Busy, Busy

This past week went by quickly as I was busy with several different school related things. I spent Tuesday & Wednesday working all day with a couple of other 7th grade social studies teachers. This is what I counting for my "swap" days. (In Fayetteville, we can "swap" professional development days that we do in the summer for days off during regularly scheduled professional development during the school year.) Working these two days will allow me to have the whole week of Thanksgiving off. Plus, since the teachers who worked these two days could determine what we worked on, we were able to get a whole lot accomplished. We were able to sketch out lesson plans for the first nine weeks of school. We were able to create several complete new lessons and create some new things using our new textbook materials.
My other school activity was teaching in the Non-Traditional Teacher Licensure Program. This was a first for me. I taught a group of about 80 novice teachers. Fortunately, the topic was one I know well - - Pathwise and Praxis III. The teachers had a lot of questions about doing their Praxis assessment that I was able to answer. I teach again tomorrow (for the second and final time). I'm a little more nervous because I'm using canned materials on professional ethics. I have tried to throw in some of my own stuff to "jazz" it up some. I certainly don't want my audience to feel the way I have felt in many a professional development session (like I want to impale myself with the plastic fork at my table!). It's been a good experience, something new. I think I will have the option of teaching some Saturday classes during the upcoming school year.