Ben Guest Assignment: Answer the following question, "What has been your biggest challenge?"
Hands down, my biggest challenge has been finding the time to do everything that needs doing. I've always thought of myself as an extremely organized person, a quality that has hardly ever failed to keep stress at bay, and when need be, I can be efficient to an almost unnerving degree. Despite these characteristics, it seems as though my to do list never grows shorter.
Our school mandates we stay on premises for nine and a half hours each day, forty minutes of which is spent teaching an intervention period where the students are not given grades, but between coming in early to set up and staying after to grade, we're talking about a twelve hour workday. If only it ended there it might not be so bad, but that's just the part of my day that actually involves being at the school. I get home, more often than not after the sun has already begun falling, and I find myself spending four or five hours preparing for the next day, which includes writing up a lesson plan, finding appropriate YouTube videos, and creating all of my materials. Hour after hour passes as I sit trying to think of the most effective way to teach any given topic. Somewhere in all that mess I should really be making time to eat and sleep, but those endeavors always seem to be the first to get cut from my schedule.
Fortunately I really enjoy being in the classroom, so I keep holding on to the prospect that next year should involve significantly less time spent on planning. I know my second year of teaching is a long way away, but knowing that eventually there may be some relief from the incessant work and unrelenting obligations is just comforting enough to allow me to get by. I don't see teaching ever becoming easy since there's always room for improvement, both in the effectiveness of one's lessons and one's ability to teach, but I can't imagine it ever being harder than it is right now. True or not, I've often found great solace in the thought that if I can just make it through this year, I'll be doing pretty all right.
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