For those of you not familiar with teacher lingo, preps do not refer to prep periods but rather the different courses that a teacher teaches in one day. If you only teach 8th grade science, you have one prep. Me, I teach French 7, French 8, ENL Beginner and ENL Intermediate. All in one day.
Don't get me wrong, I've probably go insane if I taught the same class six periods in one day. But being a new teacher and having the biggest workload is getting to me more than I'd ever dare let on. I'm supposed to be an expert in not one but two different fields with two separate levels. I can talk about my expertise until I'm blue on the face, but to be teaching French only to have an administrator come in saying we have a newcomer with no English that needs help in a class...to teaching English and having an administrator come in with a Native Frenchman wondering if he can sit in on my classes...not to mention the typical popping in to see how I'm doing teaching my lessons because evaluations will start in two months and those decide my future as a teacher...
Part of me is waiting for someone to tell me they think I'm struggling and I'll just explode asking if they could handle cramming everything I do into one day. Or sometimes my facilitator wants to talk about lesson plans three weeks down the road because we have new standards so we have to make a new curriculum and I know where he's coming from and he doesn't have the background to make all these decisions but I'm dealing with exactly the same issue with new French books, new French teacher, and loss of parallelism between last years curriculum and the high school curriculum.
...I'm legitimately on my own. No one else does what I do and certainly not to the extent. I know it will get easier with time but I'm hoping I make it long enough to actually feel like I'm doing more than just surviving.
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