Thursday, September 8, 2011

School, a New-Used Vehicle, and Other Stuff

Again, I've gone and neglected this blog. For my loyal reader (yeah, singular--you know who you are! lol), I am sorry.

It's our third day back at school and already it's been like a roller coaster. The kids seem content enough to be back at it full time, but I'm still getting over the end-of-summer blues. Things were so relaxed and stress free for a while there, and then, BAM! Because of this, we all decided to take a few weeks off of the kung fu. And then the hurricane interfered with our plan to finally attend class the week before last, and of course, last weekend was a long holiday. So we've been out even longer than we had anticipated. It's been nice to be off. But the longer we delay, the harder it will be to return.

And then CCD starts up again this coming Sunday, and for some reason, I'm irrationally stressed about that as well. This will be my fifth year teaching CCD. This year, like the last, I'll be teaching the 2nd graders preparing for first penance and Holy Eucharist. We're using a new curriculum again this year, so that's another program I have to adjust to. I've thumbed through the text, but I've yet to really sit and read through a series of lessons to get a feel for it. I think I'm most worried about getting it all done. We use large school editions of the texts, rather than the smaller, "intended-for-once-a-week" manuals, and I suspect that this is because many teachers are able to get through the shorter books at a clip, leaving these teachers with nothing to cover for the last few weeks of the year, whereas I tend to stray from the text all of the time. I never feel that the text explains things well enough to foster a deeper understanding of the Faith. I know I can teach the material with just the shorter volumes, and expound on topics as necessary. But frequent straying from the larger text isn't really feasible long term, as I'd just get further and further behind. It's expected that we get through an entire chapter per week, and we only have about a one hour session (not counting time spent in choir practice). Add into this the time spent just on classroom management, it just seems like a tall order for me, especially with classes that sometimes exceed 20 students. I will have a teacher's aide this year, so I'll have some help on that front, thank God!

But yeah, about school...

I'm trying something a bit different this year. I'm starting off with the younger two. So far, this appears to have been a good idea. They're highly distractible, so getting them done nice and early has been a positive change. Rather than having everyone rotate times spent with me, it's just a nice long block with the younger two first, and then one-on-one time (mostly troubleshooting problem areas) with my teen. She spends most of her morning working independently...viewing her math lesson on the computer, taking notes from her textbooks, working on her language copybook (mostly her Latin paradigms per the Dowling Method), and reading her literature selections. We're still trying to work out little things like meeting deadlines, and learning to more efficiently schedule time spent working independently. This is a big challenge for her. It's almost like she sees her morning as this long, endless stretch of time, and doesn't realize the need to schedule her time appropriately in order to accommodate everything. I've suggested time limits for certain tasks, but she hasn't seemed to take to them just yet. I'm -->thisclose<-- to just handing her a wind-up timer to see if that would help. I suppose it would. We'll see. I don't think my expectations are irrational, and neither does she, so at least we're on the same page on that note.

Let's see...what else?

Oh, my husband's friend at work just gave us his mini-van. It seems his sister recently bought a new car, and passed her old one along to him, so we luckily became the happy recipients of his old mini-van! It's lovely, too! And we couldn't be more grateful, particularly as the Banshee, i.e., our little eyesore of a vehicle, has seen better days. We're just relieved to have a vehicle large enough to accommodate us all, with enough room to spare so that we are able to take my Mom out when she's up for taking a spin. The kids are over-the-moon excited over it, as it's all one even color (LOL!) and it has a CD player. That's like cutting edge for them. Sad, but true. Our older vehicles only had tape decks (this blog is called "Ye Olde School" for a reason after all), neither of which worked. And the radio in the Banshee was temperamental, too, and would only go on for my husband. I'm just delighted that our coming and going won't be obnoxiously heralded by loud screeching anymore. That got old really quick. The kids found it amusing some of the time, but most of the time, I'm sure it embarrassed them. My repeated assertions to them that routinely dealing with such annoyances would only build character, started to fall on deaf ears. They were definitely ready to move on, and I can't blame them. I was too.