It’s hard to believe that in 3 days I’ll have been at my new job for a month! I can’t remember if I posted about it already or not, but I left my position at McGraw-Hill Education to become the lead curriculum specialist for elementary math at my old school district.
By the way, my job title is a mouth full and I feel pretentious every time I have to tell it to people. I’ve tried finding ways to shorten it, but it just doesn’t work. If I say I’m a curriculum specialist, then it sounds like I do it all. While technically I can do it all as an elementary teacher, I don’t do it all now. And I can’t just say I work in elementary math because that doesn’t really feel very descriptive. Oh well. As far as problems go, I can live with this one.
Time has flown by, mostly because I’ve been so busy. I’ve been enjoying meeting lots and lots of new people and learning the ropes. My first big hurdles on the job relate to our new textbook adoption. In the spring, our district adopted a curriculum called Stepping Stones. It’s by a company called Origo. It’s a digital curriculum, meaning there is no printed book for the teachers. All of the lesson plans are online.
After a week or so on the job, I was tasked with compiling a list of all the elementary teachers in the district who teach math so we could create their online accounts. Basically we don’t want to spend money buying content licenses for teachers who aren’t going to use the curriculum at all. Making a list sounds easy, right? Just contact HR and get one from them. Yes? Maybe?
No, not so much. HR was able to give me an initial list, but it took communicating with Assistant Principals at our 33 elementary schools and making lots of edits to a spreadsheet to finally nail it down.
The next big hurdle was putting on implementation training for about 1,200 teachers spread out at 6 campuses across the district. Thankfully I have a wonderful partner in crime on my team who knows the district inside and out. She was invaluable in getting everything organized and ready to go. The trainings took place last Wednesday, and all in all, they went amazingly well. Yay!
With those two big tasks under my belt, I’ve moved on to an ever growing to-do list. Currently we’re wrapping up the curriculum documents for the second nine weeks for grades K-5. Then we have to write second semester timelines and unit guides which haven’t even been started yet. We also have Curriculum Based Assessments (fancy name for benchmark exams) to prepare, a department website to update, and preparations to make for upcoming trainings we’re doing with our interventionists.
Whew! Good thing I like what I do.
Teaching to the Beat of a Different Drummer 