What should I be doing these next few weeks if I’m a first year?

Working. Organizing. And working some more. I know it sucks, especially considering you haven’t had a break from lesson planning and teaching since the second week of June, but it will make things so much easier for the Fall. In fact, I wouldn’t so much work on lesson planning right now as I would organizing and writing out a 9 weeks (or even a full year) syllabus. This is the most important thing you can do, because it will give your lesson plans and classes direction. If you already know what you’re teaching, contact the principal or curriculum administrator at your school and find out if there’s a pacing guide for your district/school. Find out if you’re required to lesson plan with the other teachers who teach the same subject as you. (It would suck if you worked so hard on these lesson plans and then you find out you’re not able to use them, or not able to use them until February.) Your principal will be very impressed with your assertiveness. Think about what overarching concepts you want your students to be able to know/identify/apply at the end of the year and think about how you’re going to incorporate those concepts throughout the year. Think long and hard about how you’re going to teach vocabulary, give tests, or assign homework.

Then, when you’re done with all that, work some more. Research how your school discipline structure works. For this, I’d try and contact someone who worked at your school previously in TeacherCorps or another teacher that currently works there. Again, you would hate to do all this work creating classroom rules and procedures on beautiful poster board and then you find out on the first day of school that because your school has a specific bathroom policy plan, you can’t use the brilliant one you came up with.

I’m not saying work all the time all day, but formulate ideas in your mind and actually write them down (I can’t count how many good ideas I had at one point throughout the school year that eventually got lost in the crevices of my mind). The more work you put in now, the easier the first nine weeks will be. The less likely it will be that you’ll want to kill yourself or your students. I can preach because I know first hand. My time off was spent at BestBuy, Finnian’s (a local pub), or on the foosball table. And I suffered in the long run. I came in with half-assed, poorly-thought-out lessons and strategies and my kids could tell. I’m so much more excited about next year because I’m actually writing out a week-by-week plan of what I’m going to teach for the entire year. Granted, I’ve had a year teaching it, so I know much better than you do what works and what doesn’t, but at least I can see where my year is going.

Go get drunk. Go explore your city (or town, or village, or hamlet). Go hang out with the rest of MTC. But those early Sunday mornings when you’re watching Sportscenter and drinking the Bloody Mary to recover from the even earlier Sunday morning, pull out the ol’ laptop and start typing away.