Yours portly is back at work, although students don’t return until this coming Monday.  Naturally, I’ve been getting prepared for their imminent return this week.

I’ve been teaching for about fifteen years, but this year will be the first since the 2011-2012 school year that I’ve taught World History.  The change came as something of a surprise, and I’m not exactly prepared (at the time of writing), but I’ve been going through my old notes and quizzes from twelve years ago.  While the textbook we use for the course is totally different now, the first chapter still tracks almost point-for-point with a quiz I wrote in 2011, so I’m thinking the only major prep work there will be putting together slides (back in 2011-2012, the school did not have projectors or the like in classrooms, so I just worked from my own prepared notes and wrote information on the board).

I’m pretty excited about teaching World History.  I’ve taught some variation of United States History constantly since 2011 at both the high school and collegiate levels, and as much as I love the history of my nation, repeating it over and over again was starting to get old for me and the students (and they were hearing it mostly for the first time!).  So getting to talk about the rise of agriculture and civilizations and Sumeria and Egypt and all that stuff will be awesome.

Registration for students started yesterday, and we break it down by grade level, spread out over four days, which helps to alleviate some of the congestion and busyness of it (my school runs 6th-12th grades, so we do two grades a day until Friday, when the new 6th graders and their families come in to register).  I’m not on a registration duty until Thursday, so I’ve had a couple of days in my classroom to work on syllabi, write lesson plans, and generally goof around in solitude (but it’s productive goofing).

It’s looking like my schedule this year will be much more manageable than last year.  While teaching World History again will require a bit more legwork than the turn-key operation I’d made of US History, I will actually have the planning time necessary to get that work done.  Of course, anything can change (and, in the past, has changed) between now and the 19th, so I could end up with another section of a class, but I think I’m going to avoid that this year.

So, yours portly is feeling pretty good overall.  Check back in at Labor Day and see if I’m still singing the same tune—ha!

—TPP