two Tech classes about it), and I was hoping I could get at least one section out of it. I got THREE. So, yeah. Enrollment went well this year. :) Here's my Engineering video. The Tech one I can't put on youtube because it has kids in it.

• The politics of teaching were really irritating this year. Like...REALLY irritating. I won't go into details, but I was 95% sure I was done with my school and my district. Then I decided I wanted to teach the ECS class (I get a pretty generous stipend for it, and this will be the last year they offer money...) and so I'm locked in for another year. I say I'm leaving every single year...maybe 23 years from now, I'll still be saying it. Who knows. When things get crappy, it's how I comfort myself, I guess. That, and cupcakes. :P
• I had a really good lunch group this year. That doesn't happen often. I think I skipped going to the faculty room for lunch a ton last year, partially because I was busy, and partially because I was tired of the other teachers bringing me down--with the whining and complaining and blah blah blah negativity and life-story-I-didn't-need-to-hear. This year I had lunch with the 2 FACS teachers and the shop teacher I mentored, and the 4 of us (usually the dance teacher too) had a lot of fun. There was a lot more talking about random things and laughing and just enjoying one another's company. I found myself actually WANTING to go down to lunch and hang out with them, rather than feeling obligated to make an appearance every now and then. It was a nice change.
• I was on the committee to write a Skills Test for the state of Utah to use for the Engineering class. Also helped revise the standards. On the one hand, the test isn't great because the standards kinda suck, but on the other hand, it'll be easy to pass and I'll get state funding now. :)

And that's year 7. Today is the best day of the year...I get to go home and breath and think, "I have NOTHING for 2 months. ~big giant sigh of relief~". In August, I will have the exact opposite of that feeling. It will be like standing on the beach, my feet stuck in a block of cement, watching a tidal wave rushing towards me and unable to move. Year 8 should be interesting though--I've got some new things to look forward too:

• The Math teacher co-in-charge of the MESA student organization (Math Engineering Science Achievement) asked if I would be co-in-charge with him next year, because the science teacher who was doing it is having a baby and not coming back. I've been watching them steal my class projects for years, and thinking I needed to be involved, so I was pretty excited to say yes. Something else to add to my resume, plus a small stipend. More work, yes, but MESA kids are nerds and geeks--my favorite! This math teacher is also my favorite--he's hilarious and optimistic and should be a riot to work with.
• Teaching Exploring Computer Science next year! I'm going to training the last week of June. This class will be a relief to teach I think--less hands on. Might be a welcome break, after all the hands-on crap I do in my other classes. The prep required for that kind of teaching style really wears you down after a while. Because I'm teaching ECS and Engineering, I'm going to have mostly 9th graders next year--that'll be weird. I really hope I don't have too many (or any) of those devil-kids I mentioned earlier...
• I will only have one 7th grade CTE Intro class next year, because I'm teaching so many electives. I'm a little sad about that, but also relieved because the state is totally re-writing the course and we have to pilot it next year. They changed the name to Career and College Awareness (aka CaCA...but we're not supposed to abbreviate :P) and we have to teach specific lessons that they give us. That's yet another 3-day professional development I have to go next week. Not looking forward to it.
• If we manage to replace our Shop Teacher, I will be mentoring him/her. I don't know what's going to happen if we can't replace him though...
• I think I'm going to drop the pull toy parade next year. Take a break, try something new. Like maybe we can build trebuchets instead out of those mechanism-lego-kit thingies.

Well anyway. I guess at the end of the day, I really do like my job. I love teaching, I love kids, I love middle schoolers. I hate politics, will always hate politics, and I don't think it will ever get better. I think it's just going to get worse. All I can do is be here, and still try to give my students the best experience I possibly can, working around the red tape and the "data" and merit-pay-based-on-the-lowest-level-of-learning and whatever other crap they throw on us. The beginning of the year meetings about killed me this year--I was angry all the time. But then my students came back, and I was okay again. As long as my kids distract me, I'm always okay. :)

Summer plans are in progress. I haven't had the energy to think about it. In fact, the only thing I have energy for is watching Daredevil on Netflix. :P