Teaching stress/your own kids

Lockedout

Was not sure how to title this but I have a new baby girl. Im wondering how teachers manage to keep up with workload during the year? Do you do it all during the day or do you bring work home? Do it late at night?

byhookorbycrook

I'd never get it done at school, how did you cope to date?

Boober Fraggle

I do a mixture of both. 2 days a week I stay back in school late. Other than that, I no longer have chats during free classes and rarely take a full lunch break.

I also have set evenings for giving homework that takes time to correct, so that I don't have essays coming to me from two classes on the one night. I'm a lot more organised than I was before the baby!! I'm also more focused when I am marking, I don't daydream over a paragraph and give long winded advice, I read all of the work, and then spend time in class going through the most common mistakes and get them to take that down, and go through their own work to find those mistakes.

When work comes home with me I do it after baby's bedtime. I like to spend the few hours in the evening with my baby before she goes to sleep.

implausible

Boober, I could have written your post! Even though school finishes at 3:45 and it's only a 25 minute drive home, my childminder knew to expect me between 4:30 and 5. This gave me time to stay back (even days I finished early) and get the shopping done one evening a week.

Having a baby did wonders for my organisation. Now that I have two, I'll be running the school in January!!!:D

highly1111

Yes - agree with the above. You'll be fine but may be pretty anti social in the staff room! You'll never be more organised! I used to work through break time and would just grab a quick bowl or soup or sandwich at my desk at lunch. There's no having the chats at every free class. You'll probably introduce other tactics too - getting them to correct each others little small class tests (younger years), self correcting homework whilst walking the room, use more technology - I used to put up the marking schemes for my LC classes and explain what would have been required and asked them - did they have those points etc. Of course you'll learn to manage different things - I used to give some classes little homework during the week and then a good chunk at the weekend or for a day when my timetable was lighter and I could correct then. There's nothing like a baby to make you organised and you'll be absolutely fine. Worst case, get your other half to take bubs for a walk for an hour on Saturday morning - absolutely insane what you can get done in an hour with no distractions.

Big congrats on your little girl!

Lockedout

Thanks for all the replies. Our Girl was born in April and my wife went home to her Mother in Galway for two weeks so I was home alone thus I dont really have great experience of managing this. Im lucky in that I have a good chunk of Religion which is non exam in our school-so its only the English that will trouble me.

I will get home before my wife so I plan to leave about forty minutes after school each day to do a bit of planning. Thats one thing I will find hard to do. I used to spend a lot of time looking up Power points and other resources on TES and other sites. www.TES.co.Uk is a great site for all teachers