The Week That Was
Last week wrecked me. Nothing in particular was bad, but the whole thing just felt bad overall. I 'm finally feeling like I'm back on track with school and life things, but for a few days there, I was just hanging on.
On Monday, we were busy finishing up our unit on gases in Chemistry. We'd been hyping up the culmination - the steel barrel crush - with all of the classes. We got all of our students to come down at the end of the day only to have the demonstration not work. I'm not sure what happened, but it was kind of a big letdown. I had a few ask if I was embarressed, and I'm not, but I'm defnitely disappointed that we couldn't make it happen. It's kind of a lot to set up and coordinate and it was a bummer to start the week off with.
I'd also been struggling to challenge the web development class lately. We'd been in Javascript for several weeks, looking at ways to interact with pages they'd built, but I could tell I was losing a subset of the class. So, I took some time to back off and go back to some CSS work. We focused on grids and students spent a week building out small portfolio starter sites using grids to layout a main menu page and then to build out content pages. This class is really in the grind now and some are realizing that they don't love writing code every day. I'm glad they're sticking it out, but I needed a way to rebuild some interest.
So, I introduced a wide-open choice project. Working alone or in collaboration with others, I gave them the opportunity to design and build whatever they wanted. Luckily, I only had to change one group's direction (but not by much) and the interest and activity level picked up noticeably.
In my infinite wisdom, I also offered to help groups with server needs - if they wanted persistent storage, I would throw up a couple database routes. Two groups took me up on that, so there was a couple hours of working with them on their models and what routes they wanted available. Then, there was a group who really wanted to build a chat app. Me, an idiot who has never worked with websockets, said "sure."
The next 48 hours of my life were consumed with fighting to get a simple websocket server up and running. I started by trying to tack it into a Flask server I already had running and it quickly got into sunk cost territory. I struggled with the routing, I struggled with the application server, and I struggled with nginx. Finally, I gave up on that route, ripped it all out, and got it running as a separate service.
Going down that whole consumed my time and my thought processes. I couldn't focus on other things because I was so mired in getting this one thing to work. I really should have just let it go and asked the group to step back until I could dedicate more time to making it happen, but I chose to try and do everything. It was a bad call.
My work quality in my other classes went down. I was frustrated and tired and it bled over into other secetions. My advanced chemistry class half-did a lab that I'd been trying to put together with meager results and then kind of just floated the rest of the week. I lost out on some chances to push their own thinking becuase I fixated on the other course.
The week took a big toll on me. I left on Friday having everything running and my grades caught up, which was a huge win. I spent time tonight planning out the next two weeks before spring break for regular chemistry so I don't have to think about what's happening there. That will let me do some damage control for the advanced chemistry section and finish up their current unit strong before the break as well.
Time management has always been my weak point in teaching. I get too invested in specific projects and then I struggle to keep the other balls in the air. This year has been better (just like last year was better than the one before) and next year I'll have one fewer class to prepare, so the end is in sight. I love my job and I love my work and I really hope that this last week was the last one I'll have like it for a while.
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