Just as I suspected…

So yeah, sorry about that no-post Sunday. But as I predicted, this new subbing gig took priority and thus time from my weekend.

I was exhausted after Friday’s classes. But they went well (but more on that in a minute later).

There was some mismatch between what the permanent teacher had left me (what had been taught) and what I found to be on the original teacher’s roadmap. Like not a Waze/GPS redirection, but what felt to be an almost entirely location.

“If this was my class…” is a phrase I have got to stop using, even in my head, because these are not, and never will be. So my goal is to the re-calibrate the courses, get them going in the right direction again. Instead of getting a class from Point A (the start of school, Day One) to Point B (where the students should be in December), and finding myself somewhere between those two points, I’v found myself at Point Oh Crap, where am I?… So I’ve got to figure out a way to get back onto the A-B path then continue to B…I don’t think just trying to get to B from here is going to work so well. But that takes much more work than just following a map. Which means I find myself doing more work than even if these were my classes.

And so I probably spent at least 10 hours over the weekend trying to figure out how to do this, and lesson plan accordingly. I knew that by accepting the job, I was on the hook for lesson planning and grading, so I knew there would be a time-suck. Just not this big.

Oh, and by the way: I get a whopping $123 a day to do all this (and that’s Monday through Friday, folks, so weekends they get for free).

So then why am I putting in the extra time? Well, beyond the fact that this is how my personality is wired, I’m using this job as not only as a way of auditioning teaching to see if I want to hire it as an actor in the play that’s the rest of my life, but also I’m trying to do such a kick-ass job that if I choose to return, I will have a good enough audition to be hired.

So. Yeah.

On the plus side, I got to throw some Shakespeare at all of the classes on Friday as an introduction to me and my teaching style. And it went really well. And before these courses get to Point B, there will be the opportunity to teach Shakespeare! Well, in at least three of the five courses (the other two may work out, but definitely three of five will hit the Bard).

So to ease my anxiety (which was brutal on Saturday and fairly bad yesterday), I’ve decided to drop my Master’s course–when I decided on that, on Saturday, my anxiety attack lessened so much in severity that it was shocking.

And for this blog, for the time being, it’s going to be less about Shakespeare, with more “from the trenches” reporting about life in the classroom in 2017 and how it’s different than 1996 when I left. Sorry for the detour, but I’m on a different map for now…

Tomorrow, I look back at Friday’s Shakespeare.

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