How Many Things Can We Juggle?
Summer holidays had been a blessing for most of us, hanging out with friends, swimming, and tanning all day, dinner out, long walks by the beach, island, or mainland breeze but now (late August) time has come once again to pull ourselves together, take a deep breath and take a dive into education. However, it is extremely important to take some things into account before starting off the wrong foot.
We are very close to September, getting ready to join our schools, groups, private lessons, and our students’ parents! Before the new school year opens its gates, some of us have already done a great deal of things concerning our professional goals, achievements, and progress. And we come to have (probably) two possible teacher categories:
- the ones who are very confident and have done this, confronted “Septembers” again and again, they know how to handle students and do not need any preparation or seminars and
- the ones who always plan their professional development and attend seminars either online or not, conferences in Greece and abroad, book exhibitions (national or international) and subscriptions to English speaking magazines. (Is it my impression or are we one of the professions that spend more than what they get in return (financially wise)?) Surely, the moral reward we get from our students, soothes the first concerns!
Text by: Athena Dermentzis- Geranis
But we are not only that: most of us are also parents who must arrange HUNDREDS of things for our children in September!
Role 1- Teachers
How we can start
- Plan the timetable.
- Write the lesson plans!
(Unless we belong to the lucky ones who have them ready by the school coordinator)
- Print the worksheets we are going to use or download them in the computer.
- Buy some new stationery.
- Familiarize ourselves with the class levels we will have during the school year.
- Get the coursebooks or any other material.
- Organize the material we will need for our levels according to the number of students in the classroom, the age, and their previous knowledge.
- Set financial goals! Extremely important to be content with how much we WANT to get. Calculate our income and the expenses.
- Check our wardrobe: clothes always show how seriously we take our job and how professional we are. So, never underestimate the importance on a nice pair of heels (for the ladies), a colourful satin scarf and a high-quality jacket.
- Let’s make room to ourselves! Accept or turn down students for private lessons (we MUST always respect the time we need to ourselves. For example: time to work out, time to study with our children or discuss with them, time to relax, time to do nothing AT ALL!)
Extra things to consider:
- Staff meetings
- One to one meetings with the school directors
- Get to know our colleagues which is very important.
Role 2 – Parents
I guess as a parent, we have already started arranging everything for our children since May or June, but September is always a turning point, as in most cases we also know our timetable.
How we can start
- Logistics: take the children at school and arrange someone to pick them up
- Find the perfect extracurricular activities.
- Fix the children’s programme combining school, frontistirio, extracurricular activities and the afternoon pickups.
- Private lessons for our children - who is the most suitable colleague for them?
- Food Delivery and Doctor’s phone number (sometimes loads of work and corrections do not allow us extra time for cooking).
- Bookshop – lists from school can take time that needs to be managed.
- New clothes, shoes, bags, and new haircut!
Now, everything is ready!
Being there for everyone automatically is the most interesting part in a teacher’s life: to arrange everything else even beyond their classroom. Be there for everyone either students or family: to put the negative feelings aside, to get in the classroom and start the lesson, to smile and be polite, to be approachable even in hard days, to give their best self to the ultimate, to be ready to cope with parents, colleagues, students, teachers, to be fair, to juggle all of the above and to succeed. That’s a lot on a teacher’s plate!
Have a great School Year!
