So my teaching assignment is changing a bit for next year.

This year, I taught three “core” classes in 60 minute blocks – two “communications” classes (reading and writing), and one social studies class.  I taught social studies in 6-week chunks, then traded a class of kids with my teaching partner (who taught math while I was teaching communications, and science when I was teaching social studies).

I’ve been teaching in this format, more or less, for the last three years.  In fact, I’ve taught this way for the vast majority of my teaching career at my current school.  I’ve taught a single class before, but it was communications – which never feels like a single class.

This fall, I will be teaching on a three-core-teacher team, which means that – as we have agreed – one teacher will teach math, another will teach communications, and I will teach science and social studies.

I love teaching reading, and I’m a passionate writing teacher.  Most of my teaching career has involved teaching writing in some way, mostly because I’ve made that happen.  I don’t plan to stop, though it will take a little more creativity than in the past.  More on that later.

I should add that the vast majority of my college-level instruction was in English.  My undergraduate major was in English (and philosophy).  I have an MA in English and an MA in literacy education.  I’m also ABD in English – I never finished that dissertation.

So why am I teaching science and social studies?

There are two main reasons:

1. I’m the only one on my team with both a science and social studies endorsement.
2. I wanted to.

The woman who will be teaching communications is a fantastic teacher, gifted in ways that I will never be.  I feel like I’m a good teacher, but she’s great.  Not only that, she is better at co-planning, and she benefits a lot from collaborating with other great teachers in my building.  For a variety of reasons, I’m not that kind of teacher.  It’s complicated to explain, but I think that the best decision for this team was to let her be in charge of teaching communication.

That sounds like a sad, self-pitying reason.  The other reason, of course, is that letting go of communications means many fewer meetings and much less scrutiny.  It means I can be more creative, both in what I teach and how I teach it.  And – this is the best part – it means I can teach both literacy and science, or literacy and social studies (or heck – all three!).

It means that I will finally have the time and energy to make my science/social studies classes what they should have been the entire time.  There are so many great things to teach in these fields, and so many real-world connections.  It’s an enormously fertile, untapped teaching area for me.  I’ve never had the time or energy to invest in these things because I’ve always been so focused on communications, which was the bulk of my teaching load and the biggest area of concern (thanks to state standardized tests).

In other words, I’m really excited about making my classroom completely new.  It means that I know the content, but I get to spend the summer re-discovering and re-planning it from the ground up, diving into it with new-teacher energy.  I feel like I did when I first started.  Isn’t this awesome?

Don’t get me wrong – this is a challenging assignment.  We’re full inclusion, and we have a large, three-tiered bilingual program where the third, most linguistically advanced tier enters the science/social studies classroom.  That means that I’ll have students with special needs, students who still need support with learning in English, as well as a typically diverse classroom.  Moreover, while we have an accelerated math class and an accelerated communications class, we don’t have an accelerated science and social studies class.

In other words, for this class, we must differentiate or die.

I like that challenge.  I like the crazy ideas that I’m throwing out there.  I’m already trying to talk our technology teacher into letting me write a grant for a 3D printer and putting it in her room.  I’m already researching field trips to Fermilab.  I’m already checking out a dozen books on cutting edge science – dark matter, the search for “near-Earths,” parallel universes, and other wacky stuff.  And I’m already planning to tear my classroom apart – again – and rebuild it completely different.

(I’m keeping my classroom library, darnit.  I love my books too much to let them go.)

So, I’m taking suggestions.  I’ll post more on the subject, but I’m busting out my copy of Teach Like a Pirate – for starters – and going back to school on teaching.  (Hah!  Love that joke!)

Oh, and does anyone know where I can get a nice, cheap lab coat?