RC doesn't call it the chow down really, but those of you from Gunn will know just what I mean. We started with snacks, then went into the theater for the whole school staff meeting and then we met in departments. It was the first day of school for teachers. This day can be a lot of fun when you haven't seen your friends all summer and you have adventures to catch up on, but when you are new and have already been on campus for two weeks and are saturated with meeting new people it is more of a drag.
The meeting was pretty much like any other first day of school meeting, new people are introduced, schedules are laid out, reminders are given, etc. This was the first opening day of school I had ever been to with a simultaneous translator and headphones for us to wear. There was a woman in the AV booth who would translate in real time Turkish to English and English to Turkish. I thought they were cool, and I was glad to have them, but the original speaker was a bit too loud and the translator was hard to hear (even with the volume turned up.)
There was a whole staff picture after the meeting and then department pictures later on, so today was the first dress up day. The Turks take their appearance very seriously and they expect teachers to dress nicely. This is not something I am good at, and my box of teacher clothes aren't here yet, but thanks to Jenny, I did have appropriate clothes to wear today, which weren't too uncomfortable.
After lunch in the cafeteria we had a science department meeting followed by a chemistry team meeting. There are about 12 people in the science department, four chemists, 3? bio, and 5 who teach a combination of physics and prep science. One of the things that attracted me to RC was that I would have colleagues to teach with instead of being the physical science teacher. There are also two lab techs, one for physics (and chem) and the other for bio (and chem.) I am not sure it is a good thing that both of them are secondarily responsible for chemistry, it may mean that it falls through the cracks...(Especially since one of them quit on Tuesday!)
When I started hearing about how we needed to be the same, so that the students wouldn't complain that one teacher was giving more work (ie was teaching more) than another and how we would all give our tests on the same day, which will be chosen on Friday without connection to unit progress. Oh, and the test needs to be the same for every class during a given period, but different from one period to the next, but feel free to teach your own way and do the labs you want to do, as long as they are these labs. And you need to give the lycee office a copy of your lesson plans for the week so they can keep them on file and when the students come from all the same homeroom they will have a lesson book that you need to sign in blue or black ink, unless you teach an elective, in that case, there is no book to sign, just the lesson plans to turn in. Fortunately you just teach in three different rooms, but it isn't so bad, they are all on the same floor and did we mention that the classes meet on different days at different times in different rooms? Right. Anyways, I was feeling a bit overwhelmed. This on top of the facts that the periods are only 40 minutes and the order is completely different from what I am used to.
Today (Tuesday, the day after all of those revelations) I worked from 7:45 to my Turkish lesson at 4. I have three unit plans for intro chem, which gets us up to the first test. I have textbook readings, essential questions and objectives. I have fit in the labs and think I will have covered everything they will be tested on. It took all day, but I feel much better having my head wrapped around it. If tomorrow weren't tech training I would do the same thing with the Advanced chem. Advanced chem will be harder since they meet for 6 periods a week instead of 4 and their lab day (double period) does not fall at the same place in the week. When I asked Tony about that he said it is almost imossible to keep them in sync and that the labs wont really kick in for a couple of weeks, so just keep going with theory. When the labs do kick in, they are almost decoupled from the lecture, so consider it a 4 period lecture class with an independant 2 period lab class. I guess I'll give it a try.
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