My Career

Internet, please send good thoughts my way!

I want to be some sort of math leader: math coach, curriculum director, department head, math leader, instructional specialist- I don't care what it's called. I want time to do research and support teachers.

We're expecting an upcoming larger class size. We currently have 75 students per grade level and are expecting 100. This causes a huge problem in a small school with only one content area teacher per grade level. For the past two years, I've been working on a plan to restructure the school in order to accommodate this change.

I've been meeting regularly with the curriculum director to review my ideas. At first, she was confident, but recently the school decided to make some other very big changes at our elementary site, causing some major budget issues. It looked like none of my proposals would be accepted.

Despite this, our executive director was willing to hear my ideas. We originally set up a meeting for next Wednesday, but on Thursday he told me it couldn't wait, so the meeting was rescheduled for yesterday.

I had solved our English/ Social studies problem but had more elegantly solved our math problem (science isn't an issue). Yesterday afternoon, the curriculum director brought another teacher my way who had come up with a more elegant solution for the English/ Social Studies issue. She, too, had some personal reasons to be invested. She's new this year, but is absolutely incredible and committed and exciting. We combined our ideas and I invited her to the meeting.

The meeting lasted more than two hours.

At first he dismissed our plans, disappointing both of us. He was especially concerned about my math solution because there was no room in the budget for what I wanted to do. Then he shared what he had come up with, but as we did the numbers together, it didn't work.

I re-proposed our idea, telling him I thought the numbers worked for both students and teachers.

We started to do the numbers for it, and from a preliminary look, it seemed feasible (there is a space issue though). It did require some adjustments to my part in all this, but I was pleased with the results. I'd end up teaching two advanced classes and possibly one heterogeneous group. So I'd have a half day of teaching and a half day of doing everything else I want to do. My number of students wouldn't change because right now I teach six half classes and I'd move up to three full classes, but I'm okay with that. It also leaves some extra periods for the other teacher so she can do all of her cool things.

He's going to recheck the numbers over the weekend and try to figure out the space issue. We meet again next Wednesday to find out the results.

I really hope it works out.