
Today was another crazy Wednesday. It was a perfect storm of the usual entropy of new student intakes, the one and only copy machine in the building breaking sometime between afternoon GED classes and evening ESL classes, and a preventable scheduling mix-up that left me short a teacher.
Honestly though, it was far from a disaster. My new students got enough attention, my teachers got one worksheet per class via the scanner, and my Advanced class (the center of so much bad luck with their lessons!) got a decent if not elegant lesson.
I’m happy that everyone got what they needed. Still, I’d like to limit the chaos in the future. Some things I can do:
- Take a few extra moments whenever I update the schedule to ensure accuracy, and ask volunteers to quick double-check it (it’s online)
- Look for a regular intake volunteer (I had someone briefly, and it was awesome)
- Consider having a back-up or on-call volunteer teacher on Wednesdays
- Re-think my intake materials location. Currently, there’s a lot of running back and forth.
There’ll still be nothing I can do if the copier suddenly breaks, but if I add more structure (and help!) to the controlling of the controllable, the things I can’t control will be easier to adapt to.
Onward!