Hi there! Despite possible reports to the contrary, I am still alive. Yeah, I know it’s been a very long time since my last post. It’s not that I haven’t had anything to write about. Things have been very busy for me. But that’s really just making excuses.
So new year means new school year (which always seems to surprise northern hemisphere readers), which means a whole heap of changes. Here are some of the things I have to look forward to this year:
New classes
My maths class this year are
- Year 7 Maths
- Year 9 “Exploration”
- Year 10 Maths (in Semester 2)
- VCE Maths Methods Unit 3 & 4
as well as IT classes
- Year 9 & 10 Software
- VCE Information Technology Unit 1 & 2
(I’m probably just a little bit too excited about not having to teach physics this year!)
These are mostly subjects that I’ve taught before (if a few years ago), but I’m excited to see how I’ll be able to refresh the way I teach each of these. The exception is…
New subject
… Year 9 & 10 Software. This isn’t just a new subject for me. This is a new subject for the school which I basically invented, am currently developing and will teach for the first time this year. Okay, claiming I “invented” the teaching of programming is going way too far, but it was my idea to make it an elective at our school. This is part of an ongoing effort to refresh our ICT offerings, which also involved me teaching “Web Development” last year.
There will be a lot of experimentation as I figure out the best way to deliver this. We will be using Python as our language, but there are many different things we could actually end up doing with it.
The nice thing is that I’ll be able to teach whatever I want (within reason), which means sneaking a lot of maths into the course. 😉
New classroom stuff
I’m tweaking the way I do a lot of things in the classroom, including my marking, quizzing, classroom rules, notetaking, and more. It’ll be interesting to see how these go. Hopefully I’ll elaborate more in the future.
New Old responsibilities
My non-teaching responsibilities are mostly the same as I had last year, but I’m hoping that the year of experience will allow me to consolidate and build on those roles this year. In particular, I’m hoping we make significant progress on examining and improving our sequence of maths pedagogy throughout the entire school.
New blog posts!
Yay! Hopefully a bit more regularly! (I can dream, can’t I?)
New, um, personal stuff
The last part of 2014 and my summer holidays were, for lack of a better word, amazing. I’m not going to go into any of that now, but hopefully (if you care) I’ll get around to sharing more information eventually. Let’s just say that I while I hoped that getting involved in the MTBoS would affect my professional life, I never knew it would change the rest of my life quite this much. If you really have no idea what I’m talking about, there are clues on twitter and in other blogs. 😉
*EDIT (2015-08-12): So, that got a bit cryptic at the end. 😉 If you really want to know what I was talking about, you might want to read this.