Here's the weird thing about this year: I'm currently over 39 weeks pregnant. Now, if you are doing any sort of math around pregnancy overall, that means that I am just about at full term. I'm actually past full term, I'm just almost at what is considered my due date. Now, I've done something with this pregnancy that not a lot of teachers do: I worked up until the last day before my leave started. Which means today is my last day working for a while. This is a truly bizarre feeling for me to have such a major shift in my identity because being a teacher is so much of who I am and what I think about all the time. Now, I'm going to have my own little offspring depending on me not to let them die and eventually I'll have to entrust another human with their education, but that's a longish way off.
The big thing is I have to trust my classroom to someone else. I got so lucky that my longterm sub is actually a skilled science teacher and has been a long term sub quite a few times at our school, but I still want to do my best to set him and my kids up with as much stuff as possible. Here's a couple things I did so that I could give my students all the support they might need.
Resource Website
A few years ago with the help of Google Sites, I sat down and created a website where students can look for contact information, tutorial videos from Khan Academy and practice problems all organized by unit of study. There is a ton of stuff on there, and I encourage students to explore it as much as they can because it always happens that I get panicked emails around finals week for what to study. It's on the website, believe me. I started expanding it to include materials I actually made and more things that are just fun, like advice from former students and fun physics videos from Youtube. I even have posted homework solutions up there.
Tutorial Videos
One resource I made specifically for this year are problem solving videos. Last year, I had students asking me over and over and over again to show them how to solve the same problems, and so I decided to make a few videos over the summer working through tricky problems so they could just watch them on their own time. Using Screencastomatic and my tablet, it became so easy to record that I kind of cant stop myself from keeping it going. I also left the videos unlisted so students need a link to see them, but some have already found them to be a useful study tool. Plus, this way they hear my voice so they still get a chance to get to know me, even if I can't get to know them yet.
Set Up Draft Assignments in Google Classroom
I think it's fair to say many teachers have control issues. Besides hoarding tendencies, this may be another common thread that unites most teacher personalities. If you don't have either, good for you. I have mad respect for you. But that's not me. So something I did for big projects and things I want students to do in Classroom, I created draft versions of the assignments with the point values I want for each assignment, the appropriate attachments and directions. All my sub has to do is post it to one section and copy it across the rest of the sections and he's set up to go.
Email on My Phone
I have never been the kind of person to have work email on my phone. I don't want to be reachable on weekends. However, having the ability to quickly respond via my phone is going to be necessary while on leave. While I don't want people to have access to me all the time, I don't want to feel cut off from the school community. I did, however, create an auto-response redirecting urgent emails to my sub.
Letters of Rec Over the Summer
The biggest job I had over the summer was to write letters of rec. Usually, during the fall I have appointments on appointments to meet with students to get the process going and my weekends are inundated with writing letter after letter to submit to colleges. This year, I knew writing this fall would be out of the question, but submitting the letters wouldn't be. I let students submit materials end of last school year and told them I would write 10 letters TOTAL for submission this fall. One student did get upset with me about that timeline and cutoff, but I only made it through the first 2 weeks of school before I had to go on leave, so it was actually a realistic issue in terms of time. I ended up writing the letters over a few days this summer, and I'll submit them as students get their requests through the system in order.
Hopefully, through all of this set up, I may stay somewhat connected to work and my students. Next step: labor!
